Conrad romanticised the Congo; Stanley, for all his genius of adventurousness, had a vulgar mind. Conrad projected his horror of the savage greed with which the agents of Léopold II brought ‘civilisation’ to the river in the 1880s, into the look of the river itself. The inviolate privacy of the primeval forest became a brooding symbol of the ugly deeds that were done there, the tattooed faces became the subjective image of life without the organised legal and moral strictures with which the white man keeps the beast in himself at bay. Stanley sometimes saw the river as a potential old-clothes mart; the tattooed and naked people irresistibly suggested to him a ‘ready market’ for the ‘garments shed by the military heroes of Europe, of the club lackeys, of the liveried servants’.
Neither vision fitted what I saw on the Congo, though some of the anti-white and inter-tribal atrocities that have been committed since independence have matched in horror what white men did in the name of civilisation less than a century ago, and Conrad’s vision of this part of Africa as the heart of man’s darkness has taken on the look of prophecy. For myself, I had not been many days on the river when I stopped thinking of the people around me as primitive, in terms of skills and aesthetics. Their pirogues and all the weapons and tools of their livelihood were efficient and had the beauty that is the unsought result of perfect function. The pirogues were masters of the water, and like their gear, many of them were chased with carving of great restraint and discipline. The armoury of fishing spears, with their variety of tips and barbs, represented hand-forging and metalwork of a long skilled tradition, and a jeweller’s eye for the beauty inherent in the strength of metals. Any paddle or bailing scoop – common articles of everyday use among riparian people – could have gone straight into an art collection; which is as if to say one could pick up a plastic spoon in a white man’s kitchen, a spade in a suburban garden, and confidently put them on exhibition.
After Coquilhatville the river mustered such a day-and-night assault on the senses that you could not read. In the slowly passing forest were the halls and mansions of prehistory: great mahogany trees, ficus, and, out-topping the tallest palm, the giant kapok with its trunk like pale stone. There were times when the pull and contrast between the elements of land and water seemed to disappear altogether. On golden water, garlands of green islands floated. As the light changed, the water became smooth as ice; our length, our bulk skimmed it like a waterbug. Then the floating islands, with their hazy, lengthening reflections, coloured a surface like that of a mirror on which the quicksilver is worn; and perfume came to us from the forest. There were many flowering creepers – an orchid-pink one that spread itself out to the sun over a tree, an occasional red or orange one – but the perfume was the cold, sweet, unmistakable one of white flowers, and came from a waxy trail of blossoms, deadly poisonous, very beautiful.
A storm in the night brought tremendous rain hosing down on us. The sky swelled and thinned with lightning like the overblown skin of a dark balloon. In the morning, the jungle was dripping and brilliant, and an hour-long forest of trees suddenly appeared, covered with ethereal orchilla moss, their beards matted with water. Other trees had ant-heaps looking like spools of thread wound high up on their branches. When the boat drew near an island – there are four thousand of them in this stretch of the Congo – or passed close to one of the banks, the raucous gossip of grey-and-red African parrots was overheard. The Africans catch young parrots by letting a ball of latex, from the wild rubber lianas, down the hollow trees where the parrots nest; the claws of the young become entangled in the tacky ball, and when it is drawn up they come with it. They are caught to sell as white people’s pets, unlike the monkeys, which are favoured as food. In a lonely stretch of forest, two men wearing nothing but loincloths of bark startled me by holding up a monkey they had just found and killed in one of the traps they set up along the river.
Not long after the caravan had left Bumba, its most northerly stop in the curving course of the river and the point at which the Congo–Nile road down Africa meets the Congo, we approached a village where a whole armada of pirogues came out to meet us. From our galley came a shower of jam tins; men, women and children leaped for them from the pirogues into the water. The men were naked; the women were wrapped in mammy cloth but they too seemed unencumbered. Some who boarded our boat did not leave it for several miles, when the pirogues had left them behind long ago; they simply stepped off into our swirling wake and swam back home. They are the only people I have ever seen who swim as others walk or run.
We passed, and sometimes made a stop at, places that were once the Arab fortresses of Tippu Tip, a powerful Arab slave trader whose help Stanley was ironically forced to seek in his journeys, although one of the professed objects of the association for which Stanley worked was to wipe out the slave trade. One of these places was Yangambi, which Stanley came upon in 1883 as a populous village in ruins, with its male population murdered and its women and children fettered by the neck or leg in an Arab slave camp built of the remains of their home.
The Belgians built a fine agricultural research station at Yangambi, the biggest in Africa, a garden town with its own shops, school, hospital, club and pleasant houses as well as laboratories and experimental plantations. It belonged, like everything else, to the new Congolese state, and it still had its complement of Belgian scientists when I was there, but the disorder that has since descended on nearby Stanleyville (Kisangani) may have brought its usefulness to a standstill.
Across the river, from a great village that stretched for several miles along the bank, Topoke people brought huge forest pineapples to sell us. The tribesmen were intricately tattooed, with the attentive eyes of merchants, though they grow bananas and catch fish. Many of them are followers of what is known as the Kitiwala – an African corruption of the name as well as the character of the Watch Tower Society, which (like a number of other harmless religious sects in a country where Christianity, traditional animism and black nationalism provide a heady inspirational mixture) has become a subversive secret society. So much so that the Belgian colonial administration outlawed the distribution of those apocalyptic pamphlets familiar on street corners all over the world.
At Stanleyville the river’s great right of way through twelve hundred miles ends; the Stanley Falls (Boyoma Falls) break it – they are rapids, really – and the Equator is crossed again. On the other side, in the southern hemisphere, is the stretch of the Congo that leads to its source near the copper belt of the south; it has another name, Lualaba. Livingstone ‘discovered’ it (for Europe) but did not dream that it could be the distant Congo, known far away in West Africa.
Stanleyville lies just below Stanley Falls, as Léopoldville lies just above the lower Congo rapids. But the river at Stanleyville is of a size the eye can encompass, and in fact the town is on both sides of it. Here is a place deeply of Africa, sunk in Africa. In Léopoldville the tropical vegetation is not dwarfed by, but a match for, the giant modern buildings; the modest colonial buildings of Stanleyville make no challenge to the towering fecundity of the tropics. There is a lofty feeling that comes from living things, not buildings; palms, whose trunks are covered with a cool compress of moss, bright as seaweed and feathered with ferns, hang above the avenues, and the Traveller’s Tree – an exalted relation of the banana palm that stores cool water for the passer-by at the base of fringed fronds arranged like the spread of a peacock’s tail – is common.
Stanleyville is – or was – the late Patrice Lumumba’s town, and it has become a place of terror for white people. From time to time, now, it is cut off from communication with the rest of the country, and the world; planes cannot land there, and the river convoy service from Léopoldville, carrying food and other supplies, is disrupted by unrest. But the Gouverneur Moulaert and its water caravan reached the end of their journey at Stanleyville during an interval of calm. There, I was even able to have one last experience of the river before I left it to continue my journey by land.
I went
with the Wagenia fishermen to visit their fishing grounds in the rapids of Stanley Falls. I found them at home in an ugly ‘Arabised’ village a mile or two from the town. It was a poor collection of low mud houses like a heap of sandcastles that a tide had lapped over; the extent of its Arabisation seemed to consist of the one mud hut, daubed with white and a line of shaky Arabic script, that served as a mosque. African villages such as this one on the riverbank are relics of the proselytising for Islam that was a sideline of Arab slavers from the East Coast.
It was just five in the afternoon when I got to the Wagenia village, and I had to wait while the crew mustered, struggling out of the patchy decency of the white man’s cast-offs that they wore to work in Stanleyville, and emerging from their dark mudholes in shorts and loincloths. There were twenty-five paddlers and three musicians, and we took to the water in a big pirogue that held us all comfortably. A coxswain stood in front of me where I sat in the middle, and another, a lean and handsome old man, stood up aft. He was the leader of the chanting; sometimes this accompanied the drumming, sometimes followed on the beat of the drums, and sometimes was beaten into silence by the master voice of the drums. The pirogue skidded and shot across the rapids, the bodies of the paddlers jabbing and rising, and as the water became wilder the drums hammered up the energy of the men, deafening and dramatic.
We crossed the river and landed among reeds where rocks jutted out half-hidden by very fast and evil-looking rapids. Giant cornucopias of fish traps hung from an incredible catwalk of huge logs and lianas strung over the dreadful waters. Three of the fishermen shinned over the lianas and logs and, balancing like high-wire artists, pulled up the traps full of slapping fish. I found myself in a scene I recognised as identical in every detail with the sketch reproduced in Stanley’s account of the Wagenias when he founded his first river station at the Falls in 1885; they fish the wild, twisted water exactly as they did then.
Returning downstream towards Stanleyville, the going was smoother and the paddlers made a great show of speed, rhythm and drumming. We cut across the path of the ferryboat that plies between the ‘black’ town on one bank and the ‘white’ town on the other; the cranes on the dock were at work on their slow devouring and disgorging. It was an odd feeling to be the centre of a kind of floating war dance in the middle of a modern port preoccupied with political fervour; while I enjoyed the show-off of the Wagenias, I felt something was fraudulent, and could not make up my mind whether it was the modern port or the old pirogue. Yet the Congo River was not demeaned either way. The Congo, like that other stream, of time, is neither past nor present, and carries both in an immense indifference that takes them to be one. There is no old and no new Africa to the great river; it simply bears a majestic burden of life, as it has always done.
While I was travelling on the Congo River I might have forgotten for days at a time that I was in a land suffering the great political crisis of its existence. Yet all through the thousand-mile river journey from Léopoldville to Stanleyville, while the banks of the Congo showed a life regulated by other mores and even other gods than those of the contemporary world of history, a scribble, chalked by an idler in Léopoldville on one of the barges in the water caravan in which I travelled, remained: ‘Vive le Roi M. Kasavubu et l’Indépendance’. In all the traffic of the caravan’s progress, the scribble was not rubbed off. And whenever it caught my eye there was brought home to me the realisation that Africa, however troubled it may be, has never been more interesting than it is in this decade; it may never be so interesting again. The Africa the nineteenth-century explorers found – the jungle and the scarified faces that I myself was seeing on the river – and the Africa I had seen emergent in the city life of Stanley Pool are in living coexistence though centuries apart. These are the two great periods of the continent; the colonial Africa that came between them was the dullest, despite its achievements and historical necessity.
When Stanley was busy opening up the Congo River to trade in the name of Léopold II of Belgium, he met in the wilderness Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who was equally busy staking out rival claims for the French. Opposite Léopoldville, which Stanley founded, across the great width of Stanley Pool is Brazzaville, which de Brazza founded. Four years ago the Pool was French on one bank and Belgian on the other; now Brazzaville is the capital of one Congo Republic, and Léopoldville is the capital of another. The new definitions are only a little less artificial than the old colonial ones; for the people on both banks of Stanley Pool are the same people – the Bakongo – who had a kingdom of their own in the fifteenth century. The definitions are less artificial only because the people of the right bank and the people of the left bank have entered into community with the modern world under two different influences – the one French, the other Belgian – and certain approaches to life characteristic of the French, and others characteristic of the Belgians, will probably distinguish the two African peoples for ever, despite the fact that the Congolese of the former Belgian Congo have shown a fanatic revulsion against the Belgians.
On a Saturday night I took the ferry across Stanley Pool to what used to be the French side, and went to an open-air café in the Poto Poto district of Brazzaville, a vast black slum that is the real city, although its swarming existence in shacks and unlit streets goes on completely buried under an extravagant growth of creepers and palms, while the pleasant colonial town built by the French shows up more prominently through the tropical green.
Chez Faignon lay behind a dirty alley full of amiable hangers-about, a barber’s stall doing good business, and an old, blind house. Yet it turned a face to the sky as a moon-flower; there was a raised dance floor, a marvellous band panting out to the night the triumph of its return from a Left Bank engagement in Paris, a pungent atmosphere of cats and spilled beer, and a collection of women whose blatant gorgeousness is the only grand style of beauty I know of in the world today.
These ladies of joy – as many of them were – suggested all the wickedness of courtesans of the great age; they also giggled and whispered in each other’s ears like schoolgirls. They were wearing – carried to the nth degree – the form of dress that the modern women of the Congo basin have evolved for themselves, and that, though it goes by the humble French word pagne – loincloth – combines the grace of the sari with the revelations of the bikini. It consists of a décolleté, almost backless tight bodice, a bandage-narrow skirt from pelvis to ankle, and some yards of material draped to cover the gap between bodice and skirt. The ladies dance the paso doble in this outfit, and the gesture with which they unhitched and rearranged the drape recalled the business of the cape before the bull and also revealed, for quick glimpses, smooth, bare belly.
I sat at a table with French friends and pointed to various people around us: ‘Who would they be?’ There were a few white couples among the gay ladies and town bachelors.
‘Just people who like a good band to dance to on a Saturday night.’
‘And that man over there?’ He was a white-haired white man with a smooth, pink jaw, impeccably dressed in quite a different way from that of the Congolese bachelors, who were elegant in the manner of young Americans trying to look like young Italians. I was told he was Monsieur Christian Gayle, Minister of Information at the time – the only white man in Africa holding a cabinet post in an independent black government. A little later the Minister of Information left his party of African friends – which included the Minister of Finance and also a spectacular six-foot Senegalese lady in turquoise chiffon pagne and diamonds – and joined us. He was a calm, charming man who wore the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur and was once a member of the French Chamber of Deputies. The finish of Europe lay upon him invisibly but effectively; he was serenely unaware of any temptation to Africanise himself. He told me that he had come to Brazzaville seven years ago on a stopover between planes, and had lived there ever since.
‘The only way a white man in Africa keeps his self-respect now is when he is working with independent Africa
ns. Last year, when I was Speaker, the leader of the opposition knocked me over the head with a portable radio. I remained calm. That is one of the important things left to do in Africa – to keep the peace between Africans, who don’t really understand the principle of loyal opposition – of putting the country first.’
A few weeks later Léopoldville, on the other side of the river, was a place of brutality again, with the Congolese battering a bewildered assertion of their freedom on the heads of one another, as well as on white heads, and the size of the task M. Gayle had foreseen became clear. Since then, even the United Nations has seemed less than equal to this important thing left to do in Africa.
Telling Times Page 10
