The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo - Hardcover

Edgerton, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312304862 ISBN 13: 9780312304867

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2002

Synopsis

Written over a century ago, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness continues to dominate our vision of the Congo, unlikely as it might seem that a late-Victorian novella could encapsulate a country roughly equal in size to the United States east of the Mississippi. Conrad's Congo is hell itself, a place where civilization won't take, where literal and metaphor darknesses converge, and where human conduct, unmoored from social (Western, in other words) norms, turns barbaric. As Robert Edgerton shows in this crisply narrated yet sweeping work of history, the Congo is still trying to awaken from the nightmare of its past, struggling to pull free from the grip of the "heart of darkness" cliche.

Plundered for centuries for its natural resources (which remain Africa's most abundant), the Congo was not always a place of horror. Before the Portuguese landed on its shores at the end of the 15th century, it was a prosperous and thriving region. The Congo River, the world's second longest as well as the deepest, and one of the only routes to the continent's interior, provided indigenous populations with ample means for living and trading. What the Portuguese found first to exploit were people, and with the slave trade began a dizzying downward spiral of conquest and degradation that continued for centuries. By the 19th century the race to explore the full length of the legendary river masked a fight for territorial and moral control among the French, Arabs, British, Germans, as well as American missionaries, all of whom dreamed of possessing Africa's very heart. When King Leopold of Belgium managed to solidify control in 1885, the Congo "question" seemed solved. His reign, of course, was almost pathological in its cruelty-the true source of Conrad's "horror"-and its grim legacy endures to this day.

Edgerton documents the Congo's long, sad history with a sense of empathy with and admiration for the character of the land and its inhabitants. Since independence in June 1960, the country has endured the machinations and disappointments of one dictator after another, beginning with Patrice Lumumba, and continuing through Joseph Mobutu, Laurent Kabila, and today Kabila's son, Joseph, who assumed power after his father was assassinated in January 2001. Whether called the "Congo Free State," or "Zaire," or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the country remains perilously unstable.

s20The Troubled Heart of Africa is the only book to give a complete history of the Congo, filling in the blanks in the country's history before the advent of Henry Stanley, David Livingstone, King Leopold, and other figures, and carrying us straight into today's headlines. The Congo continues today to be the subject of intense speculation and concern, and with good reason: upon it hangs the fate of sub-Sahara Africa as a whole. Here is a book that helps us face the stark truths of the Congo's past and appreciate both the enormous potential and uncertainty of its future.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert B. Edgerton teaches in the Departments of Psychiatry and Anthropology at UCLA. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and president of the Society of Psychological Anthropology. His previous books include Warriors of the Rising Sun: A History of the Japanese Military and Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America's Wars. He lives in Los Angeles.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

  1THE LAND BEYOND OBSCURITY AND DARKNESSThe Congo that so horrified Joseph Conrad in the 1890s embraced nearly 1 million square miles, an area as large as the United States east of the Mississippi or all of Western Europe. When Europeans first discovered it in the late fifteenth century, it was home to at least 250 different ethnic groups, ranging over fifteen cultural regions as different as the Mbuti Pygmies, who lived by hunting in the Ituri Forest in the eastern Congo, and the prosperous farmers of the Bakongo Kingdom in the west, where cleared fields and large towns once supported well over a million people spread across three hundred square miles.1 Most of the peoples in the Congo spoke a Bantu language, and although most of these were not mutually intelligible, the first word an infant uttered in all of them was “Mama”—mother—and a dying person’s last utterance, too, was often “Mama.”2 There were also people in the northeast of the Congo who spoke Sudanic or Nigritic languages, including the warlike Azande people, who successfully resisted European rule well into the twentieth century.Large portions of the Congo are open, strikingly beautiful, silver-baobab-tree-dotted savannas of tall, yellow elephant grass that are home to herds of wildlife. Some hilly areas are covered with ten- to twelve-foot-tall grass with edges so sharp that when dry, cut like razors. Other regions, particularly in the east, are steeply mountainous but split by deep valleys where bamboo, tree ferns, huge orchids, lobelias, and other beautiful flowers flourish. The volcanic peaks and glaciers in this eastern region, known as the Mountains of the Moon, are permanently snowcapped and higher than the Alps. Their foothills are black lava, and nearby lakes are jade green or a brilliant blue. These eastern uplands are so cold that they are completely free of both flies and mosquitoes, and the Europeans who later came to live there had to wear sweaters even at midday. But the low-lying regions of the Congo are intensely hot, steamingly humid, and home to multitudes of fleas, centipedes, large grasshoppers with green bodies and scarlet wings, cicadas, cockroaches, bees, ticks, leeches, hornets with a painful sting, little green fireflies, and myriads of beautiful butterflies and dragonflies of all colors. Throughout the low-lying, central Congo basin, there are hordes of flies as large as hornets, and blood-sucking mites, while every evening brings swarms of mosquitoes so voracious they can bite through European clothing.3Large portions of the Congo are permanent swampland, but almost half of the country is covered by a dense, dark tropical forest—“darkness,” literally. Within these forests there are lichenand moss-covered ebony, oak, mahogany, cedar, walnut, and rubber trees, as well as clumps of bamboo all tied together by lianas and flowering vines. Within many of these dark forests there is rarely any sound or movement, and a sickening smell of decaying vegetation pervades the air. Usually, no birds, bats, or monkeys are to be seen, nor whirring insects to be heard. The silence is so profound that when explorers in large caravans first entered these forests, they felt compelled to speak in whispers, and if a monkey chattered, a toucan shrieked, or a tree limb fell, they were visibly startled.In most of these forests, there are no flowers, but a dark green wall of trees usually rising two hundred feet overhead. The ground is covered with sodden, decaying vegetation that often is several feet deep. European explorers often despaired of cutting their way through these “jungles,” as they called them, a Hindi word meaning impenetrable thicket. Yet, in some parts of the Congo, forests such as these have long been cleared, allowing millions of people to farm the now open land. In many of these areas, palm trees flourished, providing both highly valued palm oil and palm wine in return for little effort. Bananas and yams also thrived in these hot, moist regions while older crops such as sorghum and millet would not. And in some parts of these forests there are bats, rats, flying squirrels, civet cats, hairy pigs, monitor lizards six feet long, and even elephants.Much of the Congo basin is crisscrossed by so many wide, rapidly flowing, mud-brown rivers that together they make up one-sixth of the world’s hydroelectric potential. Spanned by hundreds of vine bridges, dotted by over four thousand islands covered with trees, reeds, mangroves, and water hyacinth, most of these rivers have long been traveled by people paddling standing up in long canoes made from hollowed-out tree trunks. The rivers are home to many crabs, shrimp, turtles, hippopotamuses, and crocodiles, while nearby live thousands of pelicans, egrets, ducks, pygmy geese even smaller than ducks, kingfishers with scarlet beaks, five-foot-tall purple herons, sacred ibises, white-tailed flycatchers, scarlet and black weaver birds, and fish-eating eagles. Many people came to live along the banks of these rivers, fishing and farming after they had cleared away the forests atop sandstone cliffs that were sometimes red, sometimes yellow, and even white. But most people did not live along riverbanks; they built their villages in fertile valleys farther inland and walked some distance to pick up water for drinking and bathing. The Congo River itself was not only a rich resource for fish and crustaceans, but it also posed few dangers because it neither flooded nor ran dry. Because the Congo’s tributaries come from both north of the equator and south of it, when it is the rainy season in one region, it is dry in the other, maintaining the huge river’s even flow year-round.The Congo’s more open forests and grasslands are still home to elephants, giraffes, zebras, buffaloes, lions, leopards, cheetahs, and all manner of antelope, ostriches, and smaller animals, such as rabbit-sized nocturnal tree-hyraxes that emit ear-piercing screams, while carrion-eating hyenas, jackals, and vultures are still seemingly everywhere.4 But rhinos have never lived there. In some forested areas there are still seemingly millions of monkeys, while in others there are none. In parts of the eastern Congo there are both chimpanzees and gorillas. Pythons, cobras, mambas, puff adders, and other deadly snakes are commonplace as well, as are scorpions, huge, beautiful spiders, and fiercely biting, inch-long red ants. At times, so many black bats can fly overhead that the sky is literally obliterated. People still use machetes or even sticks to knock them out of the air and cook them. Even away from the rivers, hundreds of different sorts of birds live in the Congo, from majestic eagles and hawks to gray parrots with bright scarlet tails, long-winged blue swallows, red-chested cuckoos, thick, gray plovers, and black hornbills.Despite its location astride the equator, the Congo has dramatically differing seasons. For much of the region, from February to May there is heavy rain and flooding. But, even during the rainy season, it does not rain every day. Some days are dry but the sky is gray and the sun is seldom seen. When rain does fall, it is sometimes so warm that some travelers have likened it to human sweat.5 However, every two or three days during the late afternoon, a huge purple-black cloud forms in the east. As it moves to the west, the air becomes still and claps of distant thunder grow louder by the minute. As the black, arching cloud finally passes overhead, lightning strikes, thunder crashes, and the wind suddenly roars at sixty or seventy miles an hour, driving torrents of rain almost horizontally, flooding everything for an hour or so before moving on, leaving behind a gentle rain that may continue throughout the night. In Katanga, the Congo’s southernmost province, when thunderstorms strike at its four-thousand-foot elevation, spray splashes five or six feet into the air, making it impossible to drive a car.From May through October the weather is usually dry but cloudy, and it is cold at night with temperatures often falling to fifty degrees Fahrenheit even at lower elevations, and sometimes reaching freezing in Katanga. It can also be so cold during the day that hail the size of hen’s eggs has been known to fall for hours and people have to stay inside by a warm fire. October, November, and December are rainy and hot, while January is dry and still hot. Whether humid or dry, although mornings are usually damp and cold, in many areas the midday heat is oppressive.Whatever the season, diseases continue to be rampant. There are waterborne afflictions such as schistosomiasis, Guinea threadworm, and “river blindness,” as well as bouts of malaria, sleeping sickness, dysentery, and yellow fever. Mosquito-borne yellow fever strikes abruptly with a high fever, headache, muscle pain, and violent vomiting. Blood pressure falls, blood oozes from every tissue surface, and the kidneys fail. As recently as 1960-62, yellow fever killed thirty thousand people in Ethiopia. The Congo has also been plagued by tuberculosis, pneumonia, smallpox, influenza, and with the arrival of Europeans and Arabs, syphilis. Until European rule took hold early in the twentieth century, there were wars, too, and both cannibalism and slavery were common although not universal. Nevertheless, the Congo’s population was large, perhaps as much as 20 million people, and growing at the time of European contact at the end of the fifteenth century.The ancestors of these people began to migrate south and west into the Congo basin perhaps five thousand years ago. The first to arrive were light-skinned Pygmies, who lived by hunting and gathering in the Congo’s game-rich forests. They were not warlike, but despite their diminutive size they were well able to defend themselves if attacked. Capable of hiding almost to the point of invisibility in their dense forests, they could throw a spear hard enough to pass halfway through a man and could fire their deadly poisoned arrows so rapidly that four could be in the air before the first one struck. Although these little people-even today men average less than four feet six inches in height while the women are smaller still—did not practice any form of horticulture, they knew how to make fire, were skilled metallurgists, had effective medical practitioners, and created a joyous way of life that continues to this day among Pygmy groups.Sometime around two thousand years ago, much taller, usually but not always darker-skinned Bantu-speaking horticulturalists began to move into the basin, fully settling it by A.D. 1,000. They borrowed much from the Pygmies, who traded dried meat and honey for agricultural products, salt, and iron.6 Bantu people treated the Pygmies as markedly inferior—“mere animals” they often called them—and in return the Pygmies had little respect for the Bantu people. Yet, in their growing interdependence with farmers, the Pygmies somehow lost their languages. Nevertheless, they were highly successful hunters and gatherers. Pygmy groups routinely gathered nine or ten types of fruit, as many as eight types of snails, thirteen kinds of termites, and over twenty kinds of caterpillars, as well as several kinds of honey and over thirty types of mushrooms. Their nutrition was every bit as good as that of the Bantu farmers, and sometimes better.7Like the Pygmies, Bantu-speaking farmers sometimes hunted, trapped, and gathered, but they relied mainly on cultivation. Initially dependent on yams, they later adopted imported American plants such as maize, manioc, beans, and tobacco and also came to rely on avocados, sugarcane, pineapples, coconuts, tangerines, peanuts, and especially bananas, which were relatively easy to grow as they required little clearing of forests yet provided a yield ten times that of yams.8 One large Bantu society, the Bakongo Kingdom, cultivated twelve species of vegetables, a different one becoming ripe each month of the year.9 These farming people became highly skilled ironworkers, potters, weavers, and artists. The social systems they created were complex yet effective. There was little crime and steady population growth. There were many differences among the hundreds of societies in the Congo. Some had marked social inequality, while others were largely egalitarian; some had complex ceremonials, while others did not; some were fiercely warlike but others avoided conflict whenever possible; and some lived in simple bamboo houses, while others fashioned large wooden homes that were elegantly decorated. Despite warfare and the ravages of tropical disease, their populations grew, their religious beliefs and institutions prospered, and most people’s lives appear to have been rewarding.In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus told of an expedition that sailed south of the Canary Islands, and in the first century A.D., Pliny described an admiral who sailed all the way to Senegal.10 But no European is known to have ventured into the Congo’s “darkness” until 1482, ten years before Columbus sailed to North America. Both dangerous and alluring, Africa south of the Sahara was still thought by Europeans to be the home of one-eyed or two-headed people, among other monsters, as well as ferocious, gigantic animals, including birds large enough to carry away elephants, and ants as big as foxes. It was also thought to be the home of long-lost Prester (Presbyter) John, a Christian king who according to legend possessed a fountain of youth as well as unimaginable wealth from his many gold mines. Thanks to a forged letter from Prester John that reached the pope around A.D. 1165, Europeans became terrified of Africa. The letter not only described his wealth, it warned of Africa’s horrible dangers and horrors. Thousands of copies were made and it was widely circulated. Some Europeans hoped to discover Prester John and share in his vast riches. But despite the lure of Prester John’s gold and his fountain of youth, Africa’s dangers remained terrifying.South of the Canary Islands off the southern coast of Morocco lay what was known to Europeans as the dreaded Sea of Darkness, where every imaginable horror awaited any European explorer rash enough to enter it—liquid sheets of flame falling from the sky, a boiling ocean, mountainous waves, and deadly whirlpools where Satan lay in wait to kill. Should anyone miraculously survive these deadly terrors, he would be forever lost in the inescapable and even more fearsome Sea of Obscurity, which lay beyond the Sea of Darkness. Yet urged on by their king, who craved the riches of unknown lands as well as the discovery of a passageway to the great wealth of India, dauntless Portuguese ship captains eventually sailed through the Seas of Darkness and Obscurity in such numbers that by the middle of the fifteenth century, fifty of their ships had reached the coast of Guinea. They returned to Portugal with over a thousand African slaves. Arabs had long taken African slaves from Sudan, but these were the first Africans known to be enslaved by Europeans.11All the while, shipbuilders in Lisbon—at the cutting edge of their profession—worked to improve their sailing ships, especially the new caravel, a relatively small vessel, only sixty to a hundred feet long, with a broad bow, small stern, three masts bearing cloth and lateen sails, and a crew no larger than fifty or sixty men. By the latter half of the fifteenth century these new ships were able to survive powerful storms and to sail into the wind. As the years passed, Portuguese caravels sailed progressively farther south down Africa’s northwest coast and then east along its south-facing western “slave” and “gold” coast, as it would later be named by British explorers and slave traders. In 1482, an...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312304862
• ISBN 13: 9780312304867
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320