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Updated: June 6, 2025
Now we come to the third and the most important agency, so far as American interest is affected, in the Forminiere, whose empire is the immense section watered by the Kasai River and which extends across the border into Angola. In the Union Miniere you got the initial hint of America's part in the development of the Congo. That part, however, was entirely technical.
Of one of these boats the Deliverance was only one-third the size, but I took passage on her because she would give me a chance to see not only something of the Congo, but also one of its great tributaries, the less travelled Kasai. The Deliverance was about sixty-five feet over all and drew three feet of water. She was built like a mud-scow, with a deck of iron plates.
The Kasai region is thickly populated and I saw a new type of native, lighter in colour than elsewhere, and more keen and intelligent. The women of the Kasai are probably the most attractive in the Congo. This applies particularly to the Batetelas, who are of light brown colour.
Next day we reach the mouth of the Kasai, a large tributary which drains much of the Equatorial District of the Congo. Here is a State Post, Kwamouth, with a few well constructed houses and a Catholic Mission where pretty walking sticks with ivory handles can be purchased and where the Fathers make a few cigars from Congo tobacco which are not at all bad smoking.
Heretofore I had been under the spell of the Congo River. Now I was to catch the magic of its largest tributary, the Kasai. Long before the Forminiere broke out its banner, America had been associated with the Congo.
In November of 1906, Leopold gave the International Forestry and Mining Company of the Congo mining rights in territories adjoining his private park, the Domaine de la Couronne, and to the American Congo Company he granted the right to work rubber along the Congo River to where it joins the Kasai. This latter is a territory of four thousand square miles.
The King also commissioned Lieutenant von Wissmann to complete his former work of discovery in the great district watered by the River Kasai and its affluents; and in and after 1886 he and his coadjutor, Dr. Wolf, greatly extended the knowledge of the southern and central parts of the Congo basin . In the meantime the British missionaries, Rev. W.H. Bentley and Rev.
Two days after I left Dima we were blanketed with heavy fog every morning and the air was raw and chill. On the Kasai you can have every experience of trans-Atlantic travel with the sole exception of seasickness. As I proceeded up the Kasai I found continued evidence of the advance in price of every food commodity. The omnipresent chicken that fetched a franc in 1914 now brings from five to ten.
It is the headquarters of the Kasai Company in the Congo. I had a brick bungalow to myself and ate with the Managing Director, Monsieur Adrian Van den Hove. He knew no English and my alleged French was pretty bad. Yet we met three times a day at the table and carried on spirited conversations.
Indeed, it was only at this time that I began to perceive that all the western feeders of the Kasai, except the Quango, flow first from the western side toward the centre of the country, then gradually turn, with the Kasai itself, to the north; and, after the confluence of the Kasai with the Quango, an immense body of water, collected from all these branches, finds its way out of the country by means of the River Congo or Zaire on the west coast.
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