Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
One night, after the others went to bed, I left our mud and wattle house, my headlamp shining a
pale swath in the dark beneath the abundant silver of equatorial stars. It reflected off the eyes of
spiders on the path as I crossed the camp to the forest. The chirring of insects deepened with each
step down to the stream. At the bottom of the hill, I paused, then walked out onto a log.
The night cries were resonant, the air almost palpable with the sound of frogs. As I listened,
one group lifted their singing to a pitch, then dropped off as another, their voices entirely different,
picked up. Some kept more or less steady, but when I turned off my headlamp, they remarked the
change and the night got quieter. They slowly resumed their orchestra, and I distinguished at least
four different kinds of frogs and grew accustomed to their intervals, their crescendos and pauses. A
splash just to my side, at the reeds, startled me. The music again lulled. Above me, beyond the trees
on either side of the stream, hung the ragged line of the starlit sky.
As I stood, listening, staring up, the night so dark I felt disembodied, it occured to me that I
couldn't evaluate such a place. Have any of us ever known undisturbed nature? The stream seemed
thriving, pristine, but hunters had passed through here thousands of times. Daily, villagers bathed,
suds making rainbows, butterflies swarming bars of soap, alighting upon them and pulsing their
wings.
The age of extinction in which we live is our creation, corresponding to the rapid growth of our
population, and our industrial innovations. Environmental degradation has a long past here. Over
a thousand years ago, the Bantu established trade routes for salt, copper, and iron, founding em-
pires across Africa. In what was now the DRC, beginning in the late fourteenth century and lasting
until the mid-seventeenth, the Kongo Kingdom ruled on the coast, and farther inland, the King-
doms of Luba (1585-1889) and Lunda (1665-1887) thrived. From 1483, Portugal traded with the
Kongo, converting its people to Catholicism and then, more and more, buying slaves, until, in 1665,
it conquered the kingdom and created a puppet state. The Portuguese shipped millions of Africans
to the Americas, and during four centuries of slave trade, “America,” as Thomas Turner writes in
Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth, and Reality
, “entered into the collective imagination of the Kongo
community as the place where people went after they died.”
The roots of exploitation ran so deep here that it was hard to fathom the impact. The recent wars
were but the latest consequences of what was possibly Europe's most damaging colonial scheme.
Africa's dark heart was not something the West found, but rather brought and continued to bring,
selling weapons, propping up dictators, allowing material exploitation to run its course in any form.
If the area became known for diseases, it was in part because the social structure had been des-
troyed, the people sickly, seeking refuge from slavery in the forest. Illness and parasites that had
less impact on healthy populations thrived.
In 1884, with the Conference of Berlin, an event that formalized the European colonization of
Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium took control of the Congo. The exploitation of everything liv-
