Een Excursie in Congos Bos

Oorspronkelijk geschreven in voorjaar 2005; hier geplaatst met kleine edits en een nieuwe introductie & nawoord op 14 November 2025

Me in Congo

SORRY IK HEB DEZE POST NOG NIET VERTAALD, MAAR DAT ZAL IK BINNENKORT DOEN. IN DE TUSSENTIJD KUN JE DE AUTOVERTALING HIER VINDEN. LET OP DAT DAAR FOUTEN IN KUNNEN STAAN.

Introduction

I wrote this true story back in spring 2005, based on an excursion I had made the preceding summer during three months of fieldwork deep into the forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (the fieldwork was already deep into the forest, the excursion went even deeper). I had traveled to the area to study bonobos, also called pygmy chimps, as part of my PhD studies in biological anthropology through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a guest researcher at the field site in Salonga National Park, set up and run by a foreign research institute. The field site itself was 25 kilometers from the nearest village and, during my time there, we were five researchers (three white foreigners and two Congolese from Kinshasa), usually supported by a rotating crew of around five men from the village working as guide or cook. Since the village was far away and we only passed it briefly twice, on our way in and out, my interactions with the locals primarily concerned the men working at the site, most of us speaking in broken French. As may become apparent from this text, I became increasingly interested in the people, their culture, the colonial and neocolonial history, and the context and local effects of the field site, which would later result in a rather drastic change in my focus of study. I dug up this story because I think it can give us a tiny yet valuable glimpse into the lives of Congolese people in a remote area in the center of the country. It is also an opportunity to help shed light on the ongoing contemporary atrocities in the DRC, driven by a long history of foreign capitalist greed, severely underreported and much less visible on social media than those happening in Palestine. Please see the afterword at the end for more reflections.

All names in this story have been changed to protect people’s identities.

An excursion in Congo’s forest

My backpack was way too heavy, but I considered everything inside as absolutely essential. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to keep up, that yet again I would be the one lagging behind. Ellen and Jack claimed that I was in a much better shape than two months before and that I surely wouldn’t have any problems walking 20 kilometers with a heavy load on my back. I still had some doubts. Ellen and I would walk to Ntaku, an open space in the forest with a large water body, where we would set up our tents and stay for two nights. It was impossible to ignore this opportunity, as Ntaku was known as a drinking spot for many large mammals, an excellent wildlife viewing area. But I was hesitant to leave the relative safety of the campsite for such an expedition, to leave the well-marked trails in the forest of the study area where we now recognized every fallen tree, every broken branch and every curve, to trade it for two uncomfortable nights in unfamiliar surroundings. It would become a nightmare if someone would break a leg or step on a poisonous snake.

Jack had suggested that we should take Alongi as our guide, that it would enhance his status towards the other guys working for the project. I had previously experienced Alongi’s temperament while working with him in the forest, but after a couple of his nasty jokes and tricks it seemed that we actually started to get along quite well. Now he even called me his “petite soeur”, his little sister. And I by far preferred him over his younger brother Menga, who didn’t speak much French and who was often sleepy, or laughing his head off about something funny that he refused to share with us. Alongi was much more alert and would be better at keeping us away from the elephants that could sometimes mysteriously appear without nearly the noise you’d expect from such huge creatures in a dense forest.

It would be four of us, as Boboto was coming too. I used to call Boboto “the singing cook”. He sometimes prepared our meals when both our regular cooks were unavailable. It was clear that he enjoyed the work more than anyone else. He was never annoyed by our requests for roasted peanuts or fried bananas and he sang beautifully and cheerfully, filling the camp with a happy atmosphere, bringing a smile on everyone’s face. And he always called Ellen and me if he spotted the black mangabey that so often hung around in the trees near the campsite. Boboto was just a very friendly guy.

So this morning we would be on our way. Alongi seemed somewhat nervous and he started to shout at Boboto for not dividing up the stuff they needed to carry equally between their backpacks. There was a lot of laughter when the guys tried to decide whether one was heavier or not. Apparently there wasn’t much difference at all, but Alongi was only happy after a pineapple had been transferred from his to Boboto’s backpack. Immediately after this incident he became impatient, urging us to get going and exaggerating the time it would take us to get to Ntaku. At around 10 am we finally left the camp with the usual exchange of many “bajos” (goodbye in Lingala). As the trails were too narrow to walk next to each other, we had to form a row. As usual, I avoided being the first in line. Although it meant that I could not indicate the tempo myself, I could dream away easily and just follow the leader without having to pay much attention to spider webs and snakes. This time Ellen was walking ahead, just for the six kilometers on the P-trail that we knew so well. After leaving the study area, Alongi would take the lead. Talking was too exhausting and would scare all the animals away, so we were quiet. And we soon got into that meditative state associated with walking, walking, walking.

After more than an hour we arrived at Laboka, a much smaller version of Ntaku, but also a drinking spot for large mammals. The guys had built a platform in one of the larger trees there for the project. Jack and I had once set up a tent there to stay overnight and watch for animals under a full moon. It had been incredibly uncomfortable, so high up in the tree, and an unbelievably large number of insects had kept us from going outside the tent. At 8 pm we heard elephants, wandering through the mud, splashing water. Although it had been too dark to see anything, just the sounds of these majestic animals had been enough to make us feel overwhelmed and humble. Soon after the elephants had left, we heard the roar of a leopard, so powerful that it made the entire forest tremble. Thinking back of that night still makes me wonder about the lives of these fascinating creatures, about the many aspects of the forest that we never even saw.

But this time we would not stay at the platform; we would actually have to cross Laboka. I had been halfway once before and knew that there was a lot of mud, up to our thighs. Alongi would guide us through, but soon we noticed that we had gotten ourselves into a real deep patch. The elephants had been here again and had loosened and deepened the ground with their heavy footsteps. Alongi was convinced that there was no better way, so we waded and struggled further. Every step involved the sucking sounds of mud trying to hold on to our feet, every step we would wonder how much deeper we would sink. I started to feel slightly claustrophobic, asking myself whether there would be a way out of this mess. And then I took the step that caused me to get stuck up to my bellybutton.

I immediately panicked. I did not see any branches or things to hold onto or pull myself up with. I could barely move my legs and I was afraid that any movement would just cause me to sink deeper. The world started to spin around me faster and faster, while I imagined choking to death by inhaling the mud that would soon surround my entire body. Alongi and Boboto were about 20 meters ahead, so they were of no help, but fortunately Ellen was not far behind me. She pointed out a tiny bit of short grass at a higher and dryer area of sand that I should just be able to reach. I struggled for a couple of minutes and I managed to pull myself and my heavy backpack out of this misery. My legs were shaking heavily, but I had to continue. This was no place to take a break and relax. It took ten more minutes before we reached solid ground, but it felt like I had spent half a day swimming in a pool of glue.

The elephants of Laboka had certainly made it difficult for us to cross their territory. But then again, they had not shown their presence while we were in this vulnerable position, even though they could have attacked any time. People say that elephants have a very good memory, so I can imagine that in this area they are not very fond of humans at all. The village of Lampu, which is located a 25 kilometers walk from our campsite, knows a long history of elephant killing, for meat and for ivory. As far as I could tell, it was all in some way connected to Pappa Elombe. I had heard many things about his time as elephant hunter, which had been before machineguns were readily available due to the civil war. This short grumpy old guy had actually killed elephants with spears. Sometimes he would tell stories in Lingala to the other guys and, even though I could not understand the language, his singing and dancing, his tone of voice and animated body movements gave me an understanding of the dangers involved.

Pappa Elombe was thought to have some sort of power over the elephants (just as Pappa Koko was thought to have power over the green mamba, a very poisonous snake). Jack, a rather down-to-earth guy, seemed convinced that Pappa Elombe had once sent elephants to chase him in the forest after a serious argument about money between the two. Previous camp managers had freely lent the pappa money, but now Jack tried to explain how much he owed the project. Pappa Elombe did not believe it and got extremely upset. The next day, Jack was in the forest with one of the local guys named Bondeko when they suddenly heard elephants behind them. They decided to change direction with 90 degrees, but the elephants kept following them. Again, they changed direction, but they couldn’t shake them off that easily. Finally, after about half an hour, they got rid of the elephants and returned to the camp. Bondeko told Jack about Pappa Elombe’s powers and explained that he should make up with the old guy, otherwise he would be in trouble.

Pappa Elombe was very skilled in recognizing the most dangerous elephants, namely the ones that were not real elephants, but people who could change their physical appearance freely between human and elephant shapes. This was a very important skill, because killing such an individual would call for revenge from the other “shape-shifting” elephants. It would basically be the same as suicide. Alongi had once been Pappa Elombe’s student and they had gone out killing elephants together many times. Alongi’s impatience and reckless courage (or stupidity if you will) had gotten him into trouble on numerous occasions. If Pappa Elombe mentioned Alongi in his stories, he would always end by saying: “Eeh, Alongi, eh-eh-eh-eh.”, which would be repeated in chorus by everyone listening. I interpreted this as something like: “Alongi, that lucky dumbass.” Because, despite his careless actions, he was still alive and well. This fact had caused great admiration and fear by the people in the village. They concluded that Alongi must have very special powers. Even though he had killed the wrong kind of elephants, he had actually gotten away with it.

Jean once told a story about Alongi at the dinner table. Jean was a friendly and educated guy from Kinshasa, working on the tree monitoring project. One day he was in the forest doing the phenology, or looking at the fruiting stages of the trees along the trails. Alongi had passed him late in the afternoon to look for bonobos (apes closely related to chimpanzees) and their night nests, so that the students would be able to observe them in the early morning. After a while, Alongi appeared before Jean again, looking as if he had seen a ghost. He was breathing heavily and his t-shirt was ripped apart. He told Jean how he had ended up right in the middle of an elephant group. All of a sudden he had been surrounded by four individuals, including a furious male. Mysteriously, Alongi had managed to escape and it was suggested that he must have made an incredible jump, flying from the Nkuma trail almost five kilometers back to the spot where Jean had been in only a few minutes. Clearly, because of his status, Alongi was a key character in the existence of the project. If he had not agreed to give up the poaching of elephants and to work with the institute by setting up the camp and supporting the research activities (while of course being paid for it), the project would never have been possible.

So now we were walking with this guy, following his lead into a forest that we did not know. Sometimes it struck me that we were absolutely dependent on him, that basically he could do anything he wanted, he had total control over the situation. But then he would stop to carve our names in a tree, a local tradition that had resulted in special large trees at strategic positions, identifying who had been there and how long ago. It was especially disarming to see his sincerity in these efforts. On the other hand, he could sometimes enjoy our confusion or fear in certain situations. Once he called to me with a loud voice: “Karin, regarde là!”, wildly pointing to the ground as if there was a snake. When I froze and showed a frightened face, he started to laugh and laugh, repeating what he had just said over and over again “Karin, regarde là! Karin, regarde là!”. Another time, Ellen had walked straight into one of those huge sticky spider webs that harbor large and mean biting spiders. She screamed and ran, waving her arms high in the air. There had been no spider, but she had been so startled that she had panicked. Of course Alongi did not do anything to calm her down. Instead he burst with laughter and I thought he was close to rolling on the forest floor, shaking and holding his belly.

This time, on our way to Ntaku, there was another such occasion. We had bumped into a so-called savannah patch, a weird round grassy area, a rare place that was not invaded by the forest. I had seen them from the plane when we flew into the area; they were sometimes more than ten kilometers in diameter. This was one of the largest continuous forests in the world, a national park of 36,000 km², but the seemingly never ending layer of tree crowns was interrupted by those mysterious circles. I had wondered why they existed. Did it perhaps have something to do with soil types? Was the earth in some areas not rich enough to sustain the trees? Although it was a relief to be able to see further than the 15 meters of sight we had become accustomed to in the forest, the sun was burning hot and the high grass was cutting our skin. Fortunately, this particular patch was not very large.

Boboto asked for my lighter, which I gave to him wondering what he would do with it. It occurred to me in an instant: “Was he going to burn the savannah?” And immediately we saw the flames and the smoke caught by the wind. The fire was coming right at us and we were still in the middle of the patch! Ellen gave me a frightened look and asked “Don’t you think this is dangerous? Do you think we will be able to make it to the forest edge? Maybe we should run. I think we should run!” and she pushed me in the direction of safety. I was ready for a spurt, only Alongi was right in our way. He looked at us, feigning confusion, and asked what was the problem. Then he grinned and said that there was nothing to worry about. Meanwhile the fire was quickly coming towards us and I thought we would be fried alive. Then I suddenly realized that Boboto was lighting the grass over and over again, every few steps, while he was following us. I explained it to Ellen and, after some deep sighs of relief, we walked calmly to the edge of the patch into the cool protective forest where we waited until the fire reached the first trees and died out.

We were maybe 15 kilometers away from our camp when we approached a small campsite near the river. Alongi pointed at some broken twigs along the trail and stated that someone had passed through not so long ago, that it might have been poachers. Ellen and I exchanged a few glances, expressing disbelief, doubt, and an edge of fear. We were wondering whether Alongi was pulling one of his tricks again, as he had claimed before that he wanted to stay at the campsite overnight and continue the expedition to Ntaku only the next day. This would be a good excuse to keep us from moving on. Of course we saw the tracks, but perhaps they weren’t poachers, perhaps they were long gone. But would we really want to take the risk of bumping into guys with guns in such a remote place in the forest? Alongi checked the sides of the river for more tracks. The three of us followed. He pointed out some footsteps that I could not distinguish from the natural patterning in the sand. Although Boboto gave an excited confirmation, I was not entirely convinced and Ellen looked skeptical too. Finally he found some real clear fresh footsteps. We could no longer deny that someone had been here fairly recently, within the last two days.

We decided that it was too late in the afternoon to return to the camp, so we would set up our tents, eat, sleep, and return tomorrow. Boboto explained to us that it was too dangerous to continue. These men were unpredictable and Alongi and Boboto would not be able to guarantee our protection. After all we were “rich white girls”. Who knows what they would want to do with us, other than just steal out stuff. I was thinking “rape”, “kidnap”, “hostage”, “guns” and I started to believe that perhaps it would be better to return immediately. I would rather cross a muddy Laboka in the dark night than to wait in our tent to get attacked and abducted. But I calmed myself down, realizing that it was too late to do anything but enjoy a bath in the river and a nice dinner of sweet potatoes and pineapple. This is exactly what we did. Ellen and I went to a beautiful spot at the river where the water was clear and the sand was white. We immersed ourselves in the cool stream, splashing, and giggling, forgetting about our frustrations and concerns.

After this refreshing bath, we set up our tent and retreated, while Boboto was cooking and Alongi went out fishing. We were chatting intensely about our experiences for the past months at the camp when Boboto came calling us with an excited voice. We had not even heard the forest pigs that had come to eat from the garbage that Boboto had just thrown about 20 meters from our tent. They ran away as soon as we approached, while Boboto was laughing about our poor sense of hearing. He made a fantastic dinner, but the bees came quickly, attracted by the smell of people and food. It was dangerous to eat with so many bees around, because you could accidentally swallow one and they could sting you in your mouth or throat. So we gorged our food and locked ourselves up in our tents. And suddenly it was night.

It was probably one of the most fearful nights of my life. As soon as the darkness surrounded us and everyone else had apparently fallen asleep, I realized how vulnerable we were, with as our only protection a thin piece of fabric. The poachers could come back, or we could be trampled by elephants, or attacked by a hungry leopard. We were suddenly in the territory of all those creatures that would never approach us 15 kilometers back at our campsite. But here the rules were different. I heard the sound of snapping twigs around us, I felt the presence of a living being and I was paralyzed in my sleeping bag. I was afraid to make a sound and I wish I had closed the tent properly. We had only closed the gauze part of the “door”, which meant that we could be seen easily. I could not imagine going to sleep at all and thought I would be in this uncomfortable stiff position the entire night. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the campfire started burning again. I was shocked when I saw the flames reach high and I quietly woke Ellen by poking her in her arm. We exchanged startled looks and waited and listened. Perhaps the poachers had come back! But there was nothing to be seen or heard, except Alongi’s snoring from the other tent next to us, so we assumed that the fire had caught flame again by itself and Ellen went back to sleep. And me? I spent the rest of the night listening to some animal roaming around our tents and wishing it was morning.

Then, when the morning finally arrived, I wished it was evening. I was sore and tired and grumpy and I wished that we had never bothered to come on this stupid expedition. Now we would have to walk the 15 kilometers back with our heavy backpacks, back through muddy Laboka, without even having seen Ntaku. All this effort for nothing. As soon as we were on our way, we heard a big bang. Ellen and I wondered “Was that a gun shot? Or perhaps a falling tree?”, but Alongi and Boboto did not say anything and we simply continued walking. Later we would hear that it had been a shot with a big caliber gun, the one used to kill elephants.

The way back was much easier, especially since Alongi found a way through Laboka that didn’t involve much mud at all. When we reached the study area, they began to walk faster and faster. I was barely keeping up and had to ask Ellen to walk a bit slower. The last two kilometers were a nightmare, my legs almost collapsed, but I made it, back in the relative safety of the camp. Or was that feeling of safety just an illusion? Had we been living in a big bubble of an imagined world for the last two months? All I knew was that the camp had a radio and a satellite phone, two connections to the outside world. That was all that mattered to me really.

Back in the camp, Alongi immediately started to tell Jack everything about the poachers. He provided the names of the six guys who he knew were involved in poaching activities, including one from the military. The weapons came from a commandant, while the chief of the national park, in charge of nature conservation efforts, was probably corrupt and paid by poachers and military. He mentioned that he had seen a sign on a tree, which indicated that 411 elephants had been killed. Poachers like to brag about their achievements and do this by cutting out their names and their kills. He spilled everything he knew and told Jack that Patricia and Peter, the researchers in charge of the field site, should inform their embassy and pressure the Congolese government to do something about this.

It was odd to see Alongi so concerned about poachers, while everyone knew that he had been a poacher himself. Was he all of a sudden a converted conservationist? Did he actually care about the elephants? Jack suggested that Alongi must have felt threatened by his previous competitors. He had agreed to cooperate with the project and he now felt responsible for the study area and the inflow of legal money from the researchers. Also, the elephants might flee into our study area, which in turn would be dangerous for everyone walking around on our trails. I was wondering what was the effect of the project on the lives of the local guys. I had heard stories about Alongi being so obsessed with the elephant hunt that he had gathered many many tusks and, while the flesh of the bodies was rotting in Laboka, he had to knock on his neighbors doors to beg for food. Maybe now he was becoming a more responsible person.

There was also the story of Esengo and Bondeko who once had stacks of guns stuffed underneath their beds. They had earned enough money with the ivory trade that they could afford to travel to Kinshasa and attend university. When they ran out of cash, they returned to the village to get more ivory in order to continue their education. But that was in 1997, when Laurent Kabila and his troops invaded Kinshasa to overthrow the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. The First Congo War (1996-1997) was soon followed by the Second Congo War (1998-2002), bringing their plans to a definite end. The two men found themselves stuck in the village, unable to finish their degrees, so they had no other choice but to return to subsistence farming.

Now they were rather happy with the presence of the project and the possibility to participate. Although there were still plenty of difficulties for the villagers in their daily lives, and there was always another potential war waiting around the corner, the project brought new imaginations of possibilities. At the same time, the influx of money also caused tensions and conflicts. Bondeko told us once that he could barely save parts of his salary, because family and neighbors all demanded a share. And in order to counter the increasing consumption of alcohol, which was one of the few items that money could buy in this area, the research institute regularly brought in goods from Kinshasa, such as clothing, baby bathtubs, and bikes, creating a small economy that was completely dependent on the field site.

After three very intense months in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I left the country with mixed feelings, wondering what changes would be needed to improve the lives of the people who have been faced with a violent history of colonialism, warfare, corruption, poverty, and a lacking infrastructure for as long as they can remember. I once spoke about this with Peter. He seemed to think that rebuilding the economy would be the way forward for this country. Creating a sense of trust and confidence by the presence of Western companies. After all, if the Westerners return, it must be safe. Of course, he simply ignored the fact that all the problems had been caused by Westerners in the first place. Would bringing in a new load of us really change things for the better? And wouldn’t international logging companies be jumping at the opportunity to start cutting down that gorgeous forest, the home of our bonobos? Would such companies even contribute anything to the national and local economies?

Ultimately, a lot depends on the characters of the people in power and their resistance to international and national lobby, blackmail, and corruption. Elections are planned for June 2005, but in the meantime there are still clashes between the military and rebels in the east of the country. The West has its own interests in the politics of Congo and is known to meddle and manipulate. Let’s not forget that the most promising postcolonial leader, Patrice Lumumba, had been murdered by separatists from the province of Katanga, with deep involvement of Belgium and the US. This was followed by more than 30 years of dictatorship and widespread corruption under the the Western-backed Mobutu, and then followed by two wars that caused millions of deaths due to violence, hunger, and disease. How could anyone even organize elections in a country so devastated by such horrors, in a country with no decent roads, in a country where it is unknown who even has the right to vote? How could safety be ensured when UN peacekeepers rape women and children in exchange for food and “protection”? Although the situation had been relatively stable since 2003, for the first time in decades, and people were cautiously optimistic about Joseph Kabila as president, it all remained immensely precarious.

A week after the excursion, Ellen and I left the site and ended our time in Congo. We would go by charter plane from a small landing strip near Lapope village and we had been told that the “conservateur”, or the corrupt chief of the park, would be flying with us. He was dressed in suit and wore expensive shiny black shoes when we met him in the village. We were sitting in the house of a local teacher, supplied with roasted peanuts and bananas, when he started to harass Jack, asking him for money. According to some local guys, he had also been involved in the poaching of 40 red colubus monkeys, so we knew that he was not nearly as poor as most of the villagers. It was difficult for all of us to spend time with this man, who was becoming agitated and frustrated and red in the face, because we were not as respectful as he would have liked. Then, out of nowhere, Ellen said in English: “Maybe he should just sell his shoes!” We were all laughing and he was laughing with us, although he had not understood what Ellen had said. But five minutes later, he started to ask for my watch. This guy was incredible! Ellen and I left him behind at Kinshasa airport where he was bragging to the custom officials about the park. I overheard him say something about gorillas in the park, but I knew as a fact that gorillas do not even exist south of the Congo river. And then this was supposed to be one of the good guys!

I don’t think that Patricia and Peter have been in touch with their embassy or the Congolese ministry about the corruption and the poaching. I think they do not want to endanger the fragile relationships and the presence of the project. Patricia once mentioned that, by “coincidence”, every expedition to Ntaku that included Alongi had returned because of “poachers”. She seemed to doubt his statements altogether, but I wondered if we would have ignorantly walked into a rain of bullets had we decided to take Alongi’s younger brother Menga instead. All I know is that the information has been delivered to the organization of a convention on the international trade in endangered species that has been collecting data on elephants and ivory trade for many many years. Whether they will be able to change anything in a country that is faced with more immediate concerns than conserving nature remains to be seen.

Afterword

I was reminded of this story while I was reading the book Lumumba's Dream by Sibo Rugwiza Kanobana (published in 2025 in Dutch), a book I had spotted and ordered in the webshop of The Black Archives in Amsterdam. This is a very important book about one of many postcolonial socialist leaders who showed potential for restoring justice and who were murdered or otherwise crushed and displaced by the empire to serve their own ongoing interests in the exploitation of former colonies. It remains valuable to revisit the visions of such leaders, who were often demonized as evil communists, but who showed tremendous wisdom and inspiring imaginations of a different kind of world.

When Patrice Lumumba became prime minister in 1960, Congo had endured more than 30 horrific years (1877-1908) under the private “ownership” of Belgian King Leopold II. During this period, the Congolese were forced and tortured to work in rubber plantations, and eight to ten million people died through violence, forced labor, and starvation (Hochschild, 1998). Congo had also endured another 52 years as the colony of Belgium, a time during which the colonizer’s economic interests remained priority over the wellbeing of the colonized population, shifting from rubber trade to the mining of copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, and other minerals. At this crucial moment of independence in 1960, which would set the stage for the future course for the country, Patrice Lumumba promoted complete self-determination for the Congolese, full control over their own resources, unification of all Congolese while recognizing cultural and linguistic diversity, collaboration with the Belgians on the basis of true equality, and similar revolutionary ideas.

Of course these were all very dangerous ideas from the perspective of those who wanted to maintain control of the situation in the county and to maintain access to Congo’s valuable resources, even after the official end of colonialism. The colonial administration had already fed various divisions between Congolese, particularly on the basis of class and ethnicity. The separatist ambitions of the wealthiest province of Katanga, as promoted and supported by Belgium, as well as the US, were ultimately the downfall of Lumumba. It resulted in many decades of further exploitation, corruption, and violent conflicts, even up until today, all very far from what Lumumba envisioned for the country.

Reading about Lumumba brought me back to my time in Congo more than 20 years ago and I dug through my folders to find this story that I had written for a writing course. Spending these few months in deep in one of the largest continuous forests in the world had been a fantastic opportunity and I considered myself lucky to have seen bonobos in the wild (even though the bonobos were not yet well habituated to the presence of human researchers and I spent much more time collecting, washing, and examining their poo than actually observing them). But I realized that I was less interested in the bonobos and much more captured by the colonial continuities in the existence of the field site, set up and run by white foreign researchers in a poor war-torn country that had never been able to recover from well over a hundred years of violent colonial and postcolonial, or rather neocolonial, rule. Thus, I ended up changing my subfield from biological to cultural anthropology so that I could specifically investigate these types of issues.

I definitely considered trying to go back to the DRC as a cultural anthropologist and do a study from the perspective of the village to critically examine the presence and effects of the field site in this historical context. However, I suspected the researchers in charge of the site would not be interested to facilitate my stay there in that capacity. In addition, I had concerns about the remoteness of the area, about the rather narrow scope of study of a tiny field station and a tiny village, and about potential safety issues with armed poachers roaming around. In the meantime, the situation in the country remained precarious and unpredictable altogether. For these reasons, I ended up switching my research to Kibale National Park in Uganda, a site with a dense history of convergence of various conservation and development projects, often with a violent and manipulative character towards local communities (you can find the dissertation I wrote about that here; and more about my subsequent trajectory here). This did mean that I wouldn't be returning to Congo, I wouldn't be learning more about the special powers of Alongi and Pappa Elombe, I wouldn't be able to live with them in their village and understand more about the ways they saw their futures. Of course, I have often wondered what I might have learned and how their lives have turned out over the years.

Now, since 2004, the DRC has experienced many more periods of violent conflicts, generally in the eastern part of the country where the interests of the national government, various rebel groups, foreign governments, and corporations converge and clash around the mineral resources of the area, while often feeding into ethnic divisions, exploiting children for hard physical labor, and involving horrific sexual violence against women. In the beginning of 2025, one of the rebel groups, M23, that has been backed by the Rwandan government, conquered the city of Goma and large areas of the province of North Kivu. Because of the conflicts in eastern Congo, 5.2 million people have been displaced, 1.6 of whom were displaced in 2025 alone, leading to widespread hunger and a large-scale humanitarian crisis. Multiple tech companies have been accused of complicity in atrocities committed in eastern Congo, particularly child labor for the mining of minerals, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell and Tesla. Coincidentally, conflicts and poverty make it easier to exploit people for their labor and resources.

For the past two years, the livestreamed genocide Israel is committing in Palestine has mobilized a growing worldwide movement of activists who have been demonstrating, boycotting, striking, and blocking for a free Palestine. Through the increasing awareness of the evils of Israel and the role of colonialism and capitalism, more and more people are waking up to the interconnectednesness of genocides and atrocities worldwide, including those in Congo and Sudan. Since the people of Congo and Sudan don’t have the same access to phones and social media as the people of Palestine, and while mainstream media similarly tends to ignore or downplay their suffering, activists often wonder what they can do to support the people who are exposed to horrific violence in these countries as well. Seeing the connections and asking such question are important developments to unite us all in resisting the worldwide escalation of capitalism and the rise of fascism.

As for supporting the people of Congo specificially, I have listed a few things anyone can do:

(1) Inform yourself!
Here are some accounts you can follow on Instagram:

I also created a Goodreads reading list of books about Congo.

(2) Speak out, protest & boycott!

Share posts about Congo on social media and talk about it with family, friends, and colleagues.
Find out when there are protests in your area and join, or organize a protest yourself.
Put pressure on governments to break ties with Rwanda for supporting M23.
Buy refurbished phones and other electronics and use them as long as possible.

(3) Donate!

I found this wonderful collective of Congolese volunteers called Goma Actif who are doing mutual aid in the Goma Area. You can donate to them through their fundraiser. I have also added it to the mutual aid projects supported with 20% of the sales price of all purchases in the Fist & Fern webshop (see Support the Resistance).

Go to fundraiser - Website - Instagram - Article about Goma Actif

Een Excursie in Congos Bos

Volg Fist & Fern op social media

Info