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00:05Before you enter the forest, it is respectful to seek permission.
00:30There are first humans who live in the village, you and me.
00:34These humans find everything in the forest.
00:38The instruments to build their houses, the places to play,
00:44even the river, the source of water, they find it in the forest.
00:48But beyond this first life, there is another life.
00:53The aïeux, those who are dead,
00:56because they are dead, they are dead in the forest.
00:59So the memory of the living remains in the forest.
01:04The peoples of the Congo Basin have lived in a close relationship
01:08with their forests for tens of thousands of years.
01:12But this relationship was to radically change
01:15with the arrival of the white explorers.
01:27From the beginning, they developed very different visions of the forest.
01:36They portrayed it as a land of savage chaos, the heart of darkness.
01:43They have been corrupted by the wealth of its resources,
01:46and yet at the same time entranced by the sheer exuberance of its nature.
02:10The great swathe of forests that cover Central Africa
02:14were not penetrated by European explorers
02:17until the second half of the 19th century.
02:20When they did eventually venture in beyond their settlements on the coast,
02:25they were not to find it uninhabited.
02:29That was the perception of the Western European explorers
02:32who went down to Central Africa, imagining that this was a black hole.
02:38People have been living in Central Africa,
02:41in the deep tropical forest, for centuries and centuries.
02:45And the nature that we see there has been formed by these peoples.
02:50So this is clearly a contrast between a lot of the conservationist discourse
02:54that we hear today about trying to preserve this pristine space
02:59that resembles more the Garden of Eden.
03:01The people have formed these spaces.
03:04So what the Europeans found there, what they discovered,
03:07was something that they discovered for themselves.
03:09They weren't bringing in anything new to the people that were actually living there.
03:22For hundreds of years, the two million square kilometers of rainforests that cover the Congo Basin
03:28was merely a blank on the European map.
03:32It's a region bounded by the Atlantic to the west,
03:35and a range of ancient volcanoes to the east.
03:40It's intersected by giant river systems that feed the river that eats all rivers, the Congo.
03:53On its way to the sea, the Congo also passes through swamps and savannah,
03:59great lakes and clearings,
04:02a variety of habitats that supports an extraordinary range of species,
04:08many of which were unknown to the early European explorers.
04:37The first explorers who have put the sea into the sea into the sea
04:41of the sea and the sea,
04:43were very quickly struck by the abundance of the sea.
04:50The sea and the exuberance of the tropical forest,
04:53the plants that were there.
04:55The sea and the sea are more balanced on the Congo,
04:59the sea and the sea of the sea,
05:02the sea seemed to realize that the sea was limited.
05:22It was in 1859 that a young Franco-American explorer returned from the African forest
05:29with thousands of animal specimens, many of them unknown to science.
05:36Although Paul Dushayu wrote about his experiences with cannibals and pygmies, it was his stories
05:42of a forest brimming with wildlife that captured the public's imagination.
05:46His encounter with one animal in particular created a sensation.
05:53Dushayu's descriptions of the gorilla are quite incredible.
05:58He sort of really ups the ante on the horrific.
06:01He really sells a very good story and his audience has lapped it up.
06:05He presents an image of a hostile jungle, but particularly a hellish, beastly gorilla as
06:13the king of this jungle.
06:15His eyes began to flash fiercer fire as we stood motionless on the defensive and the
06:22crest of short hair which stands on his forehead began to twitch rapidly up and down while his
06:29powerful fangs were shown as he again sent forth thunderous roar.
06:36Now, truly, he reminded me of nothing but some hellish dream creature, a being of that hideous
06:43order half-man, half-beast, which we find pictured by old artists in some representations of the
06:51infernal regions.
06:53He advanced a few steps, and then stopped to utter that hideous roar.
07:01Advanced again, and finally stopped, and here, just as he began another of his roars beating
07:09his breast in rage, we fired and killed him.
07:16His descriptions were to perpetuate the savage image of the gorilla, right through to the
07:2220th century, in literature and eventually on film.
07:26La littérature du 19e siècle avait montré toute une série de descriptions plus ou moins mythiques
07:38et fantaisistes.
07:39Et donc, elle avait habitué le public occidental, européen et américain, à représenter des animaux
07:47féroces.
07:51In particular, Dushayu was playing up to a public that was already fascinated by the
07:56idea of powerful semi-human beasts with a high sex drive.
08:23Dushayu's efforts went beyond the written word.
08:26He even doctored the specimens he brought back.
08:30Here's your terrifying, savage, brute gorilla.
08:36Hmm?
08:37Now the leaves, good thing he's put those there.
08:39Dushayu actually cut the penises off his gorillas.
08:42And why?
08:43Because nobody would believe that a man-ape, an ape-man, could possibly be pulling women off
08:53to, as he'd let you believe.
08:55Because a penis, fully erect, is no more than one inch long.
09:01Which is why there are leaves over.
09:10And it's these stories that really set certainly British and American imagination's running
09:16riot with an idea of what might exist in Central Africa.
09:21He sets a stage for later explorers like Stanley, but also later authors.
09:26You think of Henty, or Stables, or Stevenson, or Haggard, or Kipling, or Kingston, writing
09:34these wonderful adventure narratives of a miscellaneous collection of Victorian explorers, pith-helmeted,
09:42bewhiskered, khaki-clad, sort of drifting downriver, discovering wild beasts and fighting
09:48their way through jungles and discovering lost treasures.
09:57And it's the description of wilderness that enables this.
10:00The description of an African wilderness, albeit teeming with life and indigenous peoples,
10:07a wilderness that's inherently challenging.
10:12Certainly the imagination of British audiences was an environment that was ripe to be subjected
10:18and dominated and controlled.
10:21Part of that control was through mapping and description, but obviously later through conquest
10:27and colonisation.
10:33Dushayu's gorilla specimens captured the imaginations of the cartoonists of the time, playing their
10:38part in the debates around Darwin's The Origin of Species.
10:43Am I satyr or man?
10:45Pray tell me who can and settle my place in the scale.
10:49A man in ape's shape, an anthropoid ape, or a monkey deprived of his tail?
10:55Then Darwin set forth in a book of much worth, the importance of nature's selection.
11:00How the struggle for life is a laudable strife, and results in specific distinction.
11:05For a while, the gorilla was seen as the likely candidate for mankind's closest relative.
11:11Then apes have no nose, and thumbs for great toes, and a pelvis both narrow and slight.
11:17They can't stand upright, unless to show fight with Dushayu, that chivalrous knight.
11:28Dushayu's vivid accounts of the Congo presented the idea of a place full of other human-like ancestors,
11:35leading to speculation that this forest was rich with tribes of people further down the evolutionary tree
11:42than the European white male.
11:48And so we try to find a hierarchy in the races, from the European race to the new races discovered,
12:02and essentially the races negroids.
12:22So far, Dushayu had created the image of a great African forest brimming with natural history specimens,
12:29and as an exotic habitat for early prototypes of humankind.
12:36But soon, an event occurred which was to utterly transform the European attitude to the Congo region,
12:43and to dictate its destiny right up until the present day.
12:48On August 9th, 1877, Henry Morton Stanley, the man who discovered Livingstone, reached the mouth of the Congo,
12:57having blazed a trail across the great, uncharted centre of the continent.
13:03Basically, Stanley's journey, arriving at the Congo River,
13:06it started the sounding gun for the scramble for Africa.
13:09Twenty hectic years of white men staking the interior of Africa.
13:13So it really was a massive turning point.
13:28This unimaginably huge tract of Africa was suddenly open.
13:35A whole area of the map had been filled in.
13:49Stanley's achievement was considerable.
13:51His journey had been sponsored by the New York Herald in the United States,
13:56and the London Daily Telegraph.
13:58His self-promoting articles, augmented by extensive lecturing tours,
14:03presented his account of his voyage across what he called the Dark Continent.
14:09This massive bestseller, full of exaggeration, described in heroic journey down a river and through dense forests, full of violent
14:17tribes.
14:22To the ordinary white man, it was what may well be termed impenetrable, except at constant peril of his life.
14:32It was ravaged by cannibals, fierce warlike tribes, and Arab slave raiders.
14:40Every tribe barred the ingress of the traveller, and its frontier on all sides lay exposed to any white stranger
14:47who took the trouble to plant a flag.
14:55It was a bestseller, but yes, it consigned this part of Africa to a stereotype, to an image, an Africa
15:03that was inherently brutal, almost irredeemably so.
15:07So going from, perhaps in the start of the 19th century, some of these voyages that were genuinely scientific,
15:13or had at their heart this sort of perhaps enlightened goal of adding to knowledge of scientific inquiry,
15:21to a mindset that was bristlingly imperial,
15:27and casting the African continent as something that was irredeemably savage,
15:33and therefore had to be saved by the enlightened knowledge of an empire.
15:39Perhaps Stanley is responsible for setting the African continent down that path of subjugation and colonial domination.
15:49Stanley presents his arrival in the Congo as almost as a sauveur,
15:58it is to say that he will bring the light occidental to this region.
16:06He shows that the local population and all the history of the river
16:13has no history before the arrival of Europeans and before its arrival.
16:22There was certainly going to be a new history.
16:25By demonstrating that the Congo was navigable,
16:28Stanley alerted European powers to the possibility that the entire equatorial forest could be divided up.
16:39Within eight years of the publication of Through the Dark Continent,
16:43France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Great Britain had carved out portions.
16:58And the king of one small nation had grabbed half of it as his own personal fiefdom.
17:16Leopold II, king of the Belgians, described the great swathe of African foresters this magnificent African cake.
17:28Never does he step one foot on Africa, and yet he holds an astonishing record.
17:32He is the man who has claimed as his own one piece of land larger than any other human ever
17:38has.
17:39He took that land as his plaything, as his fiefdom, as his private estate.
17:44It's astonishing. It's a million square miles, like three million square kilometres of Equatorial forest, river system, savannah.
17:51And he regards it as a large, large cake from which he can derive whatever goods he can.
18:02Leopold's giant-sized portion of cake was to prove very rich indeed.
18:08The abundance of animals and plants in his new forests were no longer merely objects of scientific interest.
18:15They'd help him finance an empire.
18:20His initial source of income came from forest elephants.
18:24Though smaller than their relatives in East Africa, they still packed a lot of ivory.
18:31The export of ivory was so lucrative that the animals were driven close to extinction.
18:39But soon, another more lucrative example of the region's abundance was to change the king's fortunes and the forest itself.
18:51Leopold was looking to the Congo to exploit its mineral wealth, rubber particularly at this point at the end of
18:59the 19th century.
19:00Rubber being used for automobile, tyres, but crucially being used for the insulation on electric cables and telephone and the
19:07telegraph.
19:08These modern technologies dependent on rubber.
19:11It was a boom, immense wealth, but it came at immense cost.
19:22Great numbers of rubber trees grew wild in the forest's interior.
19:27There was no idea of plantations at this time, and so tapping them would need to rely on the local
19:32knowledge and labour of the forest's inhabitants.
19:35And this was to be a primary example of how the region's riches would become associated with misery.
19:45Leopold now owned their forest.
19:49And his ruthless drive to extract rubber from the inhabitants radically altered their perception of the landscape they'd inhabited for
19:57thousands of years.
20:01Here is an important image that the village will keep, and especially the villages of the forest.
20:10I start with the first image, village, related to art.
20:16This story remains an horror story under Leopold II.
20:20Because when you don't produce this caoutchouc, you don't feed it, you don't feed it, you don't feed it.
20:26Because you are a goy-goy, so a dormer, a polteron, a faible.
20:31To encourage you to produce, you're sending it to the forest.
20:34And more the years passed, the liens became rare, so it had to penetrate deep.
20:42So the destruction of the forest began.
20:44Because Leopold II had needed the caoutchouc.
20:55When a village failed to produce its quota of rubber, selected people had their hands chopped off.
21:02Frequently it was the children who were chosen.
21:06The image of the abundant Congo was supplanted with the image of the state of terror.
21:18Frankly, it was the first genocide of the modern era.
21:22Between 1885 to 1908, between four and ten million people died.
21:27Four and ten million. These are numbing figures.
21:34It happened because white man thought that they could do this to Africa.
21:38And that really is, in my mind's eye, that's where the association of central, of the Congo River Basin, with
21:45darkness comes from.
21:47The adjective darkness was to become indelibly attached to the western imaginings of the Congo, with a publication of Conrad's
21:55novella in 1899.
22:00Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the
22:06earth and the big trees were kings.
22:09An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.
22:15The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish.
22:19There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.
22:23The long stretches of waterway ran on deserted into the gloom of overshadowed distances.
22:30We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.
22:38Joseph Conrad had travelled in Leopold's so-called Congo Free State in the 1890s.
22:45Like many white men, he'd suffered from chronic dysentery and malaria.
22:50His physical degeneration was coupled with a deep disillusion with the way Leopold's regime exploited the land and its people.
23:01And what he saw, the behaviour of the white man there, scarred him so much, and it sat in his
23:07soul for eight years,
23:08that eight years later, in three hectic months, he produced the heart of darkness.
23:13They were dying slowly. It was very clear.
23:17They were not enemies. They were not criminals.
23:21They were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.
23:30Brought from all the recesses of the coast, in all the legality of time contracts.
23:36Lost in uncongenial surroundings. Fed on unfamiliar food.
23:41They sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.
23:50And there were very many layers of darkness he was referring to.
23:54One of the layers of darkness was the darkness of the colonial project and the hypocrisy at its heart,
24:01that it was pretending to be about uplifting the native and raising him up and introducing him to civilisation,
24:07but in fact all it was, it was about profit at any cost.
24:10The other darkness was the darkness of a white man, a Western, supposedly civilised man,
24:16who goes to Africa, enjoys supreme absolute power, and loses his moral bearings.
24:23The model for Kurz, the station agent who goes crazy in the middle of the forest,
24:29was probably Leon Rom, who was a Belgian member of the Force Publique.
24:35And this was a man who was famous in the Congo for decorating his palisade with the heads of the
24:41local Congolese.
24:44His was an impenetrable darkness. I was fascinated. It was though a veil had been rent.
24:52I saw on that ivory face an expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of an intense
25:01and hopeless despair.
25:06He cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath. The horror, the horror.
25:24And then the last darkness is the use now that we always think of when we use that phrase heart
25:29of darkness,
25:30which is the savagery of primeval Africa. And it's very interesting that that use is the only one now that
25:37we see in the media today.
25:42At the time of its publication, Conrad's book was just the opening salvo in what eventually amounted to a barrage
25:49of criticism of Leopold's Congo.
25:52The first human rights campaign of the 20th century, it was also to be the first to use photographs,
25:58taken by British missionaries. They provided the evidence and produced outrage.
26:05Supported by Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle, journalist Edmund Morell made the Red Rubber campaign one of the dominant
26:12political issues of the age.
26:14The Red Rubber campaign, or the campaign that Morrell led, became a huge public affair, both in England and in
26:28Europe and in the United States.
26:31And it became a mass protest with all sorts of political ramifications.
26:41And eventually, I suppose you can say that it led to the dismemberment of Leopold's private franchise and the Belgian
26:56state taking over the Congo.
27:00In 1908, Leopold handed his Congo Free State over to the Belgian nation. The extreme abuses of the past slowly
27:09began to diminish.
27:13But among all the colonizing nations, the idea of the civilizing mission to the benighted forest colonies was to be
27:21perpetuated for another half century.
27:25It is Leopold's museum outside Brussels that exemplifies this propaganda more than any other.
27:32Financed from the profits of his rubber trade, he built a stately memorial to himself and his image of Western
27:39civilization in the Congo.
27:42He died before it was completed.
27:50Although its new administration has plans to update it, the Royal Museum of Central Africa still displays the image of
27:58the white man's mission, stimulating an ambiguous response from Congolese visitors.
28:04I think that when a Congolese visits the museum for the first time, there is a feeling of joy and
28:13a feeling of sadness.
28:15Of joy first, first of all, at least.
28:16We find what we haven't seen.
28:18Most of the works of art, you will never see in the Congo.
28:22We find it in a country, in a foreign environment, Western environment, and we find the Congo that is done.
28:31The image of my country, the image of Africa, the image of our values, the image of...
28:37And we say that these works of art are important, so we feel important.
28:43But the feeling of sadness is the reading of history.
28:49When you enter the Royal Museum of Central Africa, by the central door, there are these images of equality.
28:56Black women who take a white and a black child.
29:01This brings us to the false image of the colonization.
29:07The colonization came to bring us to civilization.
29:13There was a positive side to the presentations of the colonial museums.
29:18They were also availing themselves of the cultural wealth of the forest people.
29:23Figurines and masks from unknown sculptors of the forests were a revelation to artists like Derain, Flaminque, Modigliani and Picasso.
29:38Picasso incorporated Congolese sculpture into one of the most influential paintings of the 20th century.
29:50On visiting an exhibition of African art in Paris, he wrote...
29:54I experienced my greatest artistic emotion when I suddenly discovered the sublime beauty of sculptures executed by the anonymous artists
30:03from Africa.
30:05These passionate and rigorously logical religious works are what the human imagination has produced as most potent and most beautiful.
30:15At that moment, I realized what painting was all about.
30:25Of course, it released him from all academic art.
30:29I think it's the power in these things. I mean, just looking at them.
30:34They just have this power.
30:36And any artist is going to feel proud of that, pleased of that. He's part of this tradition.
30:45The region's natural riches were also being collected in great numbers.
30:50Museums all over the world enticed their publics with vast displays of the forest's flora and fauna.
30:59Hunters and naturalists combed the forest for more and more exotic species in what was still seen as a primeval
31:06forest.
31:08There were rumors that the forest harbored survivors from the dinosaur era.
31:16Sadly, no dinosaurs were discovered, but the zoological world was rocked with other discoveries.
31:25One came from the mountains on the eastern edge of the Congo forest.
31:31In the beginning of the 20th century, in 1902, a new species of gorilles, the gorilles of the mountains,
31:38Gorilla berenguei, was discovered.
31:42But this discovery made an effect of a bomb.
31:46Because until now, we know only the gorilles of the plains,
31:50essentially the Gabon, which we talk about with the Shahu.
31:56Jusque dans les années 1920, il y a vraiment une course à la découverte dans la région du Kivu,
32:04qui est la région où les gorilles sont découverts.
32:10The American zoologist Carl Akeley was commissioned to collect specimens for the American Museum of Natural History,
32:17and he saw the forest in a new light.
32:21Carl Akeley is part of his first conservationists.
32:26He wants to go to the place to find a gorilles family.
32:32So he leaves with a large team of painters, botanists,
32:38who will describe the encounter landscape in the mountains of the Kivu.
32:46But Akeley began not only to reassess the image of the gorilla, but he brought a new concept to the
32:52region, conservation.
32:58Le fait aussi que le gorille est un animal timide, un animal sensible, délicat,
33:06qui est essentiellement végétarien, qui vit en petits groupes, qui est bipède, mais qui évolue aussi à quatre pattes,
33:17fait que doucement la mentalité va commencer à changer.
33:23Il demande a world safe for Gorilla.
33:30Akeley's exertions resulted in the creation of Africa's first national park.
33:39Mais il faut vous dire que la région est habité depuis des millénaires,
33:44essentiellement sur les rives du parc.
33:49Il y a une population de pêcheurs qui pratiquent la pêche locale.
33:55Le fait d'établir un parc national dans cette région a une base.
34:03La population locale doit être évacuée.
34:08Albert National Park was the first of many.
34:11The Congo was now perceived as a natural treasure to be preserved, not just exploited.
34:17However, this perception did not embrace the human populations who lived in and around it.
34:28People for whom the forest and its resources provided a livelihood,
34:33and also was a wellspring for their spiritual life.
34:39Et la conception que le Congolais habitant de la forêt,
34:42ou les villageois qui vivent de la forêt ont,
34:45c'est que pour les Occidentaux,
34:47ou pour le pouvoir des Kinshasa,
34:50qui traitent avec les Occidentaux,
34:52les animaux et les forêts ont plus de valeur,
34:57ou ont plus d'importance qu'elles.
35:01Throughout the various colonies that partitioned the forest,
35:04attitudes to the local inhabitants varied.
35:08In the vast territory which was the Belgian Congo,
35:12it seemed that the rulers were still locked into a perception of the forest population,
35:16but owed a great deal to the social Darwinians,
35:20and the evolutionary hierarchy of mankind.
35:23Well, the Belgians had this incredibly patronising approach to the Congolese.
35:27There were several social distinctions in Congolese cities.
35:33You had the African quarters, the popular quarters,
35:36and then you had the white quarters, which were, you know, rather nicer.
35:41And then in between you had the areas where the évolués were allowed to live.
35:46And these were Africans, evolved Africans,
35:49who were deemed to be between the Africans and the whites.
35:53I think the word évolué says everything, evolved.
35:57You're in a transitory stage between being an African, i.e. not quite human,
36:03and a white person who is fully human.
36:10The Belgian Congo began to promote itself as the best managed colony in the region.
36:17It was as if the forests had been tamed to provide the perfect tourist destination.
36:32Sustained by profits of its abundant mineral resources,
36:36airports were built, new railway lines created.
36:39A national system of roads was forged across thousands of miles of jungle.
36:46Primary education was provided for the local population,
36:49and the colony had more hospital beds than all the rest of tropical Africa.
36:55Diseases like leprosy were almost eradicated.
36:58The colony was still situated on the dark continent,
37:01but it no longer seemed to be Conrad's heart of darkness.
37:12The Congo was at its zenith in the 1950s, late 1950s.
37:16This was a time when it was integrated with the rest of the world.
37:19You could take a flight and land in the Congo quite happily,
37:22and it would connect on.
37:23That was the point, it was connected.
37:25You could buy a railway ticket in what was then Rhodesia and travel into the Congo.
37:29I know this because my own mother did it in 1958.
37:31Just a young girl in her twenties,
37:34not a particularly adventurous traveller by her own admission,
37:36and she just went through the Congo because she was on a journey from Rhodesia to Kenya,
37:40and it was the way to do it.
37:42And for me, one of the little tiny little examples is that, you know,
37:45Hollywood could send a big film crew, a big film crew, with a producer, with a big fat cigar,
37:51John Houston, a colourful, amazing, want-to-shoot-the-elephants kind of character as the director,
37:56send those guys and 40 crew, with their sailmen and their gaff boys and their best boys,
38:00and all of this, up the Congo River, about as far as it's possible to get.
38:04They went all the way to Stanleyville, then they went on the train,
38:07the equator express that cuts across the equator.
38:09Then when they got to the end of that, they then drove for another 40 miles out into the bush
38:12to find what was for them the perfect river scene for the African Queen.
38:16And it was perfectly doable.
38:18From the thrilling pages of world-renowned author C.S. Forrester's magnificent story,
38:22and filmed in the jungles and headwaters of Africa, the dark continent,
38:26in all the magnificence of colour by technicolour,
38:29comes the most exciting adventure ever screened.
38:37You promised you'd go down the river.
38:40There's death a dozen times over down the river.
38:43You promised.
38:44Well, I'm taking my promise back!
38:48The region's roads, railways, airports, schools, hospitals and hunting lodges
38:53were financed from the superabundance of mineral deposits that lay beneath the ground.
38:59Forest products like rubber and oil palm brought in more revenue.
39:03The very fact that it was a rainforest provided another resource.
39:10The great cliche about the Congo, it is cursed with its resources.
39:12It has everything you could possibly want.
39:14It has power, hydroelectric power, more than anyone could dream of.
39:18If you could reasonably trap that river.
39:22Similarly, the Congo's copper deposits, again, the richest in the world.
39:26Cobalt deposits, the richest in the world.
39:28Alluvial diamonds, fantastic.
39:30Kimberlite diamonds, even better.
39:32Gold, it goes on.
39:32Casita, right?
39:33Cold time.
39:34It's all there.
39:36At the time of Leopold II, someone described the Congo as being a geological scandal.
39:43And that's certainly the case.
39:45You have the very, very major holdings of copper and cobalt, gold, diamonds and, of course, uranium.
39:52Now, at the time of the Second World War, the uranium that was used to produce the bombs that were
40:00dropped on Hiroshima came from Congo.
40:12The very riches that had facilitated the infrastructure and wealth of the Belgian Congo were to blight the country's future
40:19as an independent state.
40:22In 1960, virtually all the countries of the region gained independence.
40:28For a moment, this part of Africa was seized with optimism.
40:36The great tracts of equatorial forests would become a collection of independent states which still retained their old colonial boundaries.
40:44The new Congo state dominated the region and international attention.
40:51But virtually from the beginning, most of the new countries were thrown into upheaval as foreign interests interfered to retain
40:59control over the mineral resources.
41:02Once again, Henry Morton Stanley's image of savage anarchy prevailed.
41:16For a few years, the region returned to the darkness of chaos and civil war.
41:22The Congo's first president was assassinated.
41:25Belgian troops and later the UN were called in.
41:29White mercenaries fought in the south. Che Guevara led guerrilla bands in the east.
41:35Eventually, a unifying figurehead arose who was to recast the image of this country of forests as Zaire, the model
41:42African state.
41:44He took his inspiration from his forest background.
41:50But Mbubutu is the originator of the forest. His parents are originators of the forest.
41:55And to speak of someone who comes from the forest, in the Congo language, we use the term Niamaya Zamba.
42:05Niamaya means animal, Zamba means forest.
42:08So, the originators of the forest, we consider them as close to an animal of the forest.
42:14And after that Mbubutu had taken the power, and as he dominated, he started to dominate,
42:22he started to dominate, to put in place Sonita Zaï.
42:24There was even a song, Niamaya Zamba is committed to Niamaya Mboka.
42:29So, an animal of the forest becomes today an animal of the city or village.
42:36Mbubutu, by his authority, by his charism, a réussi, a given the image of a strong power.
42:45Mbubutu was dressed as a leopard.
42:47It's the peau of the leopard.
42:49This is a culture that is strongly linked to the forest.
42:54There is the traditional power that we call, in my culture, the Kumo Okunda.
42:59So, the Kumo Okunda, the master of the forest.
43:02The master of the forest.
43:03That is the real power of the ancestors.
43:08First of all, he was very much a traditional chief coming from the forest tradition.
43:13His way of governing was very much based on forest type policies.
43:20Very secretive and very clannic.
43:23There's no question about that.
43:24And he always loved nature.
43:26That's one of the things that he is respected for.
43:29He was very, very supportive of nature conservation,
43:32even though there was a lot of elephant poaching at the same time.
43:36He loves to go fishing.
43:38He loves to go hunting.
43:39He used to take his VIP visitors out to nature.
43:45He had this wonderful expression.
43:47He used to say, you people in Europe have your cathedrals.
43:50In Zaire, we have our forest.
43:52That is our heritage.
43:54This is something we want to protect.
43:58As the region's powerful figurehead,
44:01Zaire's leader ensured a period of relative peace.
44:04Field researchers were able to operate in his forests.
44:07And among other discoveries,
44:09identified another close relative to humankind.
44:13Unique to Zaire, the bonobos' social relations were based on an abundance of sex.
44:23Everyone does it with everyone else.
44:26Males with males, females with females, adults with young.
44:30And they do it for all sorts of reasons.
44:33To greet, to appease, to reassure, to enhance relationships of all kinds.
44:38It's the social cement of bonobos' society.
44:42The binding force that keeps the group together.
44:52The mountain guerrillas were protected in the eastern province of Kivu, the old Albert National Park.
44:59No respecters of borders, they moved between Zaire and neighbouring Rwanda.
45:07Naturalists like Diane Fossey and David Attenborough were to recreate their image as peace lovers.
45:15There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging the plants with a gorilla than any other animal I know.
45:29They were so similar.
45:32Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell,
45:37were so similar to ours that we see the world in the same way as they do.
45:48Dushayu's image of the ferocious half-man, half-beast could now be consigned to the antique book collectors.
45:58So it seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolise all that is aggressive and
46:07violent.
46:08And that's the one thing that the gorilla is not, and that we are.
46:19But just as we were beginning to see them as playful and harmless herbivores,
46:23they were about to become a new symbol.
46:26The innocent victims of deforestation.
46:37Rainforests like the Amazon and the Congo were becoming a source of international concern.
46:44This time, it was in the ex-French colonies to the north where concessions were being granted to European timber
46:50companies.
46:51Not only was animal habitat being destroyed, but roads were being opened to the bushmeat hunters.
47:07In Zaire itself, the uncontrolled and thoroughly corrupt exploitation of the country's minerals
47:13was now causing the collapse of Mobutu's great forest state.
47:25Zaire's riches were being siphoned into foreign bank accounts,
47:29spent on palaces or squandered on expensive and often pointless purchases
47:34that could not be afforded and would not be maintained.
47:40And now it's time for birthday presents to the nation.
47:44A jumbo jet.
47:49Mobutu, the way he handled the Congo, Mobutu looked a lot like Leopold II.
47:55The Congo is my property.
47:57The Congo is me.
47:59I am the owner of men and goods.
48:03Mobutu could alienate the forests and protect them.
48:08Unfortunately, he did not protect them.
48:11He destroyed them.
48:12Even though his power became more and more weak.
48:18His final downfall was to be triggered by the fallout from the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
48:27Millions of refugees poured over the border into the forests of Eastern Congo.
48:32The upheaval resulted in the invasion of foreign armies that backed his political rivals.
48:40As his loss of power became inevitable, he began to resemble less the dominating figure of Leopold II,
48:47and more Mr. Kurtz, the failed and morally bankrupt administrator from the heart of darkness.
48:55I think there are some similarities between Kurtz and Mobutu.
48:59Certainly, when I first got to Kinshasa as a young reporter, there was this mystery figure who was in the
49:07middle of the jungle,
49:08Marooned in Badalete, where he had this vast palace, where he'd grown up, where he came from,
49:15where he spent a lot of time planting seedlings, designing his ornamental gardens.
49:21If you see some of the coverage that was shot of him during those years,
49:26there is a sense of a man who has cut himself off completely from reality,
49:31is still touring around saying hello to local villagers, planting his garden,
49:36and trying to live the life of the gentleman farmer,
49:39no longer wants to know anything about the politics of his country,
49:44international politics, who only feels at home now in the forest,
49:50and who had withdrawn into his forest hideout.
49:54Mobutu was eventually forced into exile,
49:58leaving behind his rotting palaces to become a symbol of his grandiose failure.
50:04slowly consumed by the forest he's so identified with.
50:15The spectre of savage anarchy returned once again to much of the Congo,
50:20with the civil wars that followed Mobutu's exile and death.
50:29This image has been perpetuated by the intervention of armies from other nations,
50:34and a struggle to control the country's minerals and mines.
50:39And the great forests are an easy place to hide renegade armies and tribal militias.
50:47But just as the forests can support ruthless and violent armed bands,
50:52they can be the source of food and shelter for the inhabitants.
50:57It was a constant message, a constant remark that came from every single Congolese person I spoke to,
51:03from one side to the other, either deep inland or down by the coast.
51:07At one point in their lives, they've all said, all had this experience.
51:11We've all fled to the bush. We've gone there to find sanctuary.
51:18I guess if you think about it, the sheer scale of the place,
51:21it's the geography, it is so vast.
51:23It is the second largest rainforest in the world after the Amazon.
51:26This vast, vast country.
51:28That's the only safety you've got when the bad guys are coming.
51:30You have a chance of hiding if you can just go and disperse yourself somewhere in that forest.
51:37In the last decade, the eastern part of the Congo has been blighted with natural disasters,
51:43as well as massacre, rape and pillage.
51:46Malnutrition and disease have taken an even greater toll.
51:50As many as five million people have died.
51:56For the largest human death toll since the Second World War,
52:00there's been scant coverage.
52:03But analysis of some television channels, including the BBC,
52:07shows there have been more hours focusing on the threat to the Congo's great apes and their habitat,
52:12than there has been on the plight of the human population.
52:16I've spent many months in eastern Congo, covering first the genocide in Rwanda,
52:22then there was the flood of thousands of refugees into eastern Congo,
52:27then thousands more were dying of cholera in the refugee camps.
52:29And amongst the journalists, there would be many who would be taking time out to write about the guerrillas in
52:37Virunga Park,
52:39which ran just near the refugee camps.
52:40And the emphasis would always be about, isn't it awful?
52:43There are all these Hutu genociders, these genocidal killers wandering around in the camps.
52:49And, you know, the guerrillas are being eaten, the guerrillas are being slaughtered, isn't it awful?
52:54And you sort of thought, well, yes, but there's been a genocide across the border.
52:59People are still dying of cholera. Is this an appropriate emphasis?
53:04Our western response to the Congo does seem to allow for two contradictory visions to live side by side.
53:11However much we recoil from the human bloodshed and atrocities,
53:16we're still fascinated by the idea that these forests are also home to our closest genetic relatives.
53:25Ever since the first explorers, we have been entranced by the great diversity and abundance of plant and animal species,
53:33the sheer exuberance of nature.
53:39After Leopold, the Belgians attempted to bring order and infrastructure.
53:44But now, like Mobutu's palaces, the last vestiges of the white man's colonial endeavours are being swallowed up by rampant
53:55nature.
53:57It was an amazing moment, very close to the equator, about as close as you possibly could get.
54:03I was just near the town of Kisangani, what used to be Stanleyville, the city on the bend in the
54:07river.
54:09Deep equatorial forest.
54:12And I was walking through the forest.
54:14And then suddenly, my heel felt something strange and angular.
54:20It felt a bit odd in this sort of leafy, organic world of the forest.
54:25And I scraped down through the leaf mulch with my heel and came across a railway sleeper.
54:31With the name Antwerp printed on it, 1913.
54:34But even more scary, the railway sleeper was connected to railway tracks, which again I could scrape away.
54:40And they disappeared off and then died in the forest.
54:49And Catherine Hepburn sat on that railway.
54:52Humphrey Bogart sat on that railway.
54:53And they went along that railway in 1951 to film the African Queen.
54:57And it was for me, it was a very powerful moment.
55:00And it drilled home that sense of a place where the developmental growth had gone like a parabola and we
55:05were on the downward slope.
55:07And that's the reality of today's Congo.
55:14But now there are new foreign builders in the Congo.
55:18Like the Europeans of the 19th century, the Chinese have come here, offering to bring the benefits of their expertise
55:26and technology.
55:39In a deal worth as much as $9 billion, the Chinese are promising to build new roads, railways, hospitals and
55:47schools.
55:49This is in exchange for millions of tons of the country's copper and nickel over the next 15 years.
55:57The new roads, railways and hospitals depend on a stable and open government, which will be able to maintain them.
56:05There are justified fears that history will repeat itself.
56:11Economists talk about the resource curse, which is that assets which should be a great blessing, in fact, turn out
56:18to be a blight.
56:18And I think Congo is the perfect example of that.
56:22And what's interesting is that Congolese people will often talk to you with huge pride and sort of vaingloriousness about
56:29all these wonderful,
56:29you know, we're a rich country, we've got all these mineral assets.
56:33And it really is a very important part of their self-image and their image of their own country.
56:38But of course, if you can't tap the assets, and if you can't tap the assets in a way that
56:43is then funneled back and reinvested in your own country,
56:47you'd actually be better off without them.
56:49And that is unfortunately the truth, because they have constantly seen these assets being used as an excuse to rape
56:58the country.
57:03The people of the Congo are now among the poorest in the world.
57:08In the last century, many have left the forests for the towns and cities.
57:14In earlier days, they'd seen the forest as more than just a place of refuge and sustenance.
57:20It was also the place where their ancestors lived.
57:24A place of awe, reverence, and sometimes fear.
57:28Since the arrival of the Europeans, this relationship has been fundamentally transformed.
57:35As if, since the creation of the Congo state,
57:41since Leopold II to today,
57:45the forests,
57:46the animals,
57:49are much more important than them.
57:52They don't matter.
57:54I would say that the forests are only a source of misery
57:59or pain
58:01since the state's events
58:02for the population who live in these forests.
58:06We make them transport the trees,
58:09we make them transport the trees,
58:10we make them transport the trees,
58:12they suffer the weight.
58:15They don't exist.
58:16We stop.
58:23Still to come here on BBC Four this evening,
58:25the final part of Nature's Microworlds heads to Svalbard in just a few moments.
58:29At nine, we have the second part of our brand-new series,
58:31Growing Children with Laverne Antrobus,
58:33and then striking up an unlikely friendship in tonight's movie,
58:37The Naughty Room at 10.
58:38See you next.
58:38As weasst in tonight's case to remainimentosy again.
58:39See you soon.
58:40You