Stanley was indeed traveling with three steamboats. He was carrying out King Leopold’s orders to establish stations here and there and negotiate with local chieftains. It was during this journey that he noted that his crossing had opened up the interior not only to Western trade and civilization, but also to the slave drivers from the east, who were moving farther downriver all the time. It was then that he realized that the Arab traders could very well beat him to the punch and arrive at the river’s lower reaches in no time. They had now come to just below Stanley Falls (Kisangani); soon they could be at Stanley Pool (Kinshasa). If that happened, Leopold’s plans could be relegated to the rubbish bin. It was during this journey that he realized what he was up against: the slave traders had dozens of canoes and a few thousand troops. He had three little boats and a few dozen helpers.13
In Disasi’s area, Stanley saw along the banks only burned villages and charred huts, “the remains of once- populous settlements, scorched banana plantations and felled palms … all bearing equal testimony to merciless destructiveness.” Further along he saw the slave camps beside the river. In late November 1883 he arrived at the camp where Disasi was being held:
The first general impressions are that the camp is much too densely peopled for comfort. There are rows upon rows of dark nakedness, relieved here and there by the white dresses of the captors. There are lines or groups of naked forms, standing or moving about listlessly; naked bodies are stretched under the sheds in all positions; naked legs innumerable are seen in the positions of prostrate sleepers; there are countless naked children, many mere infants, forms of boyhood and girlhood, and occasionally a drove of absolutely naked old women bending under a basket of fuel, or cassava tubers, or bananas, who are driven through the moving groups by two or three musketeers.14
First he went to establish a post at Stanley Falls, but on December 10, 1883, he returned to the slave camp. Little Disasi witnessed a remarkable scene. “Tippo Tip went to meet Stanley. After a long talk in an incomprehensible language, Tippo Tip called out to our overseer. He gathered us together and brought us over to the two gentlemen.” Disasi had no idea what was going on. Once the discussion was over, Stanley’s men fetched two rolls of cloth and a few bags of salt from the ship’s hold. His Koran teacher told him, with pain in his heart, that this white man wanted to buy him and his companions. Stanley took eighteen children with him.15 Militarily, he was too weak to take any action against the Batambatamba. The only thing left was for him to take the fate of a few children to heart. He bought them away.
A new phase in Disasi’s life began. The atmosphere on board was cheerful. “We shout, we laugh, we tell stories. No one has a rope around his neck and we are not treated like animals, as we were when we were with the Arabs.” But it would be too simple to state that Stanley had freed them from slavery. Traditionally, slavery in Central Africa was seen principally as a matter not of robbing you of your freedom, but of uprooting you from your social setting.16 It was gruesome, to be sure, but for reasons other than commonly assumed. In a society so characterized by social feeling, “the autonomy of the individual” did not equal liberty at all, as Europeans had been proclaiming since the Renaissance, but loneliness and desperation. You are who you know; if no one knows you, you are nothing. Slavery was not being subjugated, it was being separated, from home. Disasi had been uprooted from his surroundings and would remain uprooted. He valued Stanley therefore not so much as his liberator, but as a new and better master.
Never was that clearer than on the next day, when he sailed past his home ground again. Disasi thought Stanley would return him to his parents, but to his surprise the boat did not slow. “That’s where we live! That’s where we live!” he shouted. “Take me back to my father!” But Stanley spoke, as Disasi would recall a lifetime further along:
My children, do not be afraid. I did not buy you in order to harm you, but in order that you might know true happiness and prosperity. You have all seen how the Arabs treat your parents and even little children. I cannot let you return home, because I do not want you to become like them, cruel savages who do not know the True Lord. Do not mourn the loss of your parents. I will find other parents for you who will treat you well and teach you many good things; later you will be like us.
Having said that, Stanley immediate cut a roll of cloth into pieces and gave each child a loincloth, so that they would be decently clothed. “That present pleased us,” Disasi recounted, “and his goodness made us feel his fatherly love already.”17
Meeting Stanley constituted a drastic turn in Disasi Makulo’s life. For many of his contemporaries, however, there were very few changes at all. The men continued to burn off their plots, the women planted corn and manioc, fishermen mended their nets, old people talked in the shade, and children caught grasshoppers. Everything seemed to go on the way it always had.
Yet that was only the surface. Those who had actually seen those peculiar Europeans were often deeply impressed. These shabby men showed up to buy a few chickens and spent the afternoon talking to the village chieftain, but they did all they could to make an impression on the local population. Mirrors, magnifying glasses, sextants, compasses, timepieces, and theodolites were produced intentionally, for effect. That did not always result in enthusiasm. In some villages, people believed that the death by natural causes of some inhabitants could be blamed on the strange thermometers and barometers demonstrated by the white men.18 Awe was mingled with suspicion. Only later would this lead to large-scale violence, when the local population was subjected to European authority by force of arms.
There was often doubt about whether these Europeans were actually common mortals. The shoes they wore made it seem as though they had no toes. And because white, in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, was the color of death (the color of human bones, of termites, of tusks), they almost had to come from the land of the dead. They were seen as white ghosts with magical powers over life and death, men who popped open umbrellas, and could bring down an animal at a hundred yards. The Bangala referred to Stanley as Midjidji, the spirit; the Bakongo called him Bula matari, the stonebreaker, because he could blow up rocks with dynamite. Later, the term Bula matari would also be used to refer to the colonial regime. In Disasi Makulo’s village too, he was seen as a phantom. E. J. Glave, one of Stanley’s helpers, was first referred to as Barimu, ghost, and later as Makula, arrows. The Bangala gave Herbert Ward, another helper, the nickname Nkumbe, black hawk, because he was such a skilled hunter.
And the way these white people moved from place to place was so peculiar as well. By steamboat! The Bangala who lived along the river in the interior thought these travelers ruled over the water and that their boats were drawn by huge fish or hippos. After a parley, when they saw the white man disappear into the hold to fetch pearls, cloth, or copper bars, they thought he had a special door in the ship’s hull through which he could descend to the bottom of the river and collect these means of payment.19
A first wave of evangelization followed immediately in the wake of exploration. It was carried out by Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian Protestants who had started on the west coast right after Stanley’s crossing. The Livingstone Inland Mission began its proselytization in 1878, starting from the mouth of the Congo. In 1879 the Baptist Missionary Society set out from its base at the Portuguese colony to the south, the Svenska Mission Förbunet began in 1881, and the American Baptists and Methodists followed in 1884 and 1886. Two French Roman Catholic congregations were also active from 1880: the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit in the west and the White Fathers (Society of Missionaries of Africa) in the east. Such undertakings