Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  The Christianizing of Congo was therefore undertaken by Portuguese Jesuits and later by Italian Capuchins as well. These activities in no way resembled the missionizing of the nineteenth century; here the church made its appeal expressly to the upper reaches of society. The church stood for power and affluence, and that appealed to no little extent to the top of the Kongo Empire. The wealthy had themselves baptized and assumed noble Portuguese titles. Some of them even learned to read and write, although a sheet of paper at that time cost as much as a chicken, and a missal cost as much as a slave.5 Yet churches were built and cult objects (fétiches in French) burned. Where sorcery was found, Christianity was obliged to triumph. A cathedral arose in the capital, Mbanza-Kongo, and governors in the provinces had churches built as well. The population at large viewed the new religion with interest. While the Christian priests hoped to bring them the true faith, the people saw them as their best protection against sorcery. Many had themselves baptized, not because they had abandoned witchcraft, but precisely because they believed in it so fervently! The crucifix became highly popular as the most powerful of all cult objects to ward off evil spirits.

  In 1560, after Afonso’s death, the Kongo Empire went through a deep crisis. Chances are that our twelve-year-old boy wore around his neck a crucifix, a rosary, or a medallion, perhaps an amulet his mother had made. Christianity did not oust an older belief, but fused with it. Years later, in 1704, when the cathedral at Mbanza-Kongo had already fallen to ruin, a local black mystic would live amid the ruins and claim that Christ and the Madonna were members of the Kongo tribe.6 When missionaries traversed the lower reaches of the Congo in the mid-nineteenth century, they still met with people with names like Ndodioko (from Don Diogo), Ndoluvualu (from Don Alvaro) and Ndonzwau (from Don João). They also saw rituals being performed before crucifixes three centuries old, but now decked out with shells and stones and roundly claimed by all to be indigenous.

  Around 1560, in addition to an amulet, our boy also adopted different eating patterns. The Atlantic trade brought new crops to his district.7 From the moment the Portuguese established their colony on the coast close to Luanda, the change came quickly. In much the same way that the potato reached ascendancy in Europe, corn and manioc quickly conquered all of Central Africa. Corn grew from Peru to Mexico, manioc came from Brazil. In 1560 our boy of twelve would have primarily eaten porridge made from sorghum, a native grain. From 1580 on, however, he began eating corn and manioc. Sorghum could be harvested only once a year, corn twice and manioc the whole year through. While corn did well on the drier savanna, manioc flourished in the more humid forest. It was more nutritious and easier to cultivate than plantain or yams. The tubers rarely rotted. All one had to do was clear a new plot each year; it was during this period that slash-and-burn agriculture originated.8 If he was lucky, the boy’s bowl also featured sweet potatoes, peanuts, and beans—regular ingredients even today in the Congolese kitchen. Within a few decades the diet of Central Africa had been radically transformed, thanks to globalization on the part of the Portuguese.

  Congo, in other words, did not have to wait for Stanley in order to enter the flow of history. The area was not untouched, and time there had not come to a standstill. From 1500 it took part in international trade. And although most of the forest’s inhabitants would not have known it, each day they ate plants that came from another part of the world.

  Fifth slide. Final snapshot: we have arrived in the year 1780. If our boy was born then, there is a sizeable chance that he became merchandise for the European slave drivers and ended up on the sugar plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, or in the south of what would later be the United States. The Atlantic slave trade lasted roughly from 1500 to 1850. The entire west coast of Africa was involved in it, but the area around the mouth of the Congo most intensively of all. From a strip of coastline some four hundred kilometers (250 miles) long, an estimated four million people were put on transport, equaling almost a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade. No less than one in every four slaves on the cotton and tobacco plantations of the American South came from equatorial Africa.9 The Portuguese, the British, the French, and the Dutch were the major traders, but that does not mean that they themselves penetrated far into the African interior.

  Beginning in 1780 greater demand for slaves in the United States resulted in a major upscaling of the trade. From 1700 onward, between four and six thousand slaves were shipped annually from the Loango Coast north of the Congo; by 1780 that number had risen to fifteen thousand annually.10 This increase was felt far into the equatorial forest. If our boy was abducted during a raid, or sold by his parents in times of famine, he would have ended up with one of the important traders along the river. He would have been forced to sit in an enormous dugout, perhaps twenty meters in length, which could carry between forty and seventy passengers. He may have been chained. In addition to dozens of slaves, the canoe would also have carried ivory, the rain forest’s other luxury good. A Pygmy who had killed an elephant would not, after all, have gone himself to the coast to sell the tusks to an Englishman or a Dutchman. Trade went by way of a middleman. In the opposite direction as well: a keg of gunpowder could easily take five years to make its way from the Atlantic coast to a village in the interior.11

  And then the journey began, downstream. For months the captives floated down the broad, brown river through the jungle, until they arrived at the section that was no longer navigable. There arose the huge and supremely important market of Kinshasa. People gathered there from all over. One heard the bleating of goats, dried fish hung on racks, manioc loaves were piled beside textiles from Europe. You could even buy salt there! The air was filled with shouts, prayers, laughter, and argument. There was as yet no city, but the activity was in full swing. Here the trader from the interior would sell his slaves and ivory to a caravan leader, who would take his goods overland to the coast, three hundred kilometers (185 miles) farther. Only there would our twelve-year-old boy see a white man, for the first time in his life. He would be haggled over for days.

  We do not know how his crossing to the New World went. But a rare eyewitness account by a West African slave who was shipped to Brazil in 1840 provides a bit of a picture:

  We were thrown naked into the ship’s hold, the men close together on one side, women on the other; the ceiling of the hold was so low that we could not stand up straight, but were forced to squat or sit on the floor; day and night were the same to us, the close quarters made it impossible to sleep, and we grew desperate with suffering and fatigue . . . . The only food we were given during the journey was grain that had been soaked and boiled . . . . We suffered greatly from a lack of water. Our rations were one half liter a day, no more than that; and a great many slaves died during the crossing . . . . If one of them became defiant, his flesh was cut with a knife and pepper and vinegar were rubbed into the wound.12

  The international slave trade had an enormous impact on Central Africa. Regions were torn apart, lives destroyed, horizons shifted. But it also brought with it an extremely intensive network of regional commerce along the river. If you had to go down the Congo River anyway with a shipment of slaves and tusks, you might as well fill your dugout with less luxurious goods to sell along the way. And so fish, manioc, cane sugar, palm oil, palm wine, sugarcane wine, beer, tobacco, raffia, baskets, ceramics, and iron were taken along as well. Each day, some forty metric tons (forty-four U.S. tons) of manioc were transported along the Congo, over distances of no more than 250 kilometers (155 miles).13 Usually this was in the form of manioc loaves, chikwangue: boiled manioc gruel cleverly packaged in banana leaves. A hefty meal in itself, leaden on the stomach, but not perishable and easy to transport.

  The importance of this regional trade should not be underestimated. In a world of fishermen, farmers, and hunters, a new professional category arose: that of merchants. People who had traditionally lived by tossing their nets discovered that a greater catch could be obtained by plying the river. Fishermen
became merchants, and fishing villages marketplaces. Trading had always been carried out on a modest scale, but now commerce became a trade in itself. Many were none the worse for it. Some came to possess dugouts, wives, slaves, and muskets, and therefore power. Anyone possessing gunpowder had influence. And so the traditional authority of the tribal chieftains was shaken to the foundations. Centuries-old social forms were eroded. Anarchy reared its head. Political ties based on village and family were being elbowed out by new economic alliances between traders. Even the once so powerful Kongo Empire became dissolute.14 A gigantic political vacuum arose. International trade was flourishing, but it resulted in total chaos far into the African interior.

  Ninety thousand years of human history, ninety thousand years of society . . . such vitality! No timeless state of nature occupied by noble savages or bloodthirsty barbarians. It was what it was: history, movement, attempts to contain the misery, attempts that sometimes brought new misery, for the dream and the shadow are the closest of friends. There had never been anything like standing still; the major changes followed each other with ever-increasing momentum. As history moved faster, the horizon expanded. Hunter-gatherers had lived in groups of perhaps fifty individuals, but the earliest farmers already had communities of five hundred. When those societies expanded to become organized states, the individual was absorbed into contexts of thousands or even tens of thousands of people. At its zenith, the Kongo Empire had as many as five hundred thousand subjects. But the slave trade annihilated those broader ties. And in the rain forest, far from the river, people still lived in small, closed societies. Even in 1870.

  IN MARCH 2010, as I was putting the finishing touches to this manuscript, I booked a flight to Kinshasa. I wanted to visit Nkasi again, this time accompanied by a cameraman. I resolved to take him a nice silk shirt, for poverty cannot be combated with powdered milk alone. Regularly, during the long months of work on this book, I had called his nephew to ask how Nkasi was getting along. “Il se porte toujours bien!” (He’s still doing fine) was always the cheerful announcement from the other end. Less than one week before my deadline, five days before my departure, I called again. That was when I heard that he had just died. His family had left Kinshasa with the body, to bury him at Ntimansi, the village in Bas-Congo where he had been born an eternity ago.

  I looked out the window. Brussels was going through the final days of a winter that knew no respite. And as I stood there like that, I could not help thinking about the bananas he had slid over to me during our first meeting. “Take it, eat.” Such a warm gesture, in a country that makes the news so much more often for its corruption than for its generosity.

  And I had to think about that afternoon in December 2008. After a long talk Nkasi had needed a rest, and I entered into conversation with Marcel, one of his great-nephews. We were sitting in the courtyard. Long lines of wash had been hung out to dry and a few women were sorting dried beans. Marcel was wearing a baseball cap with the visor turned to the back and was leaning back comfortably in a plastic garden chair. He started talking about his life. Although he had been good at school, he had now been relegated to the marché ambulant (walking marketplace). He was one of the thousands and thousands of young people who spent all day crossing the city with a few articles to sell—a pair of trousers, two baskets, four belts, a map. Sometimes he would sell only two baskets a day, a turnover of less than four dollars. Marcel sighed. “All I want is for my three children to be able to go to school,” he said. “I liked school so much myself, especially literature.” And to prove that, in a deep voice he began reciting “Le soufflé des ancêtres,” the long poem by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop. He knew great chunks of it by heart.

  Listen more often

  To things rather than people

  You can hear the voice of the fire,

  Hear too the voice of the water.

  Listen to the bush

  Sobbing in the wind:

  It is the breath of the dead.

  Those who died never went away:

  They are in the shadow that lights up

  And also in the shadow that folds in upon itself.

  The dead are not beneath the ground:

  They are in the leaves that rustle,

  They are in the wood that groans,

  They are in the water that rushes,

  They are in the water at rest,

  They are with the people, they are in the hut.

  The dead are not dead.15

  Winter on the rooftops of Brussels. The news I just received. His voice that I can still hear. “Take it, eat.”

  MAP 3: CENTRAL AFRICA IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY

  CHAPTER 1

  NEW SPIRITS

  Central Africa Draws the Attention of East and West

  1870–1885

  NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY WHEN DISASI MAKULO WAS BORN. But then neither did he. “I was born in the days when the white man had still not arrived in our area,” he told his children many years later. “We didn’t know then that there were people in the world with skin of a different color.”1 It must have been around 1870–72. He died in 1941. Not long before, he had dictated his life’s story to one of his sons. It would appear in print only in the 1980s; twice in fact, in Kinshasa and again in Kisangani, but Zaïre, as Congo was called in those days, was as good as bankrupt. The publications were sober, with limited print runs and distribution. And that is unfortunate, because the life story of Disasi Makulo is above all a fantastic adventure. To understand the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Central Africa there is no better guide than Makulo.

  Where Disasi was born, however, he knew very well: in the village of Bandio. He was the son of Asalo and Boheheli, a Turumbu tribesman. Bandio lay in the district of Basoko, now Orientale province. The heart of the equatorial forest, in other words. Aboard the boat from Kinshasa to Kisangani, a few weeks’ journey upstream along the Congo, one passes on the port side a few days before arrival the large village of Basoko. It is on the northern bank, at the confluence with the Aruwimi, one of the Congo’s larger tributaries. Bandio is to the east of Basoko, a ways back from the river itself.

  His parents were not fishing folk; they lived in the jungle. His mother raised manioc. With her hoe or digging tool she would chop at the earth to pry loose the thick tubers. She lined them up to dry in the sun and, a few days later, ground them to flour. His father worked with palm oil. Climbing high into the trees with his machete, he chopped off the bunches of greasy nuts. Then he would press them until the lovely juice ran out, a deep orange, a sort of liquid copper that has added to the region’s wealth since time immemorial. That palm oil could be used to trade with the fishermen along the river. Commercial ties had existed for centuries between the riverine inhabitants, who had fish in abundance, and the people of the forest with their surpluses of palm oil, manioc, or plantains. The result was a balanced diet: the protein-rich fish was taken to the rain forest, the starchy crops and vegetable oil were left on the banks.

  Bandio was a relatively insular world. The radius of activity covered in a human lifetime was limited to a few dozen kilometers. People sometimes visited another village to attend a wedding or arrange an inheritance, but most of them left their region seldom or never. They died where they were born. When Disasi Makulo entered the world with a shriek, the villagers of Bandio knew nothing of the outside world. They knew nothing of the permanent presence of the Portuguese a thousand kilometers to the west, along the Atlantic, nor in fact of the existence of an ocean. The Portuguese colony of Angola had lost much of its splendor, as had Portugal itself, but—for Africans as well—Portuguese remained the major trading language along the coast south of the mouth of the Congo. Nor did Disasi’s people know that, since the eighteenth century, the British had taken over the trade of the Portuguese along the Congo’s lower reaches and embouchure. That the Dutch and the French had settled there as well: they could never have guessed that, for none of those Europeans ever made their way inland. They r
emained on the coast and the area immediately behind it, waiting till the caravans led by African traders reached them with their goods from the interior: ivory in particular, but also palm oil, peanuts, coffee, baobab bark, and pigments such as orchil and copal. Not to mention slaves. Although the trade in human beings had been abolished throughout the Western world in those years, it went on in secret for quite some time. The Westerners paid with precious cloth, bits of copper, gunpowder, muskets, and red or blue pearls or rare seashells. This latter commodity was no act of clever Western fraud. As with official coinage, those shells were piece goods of great value that could be transported easily and were impossible to counterfeit. But Bandio was too far away to see much of that. If such a white, gleaming shell or bead necklace actually happened to make it to their area, no one knew exactly where it came from.

  Newborn Disasi’s fellow villagers may have known nothing about the Europeans on the west coast, but they were even less informed about the great upheavals taking place more than a thousand kilometers to the east and north. Beginning in 1850, the Central African rainforest had also attracted the attention of merchants from the island of Zanzibar, as well as from the African east coast (present-day Tanzania) and even from two thousand kilometers away in Egypt. Their interest was prompted by a natural raw material that had been valued around the world for centuries as a luxury good for the manufacture of princely Chinese tablets, Indian figurines, and medieval reliquaries. That material was ivory. High-grade ivory was found in huge quantities in the African interior. The tusks of the African elephant comprised the largest and purest pieces of ivory in the world, weighing up to seventy kilos and more. Unlike the Asian elephant, already rare by that time, the female of the African species bore tusks as well. In the mid-nineteenth century this seemingly inexhaustible treasure trove was the subject of increasingly close perusal.