The massive anthropological wealth of Congo must not blind one to the country’s great linguistic and cultural homogeneity. Almost all the languages are Bantu languages and exhibit structural similarities. (Bantu is the plural form of munt’u, meaning “the people.”) This is not to say that Nkasi will automatically understand someone from the other side of the country, only that his language will resemble that other one just as the Indo-European languages resemble one author. Only in the extreme north of Congo are languages spoken that are fundamentally different and belong to the Sudanese linguistic group. Everywhere else, Bantu languages became common with the spread of agriculture from the northwest. Even the Pygmies, the original hunter-gatherers of the jungle, made the switch to Bantu languages.
In Congo, ethnic awareness is a relative concept. Almost all Congolese can tell you with a certain precision to which ethnic group they and their parents belong, but the extent to which they identify with that group varies widely in accordance with age, place of residence, education, and, more crucial than all the rest, living conditions. Groups become more tightly knit in proportion to the extent to which they are threatened. At various moments in one’s life one may attach greater or less importance to ethnic background. If the turbulent history of Congo makes anything clear, it is the elasticity of what was once referred to as “tribal awareness.” It is a fluid category, and one I shall refer to more often.
Although the names of the provinces and their number have changed often, still there are several regional designations used invariably by the inhabitants to delineate the parts of this enormous country. Bas-Congo, as mentioned, is the neck of the balloon. Matadi, its administrative center, is a seaport some sixty miles inland where container vessels, tacking against the Congo’s powerful current, can load and unload. Farther upstream, rapids render the river unnavigable. Kinshasa, a city of an estimated eight million inhabitants, who call themselves Kinois, is located precisely at the spot where the balloon widens. From this point the river once again becomes navigable, until deep into the interior. To the east of Kinshasa one finds Badundu, an area between forest and savanna that includes Kikwit and the historically important region of Kwilu. Beside it, in the country’s heart, lies Kasai, the diamond country. Its principal city is Mbuji-Mayi, which has grown in recent years to become the country’s third, perhaps even second largest city, due to the rush for diamonds. Farther east one arrives in the area once known as the Kivu, but which has now been divided into three provinces: North Kivu, South Kivu, and Maniema. Both Kivus form the vulnerable top of the balloon, with Goma and Bukavu as major centers directly on the border with Rwanda. This is a heavily populated farming area. Due to its altitude, sleeping sickness does not occur here and it is possible to raise cattle; the soil and climate, furthermore, are well suited to high-grade agriculture (coffee, tea, quinine).
To the north of the line Bandundu-Kasai-Kivu stretches the largest part of the rain forest, administratively categorized under two megaprovinces, Équateur and Orientale province, both long earmarked for subdivision. Mbandaka and Kisangani respectively are their capitals. Kisangani in particular has played a key role throughout the history of Congo. To the south of this central east-west axis lies another megaprovince, Katanga, with Lubumbashi as capital. This mining region forms the economic heart of the country. Katanga has a territorial peninsula sticking out to the southeast, as though a clown had given a twist to the balloon that is Congo: it is, in fact, the product of a late-nineteenth-century border dispute with England. While Katanga enjoys a great wealth of copper and cobalt, and Kasai relies on its diamonds, the earth of Kivu contains tin and coltan, and that of Orientale province, gold.
The country’s four major cities, therefore, are Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, Kisangani, and, more recently, Mbuji-Mayi. At the time of this writing they are connected by neither rail nor paved road. At the start of this third millennium, Congo has less than one thousand kilometers of asphalt roads (and most of those run to the outside world: from Kinshasa to the port at Matadi and from Lubumbashi to the Zambian border, to facilitate the import of goods and the export of mineral ores). Rail ser vice these days is almost nonexistent. The boats from Kinshasa to Kisangani take weeks to reach their destination. Anyone hoping to travel from one city to the other takes a plane. Or takes a great deal of time. One rule of thumb says that a journey that took one hour during the colonial period now corresponds to a full day’s travel.
Kinshasa is and always has been the country’s navel, the knot in the balloon. More than 13 percent of the country’s sixty-nine million inhabitants lives in one of the capital city’s twenty-four districts, but the bulk of the Congolese population still lives in the countryside. Bas-Congo, Kasai, and the area around the Great Lakes are particularly densely populated. French is the language of the government and higher education, but Lingala is the language of the army and the ubiquitous pop music. Four native languages are officially recognized as official languages: Kikongo, Tshiluba, Lingala, and Swahili. While the first two truly constitute ethnic languages (Kikongo is spoken by the Bakongo in Bas-Congo and Bandundu, Tshiluba by the Baluba in Kasai), the latter two are trade languages of a far greater range. Swahili arose on the African east coast and is spoken not only in all of the eastern Congo, but also in Tanzania and Kenya. Lingala arose in the province of Équateur and made its way down the Congo River to Kinshasa. Today it is the country’s fastest-growing language, and is also spoken in neighboring Congo-Brazzaville.
And, speaking of neighboring countries: Congo has no less than nine of them. Starting at the Atlantic and proceeding clockwise, they are: the Angolan enclave of Cabinda, Congo-Brazzaville, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola proper. Only Brazil, Russia, and China have more neighbors—ranging from ten to fourteen. This results in diplomatic complexities, and Congo was and is no different, both in colonial times and in the present. For the last century and a half, border disputes and territorial conflicts have been a constant, just as some stretches between Russia and China have long been a bone of contention.
WHERE DOES THE HISTORY BEGIN? A long way out to sea, a long way from the coast, even a long time before Nkasi was born. A tendentious urge exists to let the history of Congo begin with the arrival of Stanley in 1870, as though the inhabitants of Central Africa wandered sadly before that time through an eternal, immutable present and had to wait for a white man to come through and free them from the wolf trap of prehistoric listlessness. Central Africa, it is true, did gain major historical momentum between 1870 and 1885, but that absolutely does not mean that the inhabitants before that were suspended in a solidified state of nature. They were not living fossils.
Central Africa was a region without writing, but not without a history. Hundreds, yea thousands of years of human history preceded the arrival of the Europeans. If a heart of darkness existed back then, it was sooner to be found in the ignorance with which white explorers viewed the area than in the area itself. Darkness, too, is in the eye of the beholder.
I would like to illustrate that far-distant history with the use of five virtual slides, five snapshots. And I would like to wonder aloud what the life of, say, a twelve-year-old boy looked like at each of those five moments. The first snapshot was made about ninety thousand years ago. The date is taken fairly at random, but it happens to be the only reliable date we have for the oldest archaeological remains in Congo.
How bizarre to place Congo’s history in the hands of a European. How Eurocentric can one be? It was in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, that the line of humans split off from that of the primates. It was in Africa, four million years ago, that humans began walking upright. It was in Africa, almost two million years ago, that the first purpose-driven stone tools were made.