In 1482, An experienced Portuguese naval captain, Diogo Cão, sailing south along the west coast of Africa and saw the North Star disappear from the sky. He had crossed the equator. Navigators used the North Star to tell the position of the ship.

He continued his journey along the Coast and soon came upon something that astounded him. Around his ship the sea turned a dark, slate colored yellow. He sailed into the mouth of the inlet, which was many miles wide. His crew measured the current at 8 to 9 knots. They tasted the water and it was sweet not salty. He had come upon the mouth of the Congo River. He had a stone monument erected that still stands today.

Besides its great size Cão noted that the river did not change with the seasons like the rest of the great rivers of the world. It dumps 1.4 million cubic feet of water into the ocean every second year around.

This discovery started of one of the biggest slave and exploitation of native peoples the world has ever know. But I am getting ahead of the story.

Below Matadi (83 mi/134 km inland), the Congo is navigable by oceangoing vessels and, despite such hazards as the whirlpools of the Devil's Cauldron, shifting sandbars, and sharp bends in the river, forms one of the largest natural harbors in Africa. The Congo River enters the Atlantic Ocean between Banana Point, Congo and Sharks Point, Angola.

In the mid-1800’s King Leopold II of Belgian had followed exciting press accounts of Henry Morton Stanley who had located David Livingstone in central Africa and then led his own expedition that navigated down the Congo River to the Atlantic Ocean. He arrived at the Atlantic in 1877 after a journey of 7,000 miles.

Leopold, frustrated by the small size of his kingdom and limited powers of the Belgian constitutional monarchy, determined to gain colonies of his own. So it was that he sent Stanley to the Congo, ostensibly to do scientific research and to combat slavery. Actually, Stanley spent five years signing over 450 treaties with tribal chiefs turning over their lands and labor for a few trinkets, alcohol, and other cheap goods. Leopold even sent agents to the United States to lobby Congress, and the United States became the first nation to recognize his claims to the Congo.

Thus it was that Leopold II, with the help of many but especially Henry Morton Stanley, seized the entire Congo Basin as his own colony. He called it the Congo Free State, and it was not a colony of Belgian but his personally.

In 1888, John Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire. It was first used on bicycles, but in 1900 he began making tires for automobiles. The world demand for rubber created a boom. King Leopold’s Congo contained the world’s largest supply of wild rubber vines. The problem was the harvesting of the sap of the vines (the source of rubber) required a lot of hard and dangerous work

The local native population was conscripted into slave labor. From 1890 to 1909, when he died, 50% of the population (10 million people) died of starvation, disease or murder. The world first wanted ivory and then rubber. Leopold wanted wealth and power.

The story does not end there. In 1961, with the help of the American CIA, Prime Mister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Mobutu was installed as the leader of the Congo (which he renamed Zaire), and he ran it with an iron hand until 1997. Mobutu like Leopold before him considered the country’s income his income and became a billionaire.

Today, it is again called Congo. In spite of its many rich natural resources, most of the people live in poverty.

But why is the river’s flow, like the cruelty to the people, constant? I do not know why man continues his cruelty. The reason the river flow is constant is because the course is first below the equator and then above the equator and ending below the equator. This means that the rainy season is some where along the course of the river and its tributaries year around.

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Contents copyright 2004 by Dr. A. V. Persson and ParaComp, Inc. All rights reserved.

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