The Bakongo live upstream, close to Boma, Matadi, and Kisantu, on the river’s left bank. They are dockworkers and heavy laborers.
The Bateke are found in Kitambo. They are specialized in buying and selling.
The Bangala live around Makanza, Mobeka, Lisala, and Bumba. They are large people. They wear tattoos on their faces and ears. They remove the lashes from their eyelids and file their teeth. They are not afraid of war. Are there not, after all, many Bangala in the government’s army? They are intelligent.
The Bapoto and Basoko are brothers to the Bangala. They disfigure their faces with tattoos. They make big pestles and sound canoes, they forge spears and machetes. They kill lots of fish.22
AND SO IT GOES, on and on. Congo consisted of tribes, one was taught, each with its own territory and customs. Some were virtuous, others were not. The pupils, for example, were taught that the Azanda respected their chieftains, which was a good thing; the Babua did not and that was scandalous. The Bakongo killed elephants and were therefore very courageous. Mission schools were factories for tribal prejudice. Children who were not allowed to leave their villages were suddenly told that the Bakongo lived on the other side of their vast country and what they were to think of them. In many handbooks, Pygmies were depicted as bizarre aberrations. If you had never met one, you still knew what you were to think of them. “They excel in stealing other people’s property,” the pupils at Bongandanga read in the late 1920s, “they do not make friends with other people … Most of the peoples of Central Africa are fond of keeping themselves clean and because there is plenty of water they bathe every day. But the Pygmies detest water and are very dirty … In terms of ignorance, they stand head and shoulders above all other African peoples. They do not realize that living in a village with people of your own culture is better than moving around all the time.”23
This is not to say that there had never been tribes—of course there had, there were major regional differences, different languages were spoken, different customs honored, different dances danced, different dietary patterns observed, and there had even been intertribal wars. But now the differences were being magnified and recorded for all time. It rained stereotypes. The tribes, in fact, were not communities that had been fixed in place for eons; their rigidity came only in the first decades of the twentieth century. More than ever before, people began identifying with one tribe as opposed to the other.
In the 1980s an old man from Lubumbashi recorded a few recollections of his childhood. The nascent mining operations then had brought people from various backgrounds together in the compounds: “In the olden days we didn’t look at other people and say: ‘That one there is from Kasai, that one is a Lamba, a Bemba or a Luba.’ No. We were together.” And, he added: “There was no difference. No one talked about the differences.”24
The missions not only ran primary schools, but also set up seminaries to train talented pupils to become local priests. The first Congolese to be ordained was Stefano Kaoze, in 1917. He came from the Marungu mountains and was molded and made by the white fathers. In 1910, at the age of twenty-five, he had already come up with a first: his long essay “La psychologie des Bantu” appeared in La Revue Congolaise. This made him the first Congolese to publish a text. And what do we read in the first paragraphs of this incontestable landmark document? What does a young Congolese intellectual write, one who has been saturated with Catholic mission schooling? Indeed, that tribal awareness in Africa was nurtured by European books: “When I had read a number of books about a number of tribes, I saw that most of the customs originate from the same background as those of the Beni-Marungu [Kaoze’s own tribe]. Now that I realize this, I am going to tell who we are, we Beni-Marungu, and what we are not.”25 The books he read caused him to reflect on his own tribal identity. Is it any wonder that, later in life, he developed into a tribal nationalist, a champion of his own people and a defender of Congolese interests? “Potentially the most dangerous black man,” a French nobleperson noted after a tour of the colony, “is he who has had a bit of education.”26
MEANWHILE, NKASI’S LIFE DRIFTED ALONG CALMLY. When interviewing him, I was struck on a number of occasions by the fact that he had few memories of the early years of the Belgian Congo. When he spoke of the building of the railroad in the final decade of the nineteenth century, his eyes twinkled and the stories came of their own accord. But the decades that followed, which he spent back in his village, seemed to have been washed away. For a long time I wondered why, until I noticed that Lutunu’s biographer was also rather laconic about that period in her subject’s life. She too had noted blank spots in her conversations with her informant. Could that be a coincidence? I don’t believe it is. I suspect that the legislation forcing people to remain in their villages also resulted in becalmed years with few spectacular events. World War I passed them by with barely a ripple, even for Lutunu who was by that time, after all, an assistant regent. When I asked Nkasi again whether he really could remember nothing of the Great War, he said: “I may have heard of it, but it didn’t happen here.”27 His world had drawn in on itself once again. His youngest brother was born around that same time, yes, he remembered that. And in the end he had finally allowed himself to be baptized a Protestant. That was in 1916, at the Lukunga mission post. His Christian name became Étienne, but everyone continued to call him Nkasi.
For him, the big turnaround came in 1921: for the first time in a long time, he left his village again. To do that he first had to apply for a valid passport and une feuille de route (a travel pass), otherwise he would not be allowed to leave. Even today, a Congolese has trouble traveling through his country without an ordre de mission; Congo is one of the few countries in the world with a migrations service that also deals with domestic travel—due to the once-so-preponderant sleeping sickness. But Nkasi was in luck. His father’s cousin worked for the railroad and so he was able to travel for free by train. He spent one whole day chugging across the grand landscape and arrived that evening in Kinshasa.
The place had changed unrecognizably since Swinburne had set up his post in the wilds there in 1885. Along the shores of Stanley Pool, some eighty companies had meanwhile built warehouses. Eight kilometers (about five miles) to the west lay the older military and administrative center, Léopoldville, where the British Baptists had once established their headquarters. In 1910 the two nuclei, Kinshasa and Léopoldville, were connected by a broad road. Today that is the Boulevard du 30 Juin, no longer a connecting road between two European settlements, but the city’s hectic, smoking main arterial. When Nkasi arrived, however, there were no more than two hundred cars and trucks in Kinshasa. A thousand white people lived there, including one hundred and fifty women. The city numbered some four hundred houses built of durable materials.28
Nkasi found himself in a city under construction, a dusty flat full of building sites and avenues leading nowhere. To the south of the European district the colonizer had built a cité indigène (district for housing African workers), a three-by-four-kilometer (about five-square-mile) checkerboard neatly divided by straight lanes. Clay huts with thatched roofs stood on the tidy square plots. Around the houses, the inhabitants grew manioc and plantain. Here and there one saw a brick house with a corrugated iron roof. Children ran naked down the sandy alleyways. Women spent hours sitting the shade, combing each other’s hair. Some of the house fronts were painted. It was there, he found out quickly, that one could buy rice, dried fish, and matches. This was a new world. Within only a few years, twenty thousand people had come to live here. Another twelve thousand settled in neighboring Léopoldville. They had arrived from all over the interior. They spoke languages he didn’t understand and came from regions he had never heard of. Only four thousand of them were women. It was a man’s world full of coarse shouting, roars of laughter, and homesickness. The cité indigène in no way resembled the traditional village; it was one huge camp of manual workers and tradesmen, but also of boys who made their way up to the white neighborhood each morning, and of vagabonds, the victims of sleeping sickness, thieves, and prostitutes.29
“I came to Kinshasa in 1921. I worked for Monsieur Martens,” he told me. “He had sheds full of diamonds from Kasai. Diamonds came from the mines, but they were sorted in Kinshasa. My job was to fill sacks and empty them.” To illustrate his words, he made a shoveling motion with his arms.