The River of Blood, Pain, Gold, Diamonds and Coltan

Congo is the fifth longest river in the world, measuring almost 5,000 km (3,000 mi) and the second in debit following Amazon: 42,450 cubic meters of water/second. From 1971, the river is known as Zaire and the indigenous call it "the river that swells all the other rivers". The volume of water dug at the river's mouth a submarine canyon of over 1 km (0.6 mi) deep. The mud dyes the Atlantic Ocean red very far away.

The banks covered by rainforest harbor puffing adders, fever and malaria. Still, even from the ancient times, the Congo basin was inhabited by the two most ancient living human races: Bushmen and Pygmies. 1,000 years ago, they were displaced by the migration of the Bantu, typical Black Africans that came from southern Nigeria and were masters of metallurgy of iron and copper, using huge ovens.

In the 14th century, Manikongo governed over 12 vassal kingdoms. His authority was not military, but he still had a reconciling role in case of disputes.

It has been long thought that its basin is the place where the famous mines of the King Solomon were located. The Congo river crosses one of the most exuberant places on Earth and so many natural riches have been its curse ever since the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao navigated its waters for the first time.

The Portuguese entered these lands in search for the kingdom of priest John, a Christian medieval legend, whose help crusaders used to ask in their fights against the Turks. They converted Manikongo to Christianity.

Today there are 60 ethnic groups living on the banks of Congo and war was a general state amongst the tribes, for gold and diamonds.

Finding the source of the Congo river was the obsession of the geographers till 1867, when the Scottish missionary David Livingstone found it. After 9 months of exhausting traveling, he reached Chambeze and believed he had found the sources of the Nile! He was helped with logistics by the Arab slave traders.

Livingstone remained lost for 6 years, till he was found after a 14-month expedition by the Irish-born American journalist Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley continued his exploration and tried to convince Great Britain to turn Congo into a British colony.

The British government was not interested and the Belgian king was faster. Leopold II turned the river's banks into a huge graveyard for 5 million victims. The genocide perpetrator with a white beard and looking like Santa Claus was a kind of precursor to Hitler and Stalin...

By tricks, Stanley bought terrains from the tribes inhabiting the river's banks and got the approval of the western powers for colonizing the area with the excuse of fighting the Arab slave traders. Leopold was the only shareholder of an array of puppet societies masking the barbarity under an altruist cover.

The Free State of Congo was his ranch. He bought Congo on a private title because the Belgian government did not want colonies.

Punishments like hand cutting were something common; displacements and executions, too. Slavery also was common. Rubber quotas were imposed on the villages and if they were not delivered, the villages would be wiped out. At a given moment, the hand cutters did not even reclaim the rubber and made their sinister harvesting by thousands just to justify themselves before their bosses. The case of Leon Rohm, a military at the service of Leopold, who had his garden surrounded by piles with cut heads, was described by the Polish writer Joseph Conrad in his novel "The Heart of the Darkness".

The atrocities were denounced by the English and the European powers took Congo from Leopold, but in 1908 the Belgian parliament annexed the colony.

For 50 years, the Belgian Congo was one of the worst administered colonies. In 1960, Belgium conceded independence to Congo with such a haste, that there was little time to organize elections. Coups, murder and depletion of the natural resources are still to be encountered on its banks.

The disorganized decolonization of Congo allowed Mobutu Sese Seko to take power in a coup from 1964 to 1997, who led the country with an iron hand. Some considered him a too cruel, kleptocratic dictator, others praised the country's relative stability and peace throughout most of his rule. In a country with over 200 tribes, Mobutu kept order and averted civil war.

The war of coltan that started in 1998 produced a frightening human catastrophe and widespread hunger, with over four million victims only till 2002. Coltan is a strategic mineral for the novel technologies. Each mobile phone needs a pinch of this magic black powder for functioning. Missiles, airbags, videogames have coltan in their microprocessors. The scarcity of this mineral forced a delay of two years in the launching of Play Station 2.

Congo harbors the biggest world's reserves. The coltan, a mix of niobite and tantalite, is also found in 6 African countries.

Children work in the coltan mines (only they can reach the narrowest galleries) and also Hutu prisoners and adults. They all must face semi-slavery conditions. On the ground, women cook and prostitute. The benefits from the coltran smuggling are directed to financing armies and guerilla forces of the confronting countries.

On one side there is the Republic of Congo, supported by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe; on the other side Rwanda, Uganda and the Congolese rebels, in a conflict qualified by some as "the First African World War".

29 western companies and 54 persons, besides the conflict involving African governments, are accused of dealing with the Congolese coltran, most of them Belgian. Not so many changes from the times of Leopold II!...Charters supply the developed world with the precious mineral.

There are groups of mercenaries that function like anonymous societies, which offer their services to those who pay more, changing constantly side.

Soldiers kill the elephants for their ivory and the mountain gorilla has been almost wiped out. About 350,000 square km (the size of Germany) of rainforest have been cut.

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