Congo River Quotes

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical

It did not quite do it justice to call it adventure travel, and it certainly was not pleasure travel. My Congo journey deserved its own category: ordeal travel.

MYSTERY HAD SWIRLED around the Congo River since 1482 when Diogo Cão, a Portuguese mariner, became the first white man to set eyes on it.

Almost astride the Equator, night fell like a portcullis. The sun dropped below the horizon and suddenly all was dark.

It taught me a lesson about one of the Congo’s chronic problems, its lack of institutional memory.

I visited white-supremacist websites, designed by American racists, in which the Congo was held up as proof of the black man’s inferiority.

the most valuable asset stolen from the Congo was the sovereignty of its people.

One of the great fallacies about white rule in Africa was that when it ended, power was handed back to the people of Africa. I saw in the Congo how this simply is not true.

In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.

….So much crueller than any British colony, they say, so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and else-where, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro-independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife. Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent’s colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form.

the normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.” p141

I had covered wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and elsewhere, but the work had started to feel routine. I wanted to leave the journalistic herd, to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project.

The normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.

For those who think Africa’s problems can simply be solved by the injection of money, I would recommend a crash course in cobalt economics in the Congo. In 2004 the cobalt boom meant there was plenty of money in Lubumbashi, but the presence of money did not guarantee that the local economy grew or even stabilised.

the Congo government had enough money from mining to promise the mercenaries extravagant pay packages, but they often ended up paying themselves. It became routine on operations when entering a Congolese town for the mercenary forces to hurry to the local bank, blow open the safe with dynamite and take whatever was inside.

It was one of the defining moments of my journey through the Congo. I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards.

Even in Africa, the Congo has few rivals for corruption.

Mobutu’s dictatorial reign between 1965 and 1997 created the violent free-for-all of today’s Congo.

One of my best friends in Johannesburg took great pleasure in arguing that crossing the Congo today would be more dangerous than when Stanley did it in the 1870s. ‘At least the natives back then didn’t have Kalashnikovs,’ he smirked.

I was born here in the Congo. When my parents took me as a child back to Greece, it was more primitive than here. I used to look forward to coming back to the Congo because it was more advanced than Greece. Can you imagine that?

What made it so galling to me, the outsider, was that of the large sums paid by the various mining companies, brokers and traders, only a tiny fraction ever reached the local economy. The vast bulk was lost in bribes demanded by corrupt officials at all levels. Lubumbashi’s cobalt bonanza brought home to me how money alone will not solve Africa’s problems. Until the Congo’s economy is underpinned by the rule of law and transparency, it will remain stagnant, chaotic and unproductive.

Stanley’s Congo expedition fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. Before his trip, white outsiders had spent hundreds of years nibbling at Africa’s edges, claiming land around the coastline, but rarely venturing inland. Disease, hostile tribes and the lack of any clear commercial potential in Africa meant that hundreds of years after white explorers first circumnavigated its coastline, it was still referred to in mysterious terms as the Dark Continent, a source of slaves, ivory and other goods, but not a place white men thought worthy of colonisation. It was Leopold’s jostling for the Congo that forced other European powers to stake claims to Africa’s interior, and within two decades the entire continent had effectively been carved up by the white man. The modern history of Africa – decades of colonial exploitation and post-independence chaos – was begun by a Telegraph reporter battling down the Congo River.

We were on the Congo’s eastern edge and, as the helicopter climbed higher, I could see nothing but an unbroken spread of vegetation. I was looking at the Congo’s rainforest, one of the natural wonders of the world. Conservationists describe it as one of the Earth’s lungs, an immense expanse of oxygen-generating green, matched in size only by the Amazonian rainforest. Explorers recorded it as one of the most impenetrable and hostile environments on the planet – as clammy as a pressure cooker, thick with disease, capped by a tree-top canopy too solid for sunlight to penetrate.

Mobutu’s dictatorial reign between 1965 and 1997 created the violent free-for-all of today’s Congo. It was Mobutu who robbed the country of its wealth, plundering national reserves on a scale economists have still not been able to gauge accurately. When he came to power, the Congo had a thriving mineral industry, reliant on copper from the south-eastern province of Katanga and diamonds from the central province of Kasai. When he was driven from office in May 1997 to die in exile a few months later, the country was broke and the output of the mines a fraction of what it had been fifty years earlier.

Sure, doing business in the Congo is unconventional, but try to look at it from a strictly business point of view. The fees we pay to the government are no different from taxes paid in other countries. Everything we do is legal to the extent that there is any law in this country. If the regime says we pay for this licence, we pay for the licence. It just so happens the money might be paid in a big, black plastic bag delivered at night to a politician’s house.

Mining might convey an image of industry or technology, but I found this was not the case in the Congo. In the so-called ‘mines’, a brutally primitive process was in place involving what was effectively slave labour clawing minerals from the earth so that they could be shipped to eager cash buyers in the developed world. President Kabila headed what was effectively a cobalt and diamond cartel, while two rival factions (one backed by neighbouring Uganda, the other by Rwanda) divided up the rest of the country’s resources. Crudely, Uganda got gold and timber, and Rwanda got tin and coltan – a mineral used in mobile telephones.

The old man might have been drunk, but he was right. Outsiders have robbed and exploited the people of the Congo ever since the days of the first European and Arab slavers. The territory that Stanley staked in the name of Leopold witnessed what many regard as the first genocide of the modern era, when millions of Congolese were effectively worked to death trying to meet the colonialists’ almost insatiable demand for resources, most notably rubber. And since independence, foreign powers have toyed with the Congo, stripping its mineral assets and exploiting its strategic position, never mindful of the suffering inflicted on its people. And that really was the point. At every stage of its bloody history, outsiders have tended to treat Congolese as somehow sub-human, not worthy of the consideration they would expect for themselves. For progress to be made, outsiders must treat Congolese as equals and they could do worse than follow the example of an amazing white woman I discovered after we got back to Kalemie.

The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

I come from east Africa, Kenya, where people die of starvation because of drought. There is never enough rain for the crops or the animals. But here in the Congo, they have all the rain they need, rivers full of fish, and soil that is unbelievably rich. If you stand still here in the bush you can actually see plants growing around you, the growth is that powerful, that strong. And yet somehow people still manage to go hungry here because of the chaos, the bad management.

The collapse of the state in this large swathe of Africa meant that its people either relied on the charity of outsiders or took to violence. I must have looked bit dejected because Louise tried to lighten my mood. 'From my point of view as a church worker,it's great.'she said.When I go on leave back to the UK and I go into a church on Sunday,I am the youngest person there by a long way. But here in the Congo,I am always the oldest.

My journey through the Congo had its ow unique category. It did not quite do it justice to call it adventure travel, and it certainly wasn't pleasure travel. My Congo journey deserved its own category: ordeal travel. At every turn I faced challenges, difficulties and threats when in the Congo. The challenge was to assess and choose the option best suited to making progress. But there were moments when there were no alternatives, or shortcuts or clever ideas. At these times, ordeal travel became really no ordeal at all.

Belgian colonial law barred Congolese from reaching senior positions in the army, civil service, judiciary or other organs of state, and by the time the colonialists left, the country had barely a handful of graduates. Control of the Congo fell into the hands not of a cadre of trained, experienced, educated leaders, but of young turks who suddenly found themselves vying for positions of enormous influence.

In the early 1960s, during the chaos after the end of Belgian colonial rule, the Congo was the world’s epicentre for mercenary activity. Soldiers of fortune came here to fight, at different times, for the government, against the government, against the United Nations, alongside the United Nations. Some of the mercenaries liked fighting so much they fought among themselves. There were those, like Che Guevara, who dressed up their involvement in ideological terms, arguing that it was part of an effort to spread socialist revolution, but many others (mostly, but not exclusively, white) had more venal motives – a passion for violence and loyalty that was transferable to whoever paid most.

Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries. It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism. The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered.

Deep in the heart of the hot, wet African rainforest, there lives a tribe of peacemakers who share a multiplicity of pleasures and make a very special kind of love. South of the sprawling Congo River, in the midst of war-ravaged territory, some 2,000 miles from the arid Ethiopian desert where the oldest human fossils have been found, lies this lush and steamy jungle paradise, the only natural habitat of the bonobo.

Kiswahili ni lugha rasmi ya nchi za Tanzania, Kenya na Uganda. Ni lugha isiyo rasmi ya nchi za Rwanda, Burundi, Msumbiji na Jamhuri ya Kidemokrasia ya Kongo. Lugha ya Kiswahili ni mali ya nchi za Afrika ya Mashariki, si mali ya nchi za Afrika Mashariki peke yake. Pia, Kiswahili ni lugha rasmi ya Umoja wa Afrika; pamoja na Kiarabu, Kiingereza, Kifaransa, Kireno na Kihispania. Kiswahili ni lugha inayozungumzwa zaidi nchini Tanzania kuliko nchi nyingine yoyote ile, duniani.

In France’s equatorial African territories, where the region’s history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies. Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company “sentries,” and the chicotte were the order of the day. Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold’s regime eventually fled back to escape the French. The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold’s Congo, at roughly 50 percent.

if you listened to everybody who gave you negative advice, you would probably never do anything.

Millions of trees have been clear-cut, dozens of villages razed, rivers and air polluted, and arable land destroyed. Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.

It’s like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

One day, putting my finger on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa, I declared that some day I would go there ... It is a fact that, about eighteen years afterwards, a wretched little stern-wheel steamboat I commanded lay moored to the bank of an African river. Everything was dark under the stars. Every other white man on board was asleep. I was glad to be alone on deck, smoking the pipe of peace after an anxious day. The subdued thundering mutter of the Stanley Falls hung in the heavy night air of the last navigable reach of the Upper Congo ... Away in the middle of the stream, on a little island nestling all black in the foam of the broken water, a solitary little light glimmered feebly, and I said to myself with awe, 'This is the very spot of my boyish boast.' A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory, but only the ... distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealised realities of a boy's daydreams!... Still, the fact remains that I have smoked a pipe of peace at midnight in the very heart of the African continent, and felt very lonely there.

various Belgian policemen and security officers - nominally under the command of Tshombe but, in reality, following orders from Brussels - had, on the night of 17 January 1961, driven Lumumba from the villa where he had been taken to rendezvous with a firing squad of local Katangan soldiers about forty-five minutes’ drive from the airport. Lumumba, his face battered almost beyond recognition and his clothes spattered with blood, was made to stand against a large anthill illuminated by the headlights of two cars. He was then executed by firing squad and his body buried in a shallow grave. Fearful the grave might be discovered and turned into a shrine, the Belgians and their Katangan stooges later moved to erase all traces of the Congo’s elected leader. The day after the execution, the corpse was exhumed and driven deeper into the Katangan bush, where it was reburied in another shallow grave until arrangements could be made to get rid of it once and for all. Under cover of darkness on 22 January 1961 two Belgian brothers, with connections to the Belgian security forces, returned and exhumed the body for a second time. They used a hacksaw and an axe to dismember the decomposing corpse, before dissolving the remains in a 200-litre petrol drum filled with sulphuric acid taken from a nearby copper-processing plant. One of the brothers later admitted he used pliers to remove two of Lumumba’s teeth as souvenirs.

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Kiswahili ni lugha ya Kibantu na lugha kuu ya kimataifa ya biashara ya Afrika ya Mashariki ambayo; maneno yake mengi yamepokewa kutoka katika lugha za Kiarabu, Kireno, Kiingereza, Kihindi, Kijerumani na Kifaransa, kutoka kwa wakoloni waliyoitawala pwani ya Afrika ya Mashariki katika kipindi cha karne tano zilizopita. Lugha ya Kiswahili ilitokana na lugha za Kisabaki za Afrika Mashariki; ambazo nazo zilitokana na Lugha za Kibantu za Pwani ya Kaskazini Mashariki za Tanzania na Kenya, zilizotokana na lugha zaidi ya 500 za Kibantu za Afrika ya Kusini na Kati. Lugha za Kibantu zilitokana na lugha za Kibantoidi, ambazo ni lugha zenye asili ya Kibantu za kusini mwa eneo la Wabantu, zilizotokana na jamii ya lugha za Kikongo na Kibenue – tawi kubwa kuliko yote ya familia ya lugha za Kikongo na Kinijeri katika bara la Afrika. Familia ya lugha za Kikongo na Kibenue ilitokana na jamii ya lugha za Kiatlantiki na Kikongo; zilizotokana na familia ya lugha za Kikongo na Kinijeri, ambayo ni familia kubwa ya lugha kuliko zote duniani kwa maana ya lugha za kikabila. Familia ya lugha ya Kiswahili imekuwepo kwa karne nyingi. Tujifunze kuzipenda na kuzitetea lugha zetu kwa faida ya vizazi vijavyo.

Mobutu’s kleptocracy had reversed the flow of time in the town, as buildings crumbled and the jungle reclaimed land. The novelist V. S. Naipaul portrayed the demoralizing aura of the city in his 1979 book, A Bend in the River: The big lawns and gardens had returned to bush; the streets had disappeared; vine and creepers had grown over broken, bleached walls of concrete or hollow clay brick. . . . But the civilization wasn’t dead. It was the civilization I existed in and worked towards. And that could make for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time sense unsettled. You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life.

Teacher, where will I come to if I start walking that way?" ... and I pointed. He laughed. "Little man," he said, "that way is North. If you start walking that way and just keep on walking, and your legs don't give in, you will see all of Africa! Yes, Africa, little man! You will see the great rivers of the continent: The Vaal, the Zambezi, the Limpopo, the Congo, and then the mighty Nile. You will see the mountains: the Drakensburg, Kilimanjaro, Kenya, and the Ruwenzori. And you will meet all our brothers: the little Pygmies of the forests, the proud Masai, the Watusi ... tallest of the tall, and the Kikuyu standing on one leg like herons in a pond waiting for a frog. " "Has teacher seen all that?" I asked, "No," he said. "Then how does teacher know it's there?" "Because it is all in the books and I have read the books and if you work hard in school, little man, you can do the same without worrying about your legs giving in.

This policy, viewed positively by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck as a way to shift the focus outside of Europe, was backed by Jules Ferry. Ferry supported what he called “the duty to civilize inferior races.” This led to a French expansion both in North Africa with the establishment of a protectorate in Tunis (1881); Africa, with the occupation of Madagascar and the expansion of France’s possession in Congo and Niger, and more importantly the development of the French “Indochine” in present-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold’s regime eventually fled back to escape the French. The

He [Stanley] had stated that he longed to do something wonderful for the African tribes along the Congo, and instead, as would become all too apparent, had set them up for a terrible fate. In 1877 he came down the great river as the first European ever to do so, declaring his hope that the Congo should become like `a torch to those who sought to do good'." Instead, it became the torch that attracted the archexploiter King Leopold II of Belgium.

Niobe earned the ire of the gods by bragging about her seven lovely daughters and seven “handsome sons—whom the easily offended Olympians soon slaughtered for her impertinence. Tantalus, Niobe’s father, killed his own son and served him at a royal banquet. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to his neck in a river, with a branch loaded with apples dangling above his nose. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, however, the fruit would be blown away beyond his grasp or the water would recede. Still, while elusiveness and loss tortured Tantalus and Niobe, it is actually a surfeit of their namesake elements that has decimated central Africa. There’s a good chance you have tantalum or niobium in your pocket right now. Like their periodic table neighbors, both are dense, heat-resistant, noncorrosive metals that hold a charge well—qualities that make them vital for compact cell phones. In the mid-1990s cell phone designers started demanding both metals, especially tantalum, from the world’s largest supplier, the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire. Congo sits next to Rwanda in central Africa, and most of us probably remember the Rwandan butchery of the 1990s. But none of us likely remembers the day in 1996 when the ousted Rwandan government of ethnic Hutus spilled into Congo seeking “refuge. At the time it seemed just to extend the Rwandan conflict a few miles west, but in retrospect it was a brush fire blown right into a decade of accumulated racial kindling. Eventually, nine countries and two hundred ethnic tribes, each with its own ancient alliances and unsettled grudges, were warring in the dense jungles. Nonetheless, if only major armies had been involved, the Congo conflict likely would have petered out. Larger than Alaska and dense as Brazil, Congo is even less accessible than either by roads, meaning it’s not ideal for waging a protracted war. Plus, poor villagers can’t afford to go off and fight unless there’s money at stake. Enter tantalum, niobium, and cellular technology. Now, I don’t mean to impute direct blame. Clearly, cell phones didn’t cause the war—hatred and grudges did. But just as clearly, the infusion of cash perpetuated the brawl. Congo has 60 percent of the world’s supply of the two metals, which blend together in the ground in a mineral called coltan. Once cell phones caught on—sales rose from virtually zero in 1991 to more than a billion by 2001—the West’s hunger proved as strong as Tantalus’s, and coltan’s price grew tenfold. People purchasing ore for cell phone makers didn’t ask and didn’t care where the coltan came from, and Congolese miners had no idea what the mineral was used for, knowing only that white people paid for it and that they could use the profits to support their favorite militias. Oddly, tantalum and niobium proved so noxious because coltan was so democratic. Unlike the days when crooked Belgians ran Congo’s diamond and gold mines, no conglomerates controlled coltan, and no backhoes and dump trucks were necessary to mine it. Any commoner with a shovel and a good back could dig up whole pounds of the stuff in creek beds (it looks like thick mud). In just hours, a farmer could earn twenty times what his neighbor did all year, and as profits swelled, men abandoned their farms for prospecting. This upset Congo’s already shaky food supply, and people began hunting gorillas for meat, virtually wiping them out, as if they were so many buffalo. But gorilla deaths were nothing compared to the human atrocities. It’s not a good thing when money pours into a country with no government.

do believe there's good and bad in all of us, usually expressed through patience, compassion, empathy and unselfishness on the one side, and impatience, cynicism, paranoia and anger on the other.

I have little fear walking up to a pig on a farm or my neighbor’s dog, but I wouldn’t dream of approaching a wild boar or a wolf in the same way. Over generations of breeding, farmers have reduced the aggressiveness of these and other animals by selecting for lower levels of testosterone and higher levels of serotonin.36 Correspondingly, many domesticated species have smaller faces. Intriguingly, some wild species also evolved reduced aggression, less territoriality, and more tolerance on their own through another kind of selection known as self-domestication. The best example are bonobos. Bonobos are the rarer, less well-known cousins of chimpanzees that live only in remote forests south of the Congo River in Africa. But unlike male chimpanzees and gorillas, male bonobos rarely engage in regular, ruthless, reactive violence. Whereas male chimpanzees frequently and fiercely attack each other to achieve dominance and regularly beat up females, male bonobos seldom fight.37 Bonobos also engage in much less proactive violence. Experts hypothesize that bonobos self-domesticated because females were able to form alliances that selected for cooperative, unaggressive males with lower levels of androgens and higher levels of serotonin.38 Tellingly, like humans, bonobos also have smaller browridges and smaller faces than chimpanzees.39 Many scientists are testing the idea that humans also self-domesticated.40 If so, I’d speculate this process involved two stages. The first reduction occurred early in the genus Homo through selection for increased cooperation with the origins of hunting and gathering. The second reduction might have occurred within our own species, Homo sapiens, as females selected for less reactively aggressive males.

The nineteenth century brought no improvement in the ethics of capitalism. The Industrial Revolution that swept through Europe enriched the bankers and capital-owners, but condemned millions of workers to a life of abject poverty. In the European colonies things were even worse. In 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium set up a nongovernmental humanitarian organisation with the declared aim of exploring Central Africa and fighting the slave trade along the Congo River. It was also charged with improving conditions for the inhabitants of the region by building roads, schools and hospitals. In 1885 the European powers agreed to give this organisation control of 2.3 million square kilometres in the Congo basin. This territory, seventy-five times the size of Belgium, was henceforth known as the Congo Free State. Nobody asked the opinion of the territory’s 20–30 million inhabitants. Within a short time the humanitarian organisation became a business enterprise whose real aim was growth and profit. The schools and hospitals were forgotten, and the Congo basin was instead filled with mines and plantations, run by mostly Belgian officials who ruthlessly exploited the local population. The rubber industry was particularly notorious. Rubber was fast becoming an industrial staple, and rubber export was the Congo’s most important source of income. The African villagers who collected the rubber were required to provide higher and higher quotas. Those who failed to deliver their quota were punished brutally for their ‘laziness’. Their arms were chopped off and occasionally entire villages were massacred. According to the most moderate estimates, between 1885 and 1908 the pursuit of growth and profits cost the lives of 6 million individuals (at least 20 per cent of the Congo’s population). Some estimates reach up to 10 million deaths.4

Casement, the diplomat who had earlier exposed the horrors of Leopold’s Congo, to investigate. Finding himself at a loss to describe the reign of terror he encountered on the Putumayo River, Casement coined a new term to do so: “a crime against humanity.” *

Nearly every English speaker interested in Africa read Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent (1878), and nearly everyone who read Stanley came away viewing African people as savages, including novelist Joseph Conrad, who authored the classic Heart of Darkness in 1899. The White character’s journey up the Congo River “was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world”—not back in chronological time, but back in evolutionary time.2

The superpowers took some of the least developed areas on earth, like the Somali desert or the Congo River basin, and pumped in first-world killing equipment. They installed leaders of these tinderboxes on the basis not of genuine popularity but merely of who would do their bidding.

Kinshasa resembles a termite queen, swollen to grotesquery and shuddering with commotion, always active, always expanding. In the sweltering heat it stretches out along the river’s left bank. On the far shore lies its twin sister, Brazzaville,

Eyes shrivelled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We’re doing this to pay for our studies. Dad’s already gone with the locomotives. He doesn’t write no more. Mom’s sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we’re sorcerers and it’s because of that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from our mom and that we should go to see the preachers who will cut the ,inks by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying round at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town. They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

This egregious example of “Belgians bad, natives good” is the conceptual foundation of King Hochschild’s Hoax. And it bleeds into what is, for most readers, the enduring imaginative impact of the book, to have put a nasty Belgian face onto Mistah Kurtz, the phantom who draws Marlow’s steamboat up the Congo river in Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. Like generations of English professors, Hochschild has misread the book as an indictment of colonialism, which is difficult to square with its openly pro-colonial declarations and the fact of the “adoring” natives surrounding the deceased Kurtz.

Even taking Sanderson’s pessimistic estimate as correct, does this mean that Léopold’s rule “killed” 500,000 people? Of course not, because, in addition to the misplaced personalization of long-term population changes, the rubber regions, as mentioned, experienced both population increases and declines. Even in the latter, such as the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control. The modest population gains caused by EIC interventions were overwhelmed by a range of wholly separate factors, which in order of importance were: the slave trade, sleeping sickness, inter-tribal warfare, other endemic diseases (smallpox, beriberi, influenza, yellow fever, pneumonia, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and venereal disease), cannibalism, and human sacrifice.

In 1892, a Belgian trader and his entire caravan of six Europeans and 40 porters were beheaded by a thug controlled by the notorious slaver and warlord Msiri, who asked that their heads be returned to him to decorate his compound. The trader had tried to persuade Msiri and other local tyrants to sell their ivory to his company, which could transport it by river, thus obviating the need for slaves.

The black American missionary George Washington Williams, visiting in 1890, noted “the most revolting crimes” committed by the natives: “Human hands and feet and limbs, smoked and dried, are offered and exposed for sale in many of the native village markets. From the mouth of the Lomami-River to Stanley-Falls there are thirteen armed Arab camps; and in them I have seen many skulls of murdered slaves pendant from poles and over these camps floating their blood-red flag.” Oddly, Hochschild quotes Williams’ testimony against native practices to criticize the EIC for being insufficiently vigorous in its attempts to govern the territory. Heads I win, tails you lose. As this logical slip implies, a justifiably proportionate response to the scourge of the slave trade required keen efforts by the EIC to recruit and feed soldiers, clear villages in areas prone to slave raids, establish military and governance posts, and pursue slave armies to the death. “Accommodating the Arab slave traders would be a crime,” wrote the EIC captain, and later WWI hero, Jules Jacques de Dixmude in 1892.

The first and biggest deceit at the heart of King Leopold’s Ghost is the attempt to equate Léopold’s “État indépendant du Congo” or EIC (long mistranslated as the Congo Free State) with Western colonialism. Yet the EIC was a short-term solution to the absence of colonial government in the Congo river basin.

Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.

In 1876, at a conference ostensibly about humanitarian projects, King Leopold II of Belgium formed the 'Internetional Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa', a front organization for violent colonization with members from many European nations. The fact that Central Africa was neither unexplored nor uncivilized — millions of the people lived in the areas around the Congo river, and many kingdoms and states there had signed treaties with European nations — did not slow down these wide-eyed, genocidal ideologues one bit.

It is a well-known fact that Henry Morton Stanley evaluated the population size on the basis of a very limited number of observations along the Congo river, and dubious extrapolation calculation methods containing several errors. As a matter of fact, nobody, even today, can seriously provide any reliable figures in this respect.

On November 29, 1883, only two days after his ship arrived in New York and he had boarded the overnight train for Washington, Sanford was received by President Arthur at the White House. Leopold’s great work of civilization, he told the president and everyone else he met in Washington, was much like the generous work the United States itself had done in Liberia, where, starting in 1820, freed American slaves had moved to what soon became an independent African country. This was a shrewdly chosen example, since it had not been the United States government that had resettled ex-slaves in Liberia, but a private society like Leopold’s International Association of the Congo. Like all the actors in Leopold’s highly professional cast, Sanford relied on just the right props. He claimed, for example, that Leopold’s treaties with Congo chiefs were similar to those which the Puritan clergyman Roger Williams, famed for his belief in Indian rights, had made in Rhode Island in the 1600s—and Sanford just happened to have copies of those treaties with him. Furthermore, in his letter to President Arthur, Leopold promised that American citizens would be free to buy land in the Congo and that American goods would be free of customs duties there. In support of these promises, Sanford had with him a sample copy of one of Leopold’s treaties with a Congo chief. The copy, however, had been altered in Brussels to omit all mention of the monopoly on trade ceded to Leopold, an alteration that deceived not only Arthur but also Sanford, an ardent free-trader who wanted the Congo open to American businessmen like himself. In Washington, Sanford claimed that Leopold’s civilizing influence would counter the practices of the dreadful “Arab” slave-traders. And weren’t these “independent States” under the association’s generous protection really a sort of United States of the Congo? Not to mention that, as Sanford wrote to Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen (Stanley was still vigorously passing himself off as born and bred in the United States), the Congo “was discovered by an American.” Only a week after Sanford arrived in Washington, the president cheerfully incorporated into his annual message to Congress, only slightly rewritten, text that Sanford had drafted for him about Leopold’s high-minded work in the Congo: The rich and populous valley of the Kongo is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is the president. . . . Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs, roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established . . . under one flag which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade. The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the valley.

The KiKongo language, spoken around the Congo River’s mouth, is one of the African tongues whose traces linguists have found in the Gullah dialect spoken by black Americans today on the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

• The historian of religion Mircea Eliade argues that many of the episodes in the myth of Theseus are garbled descriptions of ancient initiatory rituals. He describes the Ganda tradition of Central Africa, once practiced in the Kuba Kingdom between the tributaries of the Congo River: a man would disappear into a dark cave, while a group of novices gathered around the entrance. Deep inside the tunnel, the man would shout and rattle sticks, and the novices were told he was battling violent spirits. The man then daubed his body with goat’s blood, staggered out of the cave and collapsed. The king then ordered the terrified novices to enter the cave one by one. They thought they were facing a monster; in truth they met nothing more than the limits of their own fear.

In contrast, China has been a relatively isolated civilisation, both geographically and historically. On the eastern side stands the vast Pacific Ocean; to the south and the west, the impassable gorges of the Burma border and the inhospitable plateau of the Tibetan Himalayas, and to the northwest and north, the sparsely populated grasslands of Central Asia and the Gobi desert, the fifth largest desert in the world. Contact with other regions did occur, with India through the northwest corridor, with the Arab world by sea, and through the Silk Road along the steppes. But the salient point is that China has developed her own culture in a far less connected way than Europe. Black African kingdoms have been very isolated: sub-Saharan Africa is surrounded by the Sahara Desert in the north, which hindered contact with the Mediterranean, and by the Kalahari Desert in the south, which partially disconnected the southern plateau and coastal regions from central Africa. On the western side, Africa is faced by the vast Atlantic Ocean that Portuguese navigators only managed to navigate southwards in the 16th century. To the north and south of the equator, Black Africa had to contest with dense rainforests which occupy a west-east band of territory from the southern coast of West Africa across to the Congo basin and all the way to the Kenya highlands. Moreover, with an average elevation of 660 meters, African cultures were limited by the presence of few natural harbours where ships can dock, and few navigable rivers. Of the Niger, the Congo, the Nile, the Zambezi, and the Orange Rivers, only the Nile has relatively long navigable areas.

Here’s what you have come to understand. That the AIDS pandemic is traceable to a single contingent event. That this event involved a bloody interaction between one chimpanzee and one human. That it occurred in southeastern Cameroon, around the year 1908, give or take. That it led to the proliferation of one strain of virus, now known as HIV-1 group M. That this virus was probably lethal in chimpanzees before the spillover occurred, and that it was certainly lethal in humans afterward. That from southeastern Cameroon it must have traveled downriver, along the Sangha and then the Congo, to Brazzaville and Léopoldville. That from those entrepôts it spread to the world.

The Mississippi River, beginning in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and ending in the Gulf of Mexico, is 2,340 miles long. It runs as deep as 217 feet, and at the foot of Canal Street is 2,200 feet wide. It is the third largest river in the world after the Amazon and the Congo. It drains forty percent of the forty-eight continental states and has a basin covering 1.25 million square miles, including parts of thirty-one states and two Canadian provinces

In 1927, a few African locusts were spotted near a river in Timbuktu. Within three years the whole of west Africa was besieged by the creatures. Eventually, locusts covered an area more than 2,000 miles wide—extending from Ethiopia and the Belgian Congo to the luxuriant farm lands of Angola. Finally, 14 years after the plague began, 5,000,000 square miles of Africa (an area twice the size of the United States!) had been destroyed by the locusts.

Ten Things I Need to Know" The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already. Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years. There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk. Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling. When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling. It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty. How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future. The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words. I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins. In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river. The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year. How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved. Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it. The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance, I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river. Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush. Superstition Reviews issue 2 fall 2008

You can find it on almost any tree. As we made our way through the forest, it was literally raining rubber juice. Our clothes were full of it. The Congo has so many tributaries that a well-organized company can easily extract a few tons of rubber per year here. You only have to sail up such a river and the branches with rubber hang almost up to your ship. (In a Letter to King Leopold II of the Belgians)

​There is an old Congo saying that if one watches the Congo River long enough, the bodies of one's enemies will eventually go floating by. Kasavubu had been watching the Congo River as President for the last five years, during which time four Prime Ministers had gone floating by.

The barge was an invention of my own. It was 40 feet long, 6 feet beam, and 30 inches deep, of Spanish cedar 3/8 inches thick.

Stanley shoots negroes as if they where monkeys.

I saw an even more egregious example of this a few years later. I had moved to Edmonton to finish my undergraduate degree. I took an apartment with my sister, who was studying to be a nurse. She was also an up-and-out-of-there person. (Not too many years later she would plant strawberries in Norway and run safaris through Africa and smuggle trucks across the Tuareg-menaced Sahara Desert, and babysit orphan gorillas in the Congo.) We had a nice place in a new high-rise, overlooking the broad valley of the North Saskatchewan River. We had a view of the city skyline in the background. I bought a beautiful new Yamaha upright piano, in a fit of enthusiasm. The place looked good

achievement given that gravity was playing a far greater role than he’d anticipated. He shifted his hands in ever faster movements until he surrendered to the process and glided downward, catching himself only when his feet

They exist at the edge of human life in an environment that is treated like a toxic dumping ground by foreign mining companies. Millions of trees have been clear-cut, dozens of villages razed, rivers and air polluted, and arable land destroyed. Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.

Erasmus Wolfe wrote extensively about genii locorum in his ground-breaking and—at two thousand pages—wrist-breaking Exotica. He theorized that there was an upper limit to the size and power of an individual genius loci and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he provided some facts and figures to back himself up. None of the really huge rivers of Europe—the Volga, the Danube or the Rhine—appeared to possess a single tutelary deity. Instead there were Rhine Maidens, plural, a French and a German Mosel, and at least ten recorded gods and goddesses of the Don. And surely, Erasmus wrote, had the long length of the Volga possessed a single guiding spirit with loyalty to the people on its banks, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia would have foundered before it began. Or the Mississippi when the foreign invaders tooled up there, I thought, or the Congo, or the Limpopo or the Ganges or the Amazon. That is, if you assume a power so wide in scope would even be remotely human in conception or thought. But, relatively small as they were, I wouldn’t go up against either of the Thameses.