Congo (12 page)

The country of Belgium may not have been directly involved in setting up the Free State, but the king increasingly began sending his subjects off to Congo. Belgian officers led expeditions, Belgian diplomats manned a consulate for him on Zanzibar, and the stations along the river were placed under the leadership of Belgian citizens. The British helpers appointed by Stanley began to be phased out. English as administrative language made way for French, although place-names such as Beach, Pool, and Falls remained. Words like
steamer
and
boy
, due in part to the influence of British and American missionaries, never disappeared. In Lingala, the language spoken along the river, a book was by then referred to as a
buku
, and the
verb
beta
meant “to hit,” a bastardization of “to beat.”

Once the Berlin Conference was over, Leopold II had less and less use for the British. What’s more, he had been forced to promise the French that Stanley—in their eyes the devil incarnate who had thwarted “their” Brazza—would never be given a senior post in the Free State.
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In 1886 Leopold instated Camille Jansen as first Belgian governor general of Congo. The auspiciously inaugurated Association Internationale du Congo was gradually becoming an owner-run business with Belgian personnel. Among the three thousand whites who remained in Congo in 1900, seventeen hundred were Belgians.
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They were well aware that one could easily lose one’s life in this place, but they hoped above all to garner honor, fame, and money. This budding Belgian enthusiasm is not very well known. The lack of imperial zeal in the king’s European homeland was not due to the fact that the monarch stood alone at the helm of his overseas enterprise. He may never have succeeded in galvanizing a broad cross-section of the Belgian people, but an urban elite of officers, diplomats, jurists, and journalists did warm to his plans. While in the provincial towns young men from the lower middle class dreamed of a life more heroic and glorious as a soldier, government agent, or missionary.

For a person like Anthony Swinburne, this Belgification was a particularly bitter pill to take: the man who had kept Kinshasa out of French hands and so hoped quietly for an appointment as provincial governor received a pat on the back and was then sent packing.
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For his two boys, however, his dismissal was a chance in a million. Their master’s employment was terminated in 1886; Swinburne headed back to England and took them with him. And so Disasi Makulo, once Tippo Tip’s slave and destined to be shipped to Zanzibar and from there to the Arab peninsula or India, suddenly found himself in Europe.

It was horrible to see the big boat and the sea for the first
time. After we had lifted anchor to cross the sea, we felt ill and had to vomit. Despite all the care with which we were surrounded, we barely recovered during the entire crossing. After many days we arrived in England. Europe seemed to us like a dream, we could not believe that we were in the real world! The huge buildings, the streets that were paved so neatly, the cleanliness one found everywhere, the houses so well decorated inside. In the house where we stayed there was a sort of cupboard in which food could be kept for a long time without spoiling. The lives of the whites were truly very different from our own. Every day we were happy, the only thing from which we suffered was the cold. But they had us wear warm and heavy clothing.
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With that, Disasi became one of a handful of Congolese—a few hundred individuals at most—to arrive in Europe before 1900. Missionaries occasionally brought a few children back with them, to serve as teaching material during their lectures, and promotional material during their collection drives. To whet the young Africans’ appetites for industry and diligence, they were taken along to shipyards, coal mines, and glass-blowing plants. A tiny group went to study at the Congo Institute in Wales. There, at Colwyn Bay, the British Baptist William Hughes had started a training institute for young Congolese with a calling: twelve of them left home for Europe between 1889 and 1908.
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A group of around sixty boys and girls went in the year 1890 to the eastern Flemish village of Gijzegem, where they received schooling from the Reverend Father Van Impe. The boys boarded at the schools, the girls were spread over convents in Flanders. They wore blue and white sailor suits.
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Others Congolese visitors ended up in ethnographic exhibitions; Pygmies in particular were a popular attraction at circuses and fairs. At the Antwerp World’s Fair in 1885 one could view a “Negro village” with twelve Congolese. By 1894 their number had grown to 144.
But the largest group of natives, some 267 of them, traveled to Tervuren in 1897 as exotic features in the colonial exhibition there. They built huts beside the park’s pond and during the day played at being themselves, stared at by hundreds of thousands of Belgians who had come to see that for themselves: a Negro.

In addition to the wonders of the Western world, they were also regularly confronted with the inclemence of Europe’s moderate climate. During the wet summer, seven of the delegation members to Tervuren died of influenza. Lutunu, a former slave who, like Disasi, had become a boy to a white agent, left for England with a few other children in the winter of 1884–85, along with the British Baptist Thomas Comber. Some of them developed earaches and sore throats, but refused to use Western medicines, which they believed caused one to go blind (true in any case of the quinine they had seen whites use to combat malaria in the tropics). Even though there was no respectable
féticheur
(traditional African healer) among them and no palm oil suitable for ritual use in all of Liverpool, they still succeeded in healing each other in the traditional manner.
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In 1895 a young man by the name of Butungu left for England with John Weeks, another Baptist. Butungu had received schooling at a mission post in the equatorial jungle along the river and could read and write. He too came home with a pile of tall tales about steamboats, seasickness, and salt water: stories about the sea, in other words. He recorded them in Boloki, his native language. It is the only known text by a Congolese from the nineteenth century.
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And I saw so many things: sheep, goats, cows, you name it. There are all kinds of things in their country. If you don’t believe me, just look at their cities, that’s the way they are. And their villages are so clean. One day we went to a rifle show, with bullets fired in the air that exploded in light . . . . And when the cold arrived, I saw things like flakes, the
flakes from the molondo tree. And I asked: “What is this?” The people told me: “That is snow.” At our feet were hailstones, but hailstones are hard and this was soft. That was also the end of the year’s circle. For six months there is only cold, and for the other six the sun shines . . . . So their country is not like ours at all. I did not see a single snake. The little animals they raise and that we have in our country as well do not live in the people’s yards, although they too have cockroaches, rats, and cats. But they have built barriers around all the animals. If you go through one of those barriers you can see all the animals, and even there the people have built houses for the animals. Only the horse is allowed to move about freely.

Butungu stayed in England for almost a year and a half. In addition to farms, snow, and fireworks, he also saw London and “the many things the people there have made.” That was all he said about it. The homecoming to his own village, however, he described most touchingly:

I went to the Reverend’s house and talked to myself. I looked around and saw my mother and I said: “That is really my mother.” I went to her and called her, and she said: “Where is Butungu?” And I replied: “It is me.” And she said: “So you have come back.” I said: “Yes.” We walked through the village and many came out to greet me.

Anyone who had traveled to mythical Europe had to tell his story a hundred times over. Parents and children clung to his every word, family members begged him for details. Only a tiny number of Congolese had been there, but the whole village eavesdropped as he talked about his first train trip: “The train went as fast as a fly, it was unbelievable!” Those who had stayed at home saw the strangest objects up close. In addition to suits and shirts, those who returned from Tervuren brought
back bowlers, brooches, walking sticks, pipes, watches, armbands, and necklaces as well as hammers, saws, planes, axes, fishhooks, coffee pots, funnels, and magnifying glasses with which to light fires. Many of them had also bought a dog in the village of Tervuren. Young Lutunu, after his journey to England, had even sailed to New York, where he stayed with a missionary’s sister. When he left, she gave him an extremely peculiar present: a bicycle! Lutungu took it back with him to Congo and so became Central Africa’s first cyclist.

It was handy, many whites reasoned, to have your boys with you in Europe. Not only did it draw a lot of attention, but it was also educational for the young people themselves. Still, one had to be careful. Before you knew it, a young man might learn too much during his journey. The British Baptist George Grenfell traveled with a boy and a girl of nine to England, but warned his hosts: “If we shower them with attention, we shall have trouble relegating them to their former status once we return.”
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The Belgian socialist Edmond Picard mocked those colonials who paraded about in their home country with their “model servants”: “Often it does not take long before that luminous person drives to despair his incautious master, who has introduced him all too intimately to our refined civilization and our chambermaids.”
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The number of Congolese able to travel to Europe would always remain limited. Travel did not necessarily make a person more licentious, but it apparently made one less docile. That would manifest itself later on. Congolese veterans who returned from World War II in 1945 began to resent the colonial authorities. The intellectuals and journalists who returned in 1958 from the world’s fair in Brussels began to dream of independence.

Disasi Makulo returned as well. Swinburne no longer worked for the Free State, but was still bound and determined to make his fortune as a trader in Congo. Along with Edward Glave, another Brit expelled by Leopold, he began buying up ivory. As soon as he arrived in Kinshasa, Congolese people
began offering it to him. At a certain point there were no less than sixty tusks of ten to fifty kilos (22 to 110 pounds) each around his house. As soon as Swinburne was able to obtain a steamboat of his own, however, he sailed upriver; there he could buy up ivory for less than a third of the price.
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And he was not the only one, not by a long shot. Riverine commerce, the exclusive domain of local carriers for almost four centuries, was now taken over entirely by Europeans. In a twinkling Leopold’s free trade had devoured the old trading network. European trading posts and storehouses arose. Ocean steamers docked at Matadi and hoisted the ivory on board with cranes. In Antwerp there were warehouses packed full of tusks. In 1897, 245 metric tons (about 270 U.S. tons) of ivory were exported to Europe, almost half the world’s production in that year. Antwerp soon outstripped Liverpool and London as the global distribution center for ivory.
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Pianos and organs everywhere in the West were outfitted with keys of Congolese ivory; in smoky saloons the customers tapped billiard balls or arranged dominoes that were made from raw materials from the equatorial forest. The mantelpieces of middle-class homes sported statuettes made of “elfin wood” from Congo; on Sunday the people went out strolling with walking sticks and umbrellas whose handles had once been tusks. All this international free trade, however, stole bread from the mouth of local commerce.

It was primarily children and teenagers who became closely familiar with the European lifestyle. Young men got to know it as boys, the girls as
menagères
. Despite the name, the
menagère
was less concerned with managing the household in the classic sense than with managing the hormones of her employer. Because European women were considered unsuited to life in the tropics, while at the same time it was recognized that an all-too-lengthy period of sexual deprivation was bad for the white man’s zest for work and life in general, a great tolerance arose toward forms of concubinage with a native woman. In
1900 there were eleven hundred white men in Congo and only eighty-two white women, sixty-two of whom were nuns.
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A great many of the men therefore developed long-term, intimate relations with one or more African women. Some of them spoke openly of their
menagère
as “my wife,” others developed a profusely libertine lifestyle. Often the girls chosen were very young, twelve or thirteen; often the line between affection and prostitution was unclear; often pure lust went hand in hand with tenderness. Yet the relationships always remained asymmetrical. The
menagère
slept under the same mosquito net as the white man, but she often, voluntarily or not, did so on a mat on the floor.

The missionaries, of course, viewed this with dismay. Church attendance by Europeans in Congo, however, was many times lower than in Europe itself: the minuscule cathedral at Boma was more than large enough to accommodate the crowd on Sunday mornings. The Roman Catholic rites were observed only at funerals. Disasi Makulo saw this with his own eyes. In 1889, less than three years after his trip to Europe, his master Swinburne came down with gastric fever. Horrible sores covered his legs and he declined visibly. Disasi and a friend fashioned a litter from hammocks and started off with him for Boma. Along the way they stopped at the mission post at Gombe, where the British Baptist George Grenfell attended to the sick man for two weeks. When that did not help, they set off again on their gruelingly long journey. At the Dutch trading post at Ndunga run by Anton Greshoff, father of the writer Jan Greshoff, Swinburne died. He was only thirty. “The whites we had met at the trading post hastened to prepare the funeral. All of the whites in lovely suits and a crowd of blacks attended the funeral,” he noted. And he added: “That day we found the world the bitterest place of all, and our thoughts froze when we did not know whether our lives would be subject to any further support.”
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