Congo (20 page)

After such mandatory migration, local communities often became disjointed. Bakongo tribespeople forced to leave their village behind sang with nostalgia and the blues: “Hey! Look at the village of our forefathers. / The shady village of palms that we were forced to leave. / Hey! The old folks? Hey! Hey! Hey! Our dead have vanished! / Hey! Look at our abandoned village! / Too bad!”
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Lutunu’s village was allowed to stay put. In order to reduce the risk of sickness, however, he did something no one in his village had ever done before: he built a house of stone. From then on he no longer slept beneath a thatched roof, between walls of clay, but in a brick hut with galvanized iron for a roof. By then, after all, there were enough carpenters and masons to be found in nearby Thysville. They knew how to make bricks from earth and how to nail down corrugated iron. Sleeping sickness had destroyed Lutunu’s family, but now he lived more or less like the white man did. Were his new brick walls hung, as a Belgian cabinet minister noted after a visit to a village chieftain in eastern Congo, with “extremely middling portraits of our rulers, as distributed everywhere by the colonial administration, and a
few illustrations torn from magazines from Paris or London”? Did the occasional white visitor leave behind “a few pretty prints and a few tins of caramels” as a present?
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No one knows. What we do know is that a few years later the colonial administration appointed him chief of the region, and that, a former slave, he was given authority over no less than fifty-two villages.

T
HE SECOND GROUP OF SCIENTISTS
to turn their attention to the colony were the ethnographers. If the scandal of the Free State had many anything clear, it was the total lack of understanding of native culture. Félicien Cattier, the eminent Brussels scholar and a virulent critic of Leopold, had been quite explicit about that: “How can one hope to carry out useful work in the colonies, if one fails to first submit the native institutions, their customs, their psychology, the conditions of their economic existence and their societies to careful study?”
¹²
Some explorers and missionaries had shown interest in local customs, but many officers and agents of the Free State entertained rudimentary views, to say the least, about what they called “the Negro race.” If any interest existed at all, it was focused primarily on the tangible aspects of the foreign culture: their baskets and masks, their canoes and drums, the shapes of their spears, the dimensions of their skulls.

But that, Cattier felt, was not enough. This was not about specific objects or individual traits. One had to develop an eye for the deeper layers of native society. And that called for serious study. “It would be fitting if there were to be set up in Congo, just as in the Dutch Indies or British India, a ministry or office of ethnological studies.”
¹³

And so it came about. With great to-do, the Bureau International d’Ethnographie was called into being, an institution manned by Belgian and foreign researchers whose goal it was to gather and analyze as much data as possible concerning the native population of Congo. What the École de Médicine Tropi
cale was for medicine, the Bureau International d’Ethnographie was for anthropology: an agency possessing expertise that became transformed into influence. Its members read travel diaries and mission reports and invested a great deal of time in drawing up exhaustive questionnaires, which were then sent to thousands of respondents in the colony: civil servants, traders, soldiers, and missionaries. They were asked to fill out all 202 sections, with themes ranging from marital customs to funeral practices and on to personal hygiene. The informants complied and the answers began flowing in. Within a four-year period, more than four hundred thousand bits of ethnographic data were processed.
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This information ended up in a monumental series of books, the
Collection des monographies ethnographiques
, eleven volumes of which appeared between 1907 and 1914. Each volume dealt with a given population that was considered characteristic of a given geography: the Bangala for the riverside, the Basonge for the savanna, the Warega for the jungle . . . and attention was granted as well to the Mayombe, the Mangbetu, the Baluba, and the Baholoholo. A description was provided each time of all 202 sections of the questionnaire, adding up to more than six thousand pages of reading. It was the first attempt to systematically document native culture. The result was nothing less than an
encyclopédie des races noires
(encyclopedia of the black races).
¹⁵

But the result was also that these “races” were suddenly seen as something absolute. The series sorted the inhabitants of Congo into clearly distinguishable blocs, each with its own identity, ethnic character, and customs. There was something to be said for it—there were, after all, undeniable differences—but the attempt to throw up a cultural wall around each of those groups was entirely artificial and served to obscure any interrelations. Yet that is precisely what the ethnographers did. At the outset of the project in 1908, the key collaborator, Edouard De Jonghe, resolved to examine “les peuplades une à une, en elles-mêmes” (the tribes one by one, as they are).
¹⁶
Methodo
logically, this step-by-step approach was quite understandable; it kept things orderly. But what was at first a guiding principle soon became an unshakeable conclusion. The “tribes” were eternal, free-standing, and immutable entities. After a few years the project’s initiator, Cyrille van Overbergh, also a prominent Catholic politician, stated with certitude: “Generally speaking, the peoples of Congo have little in the way of mutual interrelations . . . . The tribes are independent of each other and retain their autonomy.”
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This roundly ignored the centuries-long, and by that time well-known, exchanges between various groups of the population. Pygmies lived alongside Bantu-speaking farmers; the Bobangi took their boats upriver and came in contact with dozens of other groups. Ethnically, the former savanna kingdoms of Bakongo or Baluba had been quite heterogeneous. Many natives were multilingual. The cultures of the various Bantu-speakers were closely related. But the early-twentieth-century anthropologist unraveled the population into specific racial threads, the same way the eighteenth-century taxonomist had once split up the animal kingdom into various species. Changeless throughout time, without admixtures.

Congo became like an old-fashioned typecase. The map of the colony from then on consisted of little compartments, each with its own tribe. A gigantic collection of ethnographic material was assembled in Tervuren, outside Brussels, all neatly categorized according to tribe. Because the physicians forced people to stay put, the anthropologists fell prey to the even more outspoken impression that the peoples they encountered “were tied to their respective territories,” as the head of the Bureau International d’Ethnographie put it.
¹⁸
This “monographic vision” had major consequences. Not only did the white people in the colony begin to act accordingly, but the Congolese themselves began identifying with a tribe more and more. The genie of tribalism was out of the bottle.

Early anthropology was not at all seen as art for art’s sake;
it was intended to facilitate the colonizer’s work. Recruiters for the Force Publique, for example, could profit from a description of the belligerence inherent to certain tribes. The medical services could learn about the hygienic conditions amid the peoples most heavily affected by sleeping sickness. The administrators in Brussels could adapt their legislation in accordance with what they read about traditional common law in the colony. And the mission congregations could adjust their tactics on the basis of which religion was prominent in which region. People acted on the insights gleaned from the
Collection des monographies ethnographiques
. Like the various European nationalities, the tribes were ascribed characters of their own. In Congo there arose the equivalent of the stingy Scotsman, the lazy Sicilian, the messy Spaniard, and the hardworking but humorless German.

The inhabitants of the colony, too, began seeing themselves and each other in that way. What about Lutunu, for example? He had seventeen children, thirteen of whom survived into adulthood. Beginning in 1910 they all fell under the same
chefferie
, had the same state-recognized village chieftain, and without medical permission were not allowed to leave the area—all ingredients that furthered a pronounced regional and ethnic awareness. In addition, they received schooling from the missionaries, for education in the colony was entirely in the hands of the church. In 1908 there were some five hundred missionaries in Congo, by 1920 around fifteen hundred. School attendance was not mandatory, but Lutunu with his bicycle and his brick house, must surely have encouraged them to learn to read and write like himself. He was, after all, one of the first literate inhabitants of Bas-Congo. His village lay within the sphere of influence of the British Protestants, but outside that area the power of the Belgian Catholics continued to grow.

And what were the Congolese taught, in those plain classrooms or in the shade of a tree? Reading and writing, of
course. Arithmetic as well. Church history. Devotional stories. The provinces of Belgium. About the royal family, of course, but also a few lessons concerning their own country. About the slave trade, for example. “Tungalikuwa watumwa wa Wangwana / Wabeleji wakatukomboa,” the children at Catholic mission posts in the interior sang. Literally: “The Arabized Africans were making us their slaves / The Belgians set us free.” The melody was taken from the “Brabançonne,” the Belgian national anthem. One of the oldest known school songs in Swahili provided a summary description of the colonization: “Once we were idiots / Sinning day by day / Sand fleas on our feet / Heads full of mould / Thank you, reverend fathers!”
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The songs and lessons of the Catholic priests and nuns were invariably taught in the local vernacular. Most of the missionaries came from Flanders and, in analogy to the Flemish struggle for linguistic recognition, considered one’s own language to be a supreme good. That too served to bolster tribal pride. In a grammar used by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in Mbandaka in the 1930s, one finds the following reading exercise: “Our language is Lonkundo . . . . Although some people like to speak Lingala, we love our Lonkundo best. The language is very beautiful and has many shades of meaning. We are very fond of it. It is a language given to us by our ancestors.”
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But ethnic identification also took place much more explicitly. Around that same time, pupils in Équateur read that “the people of Congo are divided in many groups. They stand out by reason of their dialects, their customs, and even their laws. Our true family is the tribe of the Nkundo.”
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This sounded like a literal echo of the
Collection des monographies ethnographiques
. The first textbooks used by the Marist Brothers (the oldest dates from around 1910) went even further. In Lingala, one read in a textbook:

The inhabitants of Congo are black. Their numbers have
not yet been counted. They are estimated at up to sixteen million. They can be divided according to various tribes: Basorongo, Bakongo, Bateke, Bangala, Bapoto, Basoko, Babus, Bazande, Bakango, Bangbetu, Batikitiki, or Baka and many others.

The Basorongo live close to the ocean.

The Bakongo live upstream, close to Boma, Matadi, and Kisantu, on the river’s left bank. They are dockworkers and heavy laborers.

The Bateke are found in Kitambo. They are specialized in buying and selling.

The Bangala live around Makanza, Mobeka, Lisala, and Bumba. They are large people. They wear tattoos on their faces and ears. They remove the lashes from their eyelids and file their teeth. They are not afraid of war. Are there not, after all, many Bangala in the government’s army? They are intelligent.

The Bapoto and Basoko are brothers to the Bangala. They disfigure their faces with tattoos. They make big pestles and sound canoes, they forge spears and machetes. They kill lots of fish.
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A
ND SO IT GOES
, on and on. Congo consisted of tribes, one was taught, each with its own territory and customs. Some were virtuous, others were not. The pupils, for example, were taught that the Azanda respected their chieftains, which was a good thing; the Babua did not and that was scandalous. The Bakongo killed elephants and were therefore very courageous. Mission schools were factories for tribal prejudice. Children who were not allowed to leave their villages were suddenly told that the Bakongo lived on the other side of their vast country and what they were to think of them. In many handbooks, Pygmies were depicted as bizarre aberrations. If you had never met one, you still knew what you were to think of them. “They
excel in stealing other people’s property,” the pupils at Bongandanga read in the late 1920s, “they do not make friends with other people . . . . Most of the peoples of Central Africa are fond of keeping themselves clean and because there is plenty of water they bathe every day. But the Pygmies detest water and are very dirty . . . . In terms of ignorance, they stand head and shoulders above all other African peoples. They do not realize that living in a village with people of your own culture is better than moving around all the time.”
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This is not to say that there had never been tribes—of course there had, there were major regional differences, different languages were spoken, different customs honored, different dances danced, different dietary patterns observed, and there had even been intertribal wars. But now the differences were being magnified and recorded for all time. It rained stereotypes. The tribes, in fact, were not communities that had been fixed in place for eons; their rigidity came only in the first decades of the twentieth century. More than ever before, people began identifying with one tribe as opposed to the other.