During his travels with Grenfell, Disasi returned to his homeland for the first time. The reunion with his parents was gripping. The gong sounded out news of the lost son’s return. Relatives immediately slaughtered a few goats and dogs, and proposed en passant that two slaves be sacrificed as well. “When I saw that I was deeply indignant that such barbaric customs of slavery and cannibalism continued to exist within my tribe.” He protested vehemently and even released the slaves, to the bewilderment of his former neighbors. “Many of them wondered in amazement why I felt pity for these slaves. Others accused me of having prevented them from eating the delicious flesh of a human. The dancing went on for two days, without a stop.”23 Disasi Makulo was now a man caught between two cultures, loyal to his tribe and to his new faith.
He was not the only one to find himself cut loose in a new moral universe. The first inhabitants of the missions were often children whom the authorities of the Free State had taken away from areas marked by conflict. They did not always come from the slave traders; some of them were victims of tribal violence. Lungeni Dorcas, a girl from Kasai, was captured by warriors from the neighboring Basonge tribe. She had watched as her mother and brothers were beaten and her youngest brother, still an infant, was pounded against the ground till dead. Hers is one of the few female voices known from that period:
After a few days we heard that a white man would come to fight against our enemies and free us. Our captors, having heard that, began selling their prisoners. Then the white man came, he was an authority from the government and accompanied by a great many soldiers. He summoned the head of the village and said that he wanted to free all of the prisoners, including those of his subjects. He had them open a chest containing all kinds of beads, necklaces, mitakos [copper currency ingots], and textiles. We were struck by the beauty of those objects and were introduced to the Europeans. After he had freed us, he took us to Lusambo. That day a boat arrived there, steered by a white man. Our government official handed us over to him and it was he who took us to the Protestant mission at Kintambo. There we met many boys and girls from different tribes, all of them bought free like us.24
The importance of this account can hardly be overestimated, for it shows us in detail how mission posts acquired their first believers through the government’s intervention and how that led to the establishment of the first interethnic communities. Young people totally unfamiliar with each other’s language and culture suddenly lived together closely. The missionaries even went a step further. As the children grew up, the Europeans became multicultural matchmakers. Once again, Lungeni Dorcas: “To save us from all manner of complications in the future, the missionaries wanted us to marry only young Christians who had been raised by them as well.” In her case, this meant marriage to an old acquaintance: “That was why they arranged for me to marry Disasi. And that is what came to pass.”25
One generation earlier it would have been unthinkable for her to marry a man born eight hundred kilometers (five hundred miles) away; now she bore him six children—three boys and three girls. The mission deemphasized tribal ties, eased people away from their villages, and promoted the nuclear family as the alternative.
As a newlywed, Disasi remained deeply distressed with la terrible barbarie (the terrible barbarism) in his village.26 He therefore proposed to Grenfell that he begin a mission post of his own. In 1902 he set up the mission at Yalemba, one of the first black-run posts in Congo. Grenfell came by to visit on occasion. After his many wanderings, Disasi had come home again:
The objective of my return was to help my own, to protect them and bring them the light of civilization . . . . I had decided that all the inhabitants of my village would come to live with me at the mission. I began with the members of my own family: my father, my mother, my sisters, my brothers, my nieces and nephews. At first, the other villagers did not want to leave their village. Only later, after great effort, was I able to persuade them to leave and settle down with me.27
Black catechists formed a bridgehead between two worlds. Old Nkasi had already told me something along those lines during our conversations. His father’s youngest brother, Joseph Zinga, went after all with the Protestant missionary Mr. Welles to Palabala to become a catechist. That was how he had absorbed European ideas and knowledge and became familiar with our Christian calendar. “It was because of him that I know that I was born in 1882,” Nkasi had said.28
MEANWHILE, THE CATHOLICS were also on the move. After early efforts by the Holy Ghost Fathers and the White Fathers, following the Berlin Conference, the Catholic mission work quickly gathered momentum. Now that Leopold II had withdrawn from his international association, he granted preference to Belgian missionaries, who were without exception Catholic. In 1886 Pope Leo XIII, who was on very good terms with Leopold, announced that the Congo Free State was to be evangelized by Belgians. The White Fathers, originally a Franco-Algerian congregation, now dispatched only Belgians. Young Scheutists and Jesuits, followed by Trappists, Franciscans, fathers of the Sacred Heart, and sisters of the Precious Blood, left from countless villages and towns throughout Belgium. They divided Congo’s interior neatly among themselves. Protestant missionaries from England, America, and Sweden continued to be active, but lost some of their influence: they were forced to work in accordance with the dictates of the new country and to learn to live with the badgering of Catholic missionaries who absconded with their converts.
While the Protestants focused largely on the individual, based on their doctrine of the personal connection between Christ and the believer, the Catholics went in search of groups from the very start. For them, the collective experience of faith took pride of place. But how, for heaven’s sake, did one go about finding groups like that? Once again, children provided the solution. Their first followers, like those of the Protestants, were often child slaves freed and entrusted to them by the state. At the mission post in Kimuenza, for example, the Jesuits began in 1893 with seventeen freed slaves, twelve workers from the Bangala tribe, two carpenters from the coast, two soldiers with their wives, and eighty-five children whom the state had “confiscated” from the Arabized slave traders. Together they formed une colonie scolaire (educational colony). Two years later, in April 1895, there were already four hundred boys and seventy girls, and even forty toddlers between the ages of two and three. In 1899 the mission had a church that could hold fifteen hundred worshipers, with three stained-glass windows and two bronze bells, one weighing two hundred kilos, the other six hundred (440 and 1,320 pounds). The bells had been cast in Belgium. One could hear them peal as far away as a two-and-a-half-hour walk from the mission post.29
Government help, therefore, was essential. But the intertwining of church and state went much further than the acquisition of new converts. When the Kimuenza mission was founded, an official called together the village chieftains to explain to them that the mission enjoyed the special protection of the state, and that they should not hesitate to sell to them chickens, manioc, and other provisions.30 The state even saw to the maintenance of the school, on condition that four out of every five children completing their studies enroll in the Force Publique, the Free State’s army! This much was clear: the Jesuits fought for Jesus, but also for Leopold. The school was run like a Belgian military academy.
The little black boys had to salute and even march . . . . The daily routine is no different. At five-thirty, get up quickly to the bugle’s call, wash quickly, then prayer: Pater, Ave, Credo in Fiote [Kikongo]. After prayers, breakfast. All gather on the square in front of the building that serves as refectory. The children line up. The sergeant screams: “Atten-shun!” Silence immediately descends over the ranks. “Right, face!” The little column starts to move and lines up, ramrod straight and silent, at the tables. “Sit!” and all are seated. Then comes the order for which everyone has been waiting impatiently. “Eat!”31
After some time had passed, such colonies scolaires also proved to have their limitations: the influx of slave childre
n was not endless, and, despite all the bell ringing, conversion among the neighboring “heathens” did not continue once all the alumni had vanished into the barracks. That was why the Jesuits followed up with the system of the fermes-chapelles (chapel farms). Close to an existing village they would establish a new settlement where local children learned to pray, read, and garden in relative isolation. The emphasis lay precisely on that relative isolation: they were to be kept away from their familiar culture long enough to prevent them from backsliding into “heathendom.” “Civilizing these blacks, while leaving them in their own surroundings, is like reanimating a drowned man while at the same time holding his head under water,” was the subtle simile applied.32 At the same time, however, their new status as well-fed and well-dressed little catechists had to remain visible to the other, seminaked villagers: that, after all, provoked useful feelings of envy. The mission became a means to material welfare. For every child he brought to the chapel farm, the village chief received a gift. Little wonder then that one of them is known to have said: “White men, come to honor my village, build your house there, teach us to live like white men. We will give you our children and you shall make of them mindele ndombe, black white men.”33
Mission posts became large-scale farms and display windows for a different way of life. The number of baptisms skyrocketed. Between 1893 and 1918 the Jesuits alone made some twelve thousand converts. At their Kisantu post in 1896 they had fifteen cows; by 1918 there were more than fifteen hundred. There was a carpenter’s shop, a little hospital, and even a printing press.34 Those who had finished their schooling stayed at the mission post and married. They worked as farmers, carpenters, or printers, and started families. Like the Protestant missions, these newly formed villages did not fall under the authority of a native chieftain. The traditional village with its countless contacts and variegated forms of solidarity lost ground to the monogamous family. Other religious orders adopted the chapel farm formula as well, but the system also met with fierce criticism. To inflate their baptismal registers, the missionaries were extremely prompt in labeling children as “orphans,” even when there were still plenty of relatives to raise them in the African tradition. Whenever sleeping sickness broke out, children were plucked en masse from their villages. “The result was disastrous,” one contemporary realized, “and it made the natives hate us.”35
The missionaries’ affability had its darker facets. As friendly as their smiles when dealing with the local population, just as underhanded were their methods at times. The Belgian missionary Gustaaf Van Acker explained how he, as White Father, dealt with the “talismans” of the native religion (“bones, hair, animal droppings, teeth, hundreds of filthy objects and more”) that he found in “hovels” along the road”:
So as not to annoy the people and to safeguard our studies, we could not act against all that diabolical filth; we had to smother our hatred and only on occasion, when we were alone, could we apply an enraged stomp and leave that mess in ruins. I hope that someday soon we may act more openly and in all of Oeroea, all its villages, along all its streets, replace these infernal signs and diabolical knickknacks with the True Cross. Oh my! So much work for so few champions of the Cross!”36
Some missionaries destroyed thousands of cult objects in this way.
In Boma I had the privilege of speaking with a few old inhabitants. Victor Masunda was eighty-seven and blind, but he remembered his father’s stories with startling clarity.37 “The first missionary my father saw,” he said as we sat together drinking Fanta in his darkened living room, “was Père Natalis de Cleene, a huge man from Ghent, a Scheutist. He was the one who set up the colonie scolaire at Boma; it replaced the mission established by the Fathers of the Sacred Heart. Leopold had asked the pope for Belgian missionaries, and the Scheutists arrived.”
He knew his history. What’s more, the name of the missionary in question was completely accurate: I found it later in registers kept by the Scheutists. De Cleene was a famous missionary.
“Four or five years later that priest left town on horseback and set up the Kango mission in the Mayombe jungle. My father and mother lived in the jungle as well. Papa was fifteen. He was baptized in December 1901. He belonged to the second batch of students. His number was 36B. My mother was baptized in 1903. They married three years later. They left their village and settled at the mission’s work camp.”
I asked Masunda why they did that.
With an outburst of laughter still intended to cover his shame, he said: “In the jungle there were no chairs to sit on, like at the mission, the people there still sat on tree trunks! All they ate was bananas, yams, and beans. But one of the priests gave my father a rifle! Then he could hunt antelope, wild swine, and beavers!” More than a century later, he still sang the mission’s praise: “In the jungle they wore rags and tatters, but at the mission my father was given a pair of short trousers and my mother a boubou, a little smock. He even learned to write a bit. There were children there from all over the place. His native tongue was Kiyombe, but that’s how he also learned Lingala, Swahili, and Tshiluba.”
A few days later, in the shade of a little mango tree, I spoke with seventy-three-year-old Camille Mananga. He was blind as well and came from Mayombe too. He told me not about his father, but about his grandfather. “He never wanted to be baptized. He climbed in his palm tree and made palm wine. He had four wives and a great many children. The missionaries felt that he should keep only one of them, but he felt responsible for all of them. And he never argued with them.”38 Converting adults was clearly a more difficult task.
The Protestant evangelists had looser ties with the state, but were not entirely independent of it either. In 1890, when the Free State requisitioned Grenfell’s steamboat for the war against the Afro-Arab traders to the east, he protested vehemently. How could they think that his Peace—the name alone said enough—might be used to wage war! One year later, however, he was all too pleased to accept a personal commission from King Leopold: he was charged with surveying the border between the Free State and the Portuguese colony of Angola. That area was not only subject to international conflicts, but was also the site of the most violent uprisings against the new regime. So he, Grenfell, a British cleric, set out with an escort of four hundred soldiers from the Force Publique to chart and pacify the region. He was given a mandate to sign treaties and establish borders. Disasi Makulo accompanied him on that exhausting trip overland through hostile territory, “the most painful and dangerous journey we had ever made.” He too noted the highly overt interweaving of mission and state: “The government provided our military equipment and porters.” Disasi Makulo wore the uniform, the plus fours and fez, of the Force Publique.39
THE FINAL WAY in which young people came in contact with the Free State was through the armed forces. The Force Publique, a colonial army under the firm leadership of white officers, was set up in 1885. Most of those officers were Belgian, but there were also any number of Italians, Swiss, and Swedes. Without exception, the most prominent and highly valued foot soldiers were the Zanzibaris, men who had accompanied the explorers on their journeys, and then mercenaries from Nigeria and Liberia. These West Africans had a reputation as trustworthy and courageous soldiers. The first group of ten Congolese was conscripted in late 1885. They had been recruited in the rain forest by the Bangala, who took them to Boma. The Bangala themselves were known as a warlike tribe, and a great many of them would also be recruited in the years to come. As a result, their language, Lingala, began spreading rapidly: it would one day become the most important in the west of the country.
As the Free State’s capital, Boma was also the country’s first garrison town. It was there that young people, previously unable to tell time, learned to live by the minute. The recruits arose at six o’clock and went to bed at nine. The bugle’s blare divided the day into drill, roll call, parade and rest. Military discipline was hammered in. The recruits learned to shoot, clean their rifles, march, and even play m
artial music. Yet even this stringent military discipline could not entirely disguise a large component of clumsiness. The cavalry had no horses, but donkeys—seventeen, to be exact. The artillery had a number of Krupp cannons, but no moving targets on which to practice. The soldiers had to make do with aiming at and firing upon herds of antelope.40 Nevertheless, the Force Publique would become a factor to reckon with. During the first few years of the Free State, King Leopold dedicated half his available budget to the army. For many young men it formed the most direct and drastic acquaintance with the state. In the year 1889 there were fifteen hundred recruits; by 1904 that number had risen to seventeen thousand. During the final days of the Free State, the Force Publique had twenty-five thousand Albini rifles with bayonet, four million rounds of ammunition, 150 cannons, and nineteen Maxim machine guns, making it the largest standing army in Central Africa.41 Unlike in Belgium, the young Congolese recruits were allowed to take their wives with them when they entered military service. The wives even received a modest stipend; an allowance was also paid for any child that might come along. In this way the army, like the missions, promoted monogamy and the nuclear family.42 True families of military careerists arose.
In Kinshasa in 2008 I met Eugène Yoka, who had been an air force colonel for decades, back when the national armed forces still had planes. In Mobutu’s day he had been part of the inner circle of pilots who flew French Mirage fighters in formation above the capital during national parades. His father, he told me, had been a professional military man as well and had experienced World War I. His grandfather, a Bangala tribesman from Équateur, was one the first recruits in the Force Publique. Colonel Yoka had two sons, one of whom had joined the army and worked his way up to major.43 Four generations of dedicated military men, serving the state for more than a century.
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