Congo (98 page)

For a long time, colonialism was seen as a form of one-way traffic between metropolis and colony, from Europe to Africa. In recent years that view has begun to change, and researchers have started looking at the repercussions of the colonial adventure on Europe. In his interesting book
Congo: De impact van de kolonie op België
(Tielt, Belgium, 2007), Guy Vanthemsche demonstrates convincingly that it was not only Belgium that formed Congo, but also vice versa. He focuses particularly on the Belgian economy and domestic and foreign policies. Along with Vincent Viaene and Bambi Ceuppens I helped to compile a reader that looks at the colonial impact on other parts of Belgian society, such as culture, religion and science,
Congo in België: Koloniale cultuur in de metropool
(Louvain, Belgium, 2009). In addition to this two-way traffic, attention is now being paid increasingly to the diversity of the colonial presence. Besides Belgians, after all, there were also Greeks, Portuguese, Scandinavians, and Italians active in the Belgian Congo. Works such as
Pionniers méconnus du Congo Belge
(Brussels, 2007) by Georges Antipas, about the Greek community in Congo, and
Moïse Levy, un rabbin au Congo (1937–1991)
(Brussels, 2000) by Milantia Bourla Errera, broaden the historical view.

Fascinating diachronic studies exist on various themes. Their cross-sectional perspective makes them worth noting here. Concerning education and science one has the work of Ruben Mantels,
Geleerd in de tropen: Leuven, Congo, en de wetenschap, 1885–1960
(Leuven/Louvain, Belgium, 2007), as well as that of Benoît Verhaegen,
L’enseignement universitaire au Zaïre: De Lovanium à l’Unaza, 1958–1978
(Paris, 1978). Kuvuande Mbote has written about architecture, as has Bruno De Meulder in
Een eeuw koloniale architectuur en stedenbouw in Kongo
(Antwerp, Belgium, 2000) and Johan Lagae in
Kongo zoals het is: Drie architectuurverhalen uit de Belgische kolonisatiegeschiedenis (1920–1960)
(Ghent, Belgium, 2002). For Congolese pop music (which is always more than just music), see Gary Stewart:
Rumba on the River
(London, 2000). Silvia Riva has written about Congolese literature in
Nouvelle histoire de la littérature du Congo-Kinshasa
(Paris, 2000). For film and visual culture, see Guido Convents’s
Images et démocratie: Les Congolais face au cinéma et à l’audiovisuel
(Leuven/Louvain, Belgium, 2006). And for the visual arts and some truly marvelous illustrations, see Roger Pierre Turine’s:
Les arts du Congo, d’hier à nos jours
(Brussels, 2007). Contemporary artists often provide the viewer with multiple layers of commentary on the history of their country. That certainly applies to the Congolese poets assembled in Antoine Tshitungu Kongolo’s lovely anthology
Poète ton silence est crime
(Paris, 2002).

A few other books amazed, surprised and baffled me with their images:
Congo Belge en images
(Tielt, Belgium, 2010) by Carl De Keyzer and Johan Lagae derails all the existing clichés concerning the Congo Free State by means of its sublime selection from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren’s collection of photographic plates. Every bit as unsettling when it comes to present-day Congo is
Congo (Belge)
(Tielt, Belgium, 2009) by Carl De Keyzer, and
Congo Eza
(Roeselare, 2007) by Mirko Popovitch and Françoise De Moor, a collection of work by contemporary Congolese photographers. It is because I value photography highly as an autonomous form of discourse that the only illustrations found in my own book are maps.

INTRODUCTION

The broad geographical sketch contained in this introductory chapter was gleaned from a wide variety of sources on the Internet and from my own bookshelves. A useful source, replete with maps, is
Géopolitique du Congo (RDC)
by Marie-France Cros and François Misser (Brussels, 2006).

My own first attempt to write a “bottom-up history,” based on interviews with those whose perspectives usually do not make it into the written sources, took place in a convalescent home in Brugge/Bruges, Belgium, in 2007. There I spoke to elderly people who had never themselves been to Congo concerning their memories of colonialism, about what they had thought at the time, and above all about what they had done (collecting silver paper, as it turned out, in addition to sewing and patching clothes for the missions, fishing for prizes at the mission-benefit carnival, and doing a great deal of praying for the “poor Congolese”). That study, and the methodological (im)possibilities presented by that combination of oral history and material culture studies, were expanded upon in the collection I edited with Vincent Viaene and Bambi Ceuppens:
Congo in België: Koloniale cultuur in de metropool
. But my analysis was in fact no more than the explicit formulation of the method I have been using for a long time in my earlier journalistic and literary work (e.g., the play
Mission)
. And of my conviction that the most highly underestimated archives in Congo are the people themselves.

In addition to my background as archaeologist of pre-history, the importance I attach to the precolonial period is due to Eric Wolf’s classic
Europe and the People without History
(Berkeley, CA, 1982). The earliest human population of Congo is virtually unknown, as Graham Connah has shown in
Forgotten Africa: An Introduction to Its Archaeology
(London, 2004). Even the more recent surveys serve only in part to fill in the blanks; see, among others,
African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction
, edited by Ann Brower (Oxford, 2005), and above all Lawrence Barham and Peter Mitchell’s
The First Africans: African Archaeology from the Earliest Toolmakers to the Most Recent Foragers
(Cambridge, UK, 2008). I therefore based my snapshot of life some ninety thousand years ago on the excavations at Katanda performed by John E. Yellen: “Behavioral and Taphonomic Patterning at Katanda 9: A Middle Stone Age Site, Kivu Province, Zaïre,”
Journal of Archaeological Science
(1996). For a good survey of the rise of modern human behavior in Africa, see Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, “The Revolution that Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Behavior,”
Journal of Human Evolution
39 (2000). My snapshot of Pygmy life around 2500 BC makes grateful use of recent studies by Julio Mercader, “Foragers of the Congo: The Early Settlement of the Ituri Forest,” in
Under the Canopy: The Archaeology of Tropical Rain Forests
, edited by J. Mercader (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003).

The period around the year AD 500 and the phenomenon of the Bantu migration became more familiar to me through reading Jan Vansina’s impressive
Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa
(Madison, WI, 1990), supplemented by the painstaking archaeological work of Hans-Peter Wotzka,
Studien zur Archäologie des zentral-afrikanische Regenwaldes: Die Keramik des inneren Zaïre-Beckens und ihre Stellung im Kontext der Bantu-Expansion
(Cologne, 1995). Concerning gongs and drum languages I turned to John Carrington,
La voix des tambours
(Kinshasa, 1974) and Olga Boone’s
Les tambours du Congo-belge et du Ruanda-Urundi
(Tervuren, Belgium, 1951).

A better understanding of the rise of the first states I gained after reading Jan Vansina’s unique ethno-historical work. My own far-too-summary sketch of the local kingdoms of the savanna was based on his classic
Les anciens royaumes de la savane: Les états des savanes méridionales de l’Afrique centrale des origines à l’occupation coloniale
(Léopoldville, 1965) and his
How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600
(Charlottesville, VA, 2004). Concerning the Kongo Empire around the year AD 1560, I turned to Anne Hilton,
The Kingdom of Kongo
(Oxford, 1985), to David Northrup,
Africa’s Discovery of Europe
(New York, 2002) and to Paul Serufuri Hakiza,
L’évangélisation de l’ancien royaume Kongo, 1491–1835
(Kinshasa, 2004).

For the section on 1780 and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade, I made extensive use of Robert W. Harms’s masterful
River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500–1891
(New Haven, CT, 1981).

CHAPTER 1

This chapter relies in part on a booklet that is not available outside Africa: Makulo Akambu’s
La vie de Disasi Makulo, ancien esclave de Tippo Tip et catéchiste de Grenfell, par son fils Makulo Akambu
(Kinshasa, 1983). That book presents the life’s story of old Disasi Makulo, as dictated to his son. It fell into my hands through a stroke of sheer luck.

Although an enormous amount has been written about the African explorers (see, among others, Christopher Hibbert,
Africa Explored: Europeans in the Dark Continent, 1769–1889
[London, 1982]), there is no truly integral overview of the period 1870–85. Tim Jeal’s wonderful
Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
(London, 2007), however, is more than an unusually richly documented and thoughtful biography: it paints the panorama of an entire age. Insight into the wild and wooly mid-nineteenth century I gained through Jan Vansina’s, “L’Afrique centrale vers 1875,” in
La conférence de géographie de 1876
[
Bijdragen over de Aardrijkskundige Conferentie van 1876
] (Brussels, 1976), as well as through Jean-Luc Vellut’s, “Le bassin du Congo et l’Angola,” in
Histoire générale de l’Afrique
, vol. 6:
L’Afrique au XIX
^e
siècle jusque vers les années 1880
edited by J. F. Ade Ajayi (Paris, 1996) and David Northrup’s “Slavery and Forced Labour in the Eastern Congo, 1850–1910,” in
Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa
, edited by H. Médard and S. Doyle (Oxford, 2007). More about the Muslim slave trade can be found in Edward A. Alpers,
Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa
(London, 1975), Abdul Sheriff’s
Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar
(London, 1987), and Ronald Segal’s
Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora
(New York, 2001). Regarding the life and work of the two most powerful Afro-Arab traders in Congo, see François Bontinck,
L’autobiographie de Hamed ben Mohammed el-Murjebi: Tippo Tip (ca. 1840–1905)
(Brussels, 1974) and Auguste Verbeken,
Msiri, roi du Garenganze: “L’homme rouge” du Katanga
(Brussels, 1956).

For the native reactions to the European explorers, see Frank McLynn,
Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa
(London, 1992). Johannes Fabian turned the anthropological gaze 180 degrees with an impressive ethnography of the European explorers:
Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa
(Berkeley, CA, 2000). I was able to document my findings on the first generation of missionaries with the help of E. M. Braekman’s
Histoire du protestantisme au Congo
(Brussels, 1961) and Ruth Slade’s
English-Speaking Missions in the Congo Independent State, 1878–1908
(Brussels, 1959).

A very great deal has been written about the division of Africa. Thomas Pakenham wrote the hefty
The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912
(London, 1991), but H. L. Wesseling’s crystal-clear and entertaining
Verdeel en heers: de deling van Afrika, 1880–1914
(Amsterdam, 1991) helped me the most in understanding the international context within which Leopold II maneuvered. Wesseling in turn made great use of Jean Stengers’s still-indispensable
Congo, mythes et réalités: 100 ans d’histoire
(Paris, 1989). Stengers’s article “De uitbreiding van België: tussen droom en werkelijkheid” in
Nieuw licht op Leopold I en Leopold II: Het archief Goffinet
, edited by G. Janssens and J. Stengers (Brussels, 1997) provides an update based on unique archive materials. Belgium’s Royal Academy for Foreign Studies published two important collections dealing with the events between 1876 and 1885:
Bijdragen over de Aardrijkskundige Conferentie van 1876
(Brussels, 1976) and
Bijdragen over de honderdste verjaring van de Onafhankelijke Kongostaat
(Brussels, 1988).

CHAPTER 2

For more than a decade, the discussion concerning the Congo Free State has been dominated by Adam Hochschild’s
De geest van koning Leopold II en de plundering van de Congo
(Amsterdam, 1998). That book’s achievement was to inform a broad public about the abuses in Congo and to make academic knowledge accessible and exciting. Unfortunately, however, it depended more upon a talent for generating dismay than on any shades of subtlety; Hochschild’s perspective is often very black and white. In understanding the complexity of a person like Leopold, I profited more from studies by Jean Stengers cited earlier, but also from more recent studies placing him in the context of his day. In his thesis,
Koningen van de wereld: De aardrijkskundige beweging en de ontwikkeling van de koloniale doctrine van Leopold II
(Ghent, Belgium, 2008), Jan Vandersmissen has pointed out the impact of geographical science. Vincent Viaene has shed light on the “fever of empire” in Belgian high society and drew my attention to the king’s national and social agenda in “King Leopold’s Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party, 1860–1905,”
Journal of Modern History
80 (2008): 741–90. Recently, Jean-Luc Vellut examined the African context of Leopold’s colonialism in “Contextes africains du projet colonial de Léopold II” (unpublished lecture, Louvain-la-Neuve, March 2009). See also Viaene, Vellut, and Vandersmissen’s contributions in
Leopold II: Schaamteloos genie?
edited by Vincent Dujardin, Valérie Rosoux, and Tanguy de Wilde d’Estmael (Tielt, Belgium, 2009). The world, however, is still waiting for a definitive biography of Leopold II.