The Golden Thread

Prologue

“Godzilla”

The Congo¹ is shaped like a real human heart, messy and organic and the size of Western Europe. It tilts counterclockwise across the lower half of the African continent and borders nine other nations.

From above, shortly before dawn in January 1959, it appeared as an unsettlingly vast swath of darkness. As the first red glow of the sun hit, it turned into the wet, dark green of an ancient forest.

It was wreathed with mist, and studded with irresistible riches. Those who lived on its borders spoke of it as a dark, dangerous place. People who entered, the legend held, either returned wealthy and brutal or disappeared entirely.

On its eastern edge, where a row of active volcanoes spat and burbled, and the world’s largest lakes gradually turned a dark blue in the morning light, the ground was marbled with gold. Oil and gas deposits were so abundant they occasionally leaked out unbidden, poisoning the locals.

On its western edge, near the modern-day border with Angola, the land was riven with veins of diamonds, both industrial and ornamental.

In the far south, toward the point of the heart, lay Katanga, a region the size of France that is one of the most naturally rich areas on earth. Under the tan-colored dirt of its cool hills were ores of copper, nickel, tin, tungsten, and cobalt so pure, they haunted the dreams of mining geologists. Bilious yellow rocks of uranium ore littered the ground. It was the source of countless fortunes.

The Congo River, the deepest and fastest on earth, which loops for three thousand miles across the north of the country, has its sources in those hills. It feeds 1.4 million square miles of fragrant, outrageously fertile land known as the Congo Basin. Crops will grow anywhere you plant them there. And its rain forests and swamps host a wild, chaotic, crawling, flying, swinging, jumping ecosystem, featuring buffalo, elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas, and a thousand species of birds. Some Congolese scraped their yards to smooth dirt to avoid ants and snakes wending relentlessly toward their homes through the undergrowth.

The river eventually bursts through a channel on the west coast, into the South Atlantic, near Leopoldville, a port city of about three hundred thousand and the capital of a nation that has never really submitted to being governed in the Western sense of the word.

The city sits on the south bank, where the river is nearly a mile wide, and clumps of green-and-purple water hyacinth drift past on the coppery water. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Leopoldville was often described by non-Africans as the pride of Africa. Pictures show white, modernist high-rise buildings arrayed along handsome boulevards, broken up with landscaped lawns and grand plazas. On the ground the architecture often feels like a temporary intrusion that the pale-reddish dirt and profusion of plants are working to dislodge.

Avenue Prince Baudouin ran down from the river. It was a determinedly straight line that betrayed the attempts by the Congo’s Belgian colonial rulers both to impose rigor, and to name it after themselves. It went on past the giant Stade Roi Baudouin, a shallow concrete bowl like a half-buried amphitheater rising from a patch of lush green grass.

Inside, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, January 4, 1959, a soccer match between a local team, Victoria Club, in vivid green-and-black-striped shirts, and their crosstown rivals, FC Royal Leo Sport, was nearing its climax, and the voices of tens of thousands of fans echoed through the sweltering tropical afternoon.

South of the stadium, where Avenue Prince Baudouin met Avenue de la Victoire, a separate crowd of about four thousand young black Congolese men had gathered, spilling out into the broad intersection. Some of them were wearing Stetson hats, rakishly tied neckerchiefs, and cowboy-style jeans. All of them emanated a suppressed anger—a giddy, terrifying kind of potential energy.

Only the first brave souls were acting on it. As white Europeans drove past in Peugeots and Mercedes, they shouted “attack the whites” and “independence.” The cars swerved, with a squeal of rubber, as rocks rained down on them.

Slightly away from the main throng, one young man had pulled his fist back to throw a punch that would loose decades of hatred and frustration. It would also begin a war that would come to kill at least a hundred thousand Congolese and one United Nations secretary-general.

It is possible to trace the motivations of that delirious blow virtually step by step back to 1482, when a Portuguese explorer named Diogo Cão, navigating his ship through the South Atlantic, noticed that the sea had turned from a cobalt blue to a rusty ocher.

He had found the mouth of the Congo River, pushing back the ocean. After he landed, he erected a monument proclaiming the Congo discovered.

It came as news to a population of two or three million native Congolese who lived in loosely linked polygamous village tribes, ruled over by local kings, busy growing bananas and yams, and raising goats, pigs, and cows.

They measured time by the cycles of the moon, and distance in marching time. They had no written language, but communicated across long distances using drum rhythms long before Morse and his code. They had a history of their own—of conquest, triumph, tragedy, of empires rising and falling—every bit as vivid as the Europeans who claimed them as property.

The white men began to take people. They loaded them onto ships. Between 1500 and 1850, one stretch of Congolese coastline 250 miles long sent four million people on slave transports. They were bound for the sugar plantations of Brazil or the Caribbean, or for the cotton plantations of the American South.

The slave trade had barely ended, in 1874, when a self-styled grand explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, arrived in the Congo with a walrus moustache, a pith helmet, and ambition in his eyes.

He had come to fame three years earlier, spinning a career as a writer and adventurer from his discovery of a lost explorer, David Livingstone, who had disappeared—from European and American view, at least—while seeking the source of the Nile.

Stanley claimed he had located Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871 and that he had the presence of mind to greet him with the line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”²

By 1874, he had a new assignment: to send more tall tales from Africa for the New York Herald and the London Daily Telegraph. They were a hit, and he fed a frenzy for global exploration, and global commerce, and added fuel to a race among European nations to claim colonies.³

The Congolese called him bula matari—stone breaker—because he could blow up rocks with dynamite. They marveled that his entire body was covered in cloth except for his head and arms, and that his canoe rowed itself. Stanley described them in turn, privately, as “filthy, rapacious ghouls.” In his stories he portrayed them as noble savages, obsequious in the face of his obvious superiority.

In Brussels, a gangling and overweening princeling with a long, gray beard that made him look like an authoritarian Santa followed each turn of Stanley’s tales, and each new colony claimed, with breathless rapture.

At forty, King Leopold II had ruled over Belgium for ten years. He had grown to dislike, even resent, all the things he had—the palaces, the jewels, and the toys. He grew obsessed, instead, with colonialization and a new phenomenon, globalized business. Plummeting transport costs and a fashion for the exotic⁴ combined to make it worth shipping tea from India or ostrich feathers from South Africa to the capitals of the West.

Leopold had calculated that if he found the right colony and allied himself with global companies keen to strip it of its natural assets, the profits were potentially endless. He tried to obtain Fiji. He lusted after the Argentine province of Entre Rios. He attempted to lease part of what is now Taiwan. But he came to realize that he could not merely buy a colony. He would have to take one.

He did not have an army. Nor did he have the political clout of a nation like Britain or France behind him. In order to claim territory, he had to resort to cunning. So he disguised his desire to pillage as a heartfelt wish for the furtherment of the noble savages and chiefs Stanley had depicted in his stories. He called it a fight against slavery, for the rights and lives of black Africans.

He started a society—the Association Internationale Africaine—with the stated aim of studying the blank spot in the middle of Africa by establishing outposts there. It meant he had license to explore, and to plant his flags, in the Congo. He hired Stanley, who put together a large team of subordinates.

Leopold’s agents began to travel the country, negotiating with village chiefs. They persuaded them to sign contracts promising all rights to all lands, for all time, and offered bales of cloth, crates of gin, livery uniforms, coral necklaces, caps, or military coats in exchange. Many agents signed dozens of these treaties a month.

With every agreement, the white men put up a flag—a blue field, with a yellow star. It represented the darkness in which the Congolese had wandered, and the light of civilization that Leopold had bestowed on them.⁵ In 1885, he was recognized by Germany, Britain, and the United States as the official ruler of the Congo Free State.

In London and New York, bicycles and cars had begun to fill the streets. Passengers marveled at the wonder of riding on rubber tires instead of hard wood and metal wheels. The demand for rubber spiked. And the value of the rubber vines and trees that grew wild in the Congo spiked with it.

Leopold spied an opportunity. He tasked every Congolese village with gathering rubber—three or four pounds, tapped painstakingly and cleaned, every two weeks, to be presented to Belgian officials and soldiers who now made up an army called the Force Publique. They passed it on to private companies that had signed generous export deals.