the dead are not in the ground
by Douglas Messerli
David Van Reybrouck Congo: The Epic History of a People (2010), trans. from the Dutch by Sam Garrett (New York: Ecco, 2014)
It wasn’t until page 500 of David Van Reybrouck’s astonishingly moving history, Congo: The Epic History of a People, that I finally broke down in tears. Not that there weren’t dozens of emotional passages previously in this very personal book, but after having traveled through pages and pages recounting the lies and violence the Congo natives had suffered from nearly every major (and many minor) countries as well as from their own kind; after years of having suffered internal wars, sometimes more related to the tribal battles of the hutus and tutsis of nearby Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda than to issues directly linked with their fellow countrymen; after finally having been able to free themselves from the madness of the long-time despot Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga; and, finally, for only the second time in the more than century-old history recounted in the pages in this book, having obtained the opportunity to vote, the fact that their major choices were the mostly brutal former rebels Joseph Kabila, Jean-Pierre Bemba (whose soldiers had practiced cannibalism in rebel attacks), Azarias Ruberwa, Antoine Gizenga (who had once served as deputy prime minister under Patrice Lumumba) and even Mobutu’s son Nzanga Mobutu, overwhelmed me. Despite those seemingly abysmal choices, however, nearly everyone who could in that far-flung country—larger at 900,000 square miles than any European country except Russia, and the 11th largest country in the world—came together in the hundreds of outlaying polling places to vote without incident. In isolated jungle areas, Van Reybrouck reports, the votes were counted by “candlelight in a hut, often after [the poll-keepers] having eaten nothing all day.” When the lights failed, the fatigued men and women counters fell to sleep, “their arms around a sealed ballot box, as though it were a shrine or a child,” to protect the ballots. Even the author seemed astounded by the facts!
The choice, ultimately, was Kabila—in part because he bought the votes of the Gizenga and Mobutu parties by promising the candidates important government posts—despite the fact that the capital city of Kinahasa had voted for Bemba. The important thing, in hindsight, seems to have been less a matter of who was chosen than the fact that the elections occurred with basic calm and lack of fraud. “Where things really going to change?” the author himself poses the question to us. How could they, we perceive, in country in which its citizens were never given a chance to learn about or even experience any truly democratic government. For more than a century the generations of intelligent Congolese had been isolated, imprisoned, enslaved, maimed, tortured, and killed always in the name of others’ definition of progress, of others’ determination of what was best for the people. Even, in those brief moments, when the citizens of this vast land were tolerated, cared for, educated, nursed, and healed, the values imbued were always imported from somewhere else.*
Van Reybrouck quotes the cleric-activist Abbé José Mpundu in connection with his question about hope: “From 1990 to 1995 I fought for elections that would not be like the charade we got this time. It was a parody, orchestrated by the international politico-financial Mafia! I wanted to vote for Tshisekedi, but he had relegated himself to the sidelines, so I just voted for Bemba. They let us play a bit part. It was one big, worthless Mafia gambit. For a lot of money, the international community bought itself the president it preferred; we would have been better off passing the hat around to finance the elections and building our own ballot boxes. At least then they would have been our own” (p. 503).
Even if Kabila had been a brilliant leader, a financial wizard, and a liberal political voice—none of which he was—he would have found it nearly impossible to live up to the dreams of his fellow countrymen or even his own dreams for his country which he parroted in his acceptance speech: “There will be punctuality, and discipline. I will take up matters again with determination and regain 100 percent control of the situation.” Without a real military, without a stable and educated community to man governmental positions, and, most importantly, without any money—in debt, in fact, for billions of dollars from loans siphoned off into Mobutu’s own pockets and which the IMF (International Monetary Fund) still refused to forgive—how could even the most enlightened of leaders have been able to give its people the things they had been shown by the formerly ruling Whites leaders that had for so long refused them? Just as Joseph Kasavubu had turned to Belgium, as Lumumba had reached out to the United Nations and, when that failed, to the Soviet Union, as Mobutu had turned to the United States, so Kabila reached out to China for help. And like all of the leaders before him, once again sold out, so many argue, the rich resources of the African nation—its ivory, coffee and other foodstuffs, palm oil, copper, diamonds, cold, uranium, and coltan—for practically nothing in return: a few promised highways, a railroad, a few new buildings. It’s enough to make even a cold cynic cry.
If history alone reveals the epic battles that time and again the Congolese citizens lost—and Van Reybrouck’s Congo details this history with an almost encyclopedic thrust (as his 22 small-print listings of source materials and another 22 pages of references representing a virtual library of Congo materials reveals)—the author gives us something that no other work about the Congo, to my knowledge, has done, a feat perhaps impossible to repeat: Van Reybrouck tells his story not only from the eyes of a sympathetic ex-conqueror (he is, after all a Belgian himself, his own father having been one of the ruling class who helped to create the original railroad lines), but through numerous astute and intelligent voices of the Congo citizens and storytellers from the earliest days of King Leopold’s mad creation (the King not only haphazardly created the borders of the country, but was originally the sole owner and emperor) to the book’s last reports of young Congolese entrepreneurial efforts in China, but from dozens and dozens of interviews with the individuals directly involved with these historical events. Leave it to Van Reybrouck not only to seek out a person whose own history begins with the Belgian involvement in redefining of the area now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, but to actually discover such a being in the figure of Étienne Nkiasi, born sometime around 1882, three years before Leopold created the country we now call Congo, who lived until the book was finally published in 2010 to the age of 128—and this in a country where the life-expectancy is currently a little less than 56 years of age. The tales this elder relates make the history of the early Congo—including his first encounter with the early missionaries, among them the American Baptist active from 1893 on, Mister Ben (Alexander L. Bain), and, perhaps, British American Methodist Bishop, William Taylor, and who personally knew Simon Kimbangu, the founder of one of the largest of African religions, Kimbanguism—come eerily alive, bringing early Congo history a living voice. Along with figures who wrote books, such as Disai Makulo, who, after being captured and taken prisoner by slave traders, actually met up with Henry Morton Stanley joining up with Stanley’s entourage before being left with Stanley’s friend Anthony Swinburne in the new station Stanley had created in Kinshasa, where the boy learned how to read and write.
But Van Reybrouck does not merely employ the memories and texts of these ancient figures living and dead, but interviews hundreds of others, including politicians, musicians, both male and female aid workers, religious figures and spiritualists, students, soccer players, boy soldiers and even local terrorists who help create a skein of incidents that lend his work a startling sense of coincidence that, in turn, helps the reader to feel as if he or she were really living at the heart of this vast and somewhat mysterious world—convincing us that “the dead are not in the ground,” as Nkaisi’s son quotes Senegalese poet Birago Diop.
By book’s end, in fact, if we still feel in awe of the enormous diversity we also come away with an intense sense of knowledge, as we gradually discover that despite Belgium being overrun in World I, for example, the Force Publique, the Black internal police force of Congo, suddenly transformed into soldiers, won the War in Africa, conquering even German held territories such as Rwanda and Burandi. In World War II Congo troops, trained in Liberia and Ghana, helped as soldiers and doctors to liberate Eritrea and Ethiopia and worked in makeshift hospitals as far away as India and Burma.
Amazing facts begin to pile up. Without Congo uranium the US would not have been able to drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan: fearing capture of their mines, Belgian mine owners had dug up their uranium deposits and shipped them, unknown to American authorities, to a warehouse in Brooklyn, so that when the Americans began the Manhattan Project they suddenly discovered what they most needed at their own back door. A large part of the Cold War was fought out by the US and the Soviet Union over the politics and geologically created products of Congo.
How many of us recall that noted statesman, United Nations head Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash on his way to meet with Moïse Tshombe in an attempt settle to the violence in Congo? Sports fans surely remember the historical boxing battle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, the “rumble in the jungle,” played out in the grand stadium in Kinhasha; Van Reybrouck interviews a Congo news photographer, Zizi Kabongo, to get a new perspective on that memorable event.
Just this past Sunday (October 7, 2014) The New York Times’ Science Times reminded us that the dread Ebola virus was first uncovered by Dr. Peter Piot, a Belgium virologist, in Zaire (Mobutu’s self-declared moniker for the country he ruled).
Who could have known that the strange black metallic ore named coltan (from which niobium and tantalum are extracted), plentiful in Congo, would be necessary to produce electronic products such as cell phones and computer chips? If to Americans the history of Congo seems somewhat shadowy, gradually we discover how interlinked the country has been with our own and world history.
As I was reading the last chapter of this intense literary work, I suddenly overhead an advertisement in the middle of my morning CNN report, prodding Americans to invest in Congo, a country, so the pitchman declared, with a large rising middle class, a land of the future; the map of Congo which I had been surveying every night during my readings was suddenly cast as an image upon my television set with an inset of a beautiful new apartment complex. I was startled by this coincidence (or was it a coincidence, even if it was the first time I had ever heard this ad, and I’ve not heard it since?). I doubt whether things have changed that radically in the four years since Van Reybrouck completed his book, but, who knows, perhaps the Chinese have come through with some of their promised commitments to the long-abused country by building some colorful new housing units.
Van Reybrouck has convinced me that, although by mid-century Kinhasha will be a city larger than New York and Los Angeles combined, it is not a beautiful place, that despite the shining skyscrapers just across the river in Congo-Brazzaville, Kinhasha is without color, a land, as the author puts it, in a world of “dream and shadow.” For me that ad simply stood out as yet another pitch, like the thousands of previous worldwide attempts, to suck up the resources of this vitally alive world still in the dark about its own future.
Congo, it turns out, is a kind of “heart” of “darkness,” an excitingly beating world in which its inhabitants are still struggling just for the necessities, let alone the riches they so palpably desire. It says something about Van Reybrouck’s study that he mentions Conrad’s great novel only once, and the author just another time in passing. You don’t need fiction to show just how dark that great nation’s history has truly been.
Yet, somehow, despite it all, the citizens of this hurt land keep singing and dancing, reaching out to another for help and to help, laughing and endlessly talking, dreaming and imagining—hoping somehow through it all that the land they inhabit might someday reward them for their enduring attachments to it. That Congo’s author can convey all this reveals he is not just an historian but a significant ethnographer who deeply cares about the people whose history is he narrating.
*For just one example, the author points to the moment when the Belgian country took over the vast territory from their King, Leopold. Well intentioned, they immediately imposed a travel ban on numerous isolated Congo natives in order to prevent the spread of numerous diseases, while simultaneously studying the native traditions (which the Bureau International d’Ethnographie published in compendious volumes) and teaching those values back to children attending the French Catholic schools. The result was that the Belgians helped solidify tribal differences and hegemonic values that, in reality, had never completely existed in pre-European days. Often dependent on commerce and trade for various different elements of their diets and daily survival, the Congo tribes had for centuries before been highly interlinked and intermixed. The results of such proselytizing ultimately revealed themselves in some of the horrific tribal battles (including those of Rwanda, which fell into Belgian hands indirectly after World War I) of the later 20th century.
Los Angeles, October 7, 2014
Reprinted from Rain Taxi IXX (Winter 2014).
A prelude to this review, I believe, is necessary, given the circumstances.
On the afternoon of June 3, 2010, the group of publishers with whom I was exploring Flemish literature were taken by bus to the small, but lovely town of Mechlin, where at the bookshop De Zondvloed we were fed wine, cheeses, sliced meats, and good bread. The bookstore was a large, two-storied place, with a reading occurring even as we dined, in another part of the building. One cannot imagine such a well-stocked busy bookstore in small town America, but Mechlin is midway between Antwerp and Brussels, and perhaps can depend on travelers scurrying between the two cities. It was certainly a perfect stop along our route.
We left Mechlin around 3:00 p.m. and continued to Brussels, where at the beautiful Grand Place we were given about an hour to simply tour alone or together. I chose the former, and quickly walked through the tourist-filled streets near the great square, indulging in some famed Belgium fries along the way, after clearly disappointing the chef by refusing any of the dozens of sauces provided in which to dip them. I've never liked fries with sauces, but in Belgium it is almost a requirement, and clearly, etiquette demands it.
After finishing as many of the fries as I could I sought out a bar, in this case a gay one, to get a drink and wash my hands. Although I personally liked all of the publishers, the fact that we had been compelled to be with each other for so many days, and that I was now completely surrounded by tourists who milled around the streets in large, laterally sliding gangs, made me seek out a place of silence where I might catch up on my daily diary and even, possibly, write. A gay bar at 3:30 in the afternoon would be as still as a tomb, I thought to myself. And, yes, it was quiet, perfectly delightful with only the bartender who might speak.
When I rejoined the group at a large restaurant nearby for coffee, Brussels waffles, and ice-cream, they asked me where I had been, and I told them. Some were confounded. How did you find a gay-bar? "Well," I paused, "it was called L'homo erectus! But I would have sniffed it out even if it had had a less ridiculous moniker. Gays know how to do that by habit." In truth, I hadn't been to a gay bar in decades and probably would never have discovered an appropriate place for such delicious silence in most cities, where gays and straights now drink together in what had formerly been exclusionary places.
Our guest at this high-caloric gala was the author David Van Reybrouck, whose Congo. Een geschiedenis (Congo: A History) some of us had perused at our publisher meetings a few days before. It was a hefty-looking, beautifully produced tome that had received raves in the Flemish press. David was a quite-charming and brilliant man, a philosopher and archeologist by training. He'd gone to the Congo to research this book, living there for a long period of time and befriending an ancient, but clearly entertaining man who had lived there as a child under Belgium rule. Van Reybrouck's history, beginning from a time before Stanley's arrival, brought his readers up-to-date with the country's current economic crises.
Van Reybrouck read a chapter, and discussed the book as a whole. But immediately after, I interrupted. "You know, David, this is clearly a marvelously brilliant work, but—and I say this with some hesitation—perhaps with the exception of Ascheoug and Luchterhand—you are trying to sell this book to the wrong people. I would love to publish such a book, but it would be a huge and very expensive undertaking, and we are all primarily literary publishers!"
Barbara Epler, from New Directions, agreed. "I was very honored, in fact, that the book was offered to us, but we are not your kind of publishers, and we could never do it properly. You need some university press, like Chicago or the University of California Press," she concluded.
"Or even a large commercial publisher," I added. "I don't see why a larger commercial publisher would not want to publish this book. It's looks to be wonderful!"
Both of us and others suggested some publisher names and agents. And he seemed appreciative, if a little taken aback by our inabilities to consider his work.
But the interchange made for a kind of momentarily intense relationship, and I couldn't help but to tell him about my childhood experiences at writing musicals in my family's basement. "When I was...I must been 12 or 13...after I'd fallen in love with Broadway musicals, I attempted to write my own musicals in the basement of our house. We had a small piano there, and, although I couldn't really play it, I'd tap out tunes, and sing them and dance. Yes, it had to have been when I was 13 because it was 1960, the year of the Congo's independence from Belgium. I wrote a work entitled "Rain on a Lonely Street," about a Midwestern family that had gone to the Congo as missionaries (I was big on missionaries as a child), and got caught up in the battles of February 1959. The father, a minister, was killed, and the mother and son had a difficult time in leaving Brazzaville, in part because they had no way to travel and also because they were committed to the people with whom they had so long lived. I still remember the major song, sung by the stranded son:
Rain on a lonely, lonely street
Will it never stop, this sleet.
The mud up to our knees, please
God, let it ease.
For me then, it was a great, romantic symphony. I now perceive it as a really ghastly piece. Why rain, and why was he so lonely? Perhaps because of the death of his father. But at the time, in my imagination, it represented a significant inter-cultural relationship.
Everybody laughed heartily. But Van Reybrouck was astounded. Had some young American Iowa boy really been so moved by the Congo and the events there that he had written of it way back then? "Yes, it seemed startlingly real to me, the news of the revolution and its aftermath. I must have read some place that missionaries had been stranded and murdered.”
Soon after came the cakes and waffles and various ice creams and silence as we sat consuming them in delight.
I recently read that David's book has been accepted for publication by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.
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