Owando

Owando was founded by the French as Rousset in 1903, renamed Fort-Rousset the following year, a post on the Kouyou River in the Cuvette basin, and served as an administrative centre for a region of scattered river villages. The surrounding country was leased in the colonial period to concession companies that extracted rubber and ivory with forced labour, abuses that led to a French government inquiry headed by Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in 1905. The Kouyou, flowing into the Likouala-Mossaka and on to the Congo, was the route by which people and goods reached the south.

The town kept its administrative role after independence in 1960, and was renamed Owando in 1977. It became the capital of the Cuvette department, with the prefecture, the courts, a hospital and secondary schools serving a wide area of farming and fishing settlements.

The Cuvette has weighed heavily in national politics: Marien Ngouabi, president from 1969 until his assassination in 1977, and Joachim Yhombi-Opango, who succeeded him, both came from the department, and Yhombi-Opango was born in the town itself while it was still Fort-Rousset; Denis Sassou Nguesso and his family have houses in and around Oyo to the south. The paved road from Brazzaville transformed the town's position, turning a remote river station into the main stop on the road between the capital and the northern forests.

This is Mbochi and Kouyou country, Mbochi being the traditional language of the Owando district and the Cuvette around it. Lingala is the everyday language, used alongside French in offices and local languages at home, and the northern identity — river and savannah rather than coast and city — is strongly felt. Ties between the town and the surrounding villages are close, with families moving between them for farming, funerals and festivals.

Christianity is the majority faith, with Catholic and Protestant congregations and revivalist churches that fill Sunday mornings with singing, while respect for ancestors and traditional practice continues in the villages. Funerals and wakes are major social occasions, drawing relatives from Brazzaville and elsewhere, and can occupy several days.

Music is Congolese rumba and its descendants, played loudly from bars and at family celebrations; dance and drumming traditions belong to the life of the river villages. Manners are formal by the standards of the capital: greetings are unhurried, elders are greeted first, and a visitor arriving in a village presents themselves to the chief before doing anything else. Football is the shared enthusiasm, played on any flat ground.

Owando is a town of some tens of thousands of people, small enough that most residents know the same few streets, and it swells with traffic on the highway. The state is the main employer — the prefecture, the hospital, the schools and the security services — and everything else turns on trade, farming and fishing. Cassava, plantain, groundnuts and maize are grown in fields around the town and carried in for sale; fish from the Kouyou and its backwaters is caught, smoked and sold on.

The market is the centre of the day. It fills soon after dawn, when produce arrives from the villages and lorries stop on their way north or south, and quietens in the heat of the afternoon. Motorcycle taxis handle the short journeys, pirogues the river ones.

Services remain thin. Electricity and mobile coverage are patchy, water supply is uneven, and unpaved streets flood in the rains, while serious medical cases are sent to Brazzaville. Young people leave for the capital for study and work, and money sent back from there is part of many household budgets. Evenings are short, spent at the bars, at church meetings and around televised football.

The table here is the north's: cassava in every form, eaten with whatever the river provides. Chikwangue, the dense fermented loaf steamed in leaves, and fufu, the pounded paste, accompany fish from the Kouyou — fresh, or smoked over wood fires until dark and hard, which preserves it for the markets. Sauces are based on tomato, palm oil or groundnut paste, with chilli on the side.

Saka-saka, cassava leaves pounded and simmered for hours with palm oil, onion and smoked fish, is the everyday green. Koko, shredded leaves of a wild forest vine cooked with palm oil and peanut paste, comes in from the forests to the north. Plantain is fried, boiled or grilled, and poulet moambé, chicken in a sauce of palm-fruit pulp, appears on celebration tables. Game from the bush is eaten in the villages, though hunting protected species is illegal.

Seasonal foods matter: wild mushrooms after rain, honey from the forest, edible caterpillars sold by the cupful, and safou, the purple fruit roasted or boiled with salt. Palm wine is drawn locally and drunk fresh, bottled lager arrives by lorry from Brazzaville, and bissap made from hibiscus flowers and ginger juice are the common soft drinks.