Congo (18 page)
Authors: David Van Reybrouck
The international pressure on King Leopold II was mounting. Something had to give, and the only option was for Leopold to part with his overseas territory and for Belgium to take over Congo. In December 1906 the knot was cut, but Leopold loitered over the modalities of the transfer for almost two more years. He wondered whether he might perhaps still be able to keep a piece of Congo for himself, the Crown Domain for example. It was with clear reluctance that he handed over his lifework. Shortly before the transfer he even ordered the Free State archives to be burned. But on November 15, 1908, the day finally arrived: on the occasion of the annual National Celebration of the Dynasty, the dynasty handed over Congo. The term
free state
itself had meanwhile become rather outmoded for a state without free trade, free employment, or free citizens. In its stead there had come a regime that revolved around a monopolistic economy, forced labor and bondage. From then on the region was to be called the Belgian Congo.
During the term of the Free State, the local population had had its first encounter with various aspects of the European presence. By the year 1908 some sixteen thousand children were attending missions schools, an estimated thirty thousand people had learned to read and write, sixty-six thousand had
served in the army, and some two hundred thousand had been baptized.
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Directly or indirectly, hundreds of thousands of locals had been effected by the rubber policies. Millions had been struck down by sleeping sickness and other infectious diseases.
And Disasi Makulo had seen it all from close by. He had been involved in the ivory trade when it was still free, he had served as boy to a celebrated British missionary, he had made countless journeys on the man’s steamboat, he had literally experienced the interweaving of mission and state firsthand when—during one of his travels with Grenfell—he was conscripted into the Force Publique. He had been baptized, married a girl from a distant region, he swore by monogamy and the nuclear family, criticized traditional village life, and in the end became a catechist in order to Christianize his own region. And it was precisely at that point that he had personally witnessed the violence of the rubber policies.
But at his mission post, even more sorrow lay in store for him. His great mentor George Grenfell came to visit there in mid-1906. Grenfell looked like a man of eighty, but had still to turn fifty-seven. His years in the tropics had been long and grueling. He was worn out. Grenfell asked his former pupil and his converts to sing a hymn for him in their own language, Bobangi. Afterward he explicitly stated his desire to be buried at Yalemba, the mission post Disasi had founded himself. Disasi called him “he who remained our father until his death.”
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T
ODAY, IN
K
INSHASA
, one sees very little that hearkens back to those early years, but during my very first trip to Congo in December 2003 I was granted access to the former garage for city buses in the borough of Limete. Buses had been absent from the capital’s streets for quite a few years already; the few broken-down examples that still existed had been converted into houses in which several families lived. The windshield wipers were used as clotheslines. The residents slept on the old seats,
their arms draped over the aluminum bars. From the shadow of a hubcap or hood one heard the bleating of an unseen goat. It was an abandoned industrial estate, where nature was regaining its grip. After walking on a bit I saw, in the grass, a highly remarkable work of postmodern art. Never had I seen a more peculiar installation invested with such historical reminiscences. Lying on its stomach in a rusty steel boat was the bronze figure of a man at least twelve feet tall. I recognized the statue right away: it was the triumphant image of Stanley that had stood looking out boldly across the river for decades, atop the hill at Ngaliema. Designed and cast in Molenbeek, outside Brussels, it had been shipped here during the colonial period, but was pulled from its pedestal after independence. And now here he lay, old Stanley. The broad sweep of that arm with which he had once taken the Congo’s measure was now pointing nowhere and at nothing. The fingers touched only the boat’s rusty boiler. Power had become a cramp, courage something laughable. On the hull, close to the bow, I saw three letters: AIA, the abbreviation for Association Internationale Africaine. This was one of the three boats with which Stanley had braved the current between 1879 and 1884, for the purpose of establishing the odd trading post. It was in one of those boats that he taken aboard Disasi Makulo after buying him from a slave trader. Now Stanley lay felled in his own boat. The fleet with which he placed Congo under a new authority had become his mausoleum. Who knows what civil servant had come up with this ingenious bit of
bricolage;
it was probably a wrecking company that had improvised on the spot this scrap heap of history, but seldom had I seen a more ironic settling of accounts with colonialism than in Stanley’s official monument lying flat on its belly in his own old tub.
The next day, in the tranquil, green district of Ngombe on the other side of town, I found the Baptists’ old mission post. It lay along the riverbank in what is now the most exclusive neighborhood in Kinshasa. Their original building was still there,
a simple construction on cast-iron stilts, just like in Boma. Around each individual stilt was a sort of vase: these had once been kept filled with petroleum, to ward off the termites. It must be, I think the oldest building in Kinshasa. I walked on a few steps to get a better view of the river. Kinshasa lies on one of the world’s largest rivers, but with all the walls and barriers (it remains, after all, a national border) there are few places where one can truly see the water. On the slope down to the river, in the tall grass, there lay something that looked like a huge insect, or the ribcage of bronze giant. It was the cooler of an enormous engine. Dozens of parallel brass tubes found their confluence in a sturdy steel rod. One of the Baptists’ students told me that this was the engine of the
Peace
, the steamboat on which Grenfell had made all his journeys of discovery. When the ship itself was finally salvaged, this showpiece of industrial archaeology had been hoisted ashore. It seemed too good to be true. Not only do we possess the details of Disasi Makulo’s formidable life story, but the two boats in which he plied the Congo are today still lying, rusting away, in the tall, silent grass of Kinshasa.
The Early Years of the Colonial Regime
L
UTUNU LOOKED AT HIS WIFE
. I
T WAS BECOMING INCREASINGLY
hard for her to walk. And she was still so young, he thought. The lumps on the side of her neck were clearly visible now, like a row of pebbles beneath the skin. He knew the signs, this was how it had started with his children too. First a fever, headaches, and stiff joints, then deathly fatigue and listlessness during the day, followed by sleeplessness. He knew what she was in for. She would become increasingly groggy, increasingly lethargic. Her eyes would roll up in her head, she would foam at the mouth. Then she would lie down in a corner until it was all over. What had he done to deserve this? All those who had this disease died. A few years ago all his brothers and sisters had succumbed to smallpox, they had dropped like flies. Then his two young boys, the first children she had borne him, had died of sleeping sickness. And now her. Had she drunk from a gourd used by someone else with the sickness? Had she eaten an orange with brown spots on it? No one knew where the sickness came from, no healer could offer a cult object or a medicine against it. Some people said it was a punishment from the missionaries, that they spread the sickness in indignation at those who still didn’t accept their doctrines.
1
Lutunu had no
idea.
Around 1900 even his leader had died of it, Mfumu Makitu, the big chief of Mbanza-Gomber. In 1884 he had been one of the first chieftains to sign an agreement with Stanley. Back then their village had been along the caravan route from the coast into the interior, long before the railroad came. Chief Makitu wanted nothing to do with the white newcomers at first, but he finally gave in. On March 26, 1884, along with several other chieftains, he had put his mark at the bottom of a sheet of paper which read: “We, the undersigned chiefs of Nzungi, agree to recognize the sovereignty of the Association Internationale Africaine, and in sign thereof adopt its flag (blue with a golden star) . . . . We declare that from henceforth we and our successors shall abide by the decision of the representatives of the Association in all matters affecting our welfare or our possessions.”
2
Lutunu remembered it as clearly as though it had happened only yesterday. Chief Makitu gave Stanley a generous welcome present, one of his youngest slaves: Lutunu himself. He was ten years old at the time. For his great display of loyalty, Makitu was rewarded in 1888 with a medal of honor: he become one of the country’s first
chefs médaillés
(decorated chiefs). His prosperity continued to grow. Now, many years later, he had left behind sixty-four villages, forty wives, and hundreds of slaves.
Lutunu’s life was as full of adventure as that of Disasi Makulo, so adventurous in fact that he is still remembered today. A street in Kinshasa was named after him, and old Nkasi, whose native village had been close to Lutunu’s, had actually met him once in the distance past. “Lutunu, oh yes, I knew him!” he told me. It was the first time I had heard that name. “He came from my area, he was a little older than me. He was Stanley’s boy. And he always refused to wear trousers. When the white man would call out ‘Lutunu!,’ he simply shouted back ‘White man!’ Just like that! White man!” Nkasi couldn’t help laughing at the thought of it. Lutunu was special. A hotshot, on friendly terms with a lot of white people. When I returned to Belgium, I discov
ered that his story had been documented by a Belgian artist and writer.
3
Like Disasi Makulo, Lutunu was a slave who fell into the hands of the Europeans. He served as boy to Lieutenant Alphonse Vangele, one of Stanley’s earliest helpers. He too came in contact with the British Baptists: they set up one of their most important mission posts in his region and Lutunu later became boy to one of the missionaries, Thomas Comber. And that took him to Europe, just like Disasi. He was there when Comber went to England and Belgium; he was present when Comber was received by King Leopold II. He was one of the nine children who were allowed to sing a song for the king. He was the one who later sailed to America and, when he came home, achieved fame from Matadi to Stanley Pool, and received a host of breathless followers as the first cyclist in Congo. That Lutunu, in other words. And his madcap adventures were not nearly over yet. Perfectly unsuited for the patient translation of the Gospels into his native language, but all the more for the world at large, he sailed up the Congo with Grenfell and must have met Disasi Makulo. He became the guide and interpreter for the Belgian officers Nicolas Tobback and Francis Dhanis during their military campaigns. For a short while, he was even a soldier himself in the Force Publique. He went everywhere the white people did and knew the colonizers better than anyone else. “Lutunu!” “White man!” But he refused to wear their trousers. And he had no interest in being baptized.
But then his wife died and he was all alone. Children dead, family decimated. After all his wanderings, he had ended up back in his native village. He spoke with the Protestant missionaries there and was converted. He was already around thirty by that time. The dozens of slaves he had bought in the course of the years he now set free. He went to live at the mission post. Francis Lutunu-Smith, that was the new name they gave him.
When great chief Makitu died around the turn of the century, his successor according to local custom was an inexperienced sixteen-year-old boy. The missionaries suggested that Lutunu act as the boy’s regent: that would be better for the village and better for the mission. It would allow them to exercise influence over the local authorities: Lutunu, after all, was one of their own. Just as Disasi Makulo was allowed to set up his own mission post, Lutunu was allowed to bear some administrative responsibility: thanks to the white man, the slave children of yore were acquiring a good deal of power.
Lutunu’s life may have resembled Disasi’s, but in piety he was no equal. Five years later he was suddenly expelled from the mission: he had taken an excessive liking to English stouts and lagers. The Congo Free State had dealt summarily with the endemic alcoholism of the local population. The consumption of palm wine was radically restricted; brandy, gin, and rum were banned. But Lutunu drank and danced. And although he continued to cherish his copy of the Bible, he suddenly turned out to be married to three different women, who bore him four, five, eight, twelve, seventeen children. Was the new religion really all that hard to reconcile with the old customs?
What did Congo’s new status as a Belgian colony mean to him? Did he notice anything of the transformation from the Congo Free State to the Belgian Congo? Was 1908 a pivotal year for him and his family as well? Did the local population actually notice anything of that reshuffle?
Hard questions to answer.
The classic historical accounts often say: the atrocities of the Free State lasted until 1908, but as soon as Belgium took over the colony everything calmed down and Congo’s history became
un long fleuve tranquille
(one long, smooth flow), which only much later, at the end of the 1950s, began to once again exhibit a few whitecaps.
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From that perspective, the colonial period in the strictest sense, lasting from 1908 to 1960, was a
long and tranquil intermezzo between two turbulent episodes. In present-day Belgium, people tend often to be more concerned about the atrocities of Leopold II and the murder of Lumumba—two moments, strictly speaking, that do not belong to the classic colonial period—than by the decades in which the Belgian parliament and therefore the Belgian people were directly accountable (or should have been) for what happened in Congo. That idea of peaceful stability is reinforced further by the lengthy tenure of a number of key figures. Between 1908 and 1960, Congo had only ten governor generals, some of whom remained in office for seven or even twelve years. The first two ministers of colonies, Jules Renkin and Louis Franck, were in service for ten and six years, respectively. A tranquil current with a few solid beacons, or so it seemed.