POLITICAL HISTORY, PAGE 16
Considering the enormity of what they had done to Africa, the distress of the colonial powers in the face of German tanks and troops might have seemed like poetic justice to many Africans if they themselves had not been made to suffer all the more for it. Had they heard them, pious pronouncements like the Atlantic Charter would have rung hollow in the ears of Congolese miners and factory workers who toiled long hours for low pay in support of an alien system that had been thrust upon them. The charter, signed by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill declared in part that, "their countries seek no aggrandisement, territorial or other...they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them."56 Although Roosevelt apparently believed the charter should apply to the entire world—insofar as Europe's colonies might devolve to the American sphere of influence at least—Churchill and the other colonial leaders (and subsequent U.S. leaders as well) refused to interpret it quite so broadly. Africa would have to wait still longer for its freedom.
Mass mobilization of Africans for the war effort only intensified the dislocation of what was left of traditional life. What began as a steady trickle of people leaving the burdens forced upon them in the countryside became a persistent stream during the war years. The new exodus echoed the old days of slavery: mostly men, the young and the strong, abandoned rural areas, heaping additional burden on the women and children who were left behind. A Belgian scholar observed that "the young people go off to the towns because life dies out in villages which are sad and comfortless, without enough food, where forced-labour services pile up without any hope of a man's seeing an end to them, where sickness is widespread without the Europeans fighting it, and where the old people, the sorcerers, and the beneficiaries of Native Custom combine to prolong their tyranny."57
Léopoldville—the small village of Kinshasa in Stanley's time—had grown by war's end into a city of 100,000 people. Other industrial towns in the Belgian Congo, especially Elisabethville (Lubumbashi) and Stanleyville (Kisangani), also mushroomed. Brazzaville—tiny N'tamo with a handful of people when Brazza first planted the French flag—contained nearly 70,000, perhaps one-tenth of the Moyen-Congo's entire population. "The growth is so rapid that, at best, the native quarters look like villages which have suddenly contracted elephantiasis, and more commonly resemble camps with an endless stream of new arrivals," wrote French anthropologist Georges Balandier in the late fifties. These burgeoning cities "bear witness less to a civilization than to its absence. In the confusion and uncertainty, ethnic groups collide and customs tend to erase each other like overlapping waves. Here Negro citizens camp in the hope of attaining wealth which the industrial powers distribute only sparingly, and many must be content to catch the crumbs and leftovers that fall their way."58
The tiny enclave of white Brazzavilleans found itself sandwiched between the exploding African quarters of Poto-Poto and Bacongo. In Léopoldville, "the original European quarter of Kalina was separated from the African town, or the Cité Africaine, as it is called, by a cordon sanitaire of uninhabited ground, consisting of the golf course, the botanical gardens, and the zoo."59 But white residents were nearly surrounded by African sections, Kinshasa, Kintambo, Barumbu, and a handful of swollen suburbs. "Indeed," Balandier observed, "this phenomenon must be regarded as the first of the African revolutions: a besieging of positions occupied by the colonizers...by large numbers of people who are all the more dangerous in that their energies are channeled neither by administrative organizations nor by traditional restrictions."60
Although descendents of the old Kongo Kingdom formed the most populous national group in both Léopoldville and Brazzaville (because these cities were located on the edge of the former kingdom's territory) the two capitals attracted peoples from throughout the rural areas. They brought with them a variety of languages and beliefs, customs and traditions, and music.
This was the scene in the late 1940s. Nearly five centuries of the white man's commerce, Christianity, civilization, and, in the end, conquest, had created on the banks of Stanley Pool a melting pot of astonishing diversity. From it flowed conflict and accommodation, accomplishment and frustration, political and cultural confusion, and an artistic revolution. This was the time and place of the birth of Congo music.
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