Kisangani & the North

The Ituri forest has long been home to the Mbuti hunter-gatherers, who trade meat, hides and other forest products with neighbouring farming peoples. In the north, the Mangbetu and Azande built powerful kingdoms in the 18th and 19th centuries. From the east came the Swahili-Arab trading networks of Tippu Tip, who dealt in ivory and slaves and was made governor of the Stanley Falls district by the Congo Free State in 1887 before war broke out between the Free State and the Arab traders in the 1890s.

Henry Morton Stanley founded a station at the Boyoma Falls in 1883 that became Stanleyville. Under the Free State and Belgian rule the north supplied rubber, ivory, cotton and gold, and gold from the Kilo-Moto belt in Ituri and Haut-Uélé was mined commercially from 1905. Stanleyville became Patrice Lumumba's political stronghold, and after his murder his supporters set up a rival government there. In 1964 Simba rebels took the city and held foreign hostages until Belgian paratroopers, flown in by US aircraft, retook it; the city was renamed Kisangani in 1966.

During the Second Congo War, the Rwandan and Ugandan armies fought each other in Kisangani in 2000, killing around a thousand people, most of them civilians. Ituri descended into conflict between Hema and Lendu militias from 1999, and in 2012 the Ituri warlord Thomas Lubanga became the first person convicted by the International Criminal Court. The Lord's Resistance Army attacked villages across the Uélé provinces from the late 2000s, and violence in Ituri revived from 2017.

Kisangani is a meeting point of languages: Lingala from the river and Swahili from the east are both widely spoken, alongside French. The Uélé provinces are home to the Azande and Mangbetu, and Ituri to the Hema, Lendu, Alur, Bira and many others, as well as the Mbuti of the forest.

The Mangbetu are famous for their art — carved harps and anthropomorphic pots — and for the old aristocratic custom of binding infants' heads to create an elongated skull, admired as a sign of beauty; the custom has died out. Mbuti polyphonic singing, performed in the forest, has fascinated musicologists for decades. Around Kisangani the Wagenya fishing families still use their own trap-fishing technique at the falls.

Most people are Christian, with many Catholic, Protestant and revival churches. Community identity is powerful in Ituri, where competition over land, cattle and mines between groups has fuelled conflict.

Kisangani, capital of Tshopo, is the country's fifth-most populous urban area, with well over a million people, a university and a river port. Bunia, Isiro and Buta are the other provincial capitals, and Bunia has grown fast as displaced families arrived from the countryside. Most people farm cassava, rice, plantain and beans, or fish the rivers.

Gold is the great economic force. The Kibali mine in Haut-Uélé is one of Africa's largest gold mines, while in Ituri thousands of artisanal miners dig around Mongbwalu and elsewhere, often in areas contested by armed groups. Timber, palm oil and river trade support Tshopo, and oil has been found in the Lake Albert basin.

Daily life in Kisangani moves at a slow, river-town pace, with motorbike taxis, markets full of smoked fish and forest produce, and evening music. In Ituri, displacement camps, curfews and the constant threat of attack shape the rhythm of life for hundreds of thousands of people.

Around Kisangani the table is set by the river and the forest: grilled and smoked fish, cassava as fufu or chikwangue, pondu, plantain and rice, with palm-oil sauces and plenty of chilli. Forest foods, including mushrooms, caterpillars in season, honey and bushmeat, are sold in the city's markets, although trade in protected species is illegal.

In Ituri's highlands the diet shifts east: beans, sweet potatoes, maize, bananas and vegetables grown on the plateau, fresh fish from Lake Albert, and milk and beef from the cattle of Hema herders. Maize or cassava dough, called ugali in Swahili, is the daily staple, eaten with beans or vegetables.

Palm wine is widely drunk in Tshopo and the Uélé provinces, and banana and sorghum beers are brewed at home in the east. Tea with sugar and milk is common in Bunia.

Kisangani stands where the Boyoma Falls, a chain of seven cataracts on the upper Congo (Lualaba), end and the river becomes navigable downstream. At the last of them, the Wagenia falls, Wagenya fishermen set conical basket traps in the rapids from scaffolds of timber poles, a sight that became one of the most photographed in the Congo. Downstream, the Yangambi Biosphere Reserve protects rainforest around a historic agricultural research station, and the Tshopo falls lie on the Tshopo river near the city.

To the east, the Okapi Wildlife Reserve covers a large part of the Ituri rainforest around Epulu, where a conservation station has studied and protected the okapi, the forest giraffe found only in the DR Congo. The reserve is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to Mbuti communities. Further east, Bunia sits on the plateau above Lake Albert, whose western shore belongs to Ituri.

In the far north-east, Garamba National Park, established in 1938 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, protects savanna and woodland with elephants, buffaloes, hippos and the last Kordofan giraffes in the country; its northern white rhinos were lost to poaching.