Congo
Authors: David Van Reybrouck
À la mémoire d’Étienne Nkasi (1882?–2010), en reconnaissance profonde de son témoignage exceptionnel et de la poignée de bananes, qu’il m’a offerte lors de notre première rencontre.
Et pour le petit David, né en 2008, fils de Ruffin Luliba, enfant-soldat démobilisé, et de son épouse Laura, qui ont bien voulu donner mon nom à leur premier enfant.
(To the memory of Étienne Nkasi [1882?–2010], deeply grateful for his exceptional testimony and for the handful of bananas that he offered me when we first met
.
And for little David, who was born in 2008, the son of the demobilized child-soldier Ruffin Luliba and his former wife, Laura, who were so kind as to give my name to their first child.)
Le Rêve et l’Ombre étaient de très grands camarades.
(The dream and the shadow were the best of comrades)
—Badibanga, L’élephant qui marche sur des œufs
(Brussels, 1931)
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Maps
Introduction
1 NEW SPIRITS
Central Africa Draws the Attention of East and West
| 1870–1885
2 “DIABOLICAL FILTH”
Congo Under Leopold II
| 1885–1908
3 THE BELGIANS SET US FREE
The Early Years of the Colonial Regime
| 1908–1921
4 IN THE STRANGLEHOLD OF FEAR
Growing Unrest and Mutual Suspicion in Peacetime
| 1921–1940
5 THE RED HOUR OF THE KICKOFF
The War and the Deceptive Calm That Followed
| 1940–1955
6 SOON TO BE OURS
A Belated Decolonization, a Sudden Independence
| 1955–1960
7 A THURSDAY IN JUNE
8 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE THRONE
The Turbulent Years of the First Republic
| 1960–1965
9 THE ELECTRIC YEARS
Mobutu Gets Down to Business
| 1965–1975
10
TOUJOURS SERVIR
A Marshal’s Madness
| 1975–1990
11 THE DEATH THROES
Democratic Opposition and Military Confrontation
| 1990–1997
12 COMPASSION, WHAT IS THAT?
The Great War of Africa
| 1997–2002
13
LA BIÈRE ET LA PRIÈRE
(SUDS AND SANCTITY)
New Players in a Wasted Land
| 2002–2006
14 THE RECESS
Hope and Despair in a Newborn Democracy
| 2006–2010
15 WWW.COM
Acknowledgments
Sources
Notes
References
Index
About the Author
Also by David Van Reybrouck
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map 2: Population, Administration, and Raw Materials
Map 3: Central Africa in the Mid-nineteenth Century
Map 4: Congo Free State, 1885–1908
Map 5: Belgian Congo During World War I
Map 6: Belgian Congo During World War II
Map 7: The First Republic: Secessions and Uprisings
Map 8: The First Congo War: Kabila’s Advance (October 1996 – May 1997)
MAP 1: GEOGRAPHY
MAP 2: POPULATION, ADMINISTRATION, AND RAW MATERIALS
I
T IS STILL THE SEA, OBVIOUSLY, BUT YOU CAN SEE THAT SOMETHING
has changed, something about the color. The low, broad rollers rock the ship as benevolently as ever; there is still nothing but ocean, yet the blue is gradually becoming tainted with yellow. And that produces not green, the way you might remember from your lessons in color theory, but murkiness. The glimmering azure has vanished. There is no more turquoise billow beneath the noonday sun. The boundless cobalt from which the sun arose, the ultramarine of twilight, the leaden grayness of the night: gone.
From here on, all is broth.
Yellowish, ochre, rusty broth. You are still hundreds of nautical miles from the coast, but you know: this is where the land starts. The force with which the Congo River empties into the Atlantic is so great that it changes the color of the seawater for hundreds of kilometers around.
Once, aboard the old packet boats, this discoloration made the first-time traveler to Congo think he was almost there. But the crew and old hands soon made it clear to the greenhorn that it was still a two-day sail from here, days during which the newcomer would see the water grow ever browner, ever dirtier. Standing at the stern he could see the growing contrast with the blue ocean water that the propeller continued to lift up from deeper layers. After a time, clumps of grass would begin drifting by, chunks of sod, little islands that the river had spit out and that were now bobbing about dazedly at sea. Through the porthole of his cabin he perceived dismal shapes in the water, “chunks of wood and uprooted trees, pulled up long ago from darkened jungles, for the blank trunks were leafless and
the bare stumps of thick branches sometimes roiled at the surface for a moment, then dove again.”
1
In satellite images, one sees it clearly: a brownish stain that stretches out up to eight hundred kilometers (about five hundred miles) westward at the high point of the rainy season. It looks as though the dry land is leaking. Oceanographers speak of the “Congo fan” or the “Congo plume.” The first time I saw aerial photos of it, I couldn’t help but think of someone who slashes his wrists and holds them under water—but then eternally. The water of the Congo, the second longest river in Africa, actually sprays into the ocean. The rocky substrate keeps its mouth relatively narrow.
2
Unlike the Nile, no peaceful maritime delta has arisen here; the enormous mass of water is forced out through a keyhole.
The ocher hue comes from the silt that the Congo collects during its 4,700-kilometer-long (about 2,900-mile) journey: from the high springs in the extreme south of the country, through the arid savanna and the weed-choked swamps of Katanga, past the endless equatorial forest that covers almost the entire northern half of the country to the rugged landscapes of Bas-Congo and the spectral stands of mangrove at the river’s mouth. But the color also comes from the hundreds of rivers and tributaries that together form the drainage basis of the Congo, an area of some 3.7 million square kilometers (about 1.4 million square miles), more than a tenth of all Africa, coinciding largely with the republic of the same name.
And all those tiny bits of earth, all those torn-off particles of clay and mud and sand go floating along, downstream, to wider waters. Sometimes they hang suspended in place and glide on imperceptibly, then roil in a wild raging that mixes the daylight with darkness and foam. Sometimes they get stuck. Against a rock. An embankment. Against a rusty wreck that howls silently up at the clouds and around which a sandbank has formed. Sometimes they encounter nothing, nothing at all, nothing but
water, different water all the time, first fresh, then bracken, finally salt.
That is how a country begins: far before the coastline, thinned down with lots and lots of seawater.
B
UT WHERE DOES THE HISTORY BEGIN
? Also much further away than you might expect. In 2003, when I first considered writing a book about the country’s turbulent history—not only the postcolonial period, but also the colonial and a part of precolonial times—I decided it would only be worth doing if I were able to include as many Congolese voices as possible. To at least challenge the Eurocentrism that I would doubtlessly find on my path, it seemed to me that I would have to go systematically in search of the local perspective or, better yet, of the diversity of local perspectives, for there is of course no single Congolese version of history, just as there is no single Belgian, European, or simply “white man’s” version. Congolese voices, in other words, as much as possible.
The only problem was: how does one set about doing that in a country where the average life expectancy during the last decade has never risen above forty-five? The country itself was turning fifty, but its inhabitants no longer were. There were, of course, the voices that came bubbling up from forgotten or nearly forgotten colonial sources. Missionaries and ethnographers had documented marvelous stories and songs. Numerous texts had been written by the Congolese themselves—to my amazement, I would even come across a native “ego document” from the late nineteenth century. But I was also looking for living witnesses, for people who would share their life stories with me, even the trivia. I was looking for what rarely ends up on the page, because history is so much more than that which is written down. That applies everywhere and always, but certainly in areas where only a tiny upper crust has access to the written word. Because of my training as an archaeologist, I attach great importance to nontextual information,
which often provides a fuller, more tangible picture than textual information does. I wanted to be able to interview people, not necessarily the big decision makers, but everyday people whose lives had been marked by the broader scope of history. I wanted to ask people what they had eaten during this or that period. I was curious about the clothes they’d worn, what their house looked like when they were a child, whether they went to church.
It is, of course, always risky to extrapolate to the past from what people tell one today: nothing is so contemporary as our memories. But while opinion can be extremely malleable—informants sometimes sang the praises of colonialization: was that because things were really so good for them back then? Or was it because things were so bad for them now? Or was it because I’m a Belgian?—the memories of commonplace objects or actions often exhibit greater permanence. In 1950 you either had a bicycle or you did not. You spoke Kikongo with your mother as a child or you did not. You played soccer at the mission post or you did not. Memory does not discolor at the same rate everywhere. The trivial details of a human life retain their color longer.
So I wanted to interview ordinary Congolese people about their ordinary lives, although I don’t like that word
ordinary
, for often the stories I was told were truly extraordinary. Time is a machine that crushes human lives to bits, I learned during the writing of this book, but occasionally there are also people who crush time.
Yet still: how was I to get started? I’d hoped to be able to speak on occasion to someone who might still remember the final years of the colonial period. I unquestioningly assumed that there would be no eyewitnesses to the period before World War II. I would have been very pleased to think that some older informant could still tell me something about his parents or grandparents in the period between the wars. For earlier periods I would have to navigate by the shaky compass of written
sources. It took a while, however, before I realized that the average life expectancy in Congo is not so low because there are so few old people, but because so many children die. It is the country’s hideous infant mortality rate that undercuts the average. During my ten journeys to Congo I soon met people of seventy, eighty, and even ninety years of age. One time, a blind old man of almost ninety told me a great deal about his father’s life: in that way I was able to descend indirectly to the year 1890, a dizzying depth. But that was nothing compared to what Nkasi told me.