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The Congo
Plunder and Resistance
By David Renton, David Seddon, Leo Zeilig Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2007 David Renton, David Seddon and Leo Zeilig
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-631-1
CHAPTER 1
missionaries and traders
The history of the Congo long precedes contact with those Europeans who claimed to have first 'discovered' the country. The archaeological evidence has allowed some writers to describe a Sangoan people, who inhabited the region of central Africa some 50,000 years ago. They worked with choppers and scrapers and travelled between caves lit by fire. The first known inhabitants, however, were pygmies, hunters and gatherers living in the forests of the north and northeast. The Egyptians knew of pygmies in Africa probably from the time of the fifth dynasty (c. 2500 BCE) when an expedition brought back 'a dwarf' from the land of Punt. Pharaoh Pepi II of the sixth dynasty (around 2300 BCE) had images of pygmies drawn on his tomb. By the last centuries BCE, small numbers of Bantu-speaking people had migrated into Congo from the north and west (today's Nigeria and Cameroon) and settled in the south. The Bantu were agriculturalists who employed Iron Age technology.
The linguist David Lee Schoenbrun suggests that the population of the Eastern Congo was part of a trading bloc that extended from present-day Katanga to Lake Victoria. The peoples of the Great Lakes 'represented an enormous variety of historical traditions in ancient Africa'. They included hunters and gatherers, fishermen and settled farmers, potters and ironworkers, merchants and traders. The evidence of their settlement includes Stone Age sites on Lake Kivu, as well as ceramic 'Urewe ware', from around 700 BCE. Many different languages were spoken. Farmers used pottery and metal, settling on lands with good soil and rainfall. Deposits of charcoal have been found from smelting furnaces, dating back to around 200 CE. 'Forests were larders where communities could trap animals, collect medicines, produce lumber and find fibres for clothing from sources like the bark cloth-bearing Ficus tree. The dense, wet landscape provided people with a rich diet, and useful tools.
Although the first settled farmers may already have been working the land, agriculture only took off after the use of iron became widespread. Later farmers used pottery and metal, settling on lands with good soil and rainfall. Agricultural innovation took place: around 500 CE we have evidence of local peoples eating millet and cowpeas. People also learned to keep cattle for their milk and blood. Cattle herding encouraged the creation and appropriation of surpluses, and the rise of hierarchical societies. So too did control of the trade in valuable minerals.
The Mongo, who remain in the Great Forest area of the Congo today, inhabited the forest regions east of Mbandaka from at least the first century CE, when they left traces of their life as hunters and yam farmers. Their main strategies for gathering food included gathering, trapping and hunting. Their diet included fruit, palm kernels, mushrooms, caterpillars, snails, termites, spices, root drinks, monkeys, antelopes, boars, elephants, fish, maize, groundnuts, beans, yams, bananas and oil palms. The dense, wet landscape provided people with a rich diet, and useful tools. 'Forests were larders where communities could trap animals, collect medicines, produce lumber and find fibres for clothing from sources like the bark cloth-bearing Ficus tree. Bananas were especially important in the central Congo: they thrived in wet, dense rainforests, where the main alternative crops (yams) often rotted. By around 700 CE copper was being traded on a 1,500-mile journey between the Katanga region and the northern lakes. Its use was a badge of leadership. Cattle herding encouraged the rise of monarchies and even empires.
Relatively little is known about the development of the more complex societies but a more complex division of labour, into chiefs, diviners, doctors and mediums had evolved in the region by around 1000 CE. Early kingdoms included the empire of the Luba, founded in the early sixteenth century and based around lakes Kisale and Upemba in central Shaba. The empire of the Bakongo was founded around the fourteenth century at the mouth of the river and included parts of today's Angola as well as today's Congo. This empire came about as the Bakongo migrated south across the Congo river. Their main commerce was in ivory and hides.
After the fifteenth century, food crops, such as manioc, increased the range of agricultural products, but population densities were never high and agriculture remained based, for the most part, on shifting cultivation rather than settled agriculture. Even today, population density in the Congo is relatively low, about 22 people per square kilometre, and unevenly distributed. Population density in the Great Forest is only about half of the national average, with stretches of several tens of thousands of square kilometres virtually empty because of the dense forest cover. It is here that the pygmies still mainly live, although other groups also inhabit the forest areas. At the edges of the forests, where the trees have been cleared for settlement, population densities are often higher than the national average. At the northern edge of the Great Forest population densities increase up to twenty people per square kilometre and then drop to one or two per square kilometre only in the extreme north of the country towards the Central African Republic. The extreme south is also sparsely populated, with between one and three people per square kilometre.
The land upon which the Bakongo settled was at the western tip of a vast country, little of which they claimed. Its geography included savannas, high plateaus, volcanoes, lakes, rivers and rainforest. The most important feature was the River Congo itself. Its waters are drained from a plateau deep in the African interior. From the edge of this plateau, the river descends 1,000 feet in 220 miles of falls, rapids and cascades. So powerful is the river that on joining the ocean, it carves a canyon in the ocean bed, 100 miles long, and up to 4,000 feet deep. We can understand, then, why the Bakongo held mainly to the west, and knew little of the interior. It was simply impossible to travel upstream by canoe. The land that locals knew was remarkable enough. Even now, the diminished wildlife of the Congo still includes numerous varieties of birds and insects, along with, lions, elephants, okapi, chimpanzees, hippos, gorillas, bonobos, antelope, bushrat and crocodile – a diversity of species. The Congo also holds, of course, a vast mineral wealth.
For the history of the Congo, we have to rely on written sources, and for earlier periods these are rare. We are forced to depend on accounts produced from the outside. Our problem is that Europeans in particular knew little of Africa's historical development. Trying to use these sources is like peering into a shallow river: images come back to us, but they are vague and distorted, and we struggle to make sense of the real history beneath them. In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus reports a story told of 'a group of wild young fellows' who travelled south from Libya into the African interior and, after crossing the desert and travelling far to the west, came to a 'vast tract of marshy country' inhabited by 'little men, of less than middle height', and to 'a town, all the inhabitants of which were of the same small stature, and all black. A great river with crocodiles in it flowed past the town from west to east'. The description may refer to the Niger river or to the Bodele Depression northeast of Lake Chad, now dry. Herodotus also reports Phoenician sailors circumnavigating the continent in a clockwise direction around the end of the seventh century or beginning of the sixth century BCE, and another voyage in the fifth century BCE down the west coast of Africa by Sataspes the Achaemenian, who reported to the Persian king Xerxes that, 'at the most southerly point they had reached, they found the coast occupied by small men, wearing palm leaves'. Although Herodotus and his contemporaries usually named the whole continent 'Libya', the name 'Africa' is usually said to derive from the Greek word aphrike, meaning without cold.
The Romans were familiar with the Mediterranean regions of North Africa, and with the trans-Saharan trade, which brought valuable goods from beyond the desert; but they knew little of the lands to the south. In the period after the decline of the Roman Empire, European knowledge of the continent remained limited, in part as a result of the Christian preoccupation with the Scriptures and with a world centred on Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and in part by force of political geography. Hostile Muslim rulers occupied the north of Africa and in any case European ships were incapable of travelling far to the south. Rumours filled the void. Sailors spoke of a Sea of Darkness, breathing with giant serpents. Other stories hinted of lands where gold, spices and precious stones might easily be found. One powerful tale was the twelfth-century legend of Prester John, a fabulously wealthy Christian ruler living on the east side of the Islamic empire. Stories of his empire were used to justify the Second and Third Crusades. Marco Polo even reported Prester John's death. The destruction of the Mongol empire, and the rise of the Ming dynasty put a temporary end to these stories, as trading links between Europe and China were broken.
Africa was not unknown to Europeans at this time, particularly the coastal regions of the Maghreb and of Egypt, but there was virtually no knowledge of the vast regions south of the Sahara. Beyond the familiar world of the Mediterranean coastal areas and the Near East, few ventured to go. Rumours abounded, however, and the trans-Saharan trade revealed to the European merchants established in the cities of North Africa the wealth (in gold and ivory) of 'black' Africa, far to the south. Books described the incredible wealth of lands beyond the seas, the extraordinary challenges that awaited explorers and the strange people and monsters lying in wait to attack them. The storytellers usually had little first-hand knowledge of these exotic regions. Typical were the descriptions given by Mandeville's Travels, fanciful accounts of travels in strange lands by an English squire who had never visited any of them. The legend of Prester John was also relocated to Africa.
In 1415, a Portuguese invasion captured the Moroccan city of Ceuta. Following this conquest, and increased access to the trans-Saharan trade, stories began to circulate in Europe of kingdoms south of the Sahara, in Mali, Ghana and Songhai, and cities in Timbuktu, Gao and Cantor. Into the middle years of the fifteenth century, Dom Henrique, the Portuguese ruler of Ceuta, still determined to find Prester John's descendants.
As late as the early fifteenth century, the Venetian fleet, probably the most powerful in Europe at the time, consisted of boats dependent on rowers and was effectively confined to the Mediterranean. New developments in shipbuilding by the Portuguese and Spaniards, however, made further exploration into the Atlantic possible. From the 1440s onwards, the development of a 100-foot long ship, the caravel, enabled Portuguese sailors to travel greater distances. In 1482 Diogo Cão became the first European to visit the area of the modern Congo, when he reached the mouth of the Congo river and sailed a few miles upstream. It was the river that drew his interest. The Congo was the greatest river that any European had seen. For 20 leagues it emptied fresh water into the ocean. The waves breaking on the beach were an astonishing yellow colour, and the ocean was muddy-red as far as the eye could see. Cão recognized the importance of the Congo river as a possible source of transport and trade. He set up a stone pillar marking this Portuguese 'discovery'. He claimed the river and lands around it for the Portuguese king.
Cão regarded himself as the man who discovered these territories, yet the empire of the Bakongo already possessed a ruler, Nzinga Nkuwu, who led some 2–3 million people. The population of the capital Banza (later São Salvador) was around 40,000. Its citizens traded shells, sea-salt, fish, pottery, wicker, raffia, copper and lead. Nkuwu's authority was semi-feudal in character. Local lords had the right to control land, in return for which they paid taxes to their king. His people were skilled in iron- and copper-working and especially weaving. They grew bananas, yams, and fruit; they kept goats, pigs and cattle and fished. From palm trees, they manufactured oil, wine, vinegar and a form of bread. The society was prosperous and self-sufficient. Yet the Bakongo were said to lack any concept of seasons, or a calendar, and the wheel had not been discovered. Cão met Nzinga Nkuwu, and encouraged him to send ambassadors to meet the King of Portugal. Cão then continued on his travels, heading south.
In the aftermath of Cão's visit, Nkuwu opened up his kingdom to Portuguese influences, and soon missionaries, soldiers and noblemen could be found at his court. Following further visits in 1491 and 1500, Nzinga Nkuwu even agreed to convert to Catholicism, starting Africa's first Catholic dynasty. In 1506, Nzinga Mbemba Affonso succeeded him to the throne. Affonso was an intelligent, literate man, who understood that his country might gain from certain forms of European learning, their science, woodworking and om masonry, their weapons and their goods. The challenge was to allow selective modernisation, to take the best parts of Western knowledge, while declining the worst parts, the cruelty and the greed.
Over time, the actions of the Portuguese began to alarm the Bakongo. Their worries grew as the Portuguese extended and professionalised the slave trade. Prior to then, slaves had been part of the domestic economy, and were even sometimes exchanged, but the trade had never been central to the economy of the region. Under Portuguese rule, the number of slaves increased, and their economic role grew. As well as holding lands in today's Morocco, the Portuguese were also settled in today's Brazil, where they set Africans to work, digging and working mines, and harvesting coffee. Slaves were also sent to the plantations of the Caribbean. In order to work these lands at their full capacity, a regular supply of new labour was needed. In the land of the Bakongo, Portuguese traders began to promote feuds between neighbours, knowing that any conflict would result in greater numbers of slaves. Young men set out to work as masons, teachers or priests; but then, faced with the actual dynamics of the existing Portuguese economy, they soon realised that their fortune would be made more quickly if they learned to trade in slaves instead.
Nzinga Affonso was a remarkable, learned man. In 1518 his son was consecrated as a Roman Catholic bishop, the last black man to hold such a position for four centuries. Affonso became a great witness to the horror of sixteenth century Portuguese colonialism. Many of his letters survive, including one sent to King João III of Portugal in 1526:
Each day the traders are kidnapping our people ... children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family. ... We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass. ... It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.
The ruler of the Bakongo understood that many of the richest of his people were complicit in the slave trade. So taken were they by these new Western goods that they were willing to sell even their relatives. The only way to stop his people from doing this was to limit their access to the West. Of course, Affonso was no better than his times. He did not argue that all slavery should be abolished. He felt rather that it should be regulated, and conducted with respect to the society in which it took place. The Portuguese system horrified him because it was incapable of recognising any limit. In 1526, Affonso reported that the Portuguese were inciting his nobles to rise against the throne. By the mid-1530s, 5,000 Bakongo slaves were being sent west each year. Some used the passage to rise up against the traders. In their absence, the society from which the slaves had been taken was reduced almost to penury. It was no longer able to defend itself from its rivals, descending from lands to the east.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Congo by David Renton, David Seddon, Leo Zeilig. Copyright © 2007 David Renton, David Seddon and Leo Zeilig. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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