Moving about was very difficult for him. He used the handle and stick of an old umbrella as a cane, but preferred to rely on the support of a few of his daughters. Nkasi had had five wives. Or six. Or seven. Accounts differed. He himself had lost count. There were always a few family members outside in the courtyard. Estimates varied concerning the number of his children. Thirty-four was the figure heard most often. In any case, four pairs of twins, everyone seemed in agreement on that. Grandchildren? Definitely more than seventy.
I was also introduced to his two younger brothers, Augustin and Marcel, ninety and one hundred years old, respectively. Marcel did not live in Kinshasa, but in Nkamba. I spoke with Augustin’s son, a smart, sensible man who had not yet reached middle age. Or so I thought. Until he told me that he was sixty. It was almost too much for me to believe: he truly looked no older than forty-five. What an extremely resilient family, it occurred to me, what a wild quirk of nature. Three ancient brothers, all of them still alive. There had been two sisters as well, but they had died recently. Also well into their nineties.
Fourteen people lived here in three little adjacent rooms, but there was family visiting all day. Nkasi shared his room with Nickel and Platini, two boys in their twenties. One of them had a sweater that read Miami Champs. As the eldest, Nkasi got the bed each night, a foregone conclusion; the young people slept on the floor on woven banana-leaf mats. During the day they sometimes took a nap on their grandfather’s thin mattress.
Nkasi ate manioc, rice, beans, sometimes a little bread. The family couldn’t afford meat. After one particularly long session he realized I must be hungry and, using his umbrella stick, slid over to me a bunch of little bananas and a bag of peanuts. “I can tell. The head is closed, but the belly is open. Take it, eat.” There was no sense in refusing. Every time I visited I brought something along and would buy a supply of soft drinks. The family, like countless others in the cité, had a modest beverage dépôt, where they sold drinks from the Bralima brewery by the bottle. But they had no money to buy the cola and orangeade themselves. One time I watched as Nkasi, sitting in his car seat, poured a bit of Coca-Cola into a plastic mug. Bloodcurdlingly slow, he held the cup out to Keitsha. It was a poignant scene: the man who had apparently been born before the Berlin Conference (and before the invention of Coca-Cola) was handing a drink to his granddaughter, born after the Congolese general elections of 2006.
The first time I met Nkasi was on November 6, 2008. The day before had been an auspicious one in world history. At a certain point, Nkasi reversed our roles. Would I mind if he asked me a question? There were more things to talk about than just the past. He had heard a rumor and could hardly believe it. “Is it true that a black man has been elected president of the United States?”
NKASI’S LIFE RAN PARALLEL to the history of Congo. In 1885 the region fell into the hands of King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold named it the État Indépendant du Congo (Independent State of Congo), commonly referred to in the Dutch language as Congo-Vrijstaat. In 1908, in the face of virulent criticism at home and abroad, he transferred his holdings to the Belgian state. It would continue to be called the Belgian Congo until 1960, when it became an independent country, the Republic of Congo. In 1965 Joseph-Désiré Mobutu carried out a coup that kept him in power for thirty-two years. During that period the country received a new name, Zaïre. In 1997, when Mobutu was dethroned by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, it was renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. The “democratic” part required some patience, however, for it was only in 2006 that the first free elections were held in more than forty years. Joseph Kabila, son of Laurent-Désiré, was elected president. Without having moved about much himself, Nkasi had lived in five different countries, or at least in a country with five different names.
Although the country as conceived by Leopold II in no way corresponded with any existing political reality, it did exhibit a striking geographical cohesion: it coincided to a great degree with the drainage basin of the Congo River. Each stream, each watercourse empties at some point into that single, powerful river and theoretically contributes to that brown spot in the ocean. That fact is a purely cartographic one: in actual practice, that hydrographic system was not seen as a unit. But ever since then, Congo—a country of 2.3 million square kilometers (about 900,000 square miles), the size of Western Europe, two-thirds the size of the Indian subcontinent and the only country in Africa covering two time zones—has been the country of that one river. Despite the many name changes, it has always borne the name of the mother of all currents (the Congo, the Zaïre). Today’s inhabitants speak of it in French as le fleuve, the stream, just as the inhabitants of the Low Countries speak of “the sea” when they mean the North Sea.
The Congo is no straightforward river; its course describes three-quarters of a circle and runs counterclockwise, as though one were turning back the hands of an analogue watch forty-five minutes. That big curve has to do with the even and relatively flat topography of the Central African interior. The Congo, in fact, makes one huge meander through an area of gently rolling hills that is mostly only several hundred meters above sea level. During its thousand-kilometer-long journey the river descends less than fifteen hundred meters (about 4,900 feet). Areas above two thousand meters (6,500 feet) are found only in the farthest eastern part of the country; the country’s highest point lies directly on the border with Uganda: Mount Stanley, 5,109 meters (16,604 feet), the second highest peak in Africa, with a permanent layer of snow and a (dwindling) glacier. The eastern mountains, along with a chain of elongated lakes (the four so-called Great Lakes, of which Lake Tanganyika is the largest), are the result of major tectonic activity, as witnessed by the area’s still-active volcanoes. This serrated eastern edge of Congo is a part of the Rift, the great fault line cleaving Africa from north to south. Climatologically, this mountainous area can be relatively chilly: a city like Butembo, for example, close to the Ugandan border, has an average annual temperature of only seventeen degrees Celsius (about sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit), while Matadi, not far from the Atlantic Ocean, has an average of twenty-seven (about eighty-one degrees Fahrenheit). Elsewhere, the equatorial setting produces a tropical climate with high temperatures and great humidity, although regional differences are considerable. In the equatorial forest, afternoon temperatures vary from thirty to thirty-five degrees (about eighty-six to ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit), while to the extreme south there may be frost on the ground during the dry season. The duration of the dry season and the time it commences also vary.
Two-thirds of the country is covered by dense equatorial forest, with its 1.45 million square kilometers (565,500 square miles) the largest tropical rain forest outside the Amazon Basin. From the air it resembles one huge and endless head of broccoli, occupying an area three times the size of Spain. To the north and south, the woods (la forêt, as the Congolese call it) gradually changes to savanna. Not an endless, National Geographic sea of yellow waving grass but a woodland savanna that gradually fades into brush savanna as one travels away from the equator. The country’s biodiversity is spectacular, but increasingly threatened. Three of the most important zoological discoveries of the twentieth century were made in Congo: the Congo peacock, the okapi, and the bonobo. The discovery of a new primate in the twentieth century was something of a miracle in itself. Congo is the only country in the world where three of the four great apes are to be found (only the orangutan is absent): but the chimpanzee and particularly the mountain gorilla are highly endangered species as well.
Twentieth-century ethnographers distinguished some four hundred ethnic groups in the interior, each of them a society with its own customs, social structure, artistic traditions, and often its own language or dialect. These groups are usually indicated in the plural form, to be recognized by the prefix ba-or wa-. The Bakongo (sometimes rendered as baKongo) belong to the Congo people, the Baluba (or baLuba) to the Luba people, the Watutsi (or waTutsi, sometimes even waTuzi) to the Tutsis. In the chapters that follow I will use the standard expression as it is found in English. I will therefore