Congo: A Journey to Our Deepest Roots

The author lived seven years in the Congo as a servant of the Belgian government. He fostered deep bonds with the primitive Sonde tribe and gained the full confidence of Kianza, their illiterate tribal chirf, who inspired this book. The deep knowledge of the earliest African life is lost forever because those who knew it could not write and those who had learned to write never knew it. Primitive African life is now overshadowed by a brand new "Africa in transition". This development took less than 75 years. Original tribal life in Africa is covered with a handful of stories as told by the chief and his father. The social hierarchy of the tribe, their laws and enforcement, worship and witchcraft, slavery and the role of ghosts, initiation processses into manhood and various secret societies get to the glue that secured the social order of a tribe that was only one step beyond the original hunter-gatherer's way of life.

Hugo Daems was exposed to Congolese culture from a very early age. His parents went to the Belgian Congo in 1921, shortly after WWI. His father was the harbor master of Matatdi and helped establish MANU-CONGO, (later called OTRACO), a railroad system between Matadi and Kinshasa. Some of the young natives hired by his parents grew up and found employment on passenger ships commuting between Matadi and Antwerp. They visited his parents in Antwerp regularly and soon Hugo learned to speak Kikongo, one of the principal languages in Congo