It was handy, many whites reasoned, to have your boys with you in Europe. Not only did it draw a lot of attention, but it was also educational for the young people themselves. Still, one had to be careful. Before you knew it, a young man might learn too much during his journey. The British Baptist George Grenfell traveled with a boy and a girl of nine to England, but warned his hosts: “If we shower them with attention, we shall have trouble relegating them to their former status once we return.”13 The Belgian socialist Edmond Picard mocked those colonials who paraded about in their home country with their “model servants”: “Often it does not take long before that luminous person drives to despair his incautious master, who has introduced him all too intimately to our refined civilization and our chambermaids.”14 The number of Congolese able to travel to Europe would always remain limited. Travel did not necessarily make a person more licentious, but it apparently made one less docile. That would manifest itself later on. Congolese veterans who returned from World War II in 1945 began to resent the colonial authorities. The intellectuals and journalists who returned in 1958 from the world’s fair in Brussels began to dream of independence.
Disasi Makulo returned as well. Swinburne no longer worked for the Free State, but was still bound and determined to make his fortune as a trader in Congo. Along with Edward Glave, another Brit expelled by Leopold, he began buying up ivory. As soon as he arrived in Kinshasa, Congolese people began offering it to him. At a certain point there were no less than sixty tusks of ten to fifty kilos (22 to 110 pounds) each around his house. As soon as Swinburne was able to obtain a steamboat of his own, however, he sailed upriver; there he could buy up ivory for less than a third of the price.15 And he was not the only one, not by a long shot. Riverine commerce, the exclusive domain of local carriers for almost four centuries, was now taken over entirely by Europeans. In a twinkling Leopold’s free trade had devoured the old trading network. European trading posts and storehouses arose. Ocean steamers docked at Matadi and hoisted the ivory on board with cranes. In Antwerp there were warehouses packed full of tusks. In 1897, 245 metric tons (about 270 U.S. tons) of ivory were exported to Europe, almost half the world’s production in that year. Antwerp soon outstripped Liverpool and London as the global distribution center for ivory.16 Pianos and organs everywhere in the West were outfitted with keys of Congolese ivory; in smoky saloons the customers tapped billiard balls or arranged dominoes that were made from raw materials from the equatorial forest. The mantelpieces of middle-class homes sported statuettes made of “elfin wood” from Congo; on Sunday the people went out strolling with walking sticks and umbrellas whose handles had once been tusks. All this international free trade, however, stole bread from the mouth of local commerce.
It was primarily children and teenagers who became closely familiar with the European lifestyle. Young men got to know it as boys, the girls as menagères. Despite the name, the menagère was less concerned with managing the household in the classic sense than with managing the hormones of her employer. Because European women were considered unsuited to life in the tropics, while at the same time it was recognized that an all-too-lengthy period of sexual deprivation was bad for the white man’s zest for work and life in general, a great tolerance arose toward forms of concubinage with a native woman. In 1900 there were eleven hundred white men in Congo and only eighty-two white women, sixty-two of whom were nuns.17 A great many of the men therefore developed long-term, intimate relations with one or more African women. Some of them spoke openly of their menagère as “my wife,” others developed a profusely libertine lifestyle. Often the girls chosen were very young, twelve or thirteen; often the line between affection and prostitution was unclear; often pure lust went hand in hand with tenderness. Yet the relationships always remained asymmetrical. The menagère slept under the same mosquito net as the white man, but she often, voluntarily or not, did so on a mat on the floor.
The missionaries, of course, viewed this with dismay. Church attendance by Europeans in Congo, however, was many times lower than in Europe itself: the minuscule cathedral at Boma was more than large enough to accommodate the crowd on Sunday mornings. The Roman Catholic rites were observed only at funerals. Disasi Makulo saw this with his own eyes. In 1889, less than three years after his trip to Europe, his master Swinburne came down with gastric fever. Horrible sores covered his legs and he declined visibly. Disasi and a friend fashioned a litter from hammocks and started off with him for Boma. Along the way they stopped at the mission post at Gombe, where the British Baptist George Grenfell attended to the sick man for two weeks. When that did not help, they set off again on their gruelingly long journey. At the Dutch trading post at Ndunga run by Anton Greshoff, father of the writer Jan Greshoff, Swinburne died. He was only thirty. “The whites we had met at the trading post hastened to prepare the funeral. All of the whites in lovely suits and a crowd of blacks attended the funeral,” he noted. And he added: “That day we found the world the bitterest place of all, and our thoughts froze when we did not know whether our lives would be subject to any further support.”18
After the funeral Greshoff decided to bring the two boys back to Grenfell’s mission post. Grenfell was a living legend who owed his reputation to his remarkable combination of enthusiastic evangelization and a feverish urge to explore. He had arrived in 1879 as one of the very first missionaries in Congo and died there in 1906, seemingly immune to all tropical illnesses. Beginning in 1884 he began piloting his steamboat Peace up countless, previously unexplored tributaries of the Congo. Within two years he covered twenty thousand kilometers (over twelve thousand miles) on the Congo, the Ubangi, the Kasai, the Kwango and other side rivers. He drew maps and set up posts. He was in fact, after Stanley and Livingstone, the third greatest among Congo explorers. Disasi Makulo had been enslaved by Tippo Tip, had been bought by Stanley, and had served as boy to Swinburne. Now, at around the age of eighteen, he and his friend became helpers to the most celebrated of all nineteenth-century missionaries in Congo.
Grenfell received us as though he had known us for a long time. He took us along in his boat and, look, there we were on the river again. We made many trips on the river and the side rivers. At first we didn’t understand the purpose of all that traveling back and forth. Only later did he explain to us that it was in order to explore the rivers and to study the various areas, so that they could set up mission posts there.19
The missionaries were dauntless. While many European civil servants were sowing their wild oats, the missionaries acted against what they saw as pernicious native customs such as human sacrifices, trial by poison, slavery, and polygamy. But all that, of course, was subjective. Many natives were not at all anxious to be Christianized. Disasi Makulo knew all about it:
When the boat approached Bolobo, a huge crowd of villagers came and stood on the banks. They shouted and waved knives, spears, and weapons, because they thought we had come to wage war. To show them that we had not come to fight, Mrs. Bentley [the wife of another missionary] picked up her baby, held him in the air and showed him to the crowd. It was the first time the people had seen a white woman and a white baby. Curious now, they put down their weapons and came to us, whooping with enthusiasm, to admire these creatures. The boat landed quietly.20
Bolobo became the site of one of the most important missions. In the absence of white babies, the Protestants also availed themselves of native children. Grenfell always took a few of “his” children along on his forays. They chopped wood for the steamboat, held the rudder, and served as interpreters. As freed slaves they often spoke the language of their native region, where the Christianizing had yet to begin. At Yakusu, the missionaries’