Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  To the north of the line Bandundu-Kasai-Kivu stretches the largest part of the rain forest, administratively categorized under two megaprovinces, Équateur and Orientale province, both long earmarked for subdivision. Mbandaka and Kisangani respectively are their capitals. Kisangani in particular has played a key role throughout the history of Congo. To the south of this central east-west axis lies another megaprovince, Katanga, with Lubumbashi as capital. This mining region forms the economic heart of the country. Katanga has a territorial peninsula sticking out to the southeast, as though a clown had given a twist to the balloon that is Congo: it is, in fact, the product of a late-nineteenth-century border dispute with England. While Katanga enjoys a great wealth of copper and cobalt, and Kasai relies on its diamonds, the earth of Kivu contains tin and coltan, and that of Orientale province, gold.

  The country’s four major cities, therefore, are Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, Kisangani, and, more recently, Mbuji-Mayi. At the time of this writing they are connected by neither rail nor paved road. At the start of this third millennium, Congo has less than one thousand kilometers of asphalt roads (and most of those run to the outside world: from Kinshasa to the port at Matadi and from Lubumbashi to the Zambian border, to facilitate the import of goods and the export of mineral ores). Rail service these days is almost nonexistent. The boats from Kinshasa to Kisangani take weeks to reach their destination. Anyone hoping to travel from one city to the other takes a plane. Or takes a great deal of time. One rule of thumb says that a journey that took one hour during the colonial period now corresponds to a full day’s travel.

  Kinshasa is and always has been the country’s navel, the knot in the balloon. More than 13 percent of the country’s sixty-nine million inhabitants lives in one of the capital city’s twenty-four districts, but the bulk of the Congolese population still lives in the countryside. Bas-Congo, Kasai, and the area around the Great Lakes are particularly densely populated. French is the language of the government and higher education, but Lingala is the language of the army and the ubiquitous pop music. Four native languages are officially recognized as official languages: Kikongo, Tshiluba, Lingala, and Swahili. While the first two truly constitute ethnic languages (Kikongo is spoken by the Bakongo in Bas-Congo and Bandundu, Tshiluba by the Baluba in Kasai), the latter two are trade languages of a far greater range. Swahili arose on the African east coast and is spoken not only in all of the eastern Congo, but also in Tanzania and Kenya. Lingala arose in the province of Équateur and made its way down the Congo River to Kinshasa. Today it is the country’s fastest-growing language, and is also spoken in neighboring Congo-Brazzaville.

  And, speaking of neighboring countries: Congo has no less than nine of them. Starting at the Atlantic and proceeding clockwise, they are: the Angolan enclave of Cabinda, Congo-Brazzaville, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola proper. Only Brazil, Russia, and China have more neighbors—ranging from ten to fourteen. This results in diplomatic complexities, and Congo was and is no different, both in colonial times and in the present. For the last century and a half, border disputes and territorial conflicts have been a constant, just as some stretches between Russia and China have long been a bone of contention.

  WHERE DOES THE HISTORY BEGIN? A long way out to sea, a long way from the coast, even a long time before Nkasi was born. A tendentious urge exists to let the history of Congo begin with the arrival of Stanley in 1870, as though the inhabitants of Central Africa wandered sadly before that time through an eternal, immutable present and had to wait for a white man to come through and free them from the wolf trap of prehistoric listlessness. Central Africa, it is true, did gain major historical momentum between 1870 and 1885, but that absolutely does not mean that the inhabitants before that were suspended in a solidified state of nature. They were not living fossils.

  Central Africa was a region without writing, but not without a history. Hundreds, yea thousands of years of human history preceded the arrival of the Europeans. If a heart of darkness existed back then, it was sooner to be found in the ignorance with which white explorers viewed the area than in the area itself. Darkness, too, is in the eye of the beholder.

  I would like to illustrate that far-distant history with the use of five virtual slides, five snapshots. And I would like to wonder aloud what the life of, say, a twelve-year-old boy looked like at each of those five moments. The first snapshot was made about ninety thousand years ago. The date is taken fairly at random, but it happens to be the only reliable date we have for the oldest archaeological remains in Congo.

  How bizarre to place Congo’s history in the hands of a European. How Eurocentric can one be? It was in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, that the line of humans split off from that of the primates. It was in Africa, four million years ago, that humans began walking upright. It was in Africa, almost two million years ago, that the first purpose-driven stone tools were made. And it was in Africa one hundred thousand years ago that the complex, prehistoric behavior of our species arose, a behavior characterized by long-distance trading networks, advanced tools of stone and bone, the use of ochre as a dye, early systems for counting, and other forms of symbolism. Congo lay a little too far to the west to join in that evolution from the very start, but extremely primitive and undoubtedly extremely ancient tools have been found at many locations, most of them, unfortunately, poorly dated. The area also produced a number of the world’s most impressive prehistoric celts, skillfully crafted stone axes of up to forty centimeters long.

  Ninety thousand years ago, let us say. Let’s imagine the shore of one of the four Great Lakes to the east, the one known today as Lake Edward. Our twelve-year-old boy could have been sitting there, at the spot where the Semliki River flows out of the lake. Perhaps he was part of that little group of prehistoric people whose remains were meticulously exhumed in the 1990s. Once a year, a group of hunter-gatherers assembled at this spot, always when the catfish were spawning. This tasty, slow-moving fish with its grim feelers can easily grow to over seventy centimeters in length and weigh more than ten kilos. Normally, it lives at the bottom of the lake, beyond the reach of people. But at the start of the rainy season it moves to shallow water to spawn. To this end, the fish is even equipped with a special respiratory organ. Useful, but risky: as early as ninety thousand years ago, people along that lake were already carving harpoons from bone, the oldest known such artifacts—in other parts of the world, that took place only twenty thousand years ago. Using a rib or a femur, a spearhead was fashioned with deadly notches and barbs. A twelve-year-old boy like ours may very well have learned to impale a fish like that, or perhaps one of the many smaller species. Very possible indeed that he also dug up lungfish, eel-like animals that nestle into a shallow recess at the start of the dry season and remain there for the eight months of summer. Paleontological research has shown that the area was much drier then. Elephants lived there, along with zebras and warthogs, animals typical of an open landscape. But the proximity of water meant there were also hippopotami, crocodiles, marsh antelope, and otters. The wind blew over the water, the bushes rustled, a fish writhing in pain beat its tail wildly and impotently against the wet rocks. And leaning over it on his harpoon, a boy’s voice might have been heard: excited, grim, and exultant. A snapshot, no more than that.

  A second slide: it is twenty-five hundred years before the start of our calendar. Our twelve-year-old boy was then a Pygmy in the dense rain forest. Agriculture did not yet exist, not by a long shot, but he would certainly have tasted the nuts of the wild oil palm. The remains of such early inhabitants have been found beneath rocky overhangs in the Ituri forest. Scattered amid a few crude stone implements there were the pits of prehistoric palm nuts. Did these forest dwellers live there? Or did they come there only sporadically? No one knows. The tools, in any case, were made from quartz and river stones that had been gathered locally. The twelve-year-old boy may have belonged to a small, extremely mobile group of
hunter-gatherers, who must have possessed a very thorough knowledge of their everyday environment. They hunted apes, antelopes, and porcupines, they picked nuts and fruit, dug for tubers, and knew which plants were medicinal and which were mind expanding.

  This too, however, was not a closed world. Even then there was contact with the outside world. Flint and obsidian were traded over great distances, sometimes up to three hundred kilometers (185 miles) away. Perhaps our boy was the first Congolese of whom we have a written record. Perhaps he was captured as a slave and abducted from the jungle, taken across the savanna and the desert, a journey that took months, to a river and a seemingly endless journey downstream: the Nile. His escort was delighted with his catch: a Pygmy, the rarest and most costly thing imaginable. His divine master in the north would send him a special summons: a letter he would later have carved in stone: “Come and bring me the dwarf, the dwarf you have brought me from the land of the spirits, alive, safe and well, to dance the holy dances to the entertainment and felicity of Pharaoh Neferkare. Be careful he does not fall in the water.”3 The hieroglyphs were chiseled into the rock at Aswan, at the grave of the expedition’s leader, twenty-five hundred years before our era began. “The land of the spirits”: it was the first time Congo was mentioned in writing.

  Next slide, the third. We find ourselves around AD 500. In Europe, the Western Roman Empire has just collapsed. A twelve-year-old Congolese boy in those days led a completely different life from his predecessor. The wandering was over, from now on he would be more or less sedentary: he no longer pulled up stakes several times a year, but only a few times in his life. Approximately two thousand years before our Christian era began, agriculture was practiced for the first time in what is now Cameroon. This new source of nutrition resulted in a growing population. And because it was extensive agriculture, new fields had to be cultivated each year. Slowly but surely, the farming lifestyle spread across Africa. It was the start of the Bantu migration. That migration should not be seen as a great trek on the part of farmers who one day packed their bags and arrived a thousand kilometers further along with the statement “This is it!” It was a slow but steady shift southward (to the north, after all, lay the Sahara). In the course of three millennia, agriculture took over all of central and southern Africa. The hundreds of languages spoken in that huge area are, as noted, related even today. The forest in Congo formed no real obstacle for the Bantu-speaking farmers. Along the rivers and elephant trails, they pushed their way into the area. There they came in contact with the local forest dwellers, the Pygmies. By the year 1000, the entire region had been settled.

  The great innovation around AD 500 was the cultivation of plantain, the cooking banana, a crop with an origin as unclear as its flavor is delicious. Our twelve-year-old boy was in luck: during the centuries before, the principle staple had been the yam, a nutritious tuber rich in starch, but rather bland to the taste. For his mother, who tended the fields, the plantain had major advantages: unlike the yam, it did not draw the malaria mosquito. The yield was ten times that of the tuber, the plantain required less care and was much less taxing for the soil. At that time, his father must also have climbed palm trees to harvest palm oil. Perhaps they had a few chickens and goats, maybe even a dog. In addition, they still did a great deal of foraging, fishing, and hunting. The son must have gathered termites, caterpillars, grubs, slugs, mushrooms and wild honey. With his father and other men from the village he hunted antelope and bush pigs. To catch fish he set out weirs or dammed streams. He had, in other words, an extremely varied diet. Agriculture still accounted for only 40 percent of his intake.

  In the year 500, our boy’s father probably had several iron tools. That was another innovation of the day: the earliest known metallurgy in the area arose during the first centuries of our era. Before that, people had used exclusively stone tools. His mother almost certainly owned pots of baked clay. Ceramics had come along centuries earlier. Pots and bowls and metal were luxury goods that his parents obtained by barter and exchange, just like costly animal skins and rare pigments.

  The family lived in a smallish village with a few other families, but between villages new forms of cooperation were arising. Agriculture’s ongoing march resulted in family ties across a larger area. Perhaps even then each village would have had its own gong or slit drum, a hollow log on which one could produce two tones, one high and one low; this allowed them to send messages across a great distance. Not vague alarm signals, but extremely precise messages, entire sentences, bits of news and stories. When someone died, his name, nickname, and calls of condolence were ruffled around. When a hut burned down, when a prey was killed or a family member came to visit, the villagers drummed the news from place to place. Early in the morning or late in the evening, when the air was cold, you could hear the beats for miles around. Distant villages passed the information along to even more distant villages. The peoples of Central Africa never developed a system of writing, but their langage tambouriné (drummed language) was ingenious. Information was not stored for the future, but broadcast immediately across field and forest and shared with the community. Nineteenth-century explorers were amazed to find that the villages where they came ashore had been expecting them for a long time. When they learned that a drummed message could travel up to six hundred kilometers (370 miles) in a single day, they spoke laughingly of the télégraphe de brousse (bush telegraph). They didn’t know that this form of communication easily preceded Morse’s invention by a millennium and a half.

  Next slide, more than one thousand years later. Let’s say: 1560. Italy is caught up in the Renaissance. Jan Breughel the Elder is painting his masterpieces. The first tulip appears in Holland. What did the life of a twelve-year-old Congolese look like? If he was born in the forest, he now almost certainly lived in a larger village, a village with dozens of houses and hundreds of inhabitants, ruled over by a chieftain. The chief’s power was based on his name, fame, honor, wealth, and charisma. Only he was allowed to don the skin and teeth of the leopard. He had to rule like a father, never placing his own interests before those of the community. A number of such villages together formed a kind of circle that helped prevent conflicts over farmland and ward off intruders.

  If our young fellow was born on the savanna, he would have noticed that this system had developed a step further there. A number of circles together formed a district, in some cases even a kingdom. The first real states, like those of the Kongo, the Lunda, the Luba, and the Kuba, appeared on the savanna south of the equatorial forest from the fourteenth century on. The expansion was made possible by agricultural surpluses. Some of the states were the size of Ireland. They were feudal, hierarchical societies. At the top stood a king, a village chieftain to the nth degree, the father of his people, protector and benefactor of his subjects. He cared for the community, consulted the elders, and settled disagreements. The result of this political construct is not hard to imagine: a great deal indeed depended on the personality of the king. One could be lucky or unlucky. When power becomes so personalized, history becomes manic-depressive. This certainly applied to the kingdoms of the savanna. Periods of prosperity alternated rapidly with periods of decline. The changing of the throne led almost invariably to civil war.

  If our imaginary boy grew up along the lower reaches of the Congo, he was a subject of the Kongo Empire, the most famous of all these feudal principalities. Its capital was called Mbanza-Kongo, today a place in Angola, just south of Matadi. In 1482 the coastal inhabitants of that empire had seen something extremely remarkable: huge huts looming up out of the sea, huts with flapping cloths. When those sailing ships anchored off the coast, the people along the shore saw that there were white people in them. These had to be ancestors who lived at the bottom of the sea, a kind of water spirit. The whites wore clothes, lots more clothes than they did, which seemed to be made from the skins of strange sea creatures. All highly peculiar. The inexhaustible quantities of cloth the strangers had with them made the people think they
probably spent most of their time weaving, there below the ocean.4

  But these were Portuguese sailors who, in addition to linen, also came bearing the consecrated wafer. The king of the Bakongo, Nzinga Kuwu, allowed them to leave four missionaries behind in his empire and sent four dignitaries with them in exchange. When the latter returned a few years later with weird and wonderful stories about that distant Portugal, the king burned with the desire to learn the Europeans’ secrets and, in 1491, let them christen him Don João. Several years later though, disappointed, he returned to his polygamy and divinations. His son, Prince Nzinga Mvemba, however, was to become a deeply devout Christian and to rule over the Kongo Empire for four decades (1506–43), under his Christian name of Afonso I. It was a period of great prosperity and consolidation, during which the king’s power was founded on trade with the Portuguese. When those Portuguese asked for slaves, he had raids carried out in neighboring districts. It was an ancient practice—slavery was an indigenous phenomenon, anyone with power also had people—but his cooperation created so much goodwill with the Portuguese that Afonso was allowed to send one of his sons to Europe to attend seminary. In Lisbon the son in question, eleven-year-old Henrique, learned Portuguese and Latin and then moved to Rome, where he was enthroned as bishop—the first black Catholic bishop in history—before returning home. But Henrique was of weak constitution and died a few years later.