Drums Along the Congo Read online

  Robert steers a course between M’Bamou Island and the right bank, slowing the boat as we enter the channel. Long ago I read about a marauding tribe of cannibals, the Yakas, who migrated from the north and terrorized the Kongo Kingdom in the seventeenth century. The Yakas set up their victory kitchens on M’Bamou; for a month they stoked cook fires that turned human prisoners into stew. The leader of the cannibals was called the Great Ghaga, and his army was unstoppable until the Portuguese appeared with guns and cannons. The story of the Yakas was related by Andrew Battell, an English freebooter and slaver they captured but decided not to eat. He eventually escaped and wrote a memoir that kept me up many nights as a child.

  We leave two sandbars to port and enter a maze of small islands. As we round the bend leading to the fabled Yaka kitchen, I’m startled by the sight of dozens of powerboats pulled up on a sandy beach. Topless French and Congolese women wave at us from a volleyball court. Beach balls and blankets lie scattered about under large umbrellas bearing the names of French aperitifs. A group of men tending a charcoal grill shout at us. Robert holds up his catch for them to admire and says he’ll be back as soon as he drops me off.

  “No fish?” the window washers ask me back at the ferry landing.

  “My friend caught plenty. One was this big.” I stretch my hands out two feet.

  “This is Clement and I’m Medard.”

  Medard is a head taller than Clement, and I tower over Medard. They profess to be the best window washers in Brazzaville.

  “Yesterday we were at the president’s house. We want to show you something.” Medard points toward an overturned plastic bucket.

  “Look,” Clement urges.

  Underneath the bucket is a host of butterflies: swallowtails, snouts, whites, judys, and a few charaxes.

  “They are for you,” the men chorus, proudly showing me how they caught the butterflies with their shirts.

  Together we flip through a field guide and identify them one by one. The blood-red Cymothoe sangaris is voted the prettiest, and we cheer as it flies to safety in the kapok tree.

  They’re reluctant to accept my invitation to the Palm Club until I assure them that it will be my treat. They both have bicycles and insist that I ride one while they double up on the other. At the top of the hill, they start chiming the handlebar bell and singing.

  “Luciole. Une tête de la luciole. Luciole, ohhhh, luciole, Monsieur Luciole. Luciole. Une tête de…,” they sing, pointing at my head, saying it shines like a lightning bug.

  CHAPTER 7

  MONDAY. BACK TO THE ROUTINE. Two pots of coffee have fueled me to keep apace in the stream of workers funneling down Cabral Avenue. Most of the men wear spotless white shirts and pressed black pants, the women fluorescent print dresses or colorful busbuses. Of course, everyone carries an umbrella.

  As usual, there’s a bottleneck this morning near the post office, where an ancient silk cotton tree stands in the road, forcing motorists, bicycles, and pedestrians to squeeze into one lane. Remarkably, no horns are honked and no curses yelled. The tree has always been here, and people reach out to touch it as they pass.

  In the animist culture of the Congo, trees are revered as the homes of spirits. By law, before an old tree on city property can be cut down, a witch doctor must be summoned to entice its spirit into taking up a new residence. This process can take months, even years to complete. One unresolved case dating back to 1963 pits a mighty baobab spirit against a team of road engineers. Nine witch doctors have tried to vanquish the spirit, but each has failed. The tree is known locally as “the wood that wouldn’t.” The Brazzaville Highway Department leaves such trees where they are and simply paints the trunks white.

  “Drivers must be alert. Cars must go slow,” the supervisor of a work gang explains. “The tree was here first.”

  As other commuters rush by, I stand and watch a road crew laying asphalt, impressed by the respect they accord a Schizolobium, cousin to the more familiar cigar tree. The three men packing asphalt around it are careful not to rip the bark or damage the roots.

  “The spirit must breathe,” one worker says, upbraiding a colleague who has splashed tar on the bark.

  The crew chief nods in assent.

  Timber companies employ legions of witch doctors to placate both the displaced spirits and these traditionalists.

  “Most of them are frauds,” Fortunado told me one night at the Palm Club. “I know of a witch doctor who claimed he relocated the spirits of an entire forest in one day. Ha! Impossible! The older the tree, the more comfortable the spirit and the harder the job!”

  “How do you know when a tree spirit has moved on?” I asked.

  “Inside,” he said, rapping his chest. “I can feel his presence and I can feel his absence.”

  “Excusez-moi,” a startled man apologizes later in the day, his knee still lodged in my side as I’m tying my shoelaces outside the Ministry of Forests.

  “Ah, bonjour, Roger,” I say, recognizing the museum curator I met last week at a Nigerian embassy party. He works at the Museum of Ethnography, better known as the Fetish Museum.

  “Are you still interested in visiting the museum? I’m headed there now.” He points to his car. Since the museum is open by appointment only, I accept the invitation.

  We drive several miles to a wealthy neighborhood, park the car, and walk down a shady street, passing tidy peastone paths leading up to ornate front doors. On either side of the street are lovely cassia and frangipani trees planted in an alternating pattern, the tall cassias ripe with clusters of golden flowers and the petite frangipanis exuding their alluring fragrance. The wind gusts, sending bell-shaped cassia blossoms tumbling into the air.

  “There’s a party up there somewhere,” Roger says of the wind. “The sky gods are playing music for a party of tree spirits.” If rain starts falling, it will be a sign that the water gods have joined the party.

  As we near the museum, Roger tells me that it was founded by Victor Malanda, a self-styled Christian prophet who railed against fetishism. Secretly bankrolled by missionaries, he bought up all the fetishes he could find, often sweetening the deal with free crosses and Bibles. People flocked to his house, happy to sell or trade their spent fetishes. “The Bibles made great tinder,” Roger explains. “Not many people could read in those days.”

  A fetish, Robert continues, is not meant to be worshiped; it’s merely a shell for the spirit, and nothing is too ugly, simple, or small for the task.

  “A lock of hair or a toenail clipping tied to a string will sometimes do the trick.”

  Each fetish is consecrated to a specific task, its power limited only by the imagination, and once its mission is accomplished, the spirit vacates the container. Believers employ witch doctors for any number of reasons; revenge, however, tops the list. Litigation can take years in the backlogged Congolese justice system, so many people rely on fetishes and spells to exact justice.

  “Voodoo and black magic are rooted here… Its power reaches all over the world,” Roger says, reminding me that many rituals that we think of as indigenous to Haiti actually started here.

  In a 1980 survey, more than half of the Congolese population declared themselves Christians, but ninety percent also said they visited a witch doctor at least twice a year. Roger himself receives Communion at Sunday mass, but he believes in animist spirits as well and calls on a witch doctor several times a month.

  By law fetishism is banned. It’s one of the few topics that the Catholic Church and the communist government agree on, but to little effect. In 1971 the government suspended the members of the Brazzaville soccer team when fetishes were found buried under the playing field. This led to the largest public demonstration since independence, and the government was forced to back off. The next soccer game was played on fresh sod, newly laid over hundreds of fetishes deposited by fans on behalf of the team.

  The museum has the dank and musty smell of a mausoleum. “Bugs love it in here,” Roger says, bemoaning
the lack of air filters, humidity controls, and air conditioning. Since most of the collection is carved from wood, he has an ongoing battle with termites. “Unfortunately, they are winning.”

  He flips on a light switch, but nothing happens.

  “Come stand over here… Feel it?”

  A draft of chilly air raises goose bumps on my neck and arms. Although it’s almost ninety-five degrees outside, its eerily cool where we’re standing.

  “Strange, eh?” He leaves me to ponder the source of the draft while he goes to the fuse box.

  In the Himalayas, lamas sometimes divine the presence of spirits through changes in the air temperature and wind strength. Devils blow cold air, but benign spirits warm the air with their generous hearts. I wonder if the opposite might hold true in the tropics, where a cool breeze is more welcome. There’s a loud thump from the rear of the building.

  “Are you all right?” I call into the darkness.

  “Fine … just hit a display. No damage.” Roger then lowers his voice to make amends to the fetish he bumped. This is no perfunctory apology but a lengthy supplication.

  Recalling an old trick taught to me by a North African tribe, I pull out a coin and drop it on the floor. This act proclaims me a vassal of a nearby spirit and eliminates the need for it to demonstrate its power.

  “Merde!” Roger fumes, flipping what sounds like a breaker switch. Click. “Merde.” Click. “Merde…”

  I reach into my bag for a flashlight and follow the clicking sounds until I find Roger, who takes the light and shines it on the fuse box.

  “Wow,” we both exclaim, looking at a rat’s nest of wiring. The electrician who hooked up this panel must have been colorblind. Blue tails are spliced to red leads; black lines are crimped to yellow ones; green grounds run to hot posts; brown wires are soldered to white ones. The diagram on the panel door bears no relation to reality; even the polarity has been reversed on the top row of switches.

  “Imbecile,” Roger snarls.

  “Or genius,” I suggest, pointing out that the electrician has made himself indispensable. With 220 volts pulsing through the system, we decide not to fiddle with the wires.

  Roger leads me into another room and shines the flashlight on the wall. A face jumps out at us. It’s a ceremonial mask covered with a chalky whitewash. Mica has been brushed around the ears and under the cheeks and nose, highlighting the vivid countenance. Wispy black eyebrows arc quizzically across the forehead. Its beehive-shaped hairdo has been charred, smoothed, and glazed, and the finely carved lips appear to be whispering. I near the face for a better look and stare into the heavily lidded eyes.

  “Pounou mask from the Niari Valley,” Roger says. “We know very little about it, but the white chalk indicates ancestor worship.”

  Years ago it was a common practice among the lower Congo tribes to share in the estates of the dead. Whenever a chief or a great hunter died, his head was severed from the corpse and hung over a block of chalk, which absorbed the vital drippings. Worthy members of the tribe would then apply the chalk to their foreheads, believing that the wisdom and strength of the deceased would be transferred to them.

  Roger flashes the light across a dizzying wall of fetishes: masks, statues, and carved animals. He highlights parts of each fetish to illustrate the similar shapes and patterns common to all of them, whether from the coast, hills, or jungle.

  “They didn’t have glue, so they carved everything out of one piece of wood,” he says, pointing out that all the statues have straight, almost rectangular bodies, with small heads and no necks. The legs are unusually short in relation to the torso, and the sex of each fetish is plain to see. “And notice that none of the fetishes tell their stories… No allegories here.”

  The narrative of each fetish was the strict provenance of the village elders and witch doctors. Because no written form of Lingala or any native tongue existed until missionaries came in the mid-1800s, much of the old lore has been lost.

  “Look at this one … from the Tsayes of the Lekouma region.” Roger spotlights a fetish on the far side of the room.

  It’s a disk-shaped bronze fringed with ornamental grasses and topped with an aureole of plumes. Blood-red eyes suggest a sinister spirit, but Roger doesn’t feel that it was cast for an evil purpose: the feathers, in fact, are symbols of celebration.

  The Kokongo tribes learned the secrets of metallurgy as early as the fourteenth century, the molten recipes trickling south from Arabs willing to trade secrets for slaves. The Congolese developed their own methods, such as converting hollowed-out termite hills into smelting ovens. It’s doubtful, however, Roger says, that they would mix a batch of ore specifically for fetishes.

  “After they finished making arrow tips, knives, and spear heads, they probably poured the excess into ground molds… Afterward the village witch doctor would sanctify and empower the object.”

  “Any Mokele-Mbembe fetishes?” I ask.

  “Not that I know about, but it’s possible… Ask the fetishes, one of them may respond.”

  No spirit answers my improvised call.

  As we shuffle down a corridor lined with objects, I remember a disastrous high school trip to a glass museum and keep my elbows tucked tight to my body.

  Roger stops, raises the light to a fetish in the corner, and blesses himself as he says, “There.”

  This fetish is painted red, black, and white, and although it’s almost four feet tall, it looks as if it was pummeled down from a larger size. All its features appear scrunched, and its head is horribly misshapen. Half of its jaw is missing, and it is scarred by deep gouges. Two rows of chiseled teeth protrude from what’s left of its black lips. Blowgun darts serve as the hair, and a series of holes riddles the ears, neck, and shoulders. The grass skirt tied at its waist is belted with bones—human bones from the look of them.

  “Don’t!” Roger grabs my hand as I reach out to touch the skirt.

  He blesses himself again.

  “The teeth were pulled from the mouths of enemies. The holes are for trophies, you know, men’s things.”

  The Yakas were not the only tribe to eat their prisoners of war. For centuries it was common practice for the triumphant to consume the defeated and thereby absorb their strength. The practice became less common after Europeans arrived and began buying prisoners for shipment to the west.

  At night, when I catalogue the feathers, beetles, and butterflies I’ve nabbed during the day, I always scrounge through the bottom of my camera bag for the odd seed or leaf. Tonight, though, I prick my finger on something sharp. It’s a tooth with a chiseled tip.

  CHAPTER 8

  “CONGRATULATIONS, I HEAR you got your permit,” a member of the Leisure Board greets me at the Ministry of Sports, Leisure, and Tourism.

  “Thanks,” I reply warily, waiting for the punch line to yet another joke about bald dinosaur hunters, but this time he shakes my hand.

  What’s the source of this rumor? A typist says his friend has heard it from another friend who was told by a clerk at the Forestry Department. This is the sort of gossip to encourage; surely, one way to make something happen is to have people presume it has already happened. After all, rumors are the currency of the bureaucracy and increase in value each time they’re traded.

  “I’ll send you a card from the jungle,” I promise, dodging outside for the next bus heading toward the Ministry of Forests.

  On the ride I think of Karl May, an early twentieth-century German travel writer, whose books consistently outsold the Bible. An expert manipulator of rumors, he hoodwinked a generation of readers with a series of fabricated adventures about his exploits in remote corners of the world. Cloistered in a Bremen warehouse, he set up his deception by writing postcards and paying sailors to mail them from exotic ports at prearranged intervals. Gullible newspaper columnists received the cards and dutifully reported his progress. All the while, without leaving the warehouse, May was composing his grand tales on a typewriter. At the end of a journey May
would emerge, his adventures accepted as fact. When he was eventually found out, he blew his fortune defending his lies to an unsympathetic court.

  The secretary at the minister’s office greets me with a large smile.

  “You came at just the right time… This typewriter is giving me trouble again.”

  He has heard absolutely nothing about my permit, and he doubts it could have been drafted without his knowledge. My head pounds with a sudden pain. The celebratory drink I’ve been anticipating will have to be a medicinal tonic instead.

  But miraculously, a day later—forty days and nineteen hours after my first application for a permit—the minister calls me to his office.

  “I hope the wait hasn’t been too long,” he says, breezing into the reception room where I’m sitting.

  “No problem,” I lie, trying to smooth out the wrinkles in my jacket. He’s wearing a tailored silk suit and a crisp white shirt.

  “Follow me, please.”

  As the secretary mentioned, the minister is not a man for small talk. Oil revenues are down this year, and the government is relying on his office to cover the shortfall. Sixty percent of the rain forest has just been opened for logging after it was reported that the Japanese would loan a large sum to the Congo in exchange for an increase in its timber quota. Somehow the minister must find a way to guarantee the increased production.

  “So you want to go to the jungle and look for Mokele-Mbembe?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Well, good luck.” He hands me a travel visa two pages long, single-spaced and written in French. Even the first few words of legalese are beyond my vocabulary. I pull out my pocket dictionary.

  “Please close the door on your way out.” The minister nods and returns to his work.

  Two staff members are waiting for me in the reception room. A few details, I’m told, must be clarified. A pile of contracts is plopped on the table. The language is ponderous and severe; it will take me a full day to translate everything.