Congo

Twentieth-century ethnographers distinguished some four hundred ethnic groups in the interior, each of them a society with its own customs, social structure, artistic traditions, and often its own language or dialect. These groups are usually indicated in the plural form, to be recognized by the prefix ba-or wa-. The Bakongo (sometimes rendered as baKongo) belong to the Congo people, the Baluba (or baLuba) to the Luba people, the Watutsi (or waTutsi, sometimes even waTuzi) to the Tutsis. In the chapters that follow I will use the standard expression as it is found in English. I will therefore speak of both the Bakongo and the Tutsis which, although not very consistent, is all the more convenient. The singular form (Mukongo or muKongo) is one I have avoided as much as possible. Kongo with a K refers to the ethnic group living close to the mouth of the Congo river; Congo with a C to the country and the river. The languages of these groups usually start with the prefix ki-or tschi: Kikongo, Tshiluba, Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda. Here too I have given precedence to common usage. Therefore: Swahili rather than Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda rather than Rwandan. Lingala is the exception to the rule, although languages in Lingala also start with ki. Once I even heard someone speak of “kiChinois.” And Kiflama is the language of the Baflama, the Flemish (derived from les flamands): Dutch, in other words.

The massive anthropological wealth of Congo must not blind one to the country’s great linguistic and cultural homogeneity. Almost all the languages are Bantu languages and exhibit structural similarities. (Bantu is the plural form of munt’u, meaning “the people.”) This is not to say that Nkasi will automatically understand someone from the other side of the country, only that his language will resemble that other one just as the Indo-European languages resemble one author. Only in the extreme north of Congo are languages spoken that are fundamentally different and belong to the Sudanese linguistic group. Everywhere else, Bantu languages became common with the spread of agriculture from the northwest. Even the Pygmies, the original hunter-gatherers of the jungle, made the switch to Bantu languages.

In Congo, ethnic awareness is a relative concept. Almost all Congolese can tell you with a certain precision to which ethnic group they and their parents belong, but the extent to which they identify with that group varies widely in accordance with age, place of residence, education, and, more crucial than all the rest, living conditions. Groups become more tightly knit in proportion to the extent to which they are threatened. At various moments in one’s life one may attach greater or less importance to ethnic background. If the turbulent history of Congo makes anything clear, it is the elasticity of what was once referred to as “tribal awareness.” It is a fluid category, and one I shall refer to more often.

Although the names of the provinces and their number have changed often, still there are several regional designations used invariably by the inhabitants to delineate the parts of this enormous country. Bas-Congo, as mentioned, is the neck of the balloon. Matadi, its administrative center, is a seaport some sixty miles inland where container vessels, tacking against the Congo’s powerful current, can load and unload. Farther upstream, rapids render the river unnavigable. Kinshasa, a city of an estimated eight million inhabitants, who call themselves Kinois, is located precisely at the spot where the balloon widens. From this point the river once again becomes navigable, until deep into the interior. To the east of Kinshasa one finds Badundu, an area between forest and savanna that includes Kikwit and the historically important region of Kwilu. Beside it, in the country’s heart, lies Kasai, the diamond country. Its principal city is Mbuji-Mayi, which has grown in recent years to become the country’s third, perhaps even second largest city, due to the rush for diamonds. Farther east one arrives in the area once known as the Kivu, but which has now been divided into three provinces: North Kivu, South Kivu, and Maniema. Both Kivus form the vulnerable top of the balloon, with Goma and Bukavu as major centers directly on the border with Rwanda. This is a heavily populated farming area. Due to its altitude, sleeping sickness does not occur here and it is possible to raise cattle; the soil and climate, furthermore, are well suited to high-grade agriculture (coffee, tea, quinine).

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 ser vice 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, sugar cane 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).

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.

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,