Congo (7 page)

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 call 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.
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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.”
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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).
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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.
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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.

T
HE 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.
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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.

No, the contemporaries of those two children could not have known that envy cropped up more often in Europe. And that it was precisely for that reason that the major nations had agreed in 1830 to the formation of a new, minuscule country. Belgium, as that ministate was called, had turned its back on the the United Kingdom of the Netherlands after a fifteen-year
mariage de raison
, and could still serve as a buffer between ambitious Prussia, powerful France, and proud England. It could, perhaps, even temper the mutual envy between those countries. That was how it had been viewed in 1815, too, after the Battle of Waterloo. For centuries, the region had served as a battlefield for the armies of Europe, and now it was to be a neutral zone for the promotion of peace. In 1830 it declared its independence. One big step for the Belgians, one small step for mankind. No one in Central Africa lost any sleep over it.

No one at all, in fact, had ever heard of Belgium. No one
could imagine that the first king of that little country would soon sire a son who would bring to bear a most disturbing ambition. The father, a melancholic prince who became a widower at an early age, was satisfied enough with his kingship. But his overweening son, the future Leopold II, seemed to bridle at the limited territory over which he ruled. “
Il faut à la Belgique une colonie
” (Belgium must have a colony), he had engraved on a paperweight destined for the desk of his finance minister when he was only twenty-four. Precisely where that colony should be, that was less important. Even before assuming the throne, he had cast a wistful glance at Dutch Limburg, Constantinople, Borneo, Sumatra, Formosa (Taiwan), Tonkin (Vietnam), parts of China or Japan, the Philippines, a few islands in the Pacific or, if need be, a few islands in the Mediterranean (Rhodes, Cyprus). But from 1875 he fell under the spell of Central Africa. He devoured the reports sent back by explorers, licked his chops at the prospect of a glorious adventure, and daydreamed about a heroic enterprise. It was not merely personal ambition or megalomania, as is often claimed. No, Leopold believed with all his heart that an invigorating involvement abroad, wherever that might be, would benefit both the finances and the morale of the young Belgian nation. Whatever else may be said about him, he did it not only for himself, but also for people and fatherland. Fully in tune with his times, the young king effortlessly reconciled warm-blooded patriotism with coolly calculating commercialism.