In this remote area with just a small patch of land cleared, there is an all-pervading sense of apprehension. Life for the tiny fishing community is one of poverty and anxiety. The barge arriving in Maluku has traveled km 60 miles from Kinshasa. It is part of a two-barge convoy with a small tug to push them. It took more than a month to reach Akula on the Mongala River.
Conditions for travelers are dire, with passengers packed in between sacks of coal and miscellaneous goods, jammed up against the edge of the barge, exposed to the blazing sun plus the overheated metal of the hull.
We were caught in a storm one night in the midst of the dark forest; it should perhaps be called a hurricane. It was frightening to be out there as the violent, torrential rain poured down, filling our canoe in a matter of seconds, to hear deafening cracks from the huge trees and the wild wind tearing at the river.
It was a feeling of complete vulnerability, as experienced by the people in the Congo Basin. Since , some people have lost their lives in accidents, on ships sinking or wrecked on the river and its tributaries. Business on board is busy and goods are traded throughout the journey, and with some quite improbable deals such as dried fish as payment for pharmaceuticals, or a crocodile for trousers, shirts, sexy underwear or a radio, then pigs for cheap perfume, pineapples for salt, grubs for sugar, and so it goes on.
Before each stopover in a populated area, dozens of canoes carrying a vast quantity and range of goods lie in wait for the barges, then make a frenzied move as they pull in.
Is there such a thing as a native forest? Studies in apparently pristine rainforests have often found ancient traces of cultivation and habitation, such as charcoal, pottery fragments and evidence of settlements.
The Distribution and Variety of Equatorial Rainforests. Washington DC 4 Maley J. The Distribution and Variety of the Equatorial Rainforests. Several animal species in this region are endangered, including mountain gorillas , chimpanzees and African wild dogs , mostly due to recent increases in deforestation and wildlife hunting. The rainforest provides crucial ecosystem services, such as regulating the climate, preventing drought , preserving unique species, and providing a source of food and medicine to local communities, said Alexandra Tyukavina, an assistant research professor of geographical sciences at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.
The Congo Basin rainforest is so valuable for sequestering carbon dioxide and producing oxygen that scientists have called the rainforest the world's "second lungs," following the Amazon rainforest, according to the European Space Agency.
Humans have lived in the Congo River Basin for 50, years, and the area is now home to approximately 75 million people, including distinct ethnic groups, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Archaeological evidence suggests that some tribes began to form villages along the Congo River around 4, years ago. Remnants of iron tools and pottery suggest that some of the groups settled along the river around 5, years ago, when populations of Bantu-speaking peoples migrated from the savannahs of West Central Africa throughout the Congo Basin — an event known as the Bantu expansion.
Deforestation, primarily as part of modern agricultural practices, is the main environmental threat to the Congo River Basin and its rainforest. And then they burn those logs to fertilize the soil with the ashes and grow crops there," Tyukavina said. Industrial logging is another driver of deforestation in the region, according to Mongabay. In addition, as the population in the region has grown at a rate of about 1. Bushmeat, or meat from wild animals like bats, monkeys, rats and snakes, which hunter-gatherer groups have traditionally relied upon as their main source of food now faces a new threat: overhunting.
But commercial hunters have increasingly targeted animals like monkeys and antelope for the commercial bushmeat trade. These midsize mammals are unable to reproduce fast enough to compensate for the high rate of hunting, causing their populations to decline. Related: Elephants vanish in Congo reserve. The region first became known as the "Congo" in the late s, from the kingdom of Kongo, an independent state that ruled the area around the mouth of the river from the late s through the s, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Zaire is the Portuguese adaptation of the Kikongo word nzere or nzadi, which means "river that swallows all rivers. The Congo has a dark and storied history. Because of all the resources that can be found along the Congo ivory, rubber, timber and rare metals such as cobalt, copper, diamond, tantalum, tin and gold , the region has long been the home of major conflicts and European colonialism.
In the late s, Portuguese explorers arrived in the Kongo kingdom and established trade outposts along the Congo River, according to the BBC. By that time, slave trade had existed in Africa for centuries — some historians estimate that African kingdoms sold captive prisoners of war to other African and Arab groups starting around B.
Portuguese traders quickly entered into the slave trade and began to send African slaves to plantations that other Portuguese traders had established on islands off the African coast, including Madeira and the Canary Islands, according to the United Kingdom's National Archives. A couple hundred years later, throughout the s and s, European traders from other countries, including Denmark, England, the Netherlands, Scotland and Sweden, came to the Congo region to seize African slaves for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Not here, unfortunately. During my last day on the Congo River the weather is placid, and we are proceeding briskly downstream, when another motorized pirogue roars up from the far shoreline. In it are four young men in camouflage uniforms, bearing AKs.
They are hollering in Lingala. One of them ropes our boats together. Two of them step aboard, holding their rifles at their hips. Their eyes widen when they see two Westerners. The young men claim to be policemen of some sort. Our fixers and the pirogue captain are all prideful young men who yell back at them. Pascal and I beg for calm.
Our ANR passenger remains, as always, exquisitely useless. We are a mere 30 miles from our destination, Mbandaka, where I plan to catch a flight to Kinshasha. The , inhabitants of that port city might as well be on another continent. The river at this juncture is a mile wide.
Its sovereignty is its wildness. The pirogue that these men have intercepted carries two laptops, four cameras, thousands of dollars in cash, and eight human lives. We are not going to win this. The only question is how much we will lose. After 30 minutes, a few cigarettes, a couple of bottles of water, and a dialogue that settles into a kind of fatigued stalemate before taking a weirdly jovial turn—Hey, you like Congo?
I like America! Their outboard motor is out of gas. And so they would like a full tank. And ten dollars. A fair price. We shake hands—it was only river commerce, after all—and then wave goodbye as the grinning young men with their guns swerve away from us, eventually disappearing into the silver-dark current somewhere beyond.
All rights reserved. This story appears in the October issue of National Geographic magazine. Travel on the Congo requires patience. Progress can be as slow as a few miles an hour. Barges get stuck in silt. Engines break down. Time inches by. Men play checkers. Some ways of life go on as they always have. Wagenia fishermen still craft enormous traps to snare fish in the roiling rapids outside of Kisangani, just as they did when the explorer Henry Morton Stanley first observed them during his famous voyage down the river in Share Tweet Email.
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