Beats from the Heart of Darkness

By Peter Stoler

THE RIVER CONGO by Peter Forbath; Harper & Row; 416 pages; $15

Joseph Conrad described the Congo River as "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea . . . its tail lost in the depths of the land." Peter Forbath shares Conrad's feeling for this mighty, mysterious river, which rises in southeastern Central Africa, more than 1,000 miles south of the equator and about a mile above sea level, and ends 3,000 miles later in the Atlantic Ocean. Forbath first saw the river as a journalist during the Simba uprising that bloodied the Congo basin in 1964. He has spent the intervening years assembling the story of what Central Africans call "the river that swallows all rivers." The result is an absorbing, fast-paced book that deserves to stand beside Alan Moorehead's White Nile and Blue Nile. Unlike the Nile, the Congo held no fascination for Europeans. It was discovered almost by accident by the Portuguese mariner Diogo Cao, who sailed into its mouth in 1482 while searching for, among other things, the kingdom of Prester John, whose realm had been the object of crusades for centuries.

For years afterward, Cao's countrymen traded and established settlements near the river's mouth. But they did not go too far inland; 100 miles upstream lay a series of 32 cataracts now known as Livingstone Falls. A stretch of white water, appropriately named the Cauldron of Hell, stopped early explorers as effectively as if it were the edge of the earth.

Later explorers were not so easily deterred. Mungo Park, the intrepid Scotsman who navigated the Niger, explored much of the area early in the 19th century without realizing that the Niger and Congo rivers were not one and the same.

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.

In October 1876 Stanley reached the Lualaba, launched a demountable boat dubbed the Lady Alice and began paddling to the sea.

The trip took 999 days, through dense rain forest and showers of spears and poisoned arrows from hostile natives. It took the expedition three weeks to descend Stanley Falls, and more than a month, much of it spent carrying the boats, to get through and around Livingstone Falls.

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.

The principal rapist, as Forbath makes clear, was Leopold, King of the Belgians (1865-1909).

Frustrated because his people did not want an African colony, Leopold set up a series of cultural committees as a front and acquired personal ownership of millions of square miles of Central Africa. His agents then terrorized villages for the rubber and ivory that fetched high prices in Europe.

In 1908 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.

Now, 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

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