Category: Photos of Rural Congo

Congo Market Visits

On By erasingbordersIn Congo Agriculture, Congo culture, Congo rainforest inhabitants, Congo Rural Life, Ikengo, Photos of Rural CongoLeave a comment
Saturday only the market opens in the village of Ikengo

And now for something completely different I want to focus on the open air market of Africa as the one place where the “winds of change” have had little effect over the last one hundred fifty years.  Those who have traveled in sub Saharan Africa will, I feel certain, find themselves reminded of their market expeditions  in reading the following descriptions of Congolese markets by two leading African explorers of the 19th century:  Dr. David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley.  Although it is Congolese markets more than one hundred years ago they describe here, the same scene could be discovered today in most countries of the continent.

First is a passage from The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa  from 1865 to His Death.  Livingstone spent several weeks in Nyangwe on the River Lualaba, central eastern Congo, recuperating from his futile wanderings in search of the Nile.  Every day he visited the busy marketplace of the large village.

Saturday at the Ingende Market

 

“All are pleased to tell me the names of the fishes and other things.  Lipidsirens (my note: a breed of chicken) are caught by the neck and lifted out of the pot to show their fatness.  Camwood ground and made into flat cakes for sale…. Are offered and there is quite a roar of voices in the multitude, haggling.  It was pleasant to be among them… vendors of fish run about with pots-herds full of snails or small fishes…each is intensely eager to barter food for relishes, and makes strong assertions as to the goodness or badness of everything; the sweat stands in beads of their faces – cocks crow briskly, even when slung over the shoulder with their heads down, and pigs squeal….They deal fairly, and when differences arise they are easily settled by the men interfering or pointing at me.” 

Whatever the particular African culture’s customs regarding gender roles and relations, it is the women who stand out in every African marketplace.  Livingstone writes of the Nyangwe market women:

“It seems to be a pleasure of life to haggle and joke, and laugh and cheat; many come

Fishermans Wife Negotiating at Ikengo Market

eagerly…..many are beautiful…. All carry very heavy loads of dried cassava and earthen pots which they dispose of very cheaply for palm-oil, fish, salt, pepper, and relishes for their food.  The men appear in gaudy lambas, and carry little save their iron wares, fowls, grass cloth, and pigs.” 

It should be mentioned that Arab slave traders attacked the Nyangwe marketplace while Livingstone resided there, killing over 400 people and leading to the Doctor’s flight to Ujijii where Stanley “found” him just months later in 1871.

Cassava root for sale at Ikengo - and everywhere else in Congo

There can be no doubt that Henry Morton Stanley was a hard, sometimes cruel, man who drove the Africans in his employ with little mercy.  Another aspect of Stanley’s character – his high regard for the innate capacity of the African – is revealed in the following paragraph from his The Congo and the Founding of Its Free State in 1885.  Stanley too clearly  learned something important from visits to Congolese markets:

“In the management of a bargain I should back the Congolese native against Jew or Christian, Parsee or Banyan, in all the round world.  Unthinking men may perhaps say cleverness at barter, and shrewdness in trade, consort not with their unsophisticated condition and degraded customs. Unsophisticated is the last term I should ever apply to an African child or man in connection with the knowledge of how to trade….I have seen a child of eight do more tricks of trade in an hour than the cleverest European trader on the Congo could do in a month…….Therefore when I write of the Congo native, whether he is of the Bakongo, Byyanzi, or Bateke tribes, remember to associate him with an almost inconceivable amount of natural shrewdness, and power of indomitable and untiring chaffer.”

As an eerie conclusion, I quote from Joseph Conrad’s  1900 commentary in The

Clothes Shop at Ingende Market

Heart of Darkness on the prevailing European view of the Congolese. Conrad marveled at “the extraordinary effort of imagination that was necessary to make us take these people for enemies”.   No doubt Conrad too spent some time in Congolese marketplaces during his Congo travels in 1890.

NOTE:  To enlarge the photos, click on them; the photo to the right here might  surprise you.

Congo Christmas in July

On By erasingbordersIn Congo culture, Disciples of Christ, Ikengo, Photos of Rural Congo, Protestant Church in Congo, Rural churches1 Comment

 

July 18, 2010 Prayer by layman for one of the offerings in the Church at Ikengo, Equateur Province
 
 
Maybe it’s the cultural emphasis on child bearing and parenthood. Maybe it’s the opportunity to celebrate Mary’s role in the divine drama in a predominantly Roman Catholic country. Maybe it’s the freedom to celebrate Christmas at all after being forbidden during most of the 32 years of Mobutu’s rule in Congo. Whatever the reason, the Congolese love Christmas. In many parishes of the Disciples Community in Congo, from a wire at the front of the church hang Christmas garlands, lights or bells. It can be seen as another offering, another testimony to the joy of Christ’s coming in the life of the community.

 

Leaving Longa

On By erasingbordersIn Congo Rural Life, Congo sacred music, Disciples of Christ, Health in Congo, Photos of Rural Congo, Rural churchesLeave a comment

The twenty five horsepower motor fired right up and the ten or twelve passengers settled into their plastic chairs or into their nests at the bottom of the pirogue. Before sitting we sang, “Biso tokobima na mpusa matembe/ Tokotambolaka nde nkolo Yesu”.

We are on the Ruki River which connects the mighty Congo to the Tshuapa, the tributary which has served as the route of successive waves of rebels seeking to overthrow the feeble governments of the country. The Ruki flows into the Congo at Mbandaka, the capital of Equateur Province, the least developed of the Congo’s 10 provinces. Equateur’s capital is also the headquarters town of the “Communaute Disciples du Christ au Congo”, number ten among 65 “Communautes” now making up the Church of Christ of Congo.

“We leave now on the next step of our journey/ The journey we walk together with our Lord Jesus” we sing before taking our seats in the pirogue. On our way, we all think of the Regional Minister for the Ingende/Longa Region who died in the Ruki just below Longa. On a night with little to no moon five months before, his over loaded pirogue had capsized and fifteen drowned. After we sang someone prayed for the deceased’s widow and family still living in Ingende where we would spend the next two nights.

"Soul Work"

On By erasingbordersIn Congo Agriculture, Congo Grass Roots Development Efforts, Disciples Church Development Aid, Disciples of Christ, Ikengo, Photos of Rural Congo

This was written in mid July after planting rice with the Pygmy young men and children at Ikengo. It’s an attempt to describe and account for the feeling of being so closely observed by one of the Pygmy youngsters while I filled the hole with dirt after planting the rice seed.

“Soul Work”

Just a pinch of seed/

You take and leave/

In the bed; the earth/

Crumbles beneath your touch./

　

This earth, a mix rich and strange,/

Teeming and foreboding,/

We handle microbes and nutrients,/

Imaging green shoots from doom./

Joints and muscles sigh/

Moving to rhythms of grace/

In the field to be,/

Now a grid of holes./

A rice harvest in the making/

In foreign fields and laboratory,/

The strain now here well studied,/

A product of microscope and cerebellum,/

From that other realm which yields/

Products but not the secrets/

Of its enthralling power;/

Behold, here now an acolyte./

He plants with us with such care,/

Laborious in filling the earth;/

His industry fascinates;/

It is not our way./

We are sprites from the forest,/

Kin to the fireflies dancing/

Before they lay a constellation/

Of stars in the grass./

To laugh is our industry,/

Our calling to live/

In the darkest, deepest places/

With, but why claim this?, our own secrets./

　

This one has come to plant with us/

A field of rice, and we stare/

In wonder for he plants differently/

And we all may eat this rice together./

　

　

A Season of Joy

On By erasingbordersIn Congo Agricultural Projects, Disciples Church Development Aid, Ikengo, Photos of Rural Congo, Rural churches

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

About thirty minutes into the worship service in the Ikengo parish church, the sermon came to me. I had the scripture passage, Jesus referring to a child as the greatest among them, but as the service began I still felt stymied to find words for the grand paradox of the message. Gradually, the setting, the singing, the heat under the tin roof freed me and I simply decided to try to describe the sources of my joy in worshipping with them that morning. It was the first time in my life I had discarded my notes for a sermon and I exulted as I scribbled “A Season for Joy” above three points on a page of my notebook.

I began with thanks and praise for the vision of Rev Paul Elonda in the founding of the Centre Agro Pastorale (CAP) in 1969. The village’s two primary schools, secondary school and health center were cited as among the fruit produced by the vision of a church leading the way in rural development. Most recently, the visit of the Equator Province’s Governor to the CAP had brought about the construction of a new school building by a British non profit. Having heard the villagers’ testimonies regarding CAP’s aid in improving their crop yields and quality I moved on to a more personal testimony.

Whites have been coming to the Congo for over five hundred years either in search of riches among the incomparable natural resources of the country or they have come seeking to give of themselves. It is another grand paradox that those who have come to give return with the greater riches. We who come to help strengthen the Church in Congo find ourselves strengthened as those who came in the past to evangelize were themselves evangelized by the Congolese. What a joy to discover spiritual resources within the people here richer than the coltan and the cobalt prized by the powerful.

But the greatest joy, I declared, comes with having discovered that God liberates peoples and persons from enslavement and from the exploitation suffered by the Congolese in these days. In the biblical accounts, the liberation of a people does not result from foreign intervention or initiative. Liberation comes in the biblical record when the captive people find the way to free themselves at hand within themselves. Some day the Congolese people will take up, like David, their five smooth stones or be led from their wilderness by a stuttering Moses and an Aaron.

Just as South Africans freed themselves from white rule under apartheid so will Congolese free themselves from the foreign plunder of their resources and the resulting deprivation and impoverishment. Nothing brings greater joy than this knowledge of the source of the people’s power and liberation. It was I proclaimed this knowledge that caused Jesus to “quiver with joy” (in the French translation of Lk 10:21) for God had hidden such things from the powerful and revealed them to the simple and the common people.

Among the medley of hymns preparing us for the “sainte scene” of communion, we sang “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”. I leaned over and shared with the Ikengo pastor Luka Is’olenge that it had been Gandhi’s favorite. Its meditation on Jesus’ call to draw on the best within ourselves described for the lifelong Hindu why he considered himself a follower of Jesus as well.

On the return to Mbandaka Sunday afternoon, I rode on the back of a motor bike piled with my gear. We fairly flew by children and adults, some of them waving and calling “mondele” (white man), and I couldn’t keep from smiling. It had been a great day.

　

RETURN TO IKENGO

On By erasingbordersIn Disciples Church Development Aid, Disciples of Christ, Ikengo, Photos of Rural Congo, Pygmy or Batswa people of Congo, Rev. Elonda Ifefe

　

The village of Ikengo welcomed me as a son of the village on my return. On our first visits there forty one years ago my role was to drive the Youth Department truck loaded with thirty plus youth singing above the groaning of the truck springs on the 30 km, two hour trip from Mbandaka . Everyone but the driver evacuated the vehicle at the culvert fashioned with branches which often had to be repaired before the last leg of the journey.

My two return trips this summer have been made comfortably seated in a plastic lawn chair placed in a pirogue powered by a 15 horsepower outboard motor. The village has grown considerably; what had been a sleepy village of 500 inhabitants is now several times larger. The deterioration of the road from Mbandaka, similar to the deplorable conditions of the roads and transportation infrastructure throughout the country, has not prevented the Governor of Equator Province and other dignitaries from making the trek to Ikengo these days.

The reputation for size and quality of the pigs raised at the Church’s Centro Agro Pastorale (CAP) d’ Ikengo, and the lovely retreat-like setting on the Congo River attract most of Ikengo’s visitors with vehicles these days. This was not the case ten years ago when a large cattle and pig raising ranch was in full swing. Former President Mobutu’s Minister of Finance maintained the road for the multiple vehicles of his ranch, developed on the land across the road from the Church’s CAP. The rain forest where giant trees emitted the shrieks and squawks of monkeys and birds was cleared in 1980 to house a large work force and sheds for the livestock. The ranch ceased operations with the death of the owner but the CAP maintains the village’s identity as the prime source for the tastiest pork in the Mbandaka area.

Rev. Paul Elonda’s founding vision of the Church’s vital role in developing the natural resources of the country is carried out at CAP today by the cultivation of the most advanced vegetable seed varieties, pig and chicken raising and the trainings carried out at the Center. The full time staff consists of ten workers and the CAP Director, with nine of the men being of Pygmy background. The current director, a Bantu, helped start a network of Pygmy civil rights groups in Equator Province before beginning work at the Center. That organizing effort began his collaboration with one of the Province’s very few Pygmy secondary school graduates now working at the Mbandaka office of UNICEF.

The preponderance of Pygmies on the staff remains something of a mystery to me so I look forward as I write this to having some of my questions answered. Whether the Peace Corps volunteer who spent two years at the Center in the mid 70s brought the village Pygmies into the Center’s life is an unknown. What I do know is that Church leaders years ago spoke out against the widespread discrimination against the Pygmies as an “inferior“, even “subhuman“, minority of the village and Equator Province population. Although I don’t recall ever meeting a Pygmy resident of Ikengo forty years ago, they were confined to the end of the village at the time, I did learn that they were masters of the hunt and supplied villagers with meat from the forest. This weekend I preach in the Ikengo Church where Pygmies now worship and I will no doubt have some fresh learnings to report on later.

The story of the Peace Corps volunteer who married a girl from the village also remains something of a mystery. Before returning to the States they had three children while he worked in Peace Corps headquarters in Kinshasa. No one I’ve spoken with to date seems to know his whereabouts or that of the wife and children. The foundation of the adobe brick house he built next to the River bank provides the outline today of the Center’s “Payote”, the thatch roofed hut without walls where visitors to the Center are now welcomed.

Worship on the River 6/27/10

On By erasingbordersIn Congo sacred music, Congolese Daily Life, Disciples of Christ, Photos of Rural Congo

Worship began with one of the choral groups parading from the beach swaying, clapping and singing their way up the ladder of steps to the sanctuary. Ministers and guest preacher (yours truly) followed, the latter noting carefully the gaps in the wooden boards five feet above the sand below. After a night, or in some cases several nights, of fishing the great river surrounding the island fishing village of Kinshasa, the fishermen and families were preparing for their day of rest.

Our half hour wait after crossing the river permitted me to learn some of the history of this Disciples’ parish. The veteran preacher, one of the two serving the parish, had first come in 1970 as a fishernan and a decade later began to preach here. The faithful of Kinshasa had achieved the milestone of purchasing sheet metal roofing for the sanctuary in the seventies, ten years after the Disciples Community became an autonomous church led by Congolese.

That the village was largely a poor community was seen in the appearance of the children and the rudimentary houses on stilts extending a quarter mile along the beach. What was not apparent was the fact the village had been pillaged this year by the small band of rebels who attempted to take the city of Mbandaka on Easter Sunday. Their minister informed me that not a few residents had still not returned after fleeing the men with machine guns who briefly occupied their village in April.

An hour into the worship service, the sanctuary was mostly filled with nearly 300 singing and clapping children, youth and adults. Among the five or six chorale groups of varying size and composition, the group of 25 men, all in white shirts with blue stripes, stood out. “They rocked” and “we rocked” seems inadequate, even mild, as a description of the mood created before the sermon.

Old man Simeon’s blessing of the infant Jesus in the temple was my scripture selection for the Sunday before the 50th Anniversary of Congo’s independence as a new nation. The theme of waiting, one any fisherman can appreciate, was associated with Jesus’ fulfillment of the nation Israel’s hopes. Parents of the community were celebrated and congratulated for their commitment and sacrifice in enabling both boys and girls to cross the river daily for school. I concluded with mention of my father’s upcoming 98th birthday and a tribute to his perservenace in awaiting the birth of two great grandsons.

“Every child comes into the world with the message that God is not yet discouraged in the creation of human beings”. Rabindrath Tagore’s quote summed up my message which was followed by me singing “Jesus Loves Me” in English while another guest minister sang in Lonkundo.

An offering for the guest minister yielded 58 crumpled and tattered bills totaling more than $5 and a large fish. A final prayer for a safe crossing before the canoe’s outboard motor was started concluded what had been an unforgettable worship experience.