Congo Square Quotes

Jimmy said, "We survived slavery. Think about that. Not because we were strong. The American Indians were strong, and they were on their own land. But they have not survived genocide. You know how we survived?" I said nothing. "We put surviving into our poems and into our songs. We put it into our folk tales. We danced surviving in Congo Square in New Orleans and put it in our pots when we cooked pinto beans. We wore surviving on our backs when we clothed ourselves in the colors of the rainbow. We were pulled down so low we could hardly lift our eyes, so we knew, if we wanted to survive, we had better lift our own spirits. So we laughed whenever we got the chance.

All is indeed a Blessing IF you can just see beyond the veils; for it is ‘all’ an illusion and a test, and one of the greatest Divine Mysteries of this life cycle.” This IS my constant prayer, my mantra, my affirmation, reverberation, reiteration and my ever-living reality.

Jimmy said, "We survived slavery.... You know how we survived?" ....We put surviving into our poems and into our songs. We put it into our folk tales. We danced surviving in Congo Square in New Orleans and put it in our bots when we cooked pinto beans. We wore surviving on our backs when we clothed ourselves in the colors of the rainbow. We were pulled down so low we could hardly lift our eyes, so we knew, if we anted to survive, we better lift our own spirits. So we laughed whenever we got the chance.

Down the street, tree branches strung in purple Halloween lights began to shudder and sway. Dusty whirlwinds rose from the ground, and from the north came a great rush of wind. From Congo Square, she thought. Where the slaves danced and sang. "...and St. Louis Cemetery," whispered in her ear. The wind blew as cold as the icy breath of Lake Superior. Blowing veins seizured round the wrought iron gate. Yet the music continued. The only one oblivious to the sudden shift in the air--as if she were expecting it--was Angelique, who continued her dance, face to the sky. As though nothing had changed, though everything had.

A child is too self-centered to relate to any dilemma that does not, somehow relate to him.

It was 1977. Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero. In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Whereas in our days occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their only fear was that somebody else might get there first. Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the “United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). It was the bargain of the millennium.

Kimbanguism is an extremely peace-loving religion, yet brimming with military allusions. Those symbols were not originally part of the religion, but were copied in the 1930s from the Salvation Army, a Christian denomination that, unlike theirs, was not banned at that time. The faithful believed that the S on the Christian soldiers’ uniform stood not for “Salvation” but for “Simon,” and became enamored of the army’s military liturgy. Today, green is still the color of Kimbanguism, and the hours of prayer are brightened up several times a day by military brass bands. Those bands, by the way, are truly impressive. It is a quiet Monday evening when I find myself on the square. While the martial music rolls on and on, played first by the brass section, then by flutes, the faithful shuffle forward to be blessed by the spiritual leader. In groups of four or five, they kneel before the throne. The spiritual leader himself is standing. He wears a gray, short-sleeved suit and gray socks. He is not wearing shoes. In his hand he holds a plastic bottle filled with holy water from the “Jordan,” a local stream. The believers kneel and let themselves be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Children open their mouths to catch a spurt of holy water. A young deaf man asks for water to be splashed on his ears. And old woman who can hardly see has her eyes sprinkled. The crippled display their aching ankles. Fathers come by with pieces of clothing belonging to their sick children. Mothers show pictures of their family, so the leader can brush them with his fingers. The line goes on and on. Nkamba has an average population of two to three thousand, plus a great many pilgrims and believers on retreat. People come from Kinshasa and Brazzaville, as well as from Brussels or London. Thousands of people come pouring in, each evening anew. For an outsider this may seem like a bizarre ceremony, but in essence it is no different from the long procession of believers who have been filing past a cave at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees for more than a century. There too, people come from far and near to a spot where tradition says unique events took place, there too people long for healing and for miracles, there too people place all their hope in a bottle of spring water. This is about mass devotion and that usually says more about the despair of the masses than about the mercy of the divine. After the ceremony, during a simple meal, I talk to an extremely dignified woman who once fled Congo as a refugee and has been working for years as a psychiatric nurse in Sweden. She loves Sweden, but she also loves her faith. If at all possible, she comes to Nkamba each year on retreat, especially now that she is having problems with her adolescent son. She has brought him along. “I always return to Sweden feeling renewed,” she says.

When, in February 1885, at the Berlin Conference that not a single Congolese attended, the fourteen participating powers, headed by Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany, graciously ceded to Leopold II—at whose side Henry Morton Stanley was a constant presence—the million square miles of the Congo and its twenty million inhabitants so that he “would open the territory to commerce, abolish slavery, and civilize and Christianize the pagans,

(When Leopold turned over his colony to Belgium he burned all the state records, declaring, ‘I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.’) Truly, this is the aching heart of the story: how a population comprised of millions of souls, spread over nearly a million square miles, rich in language and music and deeply honored traditions, can be muted and erased.

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

American motor-and-music city of Detroit. Two centuries after the settlement’s founding, Cadillac’s name was a synonym for mass-produced luxury. He thus has the best name recognition today of any French colonist, and his memory resounds in countless song lyrics.

I read everything I could find about the Congo, which wasn’t much. Americans had no connection with that place. At the top of the African continent stood some pyramids that might be worth a tourist’s while, and down at the bottom, a headline-grabbing political drama of apartheid was playing out. But the middle was a great blur. If Africa came up in conversation, it was framed by power imbalance: the Christian mission to help the unenlightened; the charitable donation to feed the wretched children. This kind of talk, with the attendant photos of pleading waifs, didn’t square with the spirited Congolese kids I’d once known, so dazzlingly proficient at the skills their lives required, so very plainly not trying to be like me. Absent from the haves-and-have-nots conversation was any notion of fully formed African cultures with their own laws and scriptures and ways of making food and homes and families. Cultures that might have been on the way to making their own history, but somehow had gotten arrested instead. Now they seemed to be marching in place, shut off from the rest of the world.

RABBIT INVENTS THE SAXOPHONE When one of the last trails of tears wound through New Orleans Rabbit, that ragged trickster, decided he wanted To be a musician. He was tired of walking. And they had all the fun. They got all the women, they were surrounded By fans who gave them smokes, drinks, and he could have All kinds of friends to do his bidding. But, Rabbit hadn’t proved to be musical. When he led at stomp dance no one would follow. No shell shaker would shake shells for him. He was never invited to lead, even when the young ones Were called up to practice. The first thing a musician needs is a band, he said to his friends. The hottest new music was being made at Congo Square— So many tribes were jamming there: African, Native, and a few remnant French. Making a new music of melody, love and beat. Rabbit climbed up to the stage but had nothing to offer. Just his strut, charming banter, and what looked like a long stick Down the tight leg of pants. Musicians are musicians, no trick will get by.

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.

I make an appeal to the people of the civilized world, whose representatives signed the Berlin Act of 1885, and the Brussels Act of 1890, to unite in putting pressure upon their respective Governments to take the territories known as the independant Congo State out of the hands of King Leopold II, now ruler over a million square miles in Africa, inhabited by twenty million negroes; and by such measures as may be decided upon at a new Conference, to ensure that the provisions of the Berlin and Brussels Acts shall be effectively carried out in those territories.

One of the many foolish things about the fools who compare writing about music to dancing about architecture is that dancing usually is about architecture. When bodies move in relation to a designed space, be it stage or ballroom or living room or gymnasium or agora or Congo Square, they comment on that space

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.

gatherings formatted around two drums, a violin, and communal singing in New Orleans’ Congo Square81 reshaped the blues into “jass” or “dirty” brass bands that transmits the magical technology of “Jes Grew” 82—an audio virus that novelist and playwright Ishmael Reed describes as “going around in circles until the 1920s when it impregnated America's ‘hysteria.’” 83 Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan was preeminently aware of this phenomenon of Black people taking and forging new outcomes from technology produced during the nineteenth and twentieth century, as evidenced in his 1968 book with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village:

81 “This kind of gathering in Congo Square was usually the only chance Negroes had to sing and play at length. And, of course, even this was supervised by the local authorities: the slaves were brought

brought back by their masters. Still, in Congo Square sessions were said to have included many African songs that were supposedly banned by the whites for being part of the vodum or voodoo rites. The slaves also danced French quadrilles and sang patois ditties in addition to the more African chants that they shouted above the ‘great drums.’” Ibid., 72. 82 “A