HISTORY OF THE CONGO BASIN EXPLORATION

Back | Projects | Main Menu | Home

sasha@tcid.on.ca

This space is available Advertise here

History of The Congo Republic

HISTORY TIMELINE OF CONGO BASIN
Note from the editor: In the course of history, the region of the Congo Basin was refered to as Congo. Later in the 19th century, with explorations of Savorgnan de Brazza on behalf of Makoko, King of Teke, and H.M.Stanley on behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium, this region was refered as "French Congo" and "Belgian Congo" acordingly. Nowadays, these are two autonomous political states; Congo (The People's Republic of), and Zaire. The below references to Congo, therefore, should apply to the whole region of the Congo Basin. The few exceptions, such as in the case of Stanley, the Congo is actually refered to as the territory of today's Zaire.

2000+ BC EGYPTIANS

The ancient Egyptians on the upper Nile knew only that their river originated far to the south, in a region they called the Land of Trees. About that time an Egyptian commander named Herkouf entered the great forest west of the Mountains of the Moon; there he found a race of tiny men who sang and danced to their god. In his journal he wrote, "A mysterious place with forests so dense they were as dark as night in the middle of the day. Strange creatures inhabited this perpetual gloom, including little men with tails, and animals half black and half white."

500-150 BC IRON ROUTE

In 500-150 BC the established Iron trade route came directly from Koro Toro in the north of Africa down south through Likouala region of the Congo Basin (Likouala aux herbes River), in between Sangha and Oubangui Rivers.

600-700 A.D. ARABS

For nearly four thousand years afterward, nothing more substantial was learned about the interior of Africa. The Arabs came to East Africa in the seventh century A.D., in search of gold, ivory, spices, and slaves. But the Arabs were merchant seamen and did not venture inland. They called the interior Zinj - the Land of the Blacks - a region of fable and fantasy. There were stories of vast forests and tiny men with tails; stories of mountains that spewed fire and and turned the sky black; stories of native villages overwhelmed by monkeys, which would have congress with the women; stories of great giants with hairy bodies and flat noses; stories of creatures half leopard, half man; stories of native markets where the fattened carcasses of men were butchered and sold as a delicacy.

Such stories were sufficiently forbidding to keep the Arabs on the coast, despite other stories equally alluring: mountains of shimmering gold, riverbeds gleaming with diamonds, animals that spoke the language of men, great jungle civilizations of unimaginable splendor.

1544 PORTUGUESE

Then the Portuguese, those indefatigable explorers, arrived. By 1544, soon after the conquest of Paradise, they were venturing inland from the west coast up the mighty Congo River, but they soon encountered all the obstacles that would prevent exploration of central Africa for hundreds of years to come. The Congo was not navigable beyond the first set of rapids, two hundred miles inland (at what was once Leopoldville, and is now Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire). The natives were hostile and cannibalistic. And the hot steaming jungle was the source of disease - malaria, sleeping sickness, bilharzia, blackwater fever - which decimated foreign intruders. The Portuguese never managed to penetrate the cantral Congo.

1644 ENGLISH

Neither did the English, under Captain Brenner, in 1644; his entire party was lost. The Congo would remain for two hundred years as a blank spot on the civilized maps of the world.

HISTORICAL EXPEDITIONS

19th - 20th CENTURIES OF THE GREAT EXPLORATIONS

Africa was not thoroughly explored until the mid-nineteenth century, by Burton and Speke, Baker and Livingstone, and especially Stanley. Even today, only half a million people inhabit the Congo Basin, and they are mostly clustered in villages along the banks of the slow muddy rivers that flow through the jungle. The great expanse of the forest remains inviolate, and to this day thousands of square miles are still unexplored.

This is true particularly in the northeastern corner of the Congo Basin, where the rain forest meets the Virunga volcanoes, at the edge of the Great Rift Valley. Lacking established trade routes or compelling features of interest, Virunga was never seen by Western eyes until less than a hundred years ago.

British explorer Sir HENRY MORTON STANLEY (*28/01/1841-09/05/1904)

London TIMES from 09 May 1904:
"

STANLEY IS DEAD, ONE PRESUMES

Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the illegitimate son of a Welsh butcher's daughter who became the most famous explorer of his time, died in London today, aged 63. He achieved fame and made a fortune with his account of his seven-month 1,500-mile safari into Central Africa in search of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871. At Ujiji on Friday the 28th of October, 1871 he finaly met Dr. Livingstone, who was in his last journey of exploration from 1866-73, in search of the source of the Nile, and on that day that these famous words were spoken:

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" said Stanley.

"Yes," replied the doctor.

"Doctor, I thank God I have been permitted to shake hands with you."

"I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you."
He later expressed regret at having greeted the missionary with what was to become a catch phrase, for wherever he went he was met with:

"Mr Stanley, I presume?"
He traced the course of the Congo River and helped King Leopold of the Belgians form the Congo Free State."

1874-77

Stanly is usually remembered as the newsman who found Livingstone in 1871, but his real importance lay in later exploits. When Stanley set out again from Zanzibar in 1874, he was again handsomely financed by newspapers. And when he emerged from the jungle at the Atlantic Ocean 999 days later, having suffered incredible hardships and the loss of more than two-thirds of his original party, both he and his newspapers had one of the great stories of the century: Stanley had traveled the entire length of the Congo River. But two years later, Stanley was back in Africa under an assumed name; he made diversionary excursions to throw spies off his trail; the few people who knew he was in Africa could only guess that he had in mind "some grand commercial scheme." In fact, Stanley was financed by Leopold II of Belgium, who intended to acquire personally a large piece of Africa. "It is not a question of Belgian colonies," Leopold wrote Stanley. "It is a question of creating a new State, as big as possible. . . . The King, as a private person, wishes to possess properties in Africa. Belgium wants neither a colony nor territories. Mr. Stanley must therefore buy lands or get them conceded to him. . . ."

When Stanley passed near Virunga in 1875, it had taken him almost a year to get there; the Americans got their expedition on-site in just over a week. And Stanley, who traveled with a small army of four hundred, would have been amazed at an expedition of only twelve-and one of them an ape. The territories through which the Americans moved a century later were autonomous political states; the Congo was now Zaire, and the Congo River the Zaire River. In fact, by 1979 the word "Congo" technically referred only to the drainage basin of the Zaire River, although Congo was still used in geological circles as a matter of familiarity, and for its romantic conotations. Despite these differences, the expeditions had remarkably similar outcomes. Like Stanley, the Americans lost two-thirds of their party, and emerged from the jungle as desperately as Stanley's men a century before. And like Stanley, they returned with incredible tales of cannibals and pygmies, ruined jungle civilizations, and fabulous lost treasures. Synonymous with the exploration of Africa are the names of Livingstone, Burton and Speke.

LIVINGSTONE

Dr. David Livingstone first arrived in Africa in 1841 to andertake missionary work but his heart was in exploring this vast continent. In 1849 he led his first expedition to find Lake Ngami on the northern fringe of the Kalahari Desert near what we now know as the Okavango Delta. Between 1853 and 1856 he successfully crossed the continent west to east discovering Victoria Falls in November 1855. His last journey of exploration, from 1866-73, was in search of the source of the Nile.

Dr. D. Livingstone died still having not found the source of the Nile on the 1st of May, 1873 just south of Lake Bangweulu in Zambia. His two loyal servants, Susi and Chuma, in some extraordinary act of devotion spent the next 12 months carrying his body to the coast for its eventual return to England.

BURTON AND SPEKE EXPEDITION

The search for the Mountains of the Moon and the Source of the Nile.
Ptolemy, the 2nd Century Greek astronomer and map-maker, spoke of a fabled mountain range somewhere in east-central Africa. He called them the Mountains of the Moon (Ruwenzori Mountaines). They became a passion with 19th century explorers because they believed the mountains to be the place where the Nile began her journey to the Mediterranean.

In June 1857 with the backing of the Royal Geographical Society and the Foreign Office. Richard Burton - explorer, linguist, anthropologist and one of the most flamboyant characters of his day - set out with John Hanning Speke to find the fabled Mountains of the Moon and the source of the Nile. Their journey lasted almost two years and succeeded with Speke. It was at Tabora that Burton and Speke headed west to Lake Tanganyika in 1858 and Speke alone headed north to discover Lake Victoria. He assumed and correctly stated this to be true source of the Nile but did so without any supporting evidence.

Speke returned, with RGS support but without Burton, in 1860 to confirm his original findings. Following almost the same route as he and Burton had taken two years earlier he reached the shores of Lake Victoria by the end of 1861. It was while he was travelling west and north around the lake (to Bukoba and on to Uganda, once described by Winston Churchill as the 'pearl of Africa') that Speke, once again alone, found the source of the Nile on the 28th of July, 1862 at a place now called Jinja in Uganda. (Map 223K)

It was 70 kms to the east where Speke's real goal was - the true source of the Nile which leaves Lake Victoria passing over a waterfall - Ripon Falls named by Speke after the president of the RGS. It is now known as Owen Falls and as he stood overlooking the falls he could watch the Nile begin its epic 4000 miles journey to the Mediterranean.

1979 AMERICAN EXPEDITION
(ERTS - Earth Resources Technology Services in Houston)

The race to make "the most important discovery of the 1980s" in the Congo (Zaire) took place during six weeks of 1979. Michael Crichton's book "Congo" 1980 (now a major motion picture from Paramount, 1995) recounts the thirteen days of the last American expedition to the Congo (Zaire), in June, 1979 - barely a hundred years after Henry Morton Stanley first explored the Congo in 1874-77.

History of The Congo Republic

HISTORY TIMELINE OF CONGO BASIN