missionaries and traders

The history of the Congo long precedes contact with those Europeans who claimed to have first 'discovered' the country. The archaeological evidence has allowed some writers to describe a Sangoan people, who inhabited the region of central Africa some 50,000 years ago. They worked with choppers and scrapers and travelled between caves lit by fire. The first known inhabitants, however, were pygmies, hunters and gatherers living in the forests of the north and north-east. The Egyptians knew of pygmies in Africa probably from the time of the fifth dynasty (c. 2500 BCE) when an expedition brought back 'a dwarf' from the land of Punt. Pharaoh Pepi II of the sixth dynasty (around 2300 BCE) had images of pygmies drawn on his tomb. By the last centuries BCE, small numbers of Bantu-speaking people had migrated into Congo from the north and west (today's Nigeria and Cameroon) and settled in the south. The Bantu were agriculturalists who employed Iron Age technology.

The linguist David Lee Schoenbrun suggests that the population of the Eastern Congo was part of a trading bloc that extended from present-day Katanga to Lake Victoria. The peoples of the Great Lakes 'represented an enormous variety of historical traditions in ancient Africa'. They included hunters and gatherers, fishermen and settled farmers, potters and ironworkers, merchants and traders. The evidence of their settlement includes Stone Age sites on Lake Kivu, as well as ceramic 'Urewe ware', from around 700 BCE. Many different languages were spoken. Farmers used pottery and metal, settling on lands with good soil and rainfall. Deposits of charcoal have been found from smelting furnaces, dating back to around 200 CE. 'Forests were larders where communities could trap animals, collect medicines, produce lumber and find fibres for clothing from sources like the bark cloth-bearing Ficus tree. The dense, wet landscape provided people with a rich diet, and useful tools.

Although the first settled farmers may already have been working the land, agriculture only took off after the use of iron became widespread. Later farmers used pottery and metal, settling on lands with good soil and rainfall. Agricultural innovation took place: around 500 CE we have evidence of local peoples eating millet and cowpeas. People also learned to keep cattle for their milk and blood. Cattle herding encouraged the creation and appropriation of surpluses, and the rise of hierarchical societies. So too did control of the trade in valuable minerals.

The Mongo, who remain in the Great Forest area of the Congo today, inhabited the forest regions east of Mbandaka from at least the first century CE, when they left traces of their life as hunters and yam farmers. Their main strategies for gathering food included gathering, trapping and hunting. Their diet included fruit, palm kernels, mushrooms, caterpillars, snails, termites, spices, root drinks, monkeys, antelopes, boars, elephants, fish, maize, groundnuts, beans, yams, bananas and oil palms. The dense, wet landscape provided people with a rich diet, and useful tools. 'Forests were larders where communities could trap animals, collect medicines, produce lumber and find fibres for clothing from sources like the bark cloth-bearing Ficus tree. Bananas were especially important in the central Congo: they thrived in wet, dense rainforests, where the main alternative crops (yams) often rotted. By around 700 CE copper was being traded on a 1,500 -mile journey between the Katanga region and the northern lakes. Its use was a badge of leadership. Cattle herding encouraged the rise of monarchies and even empires.

Relatively little is known about the development of the more complex societies but a more complex division of labour, into chiefs, diviners, doctors and mediums had evolved in the region by around 1000 CE. Early kingdoms included the empire of the Luba, founded in the early sixteenth century and based around lakes Kisale and Upemba in central Shaba. The empire of the Bakongo was founded around the fourteenth century at the mouth of the river and included parts of today's Angola as well as today's Congo. This empire came about as the Bakongo migrated south across the Congo river. Their main commerce was in ivory and hides.

After the fifteenth century, food crops, such as manioc, increased the range of agricultural products, but population densities were never high and agriculture remained based, for the most part, on shifting cultivation rather than settled agriculture. Even today, population density in the Congo is relatively low, about 22 people per square kilometre, and unevenly distributed. Population density in the Great Forest is only about half of the national average, with stretches of several tens of thousands of square kilometres virtually empty because of the dense forest cover. It is here that the pygmies still mainly live, although other groups also inhabit the forest areas. At the edges of the forests, where the trees have been cleared for settlement, population densities are often higher than the national average. At the northern edge of the Great Forest population densities increase up to twenty people per square kilometre and then drop to one or two per square kilometre only in the extreme north of the country towards the Central African Republic. The extreme south is also sparsely populated, with between one and three people per square kilometre.

The land upon which the Bakongo settled was at the western tip of a vast country, little of which they claimed. Its geography included savannas, high plateaus, volcanoes, lakes, rivers and rainforest. The most important feature was the River Congo itself. Its waters are drained from a plateau deep in the African interior. From the edge of this plateau, the river descends 1,000 feet in 220 miles of falls, rapids and cascades. So powerful is the river that on joining the ocean, it carves a canyon in the ocean bed, 100 miles long, and up to 4,000 feet deep. We can understand, then, why the Bakongo held mainly to the west, and knew little of the interior. It was simply impossible to travel upstream by canoe. The land that locals knew was remarkable enough. Even now, the diminished wildlife of the Congo still includes numerous varieties of birds and insects, along with, lions, elephants, okapi, chimpanzees, hippos, gorillas, bonobos, antelope, bushrat and crocodile — a diversity of species. The Congo also holds, of course, a vast mineral wealth.

For the history of the Congo, we have to rely on written sources, and for earlier periods these are rare. We are forced to depend on accounts produced from the outside. Our problem is that Europeans in particular knew little of Africa's historical development. Trying to use these sources is like peering into a shallow river: images come back to us, but they are vague and distorted, and we struggle to make sense of the real history beneath them. In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus reports a story told of 'a group of wild young fellows' who travelled south from Libya into the African interior and,...