When it came to impressing people, the early missionaries had their own bag of tricks. This was advisable, particularly in those areas that had been in contact with the white man for some time. The ivory trade had had more consequences than prosperity alone. In 1878, when the British Baptists George Grenfell and Thomas Comber headed north as the first white missionaries from the Portuguese colony, they stumbled upon the town of Makuta, halfway between Mbanza-Kongo in Angola and the Congo River. The local chieftain didn’t like the newcomers’ looks.
Ah, so they haven’t come to buy ivory! Well then, what do they want? To teach us about God! About dying, more likely. We already have more than enough of that: the deaths in my city go on and on. They must not come here. If we allow the white man in, that will be the end of us. It’s bad enough that they are on the coast. The ivory traders already take far too many spirits away in the tusks, and they sell them; we are dying too quickly. It would have been better if the whites had not come to cast a spell over me.21
Although one of the two men would later suffer a gunshot wound at Makuta, the Protestant evangelists—thanks in part to the miracle of technology—succeeded elsewhere in winning the hearts and minds of the local population. To the chief of the Bakongo, British Baptists displayed a number of mechanical toys. In addition to a wind-up mouse, they also showed him what they called a “dancing nigger,” a mechanical doll that played the fiddle and hopped about.22 Merriment and awe were guaranteed. Music boxes were another fine example. But the cleverest of all were the slide shows, depicting scenes from the Bible, that some missionaries projected at night with the help of magic lanterns. For the native population, such things must have seemed absolutely out of this world.23
Talking with Nkasi in his stifling room about those first pioneers was a mindboggling experience. The conversation went in fits and starts; all I received were wisps of memory, but the fact that more than a century later he still recalled the arrival of white missionaries indicated how very special those wisps were. In reference to the British Baptists he had spoken quite precisely of “English Protestants who came to Congo from Mbanza-Kongo in Angola.” He mentioned the mission posts at Palabala and Lukunga, both founded by the Livingstone Inland Mission and transferred to the American Baptist Missionary Union in 1884. He also remembered “Mister Ben,” as I jotted down phonetically in my notepad. Later I discovered that this must have been Alexander L. Bain, an American Baptist particularly active in the area from 1893 on.24 But most of all he talked about “Mister Wells” or “Welsh,” mister and not monsieur, for French was not yet spoken in Congo. “I saw him at the Protestant mission at Lukunga. He was an English missionary who gave us lessons. He lived with his wife in Palabala, close to Matadi.”
For a long time, I wondered who that man might have been. Was it the American Welch, a follower of the energetic American Methodist bishop William Taylor, who established three missions in the area in 1886 (although not at Palabala or Lukunga)?25 Or was “Mister Welsh” the nickname of William Hughes, a British Baptist who had manned the Bayneston mission post in the same area from 1882 to 1885?26 Finally I arrived at Ernest T. Welles, an American Baptist who had sailed for Congo in 1896 and who had translated Bible passages into Kikongo as early as 1898. He had to be the one. He was a direct colleague of Mister Bain and turned out to have been associated with the Lukunga mission for a time. In his letters home he wrote about native assistants who had helped him print his Bible translations.27 That was interesting. Nkasi, after all, had told me that his father’s youngest brother had worked for that missionary. Those first evangelists, in any case, made an indelible impression on the young Nkasi. What he still remembered best was their simplicity and friendliness. “Mister Wells,” he mused during one of our talks, “went everywhere on foot, he was extremely kind.”
JANUARY 1884. Stanley had been preparing his journey home for weeks. The eighteen children he had with him he distributed among the stations established on his way upriver, such as Wangata and Lukolela. Disasi Makulo and one of his young comrades were the last on board, and wondered what was going to happen to them. Finally they arrived at the “pool,” where the river widened and Stanley had established the Kinshasa station. He had left the running of that station in the hands of his faithful friend Anthony Swinburne, a young man of twenty-six who had traveled with him for a decade. It was to Swinburne’s care that Disasi and his friend were entrusted. Saying farewell to Stanley was hard: “From the first day of our liberation to the moment of farewell, he had been a father to us, full of benevolence,” Disasi wrote. In our day Stanley is often criticized as an archracist, a reputation he owes to his hyperbolic writing style and his association with Leopold II. In fact, however, his attitude was much more nuanced.28 He had great admiration for many Africans, maintained deep and sincere friendships with a number of them, and was greatly loved by many. His combination of kidnapping and bargain hunting was, of course, highly idiosyncratic, but he seems to have been sincerely concerned with the welfare of the children he had bought out of slavery. Disasi recounted:
Mister Swinburne received us with open arms. What Stanley had predicted proved true. Here we found ourselves in a situation that in no way differed from what a good father and a good mother offer their children. We were fed well and clothed well. During his free hours, he taught us to read and write.29
That Swinburne had any free hours whatsoever is little short of a miracle. Within only a few years he had developed Kinshasa into the best of all stations along the Congo. It lay close to the river, among the baobabs. He had bananas, plantain, pineapple, and guava planted nearby, as well as rice and European vegetables. He kept cows, sheep, goats, and poultry. The air was fresh and healthy. The station was known as the Paradise of the Pool.30 His clay house had a grass roof and three bedrooms. The verandah around it was a place where people came to eat and read. Behind Swinburne’s house were the huts of his Zanzibaris. The stations of that day were often no more than a simple dwelling inhabited by a white man. It served to assist travelers, promote scientific research, disseminate civilization, and, if at all possible, do away with slavery. In practice, it was actually a sort of minicolony aimed at exercising a certain authority over the surrounding region. Little islands of Europe. The Zanzibaris made up its standing army. There was, as yet, nothing like a general occupation of the interior.
Behind Swinburne’s station began a huge plain, bordered on the horizon by hills. Today this is the site of one Africa’s biggest cities; in the nineteenth century it was a marshy area full of buffalo, antelopes, ducks, partridges, and quail. On the drier stretches the villagers raised manioc, peanuts, and sweet potatoes. Their villages were a few kilometers away. Swinburne was on very good terms with the local population. His patience and tact made him not just respected, but loved. He spoke their language and they called him the “father of the river.” Yet he was not, when he deemed it necessary, shy about intervening. When a local chieftain would die, for example, he would regularly do his best to prevent the man’s slaves and wives from being killed and buried along with him. This greatly amazed the villagers: how could anyone worthy of the name of chieftain be allowed to arrive all alone in the kingdom of the dead?
In order to set up a station, Stanley and his helpers first had to establish contracts with the local chiefs. That was the way European traders at the Congo’s mouth had been doing it for centuries. They rented plots of land in exchange for a periodic payment. Swinburne, too, had closed several such contracts, often after palavering for days. Starting in 1882, however, Leopold grew impatient. His international philanthropic association had meanwhile been transformed into a private trading company with international stakeholders: the Comité d’Études du Haut-Congo (CEHC). The king ordered his agents to obtain larger concessions, within a much shorter period, and preferably for perpetuity. Rather than carry out lengthy negotiations