Débat sur NGONGO LETETA

This is an interesting debate over Ngongo Letete, who at one time was a collaborator and lieutenant of Tippu Tip, who was executed by the Force Publique during the bloody wars of colonial conquest, and whose death sparked an anti-colonial revolt.  He himself, was reputed to be quite brutal and is remembered with some ambiguity in the Congo. The full article can be found here.

Par Professeur Antoine Dimandja
E-mail: profdimandja@yahoo.fr

Le Débat:
Chers frères et sœurs,
Notre débat consiste à examiner un problème qui date du XIXième Siècle et qui continue jusqu’aujourd’hui à embrouiller l’histoire des Atetela et des Asonge. Il s’agit de connaître avec exactitude, de part et d’autre, la vérité sur le témoignage selon lequel Ngongo Lutete (sic) Leteta fut Otetela ou Osonge. Nos soigneuses recherches dans le temps et dans l’espace en RDC, en Belgique et aux États-unis auprès des vieux qui étaient encore en vie, et qui n’avaient pas de trous de mémoire, nous ont non seulement permis de confronter différents points de vue avec ce qui a été dit ou écrit maintes fois, mais encore conduit à conclure que ce conflit empreint d’héroïsme n’est pas définitivement tranché par nous, et partant pour notre postérité. L’histoire étant un sujet d’explication, nous devons faire un effort dès maintenant de rechercher la vérité pour la diaspora qui n’a pas de lien étroit avec notre terroir.

Comme tous ses concitoyens et concitoyennes du XIXième Siècle, nul ne sait quand Ngongo Leteta naquit. Feu Patrice Emery Lumumba fut le premier a nous révéler lors d’une entrevue dans la soirée au Guest House de la Sabena, sis Avenue des aviateurs, près de l’ancien aérodrome d’Élisabethville, où il logeait le 8 mai 1960 en tant que membre du collège exécutif général accompagnant le président Henri Cornelis, Gouverneur Général du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi dans sa dernière tournée qu’il a beaucoup lu et discuté de ce sujet avec de nombreux Européens et Congolais. Monsieur Lumumba qui parlait en otetela a déclaré sans ambages que Ngongo Leteta fut notre chef suprême et celui des Asonge. Certains Flamands notamment Père Boelaert en province de l’Equateur l’avait appelé péjorativement et erronément Ngongo Lutete dans ses articles dans Aequatoria .Il donnait comme explication qu’il était Ngongo “le vagabond”.

Pour nous et pour les Asonge, il était notre héros national. Il avait été injustement arrêté, mis sous les verrous et jugé publiquement à la hâte au poste d’Etat à Ngandu par un officier de la Force Publique Jean Scheerlinck. Celui-ci provoqua un conseil de guerre dérisoire dont il fut président. Ses deux assesseurs furent ses frères. Il ne s’était même pas référé à son chef Commandant Dhanis à Kasongo. Il le condamna a mort jeudi le 14 septembre 1893. Ngongo Leteta avait souhaité être comparu en justice à Lusambo ou à Léopoldville au lieu d’être jugé en brousse. Il avait également préféré que son fils Lumpungu dont la mère fut osonge, originaire de Malela (à ne pas confondre avec chef osonge Lumpungu de Kabinda), soit son successeur. Tout cela fut un coup d’épée dans l’eau! En présence d’une foule nombreuse et des deux autres blancs, Scheerlinck donna l’ordre au peloton d’exécution noir auquel un des blancs se serait mêlé de tirer leur gâchette à 7 heures du matin, vendredi 15 septembre 1893, et le Chef Ngongo tomba par terre.
Selon Patrice Lumumba, Scheerlinck fut incompétent pour ce jugement, seul le lieutenant Duchene, chef de poste de Ngandu fut compétent. Dhanis fut promu par le Roi Léopold II comme baron pour sa victoire sur les Arabes avec le concours de Ngongo Leteta et ses vaillants combattants sans lequel tout cela n’aurait pas été possible. Le haut officier belge le regretta jusqu’à la fin de sa vie au début du XXième S. La thèse de doctorat défendue en Flamand à l’université de Gand par Monsieur Philippe Maréchal, actuel chef de département d’histoire au Musée Royal De l’Afrique Centrale, en fait foi.

Répondant à notre question sur un de ses articles relatif à Ngongo Leteta que nous avons lu dans un journal méthodiste (EMECOCE) à Wembo Nyama en 1956, Monsieur Lumumba confirma qu’il avait pris l’habitude à Stanleyville alors qu’il était commis postal de commémorer jusqu’à ce jour l’exécution ou la mort de notre chef suprême ou souverain chaque 15 septembre de chaque année. En effet, ce fut lui et les chefs Asonge Lumpungu, Mpanya Mutombo ainsi que leurs vaillants guerriers qui nous ont délivrés de l’occupation arabe et mirent fin à la traite des esclaves qu’ils pratiquaient non seulement au Maniema, mais aussi au Sankuru. Nos frères et sœurs qui devinrent esclaves transportaient les pointes d’ivoire de Lomami a travers le Lualaba jusqu’a l’ océan Indien où les Sultans arabes les vendaient aux européens, sans aucun espoir de retour. On se rappellera que ces derniers pratiquaient le trafic des esclaves sur les côtes d’Afrique depuis le XVIième Siècle. Au XIXième Siècle, le Congrès de Vienne le condamna en 1815, mais malgré les diverses conventions qui le prohibaient, le trafic ne put disparaître que peu après que Ngongo Leteta eut astucieusement changé des camps notamment l’abandon des Arabes et l’appui des Européens. Pour Monsieur Lumumba qui fut à la fois détribalisé et leader nationaliste, il importait peu si Ngongo Leteta fut Otetela ou Osonge.
Au moment où il entra au service des Blancs le 19 septembre 1892, lui et ses braves combattants devinrent instrument utile de décolonisation contre les Arabes comme lui à l’égard des Belges en 1960; sauf que Ngongo joua le rôle de colonisation....

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Alesh: "Reveil-The Awakening" via NomadicWax.com

The Reveil video was filmed throughout the DRC, including Kinshasa, Bukavu, Kikwit. However, the core of the music video was filmed in Baniele, an illegal squatter settlement on the outskirts of Kinshasa. Baniele was built on land that is in a constant state of erosion and where a single electrical wire and a single well supports the entire neighborhood of thousands.

Home to another very politically engaged hip-hop artist known as MC Scotty Kanku, Baniele was chosen as the backdrop for the video because it is so representative of the Congolese struggle and experience. “Filming the video was an incredible experience,” said Nomadic Wax founder Ben Herson, “I was initially concerned that people would be turned off by the camera and large group of people filming, but the response was quite the opposite. Everyone wanted to talk to us: old women, children, and teenagers. They’re all seen in the video. People saw this as a chance to get their word out.”

“The worst of it all is that instead of pulling us out of the rubble /
you leave us all to suffocate. The number of deaths are too high to count/
much to your amazement /
I've plucked up the courage to say it.”
-Alesh, lyrics from ‘Reveil’

Despite the seriousness of the political situation in the DRC, few people outside of the country have a grasp on the issues faced by the Congolese today. “Congolese, as well as the rest of the world, needs to see what is happening here and why,” says Chirwisa. “I believe that music has the potential to create change and open peoples minds. This is exactly what the goal is with this video.

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Pambazuka - The invention of the indigène

As Southern Sudanese go to the polls this week, it is worth considering their decision in light of its impact on the larger play of regional politics, especially in Uganda and the Congo. Make no mistake, the creation of a Southern Sudanese state, if it occurs, will have a profound impact on events further south. Here, political scientist and author Mahmood Mamdani reflects on the roots of the conflicts in Eastern Congo.

Pambazuka - The invention of the indigène

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The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba (videos)

Crucial documentary. Watch it. Learn. 'Nuff said.

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From Wildlife Direct: Europeans, Arabs and Africans in the Congo, 1892-1894

Blood, Ivory and Lomami Slave Wars

All hell broke loose on the Lomami River during the 1890s.It began east of the Lualaba in the 1860s, with the rise of the Arab ivory trade. Tippo Tib from Zanzibar (where he started life as Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi ) carved out a Congolese Sultanate. Slaves hauled his ivory to the markets of Zanzibar often hefting a single tusk at over a 100 pounds.Tippo Tib, ivory merchant and slave trader, built a successful empire in eastern Congo. This picture first published in 1889, The Illustrated London News.His favorite slave, Ngongo Luteta, came to him as a young boy. Luteta was from the Batetela tribe that lives where the Lomami plunges from high savannah plateau, to forest islands and into unbroken forest. Ngongo Luteta rose fast and became a leader of Tippo Tib’s wanguaana (Arabized Congolese) warriors and the strategist who brought the most ivory and slaves back to his master. Tippu Tib was so pleased with the dashing Luteta, that he freed him when he was only 25 and sent him home to the Lomami.
But Tippo Tib sent Ngongo Luteta with a clear mission: caravans of ivory must come east to him from the Lomami and the Tshuapa basins. Luteta was immensely successful. Great graves of elephant bone rotted in the forest duff, the ivory was carried east. The people of the Lomami who carried the ivory, were enslaved and their societies torn asunder by the firearms and cold determination of Ngongo Luteta.
Ashley, 120 years later, when his dugout was not more than two days south of Opala , wrote “Not many people here. This forest is empty” . He repeated it all the way to the savanna. Were the massive slave campaigns initiated by Ngongo Luteta partly to blame?The Lomami River is depopulated here in the north and Ashley found fewer and fewer people as he moved up stream and deeper into the forest.Ngongo Lutete is hero and nemesis.
I have no picture of him (send it if you find one), but here is a description written by a begrudgingly respectful European of the 19th century (The Fall of the Congo Arabs, Sydney Hinde, 1894)
He was a well-built, intelligent- looking man…with a brown skin, large brown eyes, very long lashes, …and a straight narrow nose. His hands were his most remarkable characteristic: curiously supple, with long narrow fingers. One or both hands were in constant movement, opening or shutting restlessly. His features meanwhile remained absolutely immovable.
The description of him in battle was even more suggestive:[Ngongo Luteta] hissed out his orders one after another without a moment’s hesitation. He was capable of sustaining intense fatigue, and would lead his warriors through the country at a run for hours together.
Ivory was big money and the Europeans wanted it. Ngongo Luteta met the Belgians on the rivers of their new colony and realized he could make more profit trading his ivory to them. The Arab’s suzerainty was at stake. Tensions rose, a European ivory merchant who had set up two trading posts on the Lomami River, Arthur Hodister , was massacred with ten other whites and the Belgo-Arab wars began in earnest. Nongo Luteta was fighting on the side of the Belgians and the Congo Free State.
Although carrying an anti-slavery banner, there was no doubt that control of resources (importantly elephants) was central to the Belgian King, Leopold II.Francis Dhanis, main Belgian architect of the war, marched to Ngandu, Nongo Luteta’s post on the Lomami River in 1892. Hinde describes it thus:N’Gandu was a fortified town by the river-bank, with four gates, each approached by a very handsome pavement of human skulls, the bregma being the only part showing above ground. I counted more than 2000 skulls in the pavement of one gate alone. The campaign trail followed by Commander Dhanis with Capt. Hinde. First stop, before engaging in battle, was for reinforcement at Ngongo Lutete’s village of N’Gandu
Francis Dhanis with his Belgian officers and fighting men were strengthened by Ngongo Luteta and 10,000 of his men. Together they marched on to meet the Arabs further east.Fighting at the Arab stronghold, Nyangwe
Numerous times Ngongo Luteta’s courageous tactics pushed a battle to victory for the Belgians. In January 1894 the Belgians prevailed and central African trade routes no longer led to Zanzibar in the east but now the ivory and eventually the rubber, copper and gold all went out to the Atlantic on the west.Commander Dhanis led the campaign to drive the Arabs from the Lomami, Lualaba and all Maniema province, 1892-1894
Francis Dhanis was made a baron by King Leopold II of Belgium for his exemplary perseverance, foresight and skill throughout the campaign. But Baron Dhanis expressed a strong regret over what had occurred just four months before he received his honors in Belgium:
At N’gandu, Ngongo Luteta’s home on the Lomami, on the 15th of September 1893, a Belgian army officer named Jean Scheerlinck independently decided that Ngongo Luteta was a traitor. Without consulting his superior, Francis Dhanis, he court-martialed Luteta, had him condemned to death, and put before a firing squad.
Curious and sad what is excused by war.

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The Frontier in Indian Ocean History

As part of an Envirornmental History class for the esteemed Dr. John McNeill, I am trying to integrate an ecological and envirornmental focus into my study of identity, trade, social change and state building in the Eastern Congo. In other words, I want to know not only how merchants like Tippu Tip built nascent state structures and incorporated Swahili, Manyema, Nyamwezi, and other corporate or ethno-cultural groups into their organization, but also how the movement of these merchant-princes impacted the ecology of the Eastern Congo. What kind of crops did the Swahili Arab settlers plant? What sort of envirornmental changes did they set in motion?

It occured to me that such a project may be difficult to undertake without delving into Congolese and Omani archives. So, as part of a related but alternate set of questions, I would also like to explore how the competing discourses of Belgian, British, German and Arab primary sources sought to portray the envirornmental and social changes the Arabs set in motion. On the one hand, the Arabs called Nyangwe the 'New Bengal' and viewed themselves as bringing civilization and order to the land. They tamed the forest, and brought peace and order.

On the other hand, the many European travel accounts emphasize the devastation of Arab slave-trading, the many famines (which they linked with Arab settlement) and the general negative impact of the Arab presence. Of course this discourse itself, even if it was accurate, came to fulfillment only with European colonization--the worst years of ecological and social devastation were assuredly after the 1890s and the routing of Arab power in the Congo.

This relates back to the concept of the frontier in Indian Ocean history. Is there a way I can talk within an Indian Ocean framework of land-based frontiers? On the surface it doesn't appear to be an obviously helpful narrative framework. However, there are compelling cultural links (the presence of Comorians, Baluchis, and Omani Arabs in the Congo) and economic links (Indian financiers in Zanzibar linked the Congo River basin with the circuits of Indian Ocean capital) that make such a framework interesting. Using the idea of systems theory, which posits that we can find common features of a given 'unit' in terms of shared aspects of organization, I submit we can talk of the penetration of Indian Ocean cultural 'clusters' and the integration of Central Africa into Indian Ocean economic exchange and have legitimate historical evidence to back up our assertion. I am reminded as I consider this question of John Wilkinson's insight about Oman: "Oman as a 'natural' region has no real frontiers: like all such regions it tends to be rather more 'Omani' in places than others."

So it goes with the Indian Ocean: if we identify a set of shared religious practices, common clothing items, culinary features, familial organization, vocabulary, and more, that are found in the Indian Ocean, then certain places will have more ties than others, and this is also related to which 'features' we choose to compare.

Of course the challenge is to determine how much the 'Indian Ocean' actually explains; we want it to do some theoretical work, but we would err to depend on it to do heavy historical work as it relates to Central African history in general--most of the history of the Eastern Congo has logical connections with other lake regions in Tanganyika, Zambia, as well as points north in Uganda. But the fact that so few historians have even attempted to use it to look at the history of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century means that some potentially valuable understandings from this perspective can be integrated in with the existing literature.

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A Bend In the River

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

So begins V.S. Naipaul's classic of African literature. My last week in Oman had me searching for something to fill the spaces between the history and physics reading. I was pleased to pick up A Bend in the River a masterpiece from an extraordinarily gifted writer. I must tell you I "finished" it in two days. I say "finished" because my copy ends on page 286, as Salim the narrator heads downriver, escaping from the small town in the Congo where he has made his life. The last page is a like an ending, but I am left mysteriously wondering if there is more from Salim, whether the narrative has room for his other life at the end of that steamer voyage. Instead, the last few sentences read: "the sky hazed over, and the sinking sun showed orange and was reflected in a broken golden line in the muddy water. Then we sailed into a golden glow." A full stop, but not an ending.

Naipaul has both fascinated with his brilliant prose, and vexed with the often reactionary observations of his narrators, so much like autobiography. The man has undeniable talent, but I felt as I did when reading Paul Theroux's book Dark Star Safari; the man is grouchy, content with his sweeping views of 'Africans' and seemingly obsessed with the achievement of Europeans in contrasting his society with theirs. In this way the book reminds one of Heart of Darkness Perhaps this is a particular feature of our narrarator that Naipaul has captured with great skill, but, having read other of Naipaul's work, I suspect that Naipaul is able to write so penetratingly into Salim's mind because he himself feels the ambivalence of place, the loneliness, and the slight contempt of the privileged outsider.

Salim's family is from Africa, part of an Indian trading caste (the Khoja) who were originally Hindus but converted to Islam, particularly Ismaili Shi'a Islam. Salim introduces himself as an outsider/insider: "The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True Africa was at our back. Many miles of scrub or desert seperated us from the up-country people; we looked east to the lands of with which we traded--Arabia, India, Persia. These were also the lands of our ancestors. But we could no longer say that we were Arabians or Indians or Persians; when we compared ourselves with these people, we felt like people of Africa."

Salim feels insecure in his family, because they are static, falling behind in changing times. He wishes to get away. He lacks the religious conviction of his fathers and brothers and does not have a temperament like them to be "buried so deep in their lives that they were not able to stand back and consider that nature of their lives." This pessimism of Salim's "can drive men to do wonders" and it pushes him into Central Africa as a shop owner in Kisingani (one of the many way stops for the ivory trade, it was founded in 1883 by Henry Stanley). But even there, he writes of his displacement and loneliness, in a deliberate way: "I seperated myself from them. I still thought of myself as a man just passing through. But where was the good place? I couldn't say. I never thought constructively about it. I was waiting for some illumination to come to me, to guide me to the good place and the 'life' I was still waiting for."

Salim's commentary on both Africa and Europe reveals this insider/outsider dynamic. On the one hand, he and his family have mixed African-Indian servants, speak Swahili, and occupy a long established niche in African commerce. But one of the overriding themes of the book is the ambivalence of Salim's racial and cultural heritage. For instance, while his family and tribe continue to live in Africa and avoid political discussion of Africa's future, Europeans (through the eyes of Salim) are a more creative force in the modern world, and this makes him both envy and despise them:

"The Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues"

This dynamic finds expression in the affair he begins with Yvette, the young and beautiful wife of a European professor whose 'expertise' on this region of Africa is a penetrating example of the uses and misuses of historical knowledge. Salim reads the scholar's articles and eats with him and Yvette in their home, and then leaves to be with the latter at his house. He finds their company stimulating and it takes away his loneliness; this is the optimistic period where Salim and others in the new African university (The Domain) live "in the companionship of that pretence, to feel that...we all lived beautifully and bravely with injustice and imminent death and consoled ourselves with love."

Salim's discussions with his friend Indar reveal one of the book's dynamic figures. Indar leaves Africa, goes to university in London, and returns as a Lecturer in The Domain. Indar, like Salim, wanted more, but unlike Salim, he was rich and more ambitious. He tells Salim, "I found myself growing false to myself, acting to myself, convincing myself of my rightness for whatever was being described. And this is where I suppose life ends for most people, who stiffen in the attitudes they adopt to make themselves suitable for the jobs and lives that other people have laid out for them."

Of course, the affair ends badly, the situation under the unnamed but obvious character of The President (Mobutu) gets steadily worse, and Salim has to flee. The plot is simple, and the characters, when they are not Indian or European, seem curiously immune from Salim's otherwise penetrating interior gaze. Rarely do we see or hear about the inner life and thoughts of any African from Salim. Even his closest companion, Metty, the mixed Indian-African, is always there attendant to Salim's needs, obsequious, and seemingly concerned only with his female liasons. In the end it is Metty who Salim suspects of betraying him, after Salim tells him he can no longer take care of him. None of the African women Salim sleeps with in the brothels merit so much as a name, and there are only two other African characters who are given any narrative importance. One is Zabeth, a customer from a forest village who Salim admires for her enterprise and attachment to her village traditions. The other is her son, Ferdinand, a boy who grows into a man during Salim's stay in the Congo. I felt Ferdinand was more of a narrative device than a true character, he exemplifies for Salim the ambivalence he feels about the new generation of Africans. For Ferdinand was put in Salim's care by Zabeth, and at each juncture of the novel, Ferdinand straddles the ideological and social debates of post-colonial Africa: loss of tribal allegiance, European education, the African personality. Eventually it is he, as a newly appointed appendage of the post-colonial state, who saves Salim's life.

I always feel a sense of quiet pessimism upon finishing Naipaul's work. His prose tends towards the themes of decay and stagnation, loneliness and the loss of stability in the world. As a writer he must have struggled with this most explicitly as an Indian from Trinidad who was educated at Oxford. I suspect that in writing this book, Naipaul drew quite heavily on his own 'African experience' as an Indian minority in a majority African, postcolonial country. There are bits of him in both Salim and Indar. Of course, writing is autobiography, so this shouldn't surprise, but it ought to make one aware that the position of relentless outsider is not the only legitimate position of a writer, but the product of a unique background. (see Alan Nest's excellent review of the book which touches on this) I can identify in some ways with Naipaul's internal anguish. But I am still debating whether one has to, like Ferdinand, choose an identity and be subsumed by it, or pay the price of loneliness and exile like Salim for the sake of writing with a critical distance. I am not sure this is even the correct way to frame this debate. Can one maintain a critical distance, be true to oneself, and still be a participating member of a given community. Is it really that easy? Is 'fitting in' worth the inevitable price? Are these questions only relevant to those who, through some trick of fate, have lost their own true identity? For historians and anthropologists who want to consider the value of their own knowledge and who they produce it for, these are essential questions to fit within an ongoing critical self-analysis.

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