Congo - Blood River

When I was a child I knew that Stanley had found another explorer, who was lost, with the now famous phrase of; “Dr Livingston I presume” However, that was all I knew, and even asking a teacher at school did not enlighten me much. So I had to visit the library to try and discover more. Even then I got a sanitised version of Henry Morton Stanley's adventures in the dark heart of Africa. I had doubts about the veracity of the accounts as in his descriptions of Gorillas they were described as wild fierce beasts, yet images shown on television at the same time as I was on my own voyage of discovery were showing Gorillas as peaceful and gentle.

Apart from discovering that Henry M Stanley had mapped and navigated the Congo River, I was no more enlightened about the man at the time. In some ways I am glad to be living at a time when history was being revised to tell the true story. Even I as a child could have doubts about the history I was being informed then and the truth was far less pleasant than the daring adventurer that was being painted.

The tropical rain forests of central Africa, over two million square miles, were not penetrated by western explorers until the latter half of the nineteenth century where there was an exuberance of species and diversity found. All previously unknown, except to the peoples who had lived there for tens of thousands of years. Yet even before Stanley, in 1859 Paul De Chaillu returned from the Congo basin with hundreds of specimens of species previously unknown to science, and wild tales of the Gorilla as this fiercest near human beast of the jungle. Even exaggerating the the tales by claiming that they would abduct women to fornicate with. His book Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, published in 1861 was the inspiration for King Kong. While not the only one much 19th century literature described African wildlife in terms of myth and fantasy.

However it was Paul De Chaillu's descriptions of the peoples in the forest that had the greatest influence on the men that came latter. Men like Henry Morton Stanley, who on August 9th 1877 reached the mouth of the river Congo having traversed it from its source in the heart of Africa. In his book The Dark Continent, the peoples he encountered, he described as protohumans. This more than anything else triggered the colonial gold rush of the land grab that European countries made for Africa. After all if the land has no human people it was free to be claimed by who ever.

It took Britain, Spain, France, Portugal and Germany only eight years from the publication of The Dark Continent to divide up most of the Equatorial forest between them. However, the largest slice, half the area, was taken not by a country but by an individual, King Leopold II of Belgium Who took the land of the Congo, as his personal pleasure land. He owned every thing, the trees, the animals and the people.

The first resource he exploited in his ironically named “Congo Free State”, was Ivory from the Forest Elephants, so much so that in less than five years the elephants nearly became extinct. The next resource to be exploited was natural latex from the rubber tree. At this point in the nineteenth century rubber was essential for the then new technology of electricity and as insulation on the telegraph wires. As the rubber trees grew wild in the forests, Leopold II (who never set foot on African soil) needed the local knowledge of the various tribes to utilise this resources.

Leopold's exploitation of the forest and the lands set a new standard of horror and abuse in Africa, one that remains to this day. People that failed to produce the volumes of rubber the Belgium king wanted would be whipped for being lazy. And if a village failed to produce its quota of rubber then selected people would have their hand chopped off. Those selected were frequently children.

While European people acknowledge the genocide in Germany, in the Congo was the first modern Genocide and between 1885 to 1908 there were at least four million people killed with estimates that ten million people were mascaraed by the Belgium's All this shaped the peoples of the region and is reflected in the brutality of the modern wars and civil wars of today.

Of course the public myth was that western white men were there to civilise the natives. But the reality was that it was making a profit at any cost. While slavery was already abolished in Europe, the African land grab enabled the racist mentality of the people who still thought that slavery was a good thing to fulfil their dreams and those people who were genuinely going to Africa to help the indigenous peoples were soon made to fall into line with the system. The white man had absolute power there, even the most lowly clerk had this power and that power corrupted the colonialists.

While the public face of colonisation was to civilise and educate the native peoples, the education that Africa learnt was one of brutal exploitation of resources and people. It is from this understanding of the past that I can see and understand the problems of modern Africa today.

The regime of Leopold II though started the first Human Rights campaign of the modern age. One that would be mirrored years latter by the Blood Diamond campaign the Red Rubber campaign Slave Rubber was the first to use photographs of the excesses of the Belgium overseers, like Leon Romme who was notorious for decorating his mansion with the heads of the Congolese

The campaign did work as the king was forced to hand over the colony to the Belgium state, and slowly, very slowly the worst excesses of the colonialists diminished. However the myth of the colonial powers being there to civilise prevailed for another half century.

However, it was the exploitation of the wildlife that has been the hardest lesson that we gave the Africans. The native peoples of Africa (along with all indigenous peoples) had learned how to utilise the natural resources of the rain forest in a sustainable manner. The colonialists saw this abundance and harvested it with no thought or regard to its regeneration or conservation.

However with the discovery of the Mountain Gorilla in 1902 in Kivu the rush by naturalists to the region where the Gorillas lived started a change in the western attitude towards the forest and conservation. Conservationists like Carl Akeley brought a new understanding of the nature of the Gorilla to the world. Gorillas were not the wild man beast of myth but gentle shy vegetarians. This started to change the attitude of people towards the jungle, it was no longer seen as primeval and needing to be tamed and controlled but conserved and preserved.

It was as a result of the efforts of Carl Akeley that the first national park was created in Africa, to protect the Mountain Gorilla at Kivu, although it was originally called Albert National Park. The intention was that the park would be free of people. But the area had been inhabited for thousands of years. This brought great resentment from the peoples, and to them it showed that they were of less importance than the wildlife. Further it reflected the old colonial attitude that indigenous populations were irrelevant and unimportant.

While in the 1950s the Belgium Congo was the most developed part of Africa, with the wealth generated from the mineral resources meaning that it had good primary education and more hospital beds than the whole of the rest of Africa, the attitude towards the indigenous peoples was patronising to say the least. With only the people who resulted from mixed birth being treated with any degree of respect, and even then they were refereed to as evolving. Meaning they were evolving into humans. There were even skin colour charts produced that determined where people could live.

It was not until the advent of television that white western peoples could see the poverty that Africa and Africans suffered while the colonialists were living in the lap of luxury did the movements for freedom and independence take hold. Not just in physical form but in the minds of people across the world. By the 1960s most of the African nations gained independence and there was a genuine optimism across the continent. However the western governments that had been the colonial masters and the major industrial nations still wanted to exert their influence and via a form of industrial colonisation particularly by mining and oil companies, African independence was not as free as it should have been.

Frequently be fermenting tribal differences and illegally supplying arms to disaffected groups, American, Canadian, British and oil and mining companies from other countries were able to exploit the unrest to effectively continue stealing the newly formed states resources. Often simply because the mining companies were not allowed to extract the minerals as cheaply as they had previously. Further, these industrial giants via a system of bribes and the use of mercenaries were able to offer to solve the wars they created in return for much more favourable terms on the mineral concessions. Also government carried out similar activities if they disliked the politics of a particular government.

Therefore, potentially wealthy nations were robbed of the income to develop. Not only that but the infrastructure that was left behind from colonial times was left to decay as the wealth was leaving the country rather than being retained to aid development. All the while the corruption of this system was becoming engrained into the business and social culture.

Further the exploitation of timber and other wildlife resources meant that traditional cultures could no longer live in harmony with the land. Following the example set by their former colonial masters this gave rise to the massive poaching problems that beset Africa. With The Rhino and Elephants baring the most well known brunt of this.

However staying with the Congo, when Mobutu emerged as a leader in the Congo and the state became Zaire it was principally his roots as a man of the jungle that gained him his support and respect.

This is where the history of the Congo meets my personal quest for understanding of who people like Stanley were and my growing discovery of the magic of the wildlife in the Congo rain forest. While my primary interest was discovery of regarding the natural fauna of the region, and to protect the rain forest. I was a campaigner at an early age, the more I discovered about the exploitation of the rain forest and other environmental issues, the more I realised that they went hand in hand with the abuses of human rights.

While under Mobutu's rule, Zaire was relatively peaceful, this enabled the wildlife to survive relatively unhindered. There was still poaching and the growing bush meat trade, but there was not the wholesale felling of the rainforest that was occurring in neighbouring states. Further the wildlife was able to live with far less disturbance than was happening in other parts of Africa.

Now I don't want to create the false impression that Zaire was some bastion of good government, the wholesale and corrupt exploitation of the countries mineral wealth was a serious cancer at the heart of this forest state. Mobutu was siphoning off Zaire's wealth into foreign banks and squandered on building lavish palaces while he became more isolated from the people he ruled. In fact Mobutu had become a mirror image Leopold II. While he did not practice genocide himself it was the Genocide in Rwanda that proved to be his down fall.

He fled into exile leaving the country ravaged by civil war and internal slavery. Many of the mines were abandoned by the mining companies to the armies and militia. Who either kidnapped people to work as slaves in the mines. Or would extract a tax from the miners who are trying to secure a scant living from the mines. This form of tax collection though can not be avoided as if you don't pay the men with guns, you die, they kill you and take their form of tax anyway.

Recent investigations by the united nations have highlighted a couple of the mining and mineral companies that are profiting from this, including a British company. But all of them are involved although they work hard to keep this hidden and out of the public eye. We are all complicit in this as some of the rare and exotic metals used in making mobile telephones will have come from this trade.

The history of the Congo basin is littered with racism and exploitation. The plundering of the natural resources and corruption. While Africans themselves can not be excused for their role in this theft of the continents wealth, nor the violence that they inflict upon each other we in the west have to recognise our part in this too.

As a child I became interested in Africa because of the wildlife. I quickly learned of the threats to the habitat of the rainforest and the mass extermination of species that was following in the wake of that loss of habitat. Equally I discovered that the attitudes towards Africa was greatly influenced by the exaggerated writings of Paul De Chaillu and Henry Morton Stanley. This all combined with the lies of colonisation to give us today the situation where there is a level violence, rape and pillage that would put a Viking to shame.

However if you scanned the media for coverage of the current situation then there has been scant coverage. More hours of television and more lines have been given to the plight of the Gorillas than to the five million people that have died in recent years.

This is not Africa problem it is ours as we need to stop the illegal logging and protect the rain forest to deal with climate change. We in the west need to stop the wars that create the refugees that come to Europe and America. Further as war prevents farming being practised, stopping war and violence will reduce the need for the west to provide food aid and alleviate the current food crisis. However, the last aspect is more complicated. If we stopped our obsession with having the latest gizmo's or gadget like the latest mobile telephone every five minutes, we would not only stop the modern form of slavery that is happening in the mines of the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and other places, we would not have suffered the credit induced banking collapse and the recession.

There are important ethics in all the choices we make. I have often spoken about needing a new form of Green Economics. Here are ways that it truly would benefit us all.

Incidentally while it is true that Stanley did meet Dr Livingston on his journey down the Congo River, it was a myth that he was lost. He was at a mission station on the banks of the Congo. It was just that it took so long for letters to reach Europe that Stanley assumed he was lost.