Matadi

The Kikongo word matadi means stones, and the place is named for the rock on which it stands. Henry Morton Stanley established a station here in 1879, at the head of navigation from the Atlantic: below the town the Congo runs clear to the sea, and above it a long series of cataracts blocks any boat. That single fact of geography made a settlement on this steep, unpromising site inevitable, and everything bound for the interior had to be unloaded and carried past the rapids by porters.

To replace the porterage, the Congo Free State built a railway from Matadi to Léopoldville through the Crystal Mountains. It opened in 1898 after years of work in which very large numbers of labourers, recruited from across the region and beyond, died of disease and exhaustion. With the railway the town became the country's front door: rubber, ivory, palm oil, copper and later cobalt left through its quays, and almost every import arrived through them.

Matadi remained the chief port through the colonial period, independence and the Mobutu years, its fortunes rising and falling with the state of the roads, the railway and the mines. The suspension bridge across the gorge was completed in 1983 by a consortium of Japanese companies, and remains the only bridge across the Congo River proper, carrying traffic towards Boma, the coast and the Angolan frontier. The port has since been modernised in stages and still handles the bulk of the country's seaborne trade, in a town whose life is set by the arrival and departure of ships.

Matadi is a Kongo town, in the province that takes its name from the old kingdom whose rulers received Portuguese ships in the 1480s. Kikongo is the language of home and market, French that of administration, and Lingala is widely used because of the constant traffic with Kinshasa. People here are conscious of descending from the kingdom, and customary titles and family lineages still carry weight in questions of land and marriage.

Church life is strong and varied: Catholic and Protestant congregations with long mission histories, Pentecostal churches in rented halls, and the Kimbanguist church, founded by the preacher Simon Kimbangu, whose holy town of Nkamba lies inland in the same province and draws pilgrims through Kongo Central. Choirs are a serious business, and funerals bring large numbers of relatives from Kinshasa and the villages.

The port gives the town a mixed, outward-looking character, with sailors, traders and officials from elsewhere in the country and abroad passing through. Music follows the capital — rumba and its descendants in the bars — while the Kongo countryside keeps its own drumming, dance and masquerade traditions. Greetings are formal and lengthy, respect for age is expected, and elegance in dress is admired as much here as in Kinshasa.

Matadi, the capital of Kongo Central province, had a recorded population of about 246,000 in 2004 and has grown since, spread over three communes on the slopes above the river, and its economy is the port. Dockers, drivers, customs agents, freight forwarders, mechanics and the traders who supply them make up much of the working population, and lorry convoys queue for the highway to Kinshasa. When shipping slows or the road deteriorates, the whole town feels it.

The site shapes daily life. Houses stand on terraces cut into rock, streets climb in long ramps, and the heat radiating from stone makes afternoons heavy. Water and electricity supplies are irregular despite the Inga dams upstream, and the steepness makes both water delivery and drainage difficult; heavy rain sends water and mud down the slopes.

Markets open at dawn, selling cassava, fish, fruit from the surrounding hills and goods that have come off the quays. Motorbike taxis climb the gradients all day. Proximity to the Angolan border adds a cross-border trade in fuel and household goods. Many families depend on relatives working in Kinshasa, and conversation turns on freight, prices, the exchange rate and the state of the road.

The cooking is Kongo cooking. Chikwangue, also called kwanga — cassava fermented, pounded and steamed in leaves into a dense loaf — is the local staple and a speciality of the province, eaten with the fingers alongside a sauce. Fufu of cassava or maize flour serves the same purpose, and pondu, cassava leaves pounded and simmered with palm oil, onion and often fish, is the everyday green.

Fish dominates the protein: freshwater species from the river, sea fish and prawns brought upstream from the coast, and makayabu, salted fish soaked and stewed. Fish is grilled over charcoal or cooked as liboke in leaf parcels with chilli. Poulet à la moambe, chicken in palm-fruit sauce, is the celebration dish, and grilled goat is the usual accompaniment to a beer.

Palm oil is everywhere in the sauces, and palm wine is tapped from the oil palms of the surrounding hills; lotoko, a home-distilled spirit, circulates informally. Bottled lager arrives from Kinshasa. Mangoes, pineapples, avocados, bananas and safou, the purple fruit eaten cooked, come down from the hills into the market in season, and sweet tea or instant coffee with bread starts the day.