The Congo basin was not a blank on anybody's map except Europe's. The territory Leopold acquired in 1885 contained something in the order of two hundred distinct polities and several hundred languages, including states with royal bureaucracies, standing armies, tribute systems, courts of appeal, coinage of a kind, and artistic traditions of a sophistication that European collectors recognised immediately and European governments found it convenient not to.
This chapter exists because the rest of the volume is otherwise unintelligible. A reader who begins at the Brussels Geographical Conference of 1876 will absorb, without noticing, the assumption on which the whole enterprise was sold: that there was nothing there to interrupt.
Kongo
The Kingdom of Kongo, south of the river mouth in what is now northern Angola and the Congolese Bas-Congo, was a centralised state of perhaps half a million people by the fifteenth century, governed from Mbanza Kongo by a manikongo elected from an aristocratic lineage, with appointed provincial governors, a tax system paid in nzimbu shells, and a professional army.
The Portuguese arrived in 1483 and the encounter was, for about thirty years, something close to diplomacy between equals. Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised in 1491; his son Afonso I, who ruled from 1509 to 1542, was a literate Catholic monarch who corresponded in Portuguese with Lisbon and the Vatican, sent his son Henrique to Rome to be consecrated as the first sub-Saharan African bishop in 1518, and asked repeatedly for masons, doctors and teachers.
What he got instead was the slave trade, and his letters about it survive. In 1526 he wrote to João III that Portuguese merchants were seizing and selling his people, including members of noble families, and asked for it to stop; the request was refused in substance. The kingdom did not collapse immediately — it fought on for another century and a half — but the Battle of Mbwila in 1665, at which the Portuguese killed the king and took his head, effectively ended it as a power, and it dissolved into civil war.
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries something in the order of four million people were taken from the wider Congo-Angola coast in the Atlantic trade — the single largest regional source for the Americas. The population of the lower river had been reduced and reorganised by that traffic for three hundred years before Leopold was born.
Luba and Lunda
Inland and south-east, on the savanna between the forest and the Zambezi watershed, two state traditions developed that were as consequential for central Africa as Kongo was for the coast.
The Luba empire, in the Upemba depression from around the sixteenth century, was built on a political theory — bulopwe, sacred kingship transmitted by blood — and on an apparatus for remembering it: the lukasa, a carved wooden memory board studded with beads, read by officials of the mbudye association who were trained to recite genealogy, law and territorial claims from it. It is a mnemonic constitution, and it is one of the more remarkable political technologies produced anywhere.
The Lunda, to the south-west, developed from the seventeenth century a system of positional succession and perpetual kinship by which an incoming officeholder assumed not only the office but the name and all the kin relationships of his predecessor — which meant that a political structure could expand indefinitely by assimilation without renegotiating every relationship. Lunda title-holders carried the system outward, and Lunda-derived states ran from Angola to Zambia to the Katanga, including the Kazembe kingdom on the Luapula, which Portuguese expeditions visited and described as wealthy and orderly in the 1800s.
Both traditions were built on copper, salt, ivory and the control of trade routes, and both were long-distance trading states well before any European reached them. The copper crosses used as currency across the Katanga circulated hundreds of kilometres from where they were cast.
The forest, and the river
North and west of the savanna lies the rainforest, and its societies were organised on different principles: smaller, less centralised, and frequently described by outsiders as stateless, which is usually a statement about the observer.
The Kuba kingdom in the Kasai is the exception that shows what was possible. From the seventeenth century it had a king, a titled council with checks on him, a court of appeal, a system of taxation, an organised army, and a professionalised artistic establishment producing the ndop portrait sculptures, cut-pile raffia textiles and the masking traditions that European museums have been showing ever since. Jan Vansina's work on it is the closest thing we have to a social history of a central African state from the inside.
Along the river itself the Bobangi and other trading peoples ran a specialised commercial network in canoes, moving fish, cassava, ivory and slaves between the upper and lower reaches and maintaining the markets Stanley found already operating when he descended in 1877. The river was a highway with an established traffic, and the steamers of the 1880s did not open it so much as take it over.
In the deep forest of the Ituri and the Congo basin's north-east lived the Mbuti, Efe and Aka, hunter-gatherers in long-standing exchange relationships with farming neighbours. They appear in Egyptian records of the Old Kingdom, which makes them among the earliest identifiable peoples in the written record of the continent.
The eastern trade
The other trade came from the Indian Ocean, and by the 1870s it had reached the middle of the continent.
Swahili-Arab merchants from Zanzibar and the coast pushed inland from the 1830s in search of ivory and slaves, financed by Indian credit and armed with imported firearms. By the 1860s they were established at Nyangwe and Kasongo on the Lualaba, running a commercial empire that was also a political one: they collected tribute, arbitrated disputes, installed clients and fought wars.
The dominant figure was Hamed bin Muhammed el-Murjebi, known as Tippu Tip — Zanzibari, of mixed Arab and African descent, a merchant prince who controlled the eastern Congo from Kasongo with a private army and a plantation economy worked by enslaved people. He guided Stanley on the 1876–77 descent of the river and again on the Emin Pasha expedition, and in 1887 Leopold appointed him governor of the Stanley Falls district, which is to say that the Free State's answer to the Arab slave trade was for four years to employ its largest operator.
The violence of that trade was real and substantial. Livingstone's account of the Nyangwe massacre in 1871, when slavers opened fire on a crowded market and killed hundreds, was the single most effective piece of anti-slavery propaganda of the century, and it is what Leopold's Brussels conference of 1876 was ostensibly convened to address. The subsequent Congo-Arab war of 1892–94 destroyed the eastern trading empire, and the Free State presented it as a humanitarian campaign, which it was, in the way that one business removing a competitor can be.
What the map did not show
By 1876, then, the basin contained old states in decline and newer ones expanding, two long-running slave trades operating from opposite coasts, dense commercial networks on the rivers, and a population that had already been reorganised by three centuries of external demand for human beings.
What it did not contain was any single authority that could negotiate for the whole, any written legal tradition in a European language, or any concept of territorial sovereignty in the form the Berlin Conference would require. That last gap is the one Stanley's treaty-collecting exploited: several hundred documents signed by chiefs, in languages they could not read, ceding a thing — exclusive alienable sovereignty over defined territory — that had no equivalent in the political systems they actually governed.
The European case for the Free State rested on the proposition that this was a region without law, without trade and without government, requiring the introduction of all three. Each element of that proposition was false, and the men who made it had read the accounts that disproved it.
The next chapter takes up the man who assembled the claim.
End of Chapter I