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A father stares at the hands of his five year-old daughter, which were severed as a punishment for having harvested too little rubber.
This is what was happening in the Congo at the hands of the Belgians under King Leopold. Let us be clear dear people who like to claim that because their parents were immigrants to America they never benefited from the slave trade. People were taken from Africa & exported as slaves to other countries, but Africans were also enslaved & killed on the continent. For generations. That’s the legacy of the colonialism & imperialism that made the West so wealthy & created the “Third World”.
Bisimbi Bi Masa
Water Nymphs
Habitat - Forests near lakes, rivers and pounds.
Origins - Congo
Beautiful creatures that live in natural water places, they are know for causing skin disease that only they can cure with their haunting cries. They are so dangerous that only skilled herbalist risk entering places where they are known to be.
From left, Mangbetu woman, Congo, c. 1929-37; woman with child, Guinea, 1915; Tutsi woman, Rwanda, c. 1929-37. Photos courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.
During Colonial times, it wasn’t unusual for photographers to feature ‘natives’ (as they referred to Africans) on postcards.
Over 8,000 different postcards were produced in colonial West Africa from 1901 to 1963. Often these postcards were intended to document racial “types,” as the French called them, or illustrate the progress of French development projects. The postcards were sent mainly by European merchants and members of the French military. These postcards circulated throughout Europe, received by friends and families back home.
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In the Cotovindou logging concession a Congolese worker for the Chinese timber company Sicofor saws down a 22-meter moabi tree that will be loaded the same day on a truck bound for Pointe Noire.
From there it will be embarked for China. It will probably end up as luxury furniture in Europe or the States.
Moabi (baillonella toxisperma) takes about hundred years to reach maturity. Its fruits are edible, its bark has medical applications and the oil its seeds produce is very sought after on the African markets. The droppings of elephants, that love the Moabi fruits, are the main mechanisms for spreading the seeds and therefore of its reproduction.
Due to poaching, elephants are getting rare, due to logging Moabi is getting rare. In the Congo forest elephants and Moabi could disappear at the same time. Moabi has been included in the red list of IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) in 2004.
Congo, Conkouati National Park, 2007
The lunch break for the workers of the Bacongo site where the Chinese company WIETC is constructing two storey luxury villas.
They are paid $3.50 a day, but spend $1 for a manioc dish in this restaurant and half a dollar for public transport. They complain that they can be fired for the smallest mistake “the Chinese bosses treat us as slaves.
If we a commit an error they hit us with sticks” says Ansel sitting in the foreground left. Milandou, sitting in the center, has lost his thumb at the circular saw: “the Chinese did not even give me medication. The ones that are seriously injured get fired”.
Congo, Brazzaville, 2007
Ph: Paolo Woods
The Earliest example of Mathematics in the world found in Africa dated between 35,000-20,000 years old.
Two artifacts found in Africa represent the earliest and oldest examples of mathematical structure in human History. They are the Lebombo bone and the Ishango bone. The first being the Lebombo Bone found during the early 1970’s in the Lebombo Mountains between South Africa and Swaziland Dated back to 35,000 years. The second oldest is the Ishango bone, a bone tool handle made from the fibula of a baboon, found in 1958 in Congo which is dated back to at least 20,000 years.
The Ishango bone
The Ishango bone Has an ‘arrangement of the notches engraved on the handle of the bone, and the numbers in each group, these numbers are clearly not casual. Analysis of their numerological properties led people to conclude that the artifact is not a simple tally stick, but a kind of calculator based on special number systems. Each of the groupings in the left and right columns contains an odd number of notches (9, 11, 13, 17, 19, and 21), while the numbers contained in the first column are precisely the four prime numbers between 10 and 20. From facts such as these it is thought that the groupings represent numbers and the whole design represents a system of reckoning based upon counting by digits. It has also thought that the bone could have been used for time reckoning, following the observable course of the moon over a period of about 5½ synodic (lunar phase cycle) months, based on a period of a double lunation of 59–60 days.
One theory has been proposed stating the question “who but a woman keeping track of her cycles would need a lunar calendar?” and concludes that “women may have been undoubtedly the first mathematicians!”. since keeping track of menstrual cycles requires a lunar calendar.
The Lebombo bone
The Lebombo bone was discovered much later and is a small piece of the fibula of baboon bone marked with 29 clearly defined notches. It ”resembles calendar sticks still in use today by Bushmen clans in Namibia” .
References:
ICOMOS–IAU (2011)“Heritage Sites of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the context of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention: A Thematic Study”{Astronomy and World Heritage } [online] Available from: http://www.astronomicalheritage.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=28&Itemid=33
Weblinks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/AMU/amu_chma_09.html#2
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/Ancient-Africa/ishango.html
http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/africa/science/numbers.htm
http://www.wcu.edu/ceap/houghton/edelcompeduc/ch1/computing_tools_timeline.html
A website has been launched to promote transparency in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s mining sector, which is plagued by conflict and corruption.
The Carter Center said it helped launch congomines.org to give people more information about the mining sector, including contracts and payments.
Hundreds of mining documents and maps will be published on the site, it said.
DR Congo is rich in gold, diamonds and coltan, used in mobile phones, but many mines are controlled by armed groups.
The people of DR Congo are among the poorest in Africa, even though the country is rich in resources.
Elizabeth Caesens, the head of the Carter Center’s mining governance project in DR Congo, said www.congomines.org would make it easier for the public to track developments in the industry, including money allocated for development.
‘Opaque industry’“Our main target is Congolese actors who sometimes lack access to information about the more technical aspects of mining governance, such as mining contracts, revenue payments [and] production figures, ” she said.
The BBC’s Thomas Hubert in the capital, Kinshasa, says many people describe the industry as opaque - especially after state-owned mines changed hands earlier this year in controversial secret deals.
The site will try to give the public easier access to documents - whether they are government reports or records of a New York Stock Exchange-listed company with interests in a DR Congo mine, our reporter says.
The Carter Center - a rights organisation founded by former US president Jimmy Carter - launched the site with funding from the government of Belgium, the former colonial power.
Eastern DR Congo has been ravaged by conflict for at least 15 years, with both the army and rebel groups accused of using the fighting as cover to exploit the area’s mineral wealth.
Regional analysts say the international demand for coltan is one of the driving forces behind the conflict, and the presence of rival militias in the country.
In May, the government lifted a ban on mining in eastern regions, worst affected by DR Congo’s long-running conflict.
Foreign companies are major investors in DR Congo.
From the end of the 19th century through the turn of the 20th century, King Leopold II of Belgium ran the so-called Congo Free State as his private property, amassing an enormous fortune by turning most adult males into slaves to collect wild rubber and ivory from the jungle. The women and children were held hostages—their hands, noses and ears often chopped off when the men in their families did not meet their rubber quota or failed to return. For over 23 years, Leopold’s army forced hundreds of thousands of slaves to work in killing conditions where many died from exhaustion. Some 20 slave uprisings were put down with extreme bloodthirstiness. After the Belgians discovered gold in 1903, they worked thousands to death in gold mines. It has been estimated that about 10 million people out of a population of 20 million lost their lives under King Leopold’s barbarous rule.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo town of Kamako, seven kilometres (four miles) from the Angolan border, 10 women sit on sofas arranged in a circle by a local non-governmental organisation which helps distressed migrants.
Therese Tshanga is one of them. This 38-year-old Congolese woman is among hundreds of thousands of migrants expelled from Angola since 2003.
She cradles a toddler in her arms and has a fresh scar on her forehead.
Ms Tshanga says she was looking for a job in Angola when men in uniform arrested her on 28 September and took her into the bush.
“Three soldiers came to rape me. The first two had their way, then I resisted against the third one and he gave me this wound to the face with his teeth,” she says, pointing to the scar.
After being held for three days in the bush and another three days in a prison near the Angolan border town of Dundu, Ms Tshanga says she was finally deported to her native DR Congo with her nephew. She has lost contact with his mother.
Kamako is full of deportees with similar stories.
Jacquie Kasokome says she was raped by five Angolan soldiers. Another woman reported being stripped and searched for money and diamonds by border guards, who inserted their fingers in each of her body cavities, then stole her clothes and shoes before kicking her out of the country.
As for the men, most of them admit to crossing into Angola illegally to work as diamond miners. They report severe beatings if they are caught by Angolan security services.
“I was beaten up a lot. My ear hasn’t been working properly because of a blow I took here,” said Mubikay Mupani, as he pointed to the side of his head.
When I asked Ms Tshanga if her attackers explained why they were raping her, she replied: “They said: ‘We don’t want the Congolese to come to Angola but you don’t want to understand, so we’re raping you so that you don’t come back’.”
But Mr Mupani, a young father, says he has no hope of sustaining his family in DR Congo and he plans to return to Angola, despite the risk of being deported again.
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