Belgian Congo

BELGIAN CONGO. - In ancient times the name C. was understood to include present-day French Equatorial Africa, the Portuguese possessions of Angola and the Congo, and those of the Belgian Crown. At present the name Belgian Congo is given to the vast (2.3 million sq km, 80 times the territory of the mother country) colonial dominion of Belgium in Africa which extends, astride the Equator, from Lakes Albert and Tanganyika to the Atlantic, embracing four-fifths of the total area of the basin of the great river that gives it its name.

I. GEOGRAPHY

The basin corresponds to a high plateau depressed in its central part in the manner of a basin and enclosed at its margins by uplands or highlands, as a rule ramparted in the form of steps. The region has an equatorial climate with constant rainfall in the low zones, and a tropical one with periodic rains in the high ones; this determines the prevalence of forest in the former and of savanna in the latter. The gigantic river (4,600 km in length; 3.7 million sq km of basin), although it constitutes, with its numerous tributaries, an extensive river network suitable for large-scale navigation, does not have the importance of the Amazon, because it is interrupted in its course by rapids and cataracts that are bypassed by railway lines. The Belgian Congo is one of the richest countries in the world, but its development is held back above all by the obstacles that climate and environment oppose to European colonization. Indigenous agriculture, while allowing some surplus over internal needs (maize, peanuts, sesame, castor), remains backward; the importance of livestock raising is also slight (especially goats), from which the widespread scourge of the tsetse fly subtracts very large areas. More than the forest, which covers half of the territorial surface and supplies fine timber and palm nuts and sustains an active oil industry, more than the plantations (cotton and coffee in strong development), what today dominates the economy of the Belgian Congo are the immense mineral resources, which have made its south-eastern sector, Katanga, the most active industrial center of the entire continent (copper, iron, cobalt and tin; elsewhere, and especially in Kasai, diamonds, gold, silver, uranium, coal, etc.). Communications have received a notable impulse in the last twenty years (4,662 km of railways; 94,476 km of roads; airlines with 167 airfields; increased equipment of the ports of Matadi, Banana, Boma and Léopoldville), so as to make the penetration of the immense country by now fairly easy, although its development is still limited to relatively restricted sectors.

Of the colony's 10.7 million inhabitants, almost all are Bantu negroes, with Sudanese in the north and Pygmies in the forests. Whites number 36,000, of whom 24,000 are Belgians, 2,000 Portuguese and 1,500 Italians, for the most part officials and missionaries. The inhabited centers have an urban character only in a few cases. Léopoldville (or Léo-Kin), the capital, today has about 120,000 inhabitants (of whom 7,244 are whites), Elisabethville 69,000; there are then five other settlements with more than 10,000 inhabitants each.

The natives incline as a rule to fetishist cults, and toward the north a conspicuous Muslim penetration is noticeable. Catholics are reckoned at 2,179,303 (31 Dec. 1946), Protestants at 446,805 and Muslims at about 70,000.

The Belgian Congo, which had arisen as the "Independent State of the Congo" in 1882, on the initiative of the King of the Belgians Leopold II, was in 1908 converted into a colony of Belgium, administered by a governor-general appointed by the king. Contiguous to the Belgian Congo is the mandated territory comprising the two native kingdoms of Ruanda and Urundi (v.).

Administrative subdivision of the colony:

Giuseppe Caraci

II. HISTORY OF THE EVANGELIZATION OF THE REGION FORMERLY INCLUDED UNDER THE NAME OF THE CONGO

1. Ancient mission

After the Congo (Zaire) River was discovered in 1482 (Padrão at Cape Agostinho) by Diogo Cão, the evangelization of the kingdom of the Congo, south of the river, soon began. It is not yet entirely clear who the first missionaries were: Franciscans, Franciscan Tertiaries, Dominicans, Canons Regular of St. John the Evangelist, called Lojos.

It is more than probable that the first missionary expedition of 1490 was made up of friars of various Orders and "outros clerigos," that is, secular clergy. More precise information exists about the activity of the Lojos: in their convent in Lisbon those transported there by Cão after the second expedition of 1485-86 were educated and baptized. Three expeditions of Lojos, in 1490, 1509 and 1521, are certain. Already in 1491 the king of the Congo had himself baptized, only to apostatize shortly afterward. Only under his successor Alfonso, a convinced and zealous Christian, could Christianity take root. In 1513 he sent an embassy to Leo X; he also sent his son Henrique and several sons of chiefs to Portugal, where, after suitable formation, they were ordained priests; Henrique indeed was consecrated titular bishop of Utica. Their activity in the Congo is little known. Damião de Goes in his Chronica do felicissimo Rey Dom Emmanuel (Lisbon 1619) tells us of their zeal for the propagation of the faith. In the second half of the 16th century Jesuits and Carmelites labored for the spread of the Christian religion in the Congo. After several vain efforts to obtain a diocese in the country, in 1596 the diocese of São Salvador do Congo was erected. In the meantime, however, the center of Portuguese colonization had shifted to Angola, where the Jesuits had already been working since 1560 and baptized its king in 1584. In 1626 the episcopal see was transferred de facto, if not de iure, to São Paulo de Loanda, where the Jesuits had a college in the 17th century. From 1645 the principal missionaries were the Italian Capuchins, sent by Propaganda, to whom the prefecture erected in 1640 was entrusted, and for about two centuries the mission of the Congo and of Angola remained in their hands. In 1653 Fr. Giorgio van Gheel was martyred there. The Capuchins succeeded in extending their activity to the kingdoms of Matamba, whose queen Zinga was converted in 1656, and to the kingdom of Loango, where likewise for a short time (1766-76) some French secular priests attempted a mission. In the 18th century, however, the Capuchin mission steadily declined, being reduced in the end to a few stations. In the 19th century it fell completely into ruin and was abandoned by them. Only the episcopal see of Loanda remained, with a few coastal towns where the Portuguese secular clergy exercised the parochial ministry. The see of Loanda moreover remained vacant from 1826 to 1852.

2. The modern mission

The modern mission was begun by the missionaries of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or rather of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary of Fr. Libermann, which in 1848 merged with that of the Holy Spirit. In 1844 Fr. Jean-René Bessieux (1803-76) founded the first station of St. Mary of Gabon; in 1849 he was appointed vicar apostolic of the two Guineas. In Gabon the activity was at first limited to the surroundings of the town of Libreville, founded in 1849 by the French. There they created a large agricultural enterprise with attached schools and a hospital, with the aim of reducing the natives to a less savage life and founding Christian families. Gabon later became the starting point of the missions of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit in Nigeria and in the Congo. In 1865 Propaganda entrusted the ancient prefecture of the Congo to this Congregation. The opposition of the Portuguese government at first prevented any fruitful activity; only in 1873 were the missionaries able to establish themselves in Landana, an independent territory north of the Congo River, visiting the mission field with daring excursions.

The explorations of Henry Stanley (1841-1904) and of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (1852-1905) resulted in the division of the Congolese territory. In 1884-85 the Independent State of the Congo was founded and its boundaries were established by treaties with France and Portugal (1885). Consequently, in 1886 the reorganization of missionary activity became necessary. The territory of Landana, assigned to Portugal, constituted the prefecture of the Lower Congo, together with the northern part of the Portuguese possession south of the river. In the French part, alongside the vicariate of the two Guineas, the vicariate of the French Congo was erected. The Independent State of the Congo became an autonomous mission, elevated to a vicariate in 1888, under the name of the Independent Congo or Belgian Congo.

a) The Portuguese Congo (v. ANGOLA).

(phot. E. Lebied)

(Int. J. Mulders)

b) French Congo. - In the French Congo, called French Equatorial Africa since 1910 (v. map s. v. AFRICA: I, coll. 379-80), the missionaries were likewise the fathers of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. In the vicariate of the two Guineas, restricted in 1890 to Gabon under the name of Gabon, the missionaries from 1880 penetrated into the interior, evangelizing the black tribes on the Ogoué and Ngoumie rivers. In the middle Congo the station of Linzolo was established in 1885, a center and starting point for further advances. In 1886 the apostolic vicariate of the French Congo was erected; this was divided in 1890 into two: Lower French Congo (from 1907, Loango and now Pointe-Noire) and Upper French Congo or Oubangui (from 1922, Brazzaville). The first apostolic vicar of Oubangui, Philippe Prosper Augouard (1852-1921), pushed the activity further north as far as the Oubangui river. The Gospel succeeded only with difficulty in taking root among those tribes, in part still given over to cannibalism. The northern part of the vicariate was detached in 1909 as the prefecture of Ubanghi-Chari (named Bangui in 1940). Here the Capuchins came to the aid of the fathers of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, and for them the apostolic prefecture of Berberati was erected in 1940.

c) The Belgian Congo. - In 1880, by rescript of the S. Congregation of Propaganda Fide to Card. Lavigerie, two mission centers of the White Fathers were authorized, one of the southern Upper Congo and the other of the northern Upper Congo, which comprised the whole Congolese region east of Stanley Pool and the neighboring regions to the north and south. Only in 1885 did the first three missionaries of Card. Lavigerie found the first mission station, penetrating into the interior from the west. But already from 1879 the White Fathers had begun their activity in the region of Lake Tanganyika. After the foundation of the independent State of the Congo, King Leopold II obtained from the Holy See that those missions be reserved to the religious institutes of Belgium. Therefore in 1886 the mission of the independent or Belgian Congo was created, which in 1888 became an apostolic vicariate, made up of the territory of this name, excluding only the eastern stretch assigned to the apostolic vicariate of the Upper Congo for the White Fathers. The new mission of the Belgian Congo was entrusted to the fathers of Scheut, who placed the center of their activity at Léopoldville. Later other congregations arrived from Belgium: in 1891 the Jesuits, in 1894 the Trappists, in 1897 the Priests of the Sacred Heart, in 1898 the Premonstratensians, in 1899 the Redemptorists, in 1905 the Mill Hill Society, in 1907 the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, in 1910 the Benedictines and the Capuchins, in 1911 the Dominicans and the Salesians and, after the war of 1914-18, other institutes. Thus the ecclesiastical circumscriptions of the Belgian Congo and of the Upper Congo, through successive divisions, became ever more numerous and today are entrusted to 19 missionary institutes. Likewise numerous female congregations founded houses there. In 1891 the sisters of la Charité de Jésus et de Marie and of Ghent arrived in the Belgian Congo; numerous others followed; by 1935 there were already 52 congregations. In 1888 civil personality was granted to religious, scientific and charitable associations, and by the convention of 26 May 1906 between the independent State and the Holy See there came about an intimate collaboration between the Catholic mission and the colonial government, which did not prevent a veritable campaign of attacks and calumnies against the missionaries from being unleashed in the years that followed, in Belgium itself. The chief defender of the missions was the well-known Jesuit moralist Arthur Vermeersch. In return the mission of the Belgian Congo took ever deeper root in the hearts of the Catholics of the mother country. The result, with the cooperation of the Belgian government and people, was great progress for the missions, both in the religious field, where the number of Catholics rose to 3,247,597 (1948) and that of catechumens to 848,270 (1948), and in the social, economic and hygienic field, and principally in the scholastic field. Considerable too are the productions in ethnology and linguistics due to the missionaries, given the multiplicity of the Congolese tribes. There are 27 apostolic vicariates and 3 apostolic prefectures.

In 1929 an apostolic delegation was created for the missions of the Belgian Congo and of Ruanda-Urundi. There were three conferences of all the ecclesiastical superiors of the missions in the years 1932, 1936 and 1945, at which the principal questions of missionary activity were treated concerning the native clergy, marriage, schools, the social question, Catholic Action, etc., and common directives were issued. - See plate XIII.

Giovanni Rommerskirchen