Eighteen eighty-two? Let’s see, that would mean we were talking about Henry Morton Stanley’s day, the establishment of Congo Free State, the arrival of the first missionaries. That was even before the Berlin Conference, the famous meeting in 1885 during which the European powers determined the future of Africa. Could I really be face-to-face with someone who not only remembered colonialism, but was in fact born in the precolonial era? Someone born in the same year as James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, and Virginia Woolf? It was almost impossible to believe. That would mean the man was 126 years old! And that would make him not only the oldest man in the world, but also one of the oldest people ever. In Congo, no less. Three times the country’s average life expectancy!
And so I did what I would have done in any other situation: check and double check. In this case, that meant digging up the past, little by little, with endless patience. Sometimes that worked promptly, at other moments not at all. Never before had I spoken like this with such a distant past, never before had it felt so fragile. Often, I was unable to understand him. Often, he began a sentence and stopped halfway, with the surprised look of someone who goes to fetch something from the cupboard and suddenly no longer knows what he was looking for. It was a struggle against forgetfulness, but Nkasi not only forgot the past, he also forgot to forget. The gaps that arose healed over immediately. He was unaware of having lost anything. I, on the other hand, was doing my best to bail out an ocean steamer with a tin can.
Finally, however, I came to the conclusion that his year of birth just very well might be correct. He talked about events in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century that he could only have known about firsthand. Nkasi had not attended school, but he knew historical facts of which other elderly Congolese from his region were entirely ignorant. He came from Bas-Congo, the area between Kinshasa and the Atlantic Ocean where the Western presence had first made itself known. If the map of Congo looks like a balloon, Bas-Congo is the neck through which everything passes. His memories, therefore, I could check against well-documented events. He spoke with great precision about the first missionaries, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had settled in his homeland. They had, indeed, begun their evangelism around 1880. He mentioned the names of missionaries who, as it turned out, had come to the area in the 1890s and had moved to a nearby mission post around 1900. He spoke of Simon Kimbangu, a man from a neighboring village who we know was born in 1889 and started his own religion in the 1920s. And he talked above all about how he, as a child, had watched them build the railway between Matadi and Kinshasa. That took place between 1890 and 1898. The construction in his part of Congo began in 1895. “I was twelve, fifteen at the time,” he said.
“Papa Nkasi . . .”
“Oui?” Whenever I addressed him he would look up, slightly distracted, as though he had forgotten there was a visitor in the room. He made no effort to convince me of his advanced age. He talked about what he still knew, and seemed amazed at my amazement. He was clearly less impressed by his age than I, who wrote down an entire notebook full.
“How is it that you know the year when you were born, anyway? There was no registrar’s office back then, was there?”
“Joseph Zinga told me about it.”
“Who?”
“Joseph Zinga. My father’s youngest brother.” And from that there followed the story of the uncle who had gone with a British missionary to the mission post at Palabala and attended catechism classes himself, during which he learned about the Christian calendar. “He told me I was born in 1882.”
“But then, did you know Stanley?” Never, in all my life, had I thought I would ask someone that question in earnest.
“Stanlei?” he said. He spoke the name in the French way. “No, I never met him, but I heard about him. He came to Lukunga first, and then to Kintambo.” The chronology, in any case, jibed with the journey Stanley had made between 1879 and 1884. “I did know Lutunu, though, one of his boys. He was from Gombe-Matadi, not far from us. He never wore trousers.”
The name Lutunu rang a bell. I remembered that he was one of the first Congolese to serve the white men as a “boy.” Later, the colonizer would make him an inland chief. But he had lived until the 1950s: Nkasi could have met him much later as well. That, however, definitely did not apply to Simon Kimbangu.
“I knew Kimbangu back in the 1800s,” he said emphatically. It was the only time, with the exception of his year of birth, that he referred directly to the nineteenth century. They had lived in neighboring villages. And, he added: “We were more or less the same age. Simon Kimbangu was greater than me in pouvoir de Dieu, but I was greater in years.” During later visits as well, he confirmed time and again that he was a few years older than Kimbangu, a man born in 1889.
IN THE WEEKS AFTER my initial visit, I went by to see Nkasi several times. At the house where I was staying in Kinshasa I would run back through my notes, put together the pieces of the puzzle and search for gaps in his story. Each visit lasted no more than a couple of hours. Nkasi indicated when he was growing tired or when his memory was failing him. The conversations always took place in his bedroom. Sometimes he would sit on the edge of his bed, sometimes on the only other piece of furniture: a worn-out car seat that stood on the floor. Once I was able to talk with him while he was shaving. Without a mirror, without shaving cream, without water, only a disposable razor that he never disposed of. He ran his fingers over his chin, made a whole host of strange faces and scraped the white plastic razor across his weathered skin. After a few hesitant scrapes he would knock out the tiny hairs against the edge of his bedstead. The white stubble floated to the darkened floor.
In one corner of the room was a pile of odds and ends: what remained of his belongings. A broken Singer sewing machine, a pile of rags, a big can of Milgro powdered milk, a gym bag, and a linen bundle. The latter item had caught my eye during my first visit. It looked like it contained something round. “What’s in that package?” I asked him one time. “Ah, ça!” He reached for the bundle. Slowly, he unwrapped it and held out a beautiful pith helmet. A black one. I didn’t even know they existed. Without my asking, he put it on and smiled broadly. “Ah, monsieur David, I lived my entire life in the white man’s grasp. But within two or three days I am going to die.”
Moving about was very difficult for him. He used the handle and stick of an old umbrella as a cane, but preferred to rely on the support of a few of his daughters. Nkasi had had five wives. Or six. Or seven. Accounts differed. He himself had lost count. There were always a few family members outside in the courtyard. Estimates varied concerning the number of his children. Thirty-four was the figure heard most often. In any case, four pairs of twins, everyone seemed in agreement on that. Grandchildren? Definitely more than seventy.
I was also introduced to his two younger brothers, Augustin and Marcel, ninety and one hundred years old, respectively. Marcel did not live in Kinshasa, but in Nkamba. I spoke with Augustin’s son, a smart, sensible man who had not yet reached middle age. Or so I thought. Until he told me that he was sixty. It was almost too much for me to believe: he truly looked no older than forty-five. What an extremely resilient family, it occurred to me, what a wild quirk of nature. Three ancient brothers, all of them still alive. There had been two sisters as well, but they had died recently. Also well into their nineties.
Fourteen people lived here in three little adjacent rooms, but there was family visiting all day. Nkasi shared his room with Nickel and Platini, two boys in their twenties. One of them had a sweater that read Miami Champs. As the eldest, Nkasi got the bed each night, a foregone conclusion; the young people slept on the floor on woven banana-leaf mats. During the day they sometimes took a nap on their grandfather’s thin mattress.
Nkasi ate manioc, rice, beans, sometimes a little bread. The family couldn’t afford meat. After one particularly long session he realized I must be hungry and, using his umbrella stick, slid over to me a bunch of little bananas and a bag of peanuts. “I can tell. The he
ad is closed, but the belly is open. Take it, eat.” There was no sense in refusing. Every time I visited I brought something along and would buy a supply of soft drinks. The family, like countless others in the cité, had a modest beverage dépôt, where they sold drinks from the Bralima brewery by the bottle. But they had no money to buy the cola and orangeade themselves. One time I watched as Nkasi, sitting in his car seat, poured a bit of Coca-Cola into a plastic mug. Bloodcurdlingly slow, he held the cup out to Keitsha. It was a poignant scene: the man who had apparently been born before the Berlin Conference (and before the invention of Coca-Cola) was handing a drink to his granddaughter, born after the Congolese general elections of 2006.
The first time I met Nkasi was on November 6, 2008. The day before had been an auspicious one in world history. At a certain point, Nkasi reversed our roles. Would I mind if he asked me a question? There were more things to talk about than just the past. He had heard a rumor and could hardly believe it. “Is it true that a black man has been elected president of the United States?”
NKASI’S LIFE RAN PARALLEL to the history of Congo. In 1885 the region fell into the hands of King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold named it the État Indépendant du Congo (Independent State of Congo), commonly referred to in the Dutch language as Congo-Vrijstaat. In 1908, in the face of virulent criticism at home and abroad, he transferred his holdings to the Belgian state. It would continue to be called the Belgian Congo until 1960, when it became an independent country, the Republic of Congo. In 1965 Joseph-Désiré Mobutu carried out a coup that kept him in power for thirty-two years. During that period the country received a new name, Zaïre. In 1997, when Mobutu was dethroned by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, it was renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. The “democratic” part required some patience, however, for it was only in 2006 that the first free elections were held in more than forty years. Joseph Kabila, son of Laurent-Désiré, was elected president. Without having moved about much himself, Nkasi had lived in five different countries, or at least in a country with five different names.
Although the country as conceived by Leopold II in no way corresponded with any existing political reality, it did exhibit a striking geographical cohesion: it coincided to a great degree with the drainage basin of the Congo River. Each stream, each watercourse empties at some point into that single, powerful river and theoretically contributes to that brown spot in the ocean. That fact is a purely cartographic one: in actual practice, that hydrographic system was not seen as a unit. But ever since then, Congo—a country of 2.3 million square kilometers (about 900,000 square miles), the size of Western Europe, two-thirds the size of the Indian subcontinent and the only country in Africa covering two time zones—has been the country of that one river. Despite the many name changes, it has always borne the name of the mother of all currents (the Congo, the Zaïre). Today’s inhabitants speak of it in French as le fleuve, the stream, just as the inhabitants of the Low Countries speak of “the sea” when they mean the North Sea.
The Congo is no straightforward river; its course describes three-quarters of a circle and runs counterclockwise, as though one were turning back the hands of an analogue watch forty-five minutes. That big curve has to do with the even and relatively flat topography of the Central African interior. The Congo, in fact, makes one huge meander through an area of gently rolling hills that is mostly only several hundred meters above sea level. During its thousand-kilometer-long journey the river descends less than fifteen hundred meters (about 4,900 feet). Areas above two thousand meters (6,500 feet) are found only in the farthest eastern part of the country; the country’s highest point lies directly on the border with Uganda: Mount Stanley, 5,109 meters (16,604 feet), the second highest peak in Africa, with a permanent layer of snow and a (dwindling) glacier. The eastern mountains, along with a chain of elongated lakes (the four so-called Great Lakes, of which Lake Tanganyika is the largest), are the result of major tectonic activity, as witnessed by the area’s still-active volcanoes. This serrated eastern edge of Congo is a part of the Rift, the great fault line cleaving Africa from north to south. Climatologically, this mountainous area can be relatively chilly: a city like Butembo, for example, close to the Ugandan border, has an average annual temperature of only seventeen degrees Celsius (about sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit), while Matadi, not far from the Atlantic Ocean, has an average of twenty-seven (about eighty-one degrees Fahrenheit). Elsewhere, the equatorial setting produces a tropical climate with high temperatures and great humidity, although regional differences are considerable. In the equatorial forest, afternoon temperatures vary from thirty to thirty-five degrees (about eighty-six to ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit), while to the extreme south there may be frost on the ground during the dry season. The duration of the dry season and the time it commences also vary.
Two-thirds of the country is covered by dense equatorial forest, with its 1.45 million square kilometers (565,500 square miles) the largest tropical rain forest outside the Amazon Basin. From the air it resembles one huge and endless head of broccoli, occupying an area three times the size of Spain. To the north and south, the woods (la forêt, as the Congolese call it) gradually changes to savanna. Not an endless, National Geographic sea of yellow waving grass but a woodland savanna that gradually fades into brush savanna as one travels away from the equator. The country’s biodiversity is spectacular, but increasingly threatened. Three of the most important zoological discoveries of the twentieth century were made in Congo: the Congo peacock, the okapi, and the bonobo. The discovery of a new primate in the twentieth century was something of a miracle in itself. Congo is the only country in the world where three of the four great apes are to be found (only the orangutan is absent): but the chimpanzee and particularly the mountain gorilla are highly endangered species as well.
Twentieth-century ethnographers distinguished some four hundred ethnic groups in the interior, each of them a society with its own customs, social structure, artistic traditions, and often its own language or dialect. These groups are usually indicated in the plural form, to be recognized by the prefix ba- or wa-. The Bakongo (sometimes rendered as baKongo) belong to the Congo people, the Baluba (or baLuba) to the Luba people, the Watutsi (or waTutsi, sometimes even waTuzi) to the Tutsis. In the chapters that follow I will use the standard expression as it is found in English. I will therefore speak of both the Bakongo and the Tutsis which, although not very consistent, is all the more convenient. The singular form (Mukongo or muKongo) is one I have avoided as much as possible. Kongo with a K refers to the ethnic group living close to the mouth of the Congo river; Congo with a C to the country and the river. The languages of these groups usually start with the prefix ki- or tschi: Kikongo, Tshiluba, Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda. Here too I have given precedence to common usage. Therefore: Swahili rather than Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda rather than Rwandan. Lingala is the exception to the rule, although languages in Lingala also start with ki. Once I even heard someone speak of “kiChinois.” And Kiflama is the language of the Baflama, the Flemish (derived from les flamands): Dutch, in other words.
The massive anthropological wealth of Congo must not blind one to the country’s great linguistic and cultural homogeneity. Almost all the languages are Bantu languages and exhibit structural similarities. (Bantu is the plural form of munt’u, meaning “the people.”) This is not to say that Nkasi will automatically understand someone from the other side of the country, only that his language will resemble that other one just as the Indo-European languages resemble one author. Only in the extreme north of Congo are languages spoken that are fundamentally different and belong to the Sudanese linguistic group. Everywhere else, Bantu languages became common with the spread of agriculture from the northwest. Even the Pygmies, the original hunter-gatherers of the jungle, made the switch to Bantu languages.
In Congo, ethnic awareness is a relative concept. Almost all Congolese can tell you with a certain precision to which ethnic group they and their parents belong, but the extent to which they iden
tify with that group varies widely in accordance with age, place of residence, education, and, more crucial than all the rest, living conditions. Groups become more tightly knit in proportion to the extent to which they are threatened. At various moments in one’s life one may attach greater or less importance to ethnic background. If the turbulent history of Congo makes anything clear, it is the elasticity of what was once referred to as “tribal awareness.” It is a fluid category, and one I shall refer to more often.
Although the names of the provinces and their number have changed often, still there are several regional designations used invariably by the inhabitants to delineate the parts of this enormous country. Bas-Congo, as mentioned, is the neck of the balloon. Matadi, its administrative center, is a seaport some sixty miles inland where container vessels, tacking against the Congo’s powerful current, can load and unload. Farther upstream, rapids render the river unnavigable. Kinshasa, a city of an estimated eight million inhabitants, who call themselves Kinois, is located precisely at the spot where the balloon widens. From this point the river once again becomes navigable, until deep into the interior. To the east of Kinshasa one finds Badundu, an area between forest and savanna that includes Kikwit and the historically important region of Kwilu. Beside it, in the country’s heart, lies Kasai, the diamond country. Its principal city is Mbuji-Mayi, which has grown in recent years to become the country’s third, perhaps even second largest city, due to the rush for diamonds. Farther east one arrives in the area once known as the Kivu, but which has now been divided into three provinces: North Kivu, South Kivu, and Maniema. Both Kivus form the vulnerable top of the balloon, with Goma and Bukavu as major centers directly on the border with Rwanda. This is a heavily populated farming area. Due to its altitude, sleeping sickness does not occur here and it is possible to raise cattle; the soil and climate, furthermore, are well suited to high-grade agriculture (coffee, tea, quinine).
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