If our young fellow was born on the savanna, he would have noticed that this system had developed a step further there. A number of circles together formed a district, in some cases even a kingdom. The first real states, like those of the Kongo, the Lunda, the Luba, and the Kuba, appeared on the savanna south of the equatorial forest from the fourteenth century on. The expansion was made possible by agricultural surpluses. Some of the states were the size of Ireland. They were feudal, hierarchical societies. At the top stood a king, a village chieftain to the nth degree, the father of his people, protector and benefactor of his subjects. He cared for the community, consulted the elders, and settled disagreements. The result of this political construct is not hard to imagine: a great deal indeed depended on the personality of the king. One could be lucky or unlucky. When power becomes so personalized, history becomes manic-depressive. This certainly applied to the kingdoms of the savanna. Periods of prosperity alternated rapidly with periods of decline. The changing of the throne led almost invariably to civil war.
If our imaginary boy grew up along the lower reaches of the Congo, he was a subject of the Kongo Empire, the most famous of all these feudal principalities. Its capital was called Mbanza-Kongo, today a place in Angola, just south of Matadi. In 1482 the coastal inhabitants of that empire had seen something extremely remarkable: huge huts looming up out of the sea, huts with flapping cloths. When those sailing ships anchored off the coast, the people along the shore saw that there were white people in them. These had to be ancestors who lived at the bottom of the sea, a kind of water spirit. The whites wore clothes, lots more clothes than they did, which seemed to be made from the skins of strange sea creatures. All highly peculiar. The inexhaustible quantities of cloth the strangers had with them made the people think they probably spent most of their time weaving, there below the ocean.4
But these were Portuguese sailors who, in addition to linen, also came bearing the consecrated wafer. The king of the Bakongo, Nzinga Kuwu, allowed them to leave four missionaries behind in his empire and sent four dignitaries with them in exchange. When the latter returned a few years later with weird and wonderful stories about that distant Portugal, the king burned with the desire to learn the Europeans’ secrets and, in 1491, let them christen him Don João. Several years later though, disappointed, he returned to his polygamy and divinations. His son, Prince Nzinga Mvemba, however, was to become a deeply devout Christian and to rule over the Kongo Empire for four decades (1506–43), under his Christian name of Afonso I. It was a period of great prosperity and consolidation, during which the king’s power was founded on trade with the Portuguese. When those Portuguese asked for slaves, he had raids carried out in neighboring districts. It was an ancient practice—slavery was an indigenous phenomenon, anyone with power also had people—but his cooperation created so much goodwill with the Portuguese that Afonso was allowed to send one of his sons to Europe to attend seminary. In Lisbon the son in question, eleven-year-old Henrique, learned Portuguese and Latin and then moved to Rome, where he was enthroned as bishop—the first black Catholic bishop in history—before returning home. But Henrique was of weak constitution and died a few years later.
The Christianizing of Congo was therefore undertaken by Portuguese Jesuits and later by Italian Capuchins as well. These activities in no way resembled the missionizing of the nineteenth century; here the church made its appeal expressly to the upper reaches of society. The church stood for power and affluence, and that appealed to no little extent to the top of the Kongo Empire. The wealthy had themselves baptized and assumed noble Portuguese titles. Some of them even learned to read and write, although a sheet of paper at that time cost as much as a chicken, and a missal cost as much as a slave.5 Yet churches were built and cult objects (fétiches in French) burned. Where sorcery was found, Christianity was obliged to triumph. A cathedral arose in the capital, Mbanza-Kongo, and governors in the provinces had churches built as well. The population at large viewed the new religion with interest. While the Christian priests hoped to bring them the true faith, the people saw them as their best protection against sorcery. Many had themselves baptized, not because they had abandoned witchcraft, but precisely because they believed in it so fervently! The crucifix became highly popular as the most powerful of all cult objects to ward off evil spirits.
In 1560, after Afonso’s death, the Kongo Empire went through a deep crisis. Chances are that our twelve-year-old boy wore around his neck a crucifix, a rosary, or a medallion, perhaps an amulet his mother had made. Christianity did not oust an older belief, but fused with it. Years later, in 1704, when the cathedral at Mbanza-Kongo had already fallen to ruin, a local black mystic would live amid the ruins and claim that Christ and the Madonna were members of the Kongo tribe.6 When missionaries traversed the lower reaches of the Congo in the mid-nineteenth century, they still met with people with names like Ndodioko (from Don Diogo), Ndoluvualu (from Don Alvaro) and Ndonzwau (from Don João). They also saw rituals being performed before crucifixes three centuries old, but now decked out with shells and stones and roundly claimed by all to be indigenous.
Around 1560, in addition to an amulet, our boy also adopted different eating patterns. The Atlantic trade brought new crops to his district.7 From the moment the Portuguese established their colony on the coast close to Luanda, the change came quickly. In much the same way that the potato reached ascendancy in Europe, corn and manioc quickly conquered all of Central Africa. Corn grew from Peru to Mexico, manioc came from Brazil. In 1560 our boy of twelve would have primarily eaten porridge made from sorghum, a native grain. From 1580 on, however, he began eating corn and manioc. Sorghum could be harvested only once a year, corn twice and manioc the whole year through. While corn did well on the drier savanna, manioc flourished in the more humid forest. It was more nutritious and easier to cultivate than plantain or yams. The tubers rarely rotted. All one had to do was clear a new plot each year; it was during this period that slash-and-burn agriculture originated.8 If he was lucky, the boy’s bowl also featured sweet potatoes, peanuts, and beans—regular ingredients even today in the Congolese kitchen. Within a few decades the diet of Central Africa had been radically transformed, thanks to globalization on the part of the Portuguese.
Congo, in other words, did not have to wait for Stanley in order to enter the flow of history. The area was not untouched, and time there had not come to a standstill. From 1500 it took part in international trade. And although most of the forest’s inhabitants would not have known it, each day they ate plants that came from another part of the world.
Fifth slide. Final snapshot: we have arrived in the year 1780. If our boy was born then, there is a sizeable chance that he became merchandise for the European slave drivers and ended up on the sugar plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, or in the south of what would later be the United States. The Atlantic slave trade lasted roughly from 1500 to 1850. The entire west coast of Africa was involved in it, but the area around the mouth of the Congo most intensively of all. From a strip of coastline some four hundred kilometers (250 miles) long, an estimated four million people were put on transport, equaling almost a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade. No less than one in every four slaves on the cotton and tobacco plantations of the American South came from equatorial Africa.9 The Portuguese, the British, the French, and the Dutch were the major traders, but that does not mean that they themselves penetrated far into the African interior.
Beginning in 1780 greater demand for slaves in the United States resulted in a major upscaling of the trade. From 1700 onward, between four and six thousand slaves were shipped annually from the Loango Coast north of the Congo; by 1780 that number had risen to fifteen thousand annually.10 This increase was felt far into the equatorial forest. If our boy was abducted during a raid, or sold by his parents in times of famine, he would have ended up with one of the important traders along the river. He would have been forced to sit in an enormous dugout, perhaps twenty meters in length, which could