Congo
Page 5
In the northeast of what would later become Congo, where the rain forest meets the savanna, traders from the Nile Valley were active: Sudanese, Nubians, and even Egyptian Copts. Their clientele lived as far away as Cairo. The traders traveled to the south by way of Darfur or Khartoum. Slaves and ivory were the major export products, razzias and hunting parties the principle form of acquisition. By 1856 the entire trade had gradually entered the hands of a single individual: al-Zubayr, a powerful trader whose empire in 1880 extended from Northern Congo to Darfur. Officially, his trading zone was a province of Egypt; in practice, it comprised an empire unto itself. The Arab influence spread all the way to southern Sudan.
But it was above all Zanzibar, an unsightly island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of present-day Tanzania, that played a crucial role. When the sultan of Oman settled there in 1832 to control the flow of trade in the Indian Ocean, the move had far-reaching consequences for all of eastern Africa. Zanzibar, itself rich only in coconuts and cloves, became the global transfer table for slaves. The island exported to the Arabian Peninsula, the Mideast, the Indian subcontinent, and China.
In 1870 the villagers of Bandio noticed none of this. But the Zanzibar traders possessed excellent firearms and so they themselves moved farther and farther into the interior, farther than the Europeans to the west ever had. Some of them were pure Arabs, others were of mixed African blood. Often they included African converts to Islam, whom we refer to as Afro-Arab or Swahilo-Arab traders; in the nineteenth century, however, they were called les arabisés. Swahili, a Bantu language with many Arabic loan words, spread all over Eastern Africa. Starting at Zanzibar and the town of Bagamoyo on the coast, huge caravans began heading inland from 1850 on, until they reached the shores of Lake Tanganyika, eight hundred kilometers to the west. The settlement of Ujiji, where Stanley would “find” Livingstone in 1871, became a major trading post. From the lake’s far shore the caravans moved even farther inland, into the area now known as Congo. As with the trading empire of al-Zubayr, one saw spheres of commercial influence solidify into political entities. In southeastern Katanga, Msiri, a trader from the African east coast, took over an existing realm: the ancient, but by-then mordant Lunda Empire. From 1856 to 1891 he was lord and master over this region rich in copper and controlled all trade routes to the east. His interests, at first purely commercial, in this way took on political form.
A bit farther to the north, the notorious ivory and slave trader Tippo Tip reigned supreme. As son of an Afro-Arab family from Zanzibar he answered directly to the Sultan, but soon he became the most powerful man in all of eastern Congo. His authority was felt in the area that stretched between the Great Lakes to the east and the headwaters of the Congo (also referred to there as Lualaba), three hundred kilometers (185 miles) to the west. Tippo Tip’s power was founded not only on his exceptional business sense, but also on violence. At first he had acquired his luxury goods—slaves and ivory—in a friendly fashion: like other Zanzibaris, he established pacts with local leaders for the purposes of bartering. A number of those leaders became vassals of the Afro-Arab traders. Yet, from 1870 on, all that changed. As more and more tons of ivory began flowing eastward, traders like Tippo Tip grew in power and wealth. In the final account, the sacking and pillaging of entire villages proved more cost effective than bartering for a few tusks and adolescents. Why spend days chattering with the local village chieftain, refusing lukewarm palm wine that your religion forbade you to drink anyway, when you could just as easily torch his village? In addition to ivory, this new approach also produced additional slaves to carry that ivory. Raiding became more important than trading; firearms tipped the scales. The name Tippo Tip sent shivers down the spines of those inhabiting an area half the size of Europe. In fact, it wasn’t even his real name (that was Hamed ben Mohammed al-Murjebi), but probably an onomatopoeiac form derived from the sound of his rifle.
At Disasi Makulo’s home in Bandio, however, no one had ever heard of Tippo Tip. The stage was still empty, the world still a verdant green. In the wings, to the left and right, foreign traders—European Christians and Afro-Arab Muslims—stood awaiting their cues, ready to push on into the heart of Central Africa. It was only because the region’s power structures were already in a wretched state, due in part to the European slave trade carried out in the centuries before, that their offensive was even possible. Not much was left in those days of the once so-powerful native kingdoms, and social structures in the jungle had always been less complex than those on the savanna. The political vacuum in the interior, therefore, offered new economic opportunities for foreigners. That is putting it nicely. In reality, the period to come was one of administrative anarchy, rapaciousness, and violence. But not yet. Little Disasi still lay slumbering, tied to his mother’s back, his cheek pressed to her shoulder blade. The wind rustled in the treetops. After a thunderstorm, the rain forest went on dripping for hours.
“ONE DAY, a few people from the riverside came to visit my parents.” Thus begins Disasi Makulo’s earliest recollection. He must have been five or six at the time. The strangers brought with them a very peculiar story. “They said they had seen something bizarre on the river, a spirit perhaps. ‘We saw a huge, mysterious canoe,’ they said, ‘that rowed itself. In that canoe is a man, white from head to toe, like an albino, covered completely in garments, you could see only his head and his arms. He had a few black men with him.’”2
Besides fish and palm oil, the peoples of the river and the jungle also traded information. The river people, of course, had a tendency to come up with weird news anyway—you could hardly imagine the crazy things they heard from fishermen and traders further along!—but this report sounded particularly strange. What’s more, it was no secondhand account. The clothed albino they had seen was no one less than Henry Morton Stanley. The little group of black men were his bearers and helpers from Zanzibar. That huge, mysterious canoe was the Lady Alice, his eight-meter-long steel boat. After he had found the presumably lost physician, missionary, and explorer David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871, the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph of London had commissioned Stanley to carry out, from 1874 to 1877, what would become the mother of all exploratory expeditions: the crossing of Central Africa from east to west, a staggering journey through festering swamps, hostile tribal territories, and murderous rapids.
It was around the middle of that same century that Europe had come down with the fever of discovery. Newspapers and geographical societies challenged adventurers to explore mountain ranges, chart rivers, and map jungles. A sort of mythical fascination arose for “the sources” of streams and rivers, in particular that of the Nile. Shortly before his meeting with Stanley, the Scotsman Livingstone had found the Lualaba, a broad but unnavigable river in eastern Congo that flowed north, and which he thought could very well constitute the headwaters of the Nile. In 1875 the Englishman Lovett Cameron stood on the banks of that same river. Cameron, however, realized that a bend to the west later on was all it would take to make this, in fact, the Congo, the mouth of which was already known thousands of kilometers away on the Atlantic coast. Neither of them succeeded in following that river. Stanley did.
He left Zanzibar with his caravan in 1874 and, just to be sure, took his own ship along with him. The Lady Alice could be taken apart and portaged like a set of Tinker Toys. What a strange sight that must have been: a long caravan threading its way across the boiling hot savanna of Eastern Africa, hundreds of kilometers from any navigable current, with at the back a group of twenty-four porters bearing the man-size, glistening sections of an otherworldly steel hull.
Stanley subjected Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika to a very close inspection. Then, setting out to the west in 1876, he entered the territory of the much-feared but, upon closer acquaintance, also gallant Tippo Tip, with whom he made a deal. In return for a generous reward, Tippo Tip and his men would accompany Stanley a long way to the north along the Lualaba. It was what we today might c
all a “win-win” situation: Stanley was protected by Tippo Tip, and Tippo Tip could expand into the new territories he discovered along with Stanley.
It worked, although the presence in Stanley’s entourage of the most notorious slave driver of all did generate great hostility among the local population. No one knew what an explorer was; Stanley was seen as just another trader. Spears and poisoned arrows came raining down on more than one occasion, and more than once, there were casualties. Although in his writings Stanley tended to exaggerate the number of such clashes (which did his reputation no good), their frequency indicates how much the Arab slave trade had disrupted the area. After passing a series of cataracts, the river became navigable and turned off to the west. Stanley named the spot Stanley Falls (later Stanleyville, today’s Kisangani). Bidding farewell to Tippo Tip and accompanied by several native canoes, he moved on alone into the area where no European or Afro-Arab trader had ever been before.
On February 1, 1877, at two in the afternoon, his ship passed the area where the friends of Disasi Makulo’s parents lived. Drums had warned the inhabitants along the banks of his approach, and they had prepared themselves well.3 A war party of forty-five large dugouts carrying a hundred men each headed for Stanley’s little flotilla. He noted: “In these savage areas our mere presence awakens the most furious passions of hatred and murder, as a low-lying ship in shallow water stirs up muddy sediment.” It was, indeed, one of the most impressive military confrontations on his journey. Hundreds of sinewy arms paddled in unison. The canoes approached the Lady Alice on waves of foam. At their bows, warriors with colorful feather headdresses were standing ready with their spears. At the stern sat the village elders. There was a deafening sound of drums and horns. “This is a bloodthirsty world,” Stanley wrote, “and for the first time we feel that we hate the filthy, rapacious ghouls who live here.”4 As soon as the first cloud of spears came raining down, musket fire rang out. Stanley shot his way to shore. Once on land he found piles of tusks, and in the villages he saw human skulls mounted on poles. By five that afternoon he was gone.
It seemed like a one-off incident, a terrible apparition, an inexplicable epiphany. Peace and quiet returned, or at least so the villagers thought. But that afternoon passage would change their lives, and especially that of Disasi Makulo.
One week later, for the umpteenth time, Stanley asked a native what this river was called. For the first time he was told: “Ikuti ya Congo” (This is the Congo).5 A simple answer, but one which filled him with joy: now he knew for sure that he would not end up at the pyramids of Giza, but at the Atlantic. He soon began seeing the first Portuguese muskets as well. The attacks from the riverbanks tapered off, but malnutrition, heat, illness, fever, and rapids continued to take their toll on this historic crossing of Central Africa.
On August 9, 1877, more than six months after passing through Disasi’s homeland, to the extreme west of that vast area, near the sleepy trading post of Boma close to the Atlantic, an exhausted and emaciated white man dropped his things. No one knew that this bundle of starvation and misery was the first European to have followed the entire course of the Congo. Of the four white men who had left the east coast with him, Stanley was the only one who survived. Of the 224 members of the expedition, only ninety-two reached the west coast of Africa. It was a heroic journey, and one with far-reaching consequences: within the space of three years, from 1874 to 1877, Stanley had circumnavigated and mapped two gigantic lakes, Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria; he had unraveled the complex hydrology of the Nile and the Congo and charted the watersheds of Africa’s two largest rivers; and he had carefully documented the course of the Congo and blazed a trail through equatorial Africa.6 The world would never be the same. Today, Stanley’s name is associated sooner with that one, awkward sentence—“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”—with which he tried to maintain Victorian decorum in the tropics, than with his much more impressive achievement, which would change forever the lives of hundreds of thousands in Central Africa.
THE PEOPLE in Disasi Makulo’s region thought they had seen a ghost. How could they know that many thousands of kilometers to the north there was a cold and rainy continent where, in the course of the last century, something as mundane as boiling water had changed history? They knew nothing of the industrial revolution that had altered the face of Europe. The existence of a society, largely agrarian as their own, which had suddenly acquired coal mines, smokestacks, stream locomotives, suburbs, incandescent lighting, and socialists, was beyond their ken. In Europe it was raining inventions and discoveries, but none of that had trickled down to Central Africa. It would have taken the large part of an afternoon to explain to them what a train was.
The forest inhabitants could not have dreamed that the industrialization set in motion by the power of steam would change not only Europe, but the whole world. More industry meant greater production, more goods, and so more competition for markets and natural resources. The circles within which a European factory did its buying and selling were expanding all the time. Regional became national, national became global. World trade was growing like never before. Around 1885 steamships replaced sailing ships on the long-distance routes. The tea drunk by a rich Liverpool family came from Ceylon. In Worcester, a sauce was made on an industrial scale using ingredients from India. Dutch ships carried printing presses to Java. And in South Africa, special ostriches were being raised so that women in Paris, London, and New York could wear large, bobbing feathers on their bonnets. The world was growing smaller and smaller, time was going faster and faster. And the nervous heartbeat of this new era could be heard everywhere in offices, train stations and border posts in the hectic tapping of the telegraph.
Industrialization definitely served the European powers’ expansive urge. In faraway places one found inexpensive raw materials and, with a bit of luck, even new customers. But that did not immediately lead to colonization. No one out to maximize operational profits would thinking of founding an expensive colony. Anyone swearing by the principles of free trade (and every industrialist did so in those days) would be loath to turn to anything as protectionist as an overseas territory. Industrialization alone, therefore, cannot explain the rise of colonialism. In purely commercial terms, a colony was not even necessary. In Central Africa, one could have gone on for a time trading bales of cotton for tusks. No, there was another element needed to make colonial fever break out, and that was nationalism.
It was the rivalry between European nation-states that caused them, from 1850, to pounce so promptly upon the rest of the world. Patriotism led to a craving for power, and that craving, in turn, to territorial gluttony. Italy and Germany had only recently become distinct, united nations and they found overseas territories something that befit their newly acquired status. France had been shamefully whipped by the Prussians in 1870 and attempted to remove the blot on its reputation with colonial adventures abroad, particularly in Asia and Western Africa. England derived great pride from its navy, which had ruled the world’s waves for decades, and from its empire, which stretched across the globe, from the West Indies to New Zealand. Proud tsarist Russia was interested in expansion as well, and set its sights on the Balkans, Persia, Afghanistan, Manchuria, and Korea.
The bitter struggle manifested itself in Asia before reaching Africa. Europeans had been familiar with that region much longer and knew that lucrative dealings lay in wait there. (They were still less sure about Africa.) By the time Disasi saw his first white man, in the person of Stanley, the British already controlled the entire Indian subcontinent with offshoots to Baluchistan in the west and Burma to the east. To the southeast the French were busy acquiring Indochina, which included the present-day Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The Dutch still ruled over the enormous island group that would later be called Indonesia, and had done so for more than two centuries. The Philippines were in Spanish hands, but would soon become American territory: the United States, a cluster of former British and French colonies, had itself become a
colonial power. China and Japan resisted on all sides the pressure of Western colonizers, but were forced with great reluctance to sign treaties concerning trade tariffs, concessions, spheres of influence and protectorates. From 1850 the globalization that had begun in the sixteenth century entered a period of decisive acceleration. And it was the heady mix of industrialization with nationalism that would lead to the colonialism typical of the nineteenth century.
That applied most definitely to Central Africa too. At first the European interest in the region had been largely commercial. Until 1880 the players did not feel much of an urge to transform their economic activities into political ones. Colonies were not really called for. Without the rise of national rivalries in Europe, large parts of Central Africa would most probably have fallen under the political sway of Egypt and Zanzibar.7 That process was already under way. In the east, Tippo Tip and Msiri ruled over empires that owed allegiance to the sultan of Zanzibar. Farther north, al-Zubayr ran a huge area that was officially a province of the khedive of Egypt. In other words, the creation of an entity like “Congo” was anything but inevitable. Things could have gone very differently. The region was not predestined to become a single country. That Disasi would ever become a countryman of Nkasi, the old man I had met in Kinshasa, was not written in the stars. The two boys may have differed less than ten years in age, but one of them lived in the equatorial jungle and the other along the lower reaches of the Congo, some twelve hundred kilometers (about 750 miles) away. They spoke different languages, had different customs and knew absolutely nothing about each other’s culture. That they became compatriots was not due to them or to their parents, but was the result of envy in that mad, northern part of the world of which they had no cognizance.