Congo. David Reybrouck van

       INTRODUCTION

      IT IS STILL THE SEA, OBVIOUSLY, BUT YOU CAN SEE THAT SOMETHING has changed, something about the color. The low, broad rollers rock the ship as benevolently as ever; there is still nothing but ocean, yet the blue is gradually becoming tainted with yellow. And that produces not green, the way you might remember from your lessons in color theory, but murkiness. The glimmering azure has vanished. There is no more turquoise billow beneath the noonday sun. The boundless cobalt from which the sun arose, the ultramarine of twilight, the leaden grayness of the night: gone.

      From here on, all is broth.

      Yellowish, ochre, rusty broth. You are still hundreds of nautical miles from the coast, but you know: this is where the land starts. The force with which the Congo River empties into the Atlantic is so great that it changes the color of the seawater for hundreds of kilometers around.

      Once, aboard the old packet boats, this discoloration made the first-time traveler to Congo think he was almost there. But the crew and old hands soon made it clear to the greenhorn that it was still a two-day sail from here, days during which the newcomer would see the water grow ever browner, ever dirtier. Standing at the stern he could see the growing contrast with the blue ocean water that the propeller continued to lift up from deeper layers. After a time, clumps of grass would begin drifting by, chunks of sod, little islands that the river had spit out and that were now bobbing about dazedly at sea. Through the porthole of his cabin he perceived dismal shapes in the water, “chunks of wood and uprooted trees, pulled up long ago from darkened jungles, for the black trunks were leafless and the bare stumps of thick branches sometimes roiled at the surface for a moment, then dove again.”¹

      In satellite images, one sees it clearly: a brownish stain that stretches out up to eight hundred kilometers (about five hundred miles) westward at the high point of the rainy season. It looks as though the dry land is leaking. Oceanographers speak of the “Congo fan” or the “Congo plume.” The first time I saw aerial photos of it, I couldn’t help but think of someone who slashes his wrists and holds them under water—but then eternally. The water of the Congo, the second longest river in Africa, actually sprays into the ocean. The rocky substrate keeps its mouth relatively narrow.² Unlike the Nile, no peaceful maritime delta has arisen here; the enormous mass of water is forced out through a keyhole.

      The ocher hue comes from the silt that the Congo collects during its 4,700-kilometer-long (about 2,900-mile) journey: from the high springs in the extreme south of the country, through the arid savanna and the weed-choked swamps of Katanga, past the endless equatorial forest that covers almost the entire northern half of the country to the rugged landscapes of Bas-Congo and the spectral stands of mangrove at the river’s mouth. But the color also comes from the hundreds of rivers and tributaries that together form the drainage basis of the Congo, an area of some 3.7 million square kilometers (about 1.4 million square miles), more than a tenth of all Africa, coinciding largely with the republic of the same name.

      And all those tiny bits of earth, all those torn-off particles of clay and mud and sand go floating along, downstream, to wider waters. Sometimes they hang suspended in place and glide on imperceptibly, then roil in a wild raging that mixes the daylight with darkness and foam. Sometimes they get stuck. Against a rock. An embankment. Against a rusty wreck that howls silently up at the clouds and around which a sandbank has formed. Sometimes they encounter nothing, nothing at all, nothing but water, different water all the time, first fresh, then bracken, finally salt.

      That is how a country begins: far before the coastline, thinned down with lots and lots of seawater.

      BUT WHERE DOES THE HISTORY BEGIN? Also much further away than