Congo (13 page)

After the funeral Greshoff decided to bring the two boys
back to Grenfell’s mission post. Grenfell was a living legend who owed his reputation to his remarkable combination of enthusiastic evangelization and a feverish urge to explore. He had arrived in 1879 as one of the very first missionaries in Congo and died there in 1906, seemingly immune to all tropical illnesses. Beginning in 1884 he began piloting his steamboat
Peace
up countless, previously unexplored tributaries of the Congo. Within two years he covered twenty thousand kilometers (over twelve thousand miles) on the Congo, the Ubangi, the Kasai, the Kwango and other side rivers. He drew maps and set up posts. He was in fact, after Stanley and Livingstone, the third greatest among Congo explorers. Disasi Makulo had been enslaved by Tippo Tip, had been bought by Stanley, and had served as boy to Swinburne. Now, at around the age of eighteen, he and his friend became helpers to the most celebrated of all nineteenth-century missionaries in Congo.

Grenfell received us as though he had known us for a long time. He took us along in his boat and, look, there we were on the river again. We made many trips on the river and the side rivers. At first we didn’t understand the purpose of all that traveling back and forth. Only later did he explain to us that it was in order to explore the rivers and to study the various areas, so that they could set up mission posts there.
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The missionaries were dauntless. While many European civil servants were sowing their wild oats, the missionaries acted against what they saw as pernicious native customs such as human sacrifices, trial by poison, slavery, and polygamy. But all that, of course, was subjective. Many natives were not at all anxious to be Christianized. Disasi Makulo knew all about it:

When the boat approached Bolobo, a huge crowd of vil
lagers came and stood on the banks. They shouted and waved knives, spears, and weapons, because they thought we had come to wage war. To show them that we had not come to fight, Mrs. Bentley [the wife of another missionary] picked up her baby, held him in the air and showed him to the crowd. It was the first time the people had seen a white woman and a white baby. Curious now, they put down their weapons and came to us, whooping with enthusiasm, to admire these creatures. The boat landed quietly.
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Bolobo became the site of one of the most important missions. In the absence of white babies, the Protestants also availed themselves of native children. Grenfell always took a few of “his” children along on his forays. They chopped wood for the steamboat, held the rudder, and served as interpreters. As freed slaves they often spoke the language of their native region, where the Christianizing had yet to begin. At Yakusu, the missionaries’ activities clearly benefited from the presence of a converted native girl. The villagers recognized her tribal tattoos and knew that she was one of them.
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The spreading of the Word was therefore not simply a matter of white versus black; black people too evangelized and played an important role in the oncoming religious turnabout. Disasi Makulo also became such an intermediary. Baptized in 1894, he helped with the Christianizing, and not without success. In one of his letters, Grenfell wrote: “Disasi . . . worked well and created quite a favourable impression among the natives.”
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During his travels with Grenfell, Disasi returned to his homeland for the first time. The reunion with his parents was gripping. The gong sounded out news of the lost son’s return. Relatives immediately slaughtered a few goats and dogs, and proposed en passant that two slaves be sacrificed as well. “When I saw that I was deeply indignant that such barbaric customs of slavery and cannibalism continued to exist within my
tribe.” He protested vehemently and even released the slaves, to the bewilderment of his former neighbors. “Many of them wondered in amazement why I felt pity for these slaves. Others accused me of having prevented them from eating the delicious flesh of a human. The dancing went on for two days, without a stop.”
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Disasi Makulo was now a man caught between two cultures, loyal to his tribe and to his new faith.

He was not the only one to find himself cut loose in a new moral universe. The first inhabitants of the missions were often children whom the authorities of the Free State had taken away from areas marked by conflict. They did not always come from the slave traders; some of them were victims of tribal violence. Lungeni Dorcas, a girl from Kasai, was captured by warriors from the neighboring Basonge tribe. She had watched as her mother and brothers were beaten and her youngest brother, still an infant, was pounded against the ground till dead. Hers is one of the few female voices known from that period:

After a few days we heard that a white man would come to fight against our enemies and free us. Our captors, having heard that, began selling their prisoners. Then the white man came, he was an authority from the government and accompanied by a great many soldiers. He summoned the head of the village and said that he wanted to free all of the prisoners, including those of his subjects. He had them open a chest containing all kinds of beads, necklaces,
mitakos
[copper currency ingots], and textiles. We were struck by the beauty of those objects and were introduced to the Europeans. After he had freed us, he took us to Lusambo. That day a boat arrived there, steered by a white man. Our government official handed us over to him and it was he who took us to the Protestant mission at Kintambo. There we met many boys and girls from different tribes, all of them bought free like us.
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The importance of this account can hardly be overestimated, for it shows us in detail how mission posts acquired their first believers through the government’s intervention and how that led to the establishment of the first interethnic communities. Young people totally unfamiliar with each other’s language and culture suddenly lived together closely. The missionaries even went a step further. As the children grew up, the Europeans became multicultural matchmakers. Once again, Lungeni Dorcas: “To save us from all manner of complications in the future, the missionaries wanted us to marry only young Christians who had been raised by them as well.” In her case, this meant marriage to an old acquaintance: “That was why they arranged for me to marry Disasi. And that is what came to pass.”
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One generation earlier it would have been unthinkable for her to marry a man born eight hundred kilometers (five hundred miles) away; now she bore him six children—three boys and three girls. The mission deemphasized tribal ties, eased people away from their villages, and promoted the nuclear family as the alternative.

As a newlywed, Disasi remained deeply distressed with
la terrible barbarie
(the terrible barbarism) in his village.
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He therefore proposed to Grenfell that he begin a mission post of his own. In 1902 he set up the mission at Yalemba, one of the first black-run posts in Congo. Grenfell came by to visit on occasion. After his many wanderings, Disasi had come home again:

The objective of my return was to help my own, to protect them and bring them the light of civilization . . . . I had decided that all the inhabitants of my village would come to live with me at the mission. I began with the members of my own family: my father, my mother, my sisters, my brothers, my nieces and nephews. At first, the other villagers did not want to leave their village. Only later, after great
effort, was I able to persuade them to leave and settle down with me.
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Black catechists formed a bridgehead between two worlds. Old Nkasi had already told me something along those lines during our conversations. His father’s youngest brother, Joseph Zinga, went after all with the Protestant missionary Mr. Welles to Palabala to become a catechist. That was how he had absorbed European ideas and knowledge and became familiar with our Christian calendar. “It was because of him that I know that I was born in 1882,” Nkasi had said.
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M
EANWHILE, THE CATHOLICS
were also on the move. After early efforts by the Holy Ghost Fathers and the White Fathers, following the Berlin Conference, the Catholic mission work quickly gathered momentum. Now that Leopold II had withdrawn from his international association, he granted preference to Belgian missionaries, who were without exception Catholic. In 1886 Pope Leo XIII, who was on very good terms with Leopold, announced that the Congo Free State was to be evangelized by Belgians. The White Fathers, originally a Franco-Algerian congregation, now dispatched only Belgians. Young Scheutists and Jesuits, followed by Trappists, Franciscans, fathers of the Sacred Heart, and sisters of the Precious Blood, left from countless villages and towns throughout Belgium. They divided Congo’s interior neatly among themselves. Protestant missionaries from England, America, and Sweden continued to be active, but lost some of their influence: they were forced to work in accordance with the dictates of the new country and to learn to live with the badgering of Catholic missionaries who absconded with their converts.

While the Protestants focused largely on the individual, based on their doctrine of the personal connection between Christ and the believer, the Catholics went in search of groups from the very start. For them, the collective experience of faith
took pride of place. But how, for heaven’s sake, did one go about finding groups like that? Once again, children provided the solution. Their first followers, like those of the Protestants, were often child slaves freed and entrusted to them by the state. At the mission post in Kimuenza, for example, the Jesuits began in 1893 with seventeen freed slaves, twelve workers from the Bangala tribe, two carpenters from the coast, two soldiers with their wives, and eighty-five children whom the state had “confiscated” from the Arabized slave traders. Together they formed
une colonie scolaire
(educational colony). Two years later, in April 1895, there were already four hundred boys and seventy girls, and even forty toddlers between the ages of two and three. In 1899 the mission had a church that could hold fifteen hundred worshipers, with three stained-glass windows and two bronze bells, one weighing two hundred kilos, the other six hundred (440 and 1,320 pounds). The bells had been cast in Belgium. One could hear them peal as far away as a two-and-a-half-hour walk from the mission post.
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Government help, therefore, was essential. But the intertwining of church and state went much further than the acquisition of new converts. When the Kimuenza mission was founded, an official called together the village chieftains to explain to them that the mission enjoyed the special protection of the state, and that they should not hesitate to sell to them chickens, manioc, and other provisions.
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The state even saw to the maintenance of the school, on condition that four out of every five children completing their studies enroll in the Force Publique, the Free State’s army! This much was clear: the Jesuits fought for Jesus, but also for Leopold. The school was run like a Belgian military academy.

The little black boys had to salute and even march . . . . The daily routine is no different. At five-thirty, get up quickly to the bugle’s call, wash quickly, then prayer: Pater, Ave, Credo in Fiote [Kikongo]. After prayers, breakfast. All gath
er on the square in front of the building that serves as refectory. The children line up. The sergeant screams: “Atten-shun!” Silence immediately descends over the ranks. “Right, face!” The little column starts to move and lines up, ramrod straight and silent, at the tables. “Sit!” and all are seated. Then comes the order for which everyone has been waiting impatiently. “Eat!”
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After some time had passed, such
colonies scolaires
also proved to have their limitations: the influx of slave children was not endless, and, despite all the bell ringing, conversion among the neighboring “heathens” did not continue once all the alumni had vanished into the barracks. That was why the Jesuits followed up with the system of the
fermes-chapelles
(chapel farms). Close to an existing village they would establish a new settlement where local children learned to pray, read, and garden in relative isolation. The emphasis lay precisely on that relative isolation: they were to be kept away from their familiar culture long enough to prevent them from backsliding into “heathendom.” “Civilizing these blacks, while leaving them in their own surroundings, is like reanimating a drowned man while at the same time holding his head under water,” was the subtle simile applied.
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At the same time, however, their new status as well-fed and well-dressed little catechists had to remain visible to the other, seminaked villagers: that, after all, provoked useful feelings of envy. The mission became a means to material welfare. For every child he brought to the chapel farm, the village chief received a gift. Little wonder then that one of them is known to have said: “White men, come to honor my village, build your house there, teach us to live like white men. We will give you our children and you shall make of them
mindele ndombe
, black white men.”
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Mission posts became large-scale farms and display windows for a different way of life. The number of baptisms skyrocketed. Between 1893 and 1918 the Jesuits alone made
some twelve thousand converts. At their Kisantu post in 1896 they had fifteen cows; by 1918 there were more than fifteen hundred. There was a carpenter’s shop, a little hospital, and even a printing press.
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Those who had finished their schooling stayed at the mission post and married. They worked as farmers, carpenters, or printers, and started families. Like the Protestant missions, these newly formed villages did not fall under the authority of a native chieftain. The traditional village with its countless contacts and variegated forms of solidarity lost ground to the monogamous family. Other religious orders adopted the chapel farm formula as well, but the system also met with fierce criticism. To inflate their baptismal registers, the missionaries were extremely prompt in labeling children as “orphans,” even when there were still plenty of relatives to raise them in the African tradition. Whenever sleeping sickness broke out, children were plucked en masse from their villages. “The result was disastrous,” one contemporary realized, “and it made the natives hate us.”
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