Mbandaka

The site where the Ruki meets the Congo was a fishing and trading place of Mongo communities long before Europeans reached it. In 1883 Henry Morton Stanley established a station here and named it Équateurville for the equator, which crosses the river just south of the site; in 1886 the Belgians renamed the place Coquilhatville after the officer Camille-Aimé Coquilhat. Its position at the head of a huge network of forest rivers made it the natural collecting point for everything the basin produced.

Under King Leopold II's Congo Free State that meant rubber above all. The surrounding districts, worked by the state and by concession companies including the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company based upstream at Basankusu, were among the worst affected by the quota system of forced collection, hostage-taking and punishment whose exposure helped end Leopold's personal rule in 1908. Under Belgian administration the town became the capital of Equateur province, with a river port, mission schools, a cathedral and, from 1900, a botanical station at Eala testing tropical crops.

The town was renamed Mbandaka in 1966, in honour of a local leader, during the wave of renamings under Mobutu Sese Seko. The decline of the river fleet, of the plantations and of the state itself hit it hard in the decades that followed, and the wars from 1996 brought fighting and occupation to the province. In recent years Mbandaka has been best known internationally as a base for the response to Ebola outbreaks in Equateur, and as the administrative centre of a province that was divided into five smaller provinces in 2015.

Mbandaka is a Mongo and Lingala city. Lingala, which grew up as a river trade language along this stretch of the Congo before spreading downstream to Kinshasa, is what people speak in the market and on the quay, while Mongo languages remain strong in the surrounding countryside and in church. French belongs to the office, the classroom and the radio bulletin.

Church life is central. Catholic and Protestant missions have been present since the late nineteenth century and still run much of the schooling and health care; choirs rehearse through the week, and Sunday services are long, sung and well attended. Alongside them the extended family and the customary authority of clan elders carry weight in disputes and marriages.

The river sets the cultural rhythm as much as the calendar does. The arrival of a barge convoy is an event that fills the waterfront with traders, musicians and buyers; pirogue handling and net fishing are skills passed down through families; and the Mongo oral tradition, including the long epic of Lianja, is still recited. Congolese rumba and its successors play from bars and speakers in the evening, and football is followed closely on dirt pitches and screens alike. Visitors are noticed immediately in a city that sees very few, and politeness, patience and an unhurried greeting matter more than anything else.

Several hundred thousand people live in Mbandaka, which makes it a substantial city by Congolese standards and a small one on the map of a country of well over a hundred million. Most residents live in single-storey houses of brick, plaster and corrugated iron, spread across communes that fade into cassava gardens at their edges.

The economy is built on fish, cassava, plantain and trade. Fishers work the Congo, the Ruki and the creeks from pirogues; women dominate the markets, smoking fish for sale downstream and selling cassava, palm oil and vegetables; and the port handles the timber, fuel and manufactured goods that move between Kinshasa and the interior. Provincial administration, the university, churches, and the international organisations that base staff here provide most of the salaried work.

Days start early on the riverbank and slow through the heat of the afternoon. Mains electricity is intermittent and many households and businesses rely on generators or solar panels; piped water reaches only part of the city. The recurring concerns are the cost of living, the state of the roads, health care, and the risk of epidemics — Ebola responses have twice put the city at the centre of international attention — along with the perennial difficulty of getting goods and people in and out of a place reached mainly by air and water.

The table in Mbandaka is set by the river and the forest. Freshwater fish is the staple protein — catfish, tilapia and many local species — eaten grilled over wood, stewed, or wrapped with onion, tomato and chilli in leaf parcels and steamed as liboke, a technique that gives the fish a soft, aromatic texture. Fish is also smoked in quantity on wooden racks, both to preserve it in the humidity and to sell it down the river.

Cassava is the everyday starch, pounded into fufu or fermented and wrapped in leaves as chikwangue, a dense loaf that keeps for days and travels well by boat. Its leaves are pounded and stewed with palm oil and smoked fish to make pondu, also called saka-saka, which accompanies most meals. Plantains, makemba in Lingala, are boiled, fried or roasted at the roadside, and rice appears on more prosperous tables. Palm oil colours sauces a deep orange-red, groundnut sauces thicken them, and pili-pili chilli sharpens everything.

Forest foods matter here more than in the cities downstream: wild mushrooms, honey, edible caterpillars in season and bush produce all reach the markets. Palm wine is tapped locally and drunk fresh, village spirits are distilled from cassava or maize, and bottled lager arrives by barge from Kinshasa to be drunk warm or cold according to whether the generator is running.