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The only parallels in the Congo are the various areas of the Huileries du Congo Belge. Tshikapa, which means "belt," is a Little America in every sense. It commands the junction of the Tshikapa and Kasai rivers. There are dozens of substantial brick dwellings, offices, warehouses, machine-shops and a hospital.
Between Djoko Punda and Tshikapa the material is hauled in motor trucks and ox-drawn wagons or conveyed on the heads of porters to Kabambaie. Some of it is transshipped to whale-boats and paddled up to Tshikapa, and the remainder continues in the wagons overland. During 1920 seven hundred and fifty tons of freight were hauled from Djoko Punda in this laborious way.
The distance through the jungle was exactly seventy-two miles and he covered it, as I discovered when I reached Tshikapa, in exactly twenty-six hours, a remarkable feat. By this time my confidence in the African jitney was somewhat shaken. A new motor-boat had just been received at Kabambaie and I thought I would take a chance with it and start up the Kasai the next day.
Before going to bed I sent a runner to Tshikapa to notify Donald Doyle, Managing Engineer of the Forminiere in the field, that I was coming and to send a motor car out to meet me. I promised this runner much matabeesh, which is the African word for a tip, if he would run the whole way.
Doyle embodied the same courage that animated Mrs. Wallace. Too much cannot be said of the faith and fortitude of these women who share their husband's fortunes out at the frontiers of civilization. At Tshikapa there were other white women, including Mrs. Dunn, who had recently converted her hospitable home into a small maternity hospital. Only a few weeks before my arrival Mrs.
Midnight brought us to Kabambaie and the banks of the Kasai, where I found food and sanctuary at a Forminiere post. Here the thousands of tons of freight that come up the river from Dima by steamer and which are carried by motor trucks, ox teams, and on the heads of natives to this point, are placed on whale-boats and sent up the river to Tshikapa.
On account of the lack of certain communication save by runner in this part of Africa the traveller can always beat a wireless message I was unable to send any word of my coming and I wondered whom and what I would find there. I had the strongest possible letters to all the Forminiere officials but these pieces of paper could not get me on to Tshikapa. I needed something that moved on wheels.
In 1890 two devoted men, Samuel N. Lapsley, a white clergyman, and William H. Sheppard, a Negro from Alabama, established the American Presbyterian Congo Mission at Luebo which is about one hundred miles from Tshikapa straight across country. The valley of the Sankuru and Kasai Rivers is one of the most densely populated of all the Belgian Congo.
This region, which is watered by the Kasai River, became the center of what is now known as the Congo Diamond Fields and remains the stronghold of American engineering and financial enterprise in Central Africa. On a wooded height not far from the headwaters of the Kasai, these path-finding Americans established a post called Tshikapa, the name of a small river nearby.
It is the capital of Little America in the jungle and therefore became the objective of the second stage of my Congo journey. Kinshassa is nearly a thousand miles from Tshikapa. To get there I had to retrace my way up the Congo as far as Kwamouth, where the Kasai empties into the parent stream. I also found that it was necessary to change boats at Dima and continue on the Kasai to Djoko Punda.
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