WOMEN MAKING POTTERY
THE CONGO PICKANINNY
The more I saw of the Congo River—it is nearly twice as large as the Mississippi—the more I realized that it is in reality a parent of waters. It has half a dozen tributaries that range in length from 500 to 1,000 miles each. The most important are the Lualaba and the Kasai. Others include the Itimbiri, the Aruwimi and the Mubangi. Scores of smaller streams, many of them navigable for launches, empty into the main river. This is why there is such a deep and swift current in the lower region where the Congo enters the sea.
The astonishing thing about the Congo River is its inconsistency. Although six miles wide in many parts it is frequently not more than six feet deep. This makes navigation dangerous and difficult. As on the Lualaba and every other river in the Colony, soundings must be taken continually. This extraordinary discrepancy between width and depth reminds me of the designation of the Platte River in Nebraska by a Kansas statesman which was, "A river three-quarters of a mile wide and three-quarters of an inch deep." Thus the Congo journey takes on a constant element of hazard because you do not know what moment you will run aground on a sand-bank, be impaled on a snag, or strike a rock.
Although the "Comte de Flandre" was rated as the fastest craft on the Congo our progress was unusually slow because of the scarcity of wood for fuel. This seems incredible when you consider that the whole Congo Basin is one vast forest. Millions of trees stand ready to be sacrificed to the needs of man, yet there are no hands to cut them. In the Congo, as throughout this distracted world, the will-to-work is a lost art, no less manifest among the savages than among their civilized brothers. The ordinary native will only labour long enough to provide himself with sufficient money to buy a month's supply of food. Then he quits and joins the leisure class. Hence wood-hunting on the Congo vies with the trip itself as a real adventure. The competition between river captains for fuel is so keen that a skipper will sometimes start his boat at three o'clock in the morning and risk an accident in the dark in order to beat a rival to a wood supply.
All up and down the river are wood-posts. Most of them are owned by the steamship companies. It was our misfortune to find most of them practically stripped of their supplies. A journey which ordinarily takes twelve days consumed twenty. But there were many compensations and I had no quarrel with the circumstance:
I had the good fortune to witness that rarest of sights that falls to the lot of the casual traveller—a serious fight between natives. We stopped at a native wood-post—(some of them are operated by the occasionally industrious blacks)—for fuel. The whole village turned out to help load the logs. In the midst of the process a crowd of natives made their appearance, armed with spears and shields. They began to taunt the men and women who were loading our boat. I afterwards learned that they owned a wood-post nearby and were disgruntled because we had not patronized them. They blamed their neighbours for it. Almost before we realized it a pitched battle was in progress in which spears were thrown and men and women were laid out in a generally bloody fracas. One man got an assegai through his throat and it probably inflicted a fatal wound.
In the midst of the mêlée one of my fellow passengers, a Catholic priest named Father Brandsma, courageously dashed in between the flying spears and logs of wood and separated the combatants. This incident shows the hostility that still exists between the various tribes in the Congo. It constitutes one excellent reason why there can never be any concerted uprising against the whites. There is no single, strong, cohesive native dynasty.
Father Brandsma was one of the finest men I met in the Congo. He was a member of the society of priests which has its headquarters at Mill Hill in England. He came aboard the boat late one night when we were tied up at Bumba, having ridden a hundred miles on his bicycle along the native trails. We met the following morning in the dining saloon. I sat at a table writing letters and he took a seat nearby and started to make some notes in a book. When we finished I addressed him in French. He answered in flawless English. He then told me that he had spent fifteen years in Uganda, where he was at the head of the Catholic Missions.