Word: congos
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Another Scot, the missionary-doctor David Livingstone, reached the Chambezi, the ultimate source of the Congo, in 1867. But it remained for his "rescuer," Henry Morton Stanley, to trace the Congo from its source to its mouth. In 1874 the onetime journalist, whose "discovery" of the supposedly lost Livingstone had made him an international celebrity, set out from England on a journey to resolve the riddle of the Nile's origin and to determine if the Lualaba, which Livingstone had believed to be a branch of the Nile, was really the upper Congo...
Stanley's feat left no doubts as to the origins and course of the Congo. It also opened up the country to exploitation. Trade had long been carried out on the lower part of the river, including a lively traffic in slaves that the Portuguese continued after other European nations had abandoned the practice. But following Stanley's expedition, the rape of the Congo began in earnest...
...international pressures forced Leopold to relinquish his personal king dom. But he had already sown the seeds of the horrors that Forbath later witnessed following Congolese independence in 1960. Instead of preparing its onetime col ony for self-rule, Belgium simply cut the Congo loose on six months' notice. The Belgian departure left a vacuum that ri val factions rushed to fill, touching off further bloodbaths...
...notes Forbath, the Congo has settled into something resembling stability. A confederation of tribes has been loosely tied into the nation of Zaire. The country, Forbath writes, is becoming un recognizable. "The tribal villages are also by and large gone . . . displaced by dreary modern mining towns" where tribes men wear plastic hard hats and carry lunch buckets, and "fires can be seen burning everywhere, burning through the grass, blackening the earth, destroying the land." But the river remains unchanged...
Unconscious of the men who have navigated it or murdered along its banks, the Congo continues to cross the continent, like a giant artery leading out of Africa's heart of darkness. - Peter Stoler