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shipped annually from the Loango Coast north of the Congo; by 1780 that number had risen to fifteen thousand annually. 10 This increase was felt far into the equatorial forest. If our boy was abducted during a raid, or sold by his parents in times of famine, he would have ended up with one of the important traders along the river. He would have been forced to sit in an enormous dugout, perhaps twenty meters in length, which could carry between forty and seventy passengers. He may have been chained. In addition to dozens of slaves, the canoe would also have carried ivory, the rain forest’s other luxury good. A Pygmy who had killed an elephant would not, after all, have gone himself to the coast to sell the tusks to an Englishman or a Dutchman. Trade went by way of a middleman. In the opposite direction as well: a keg of gunpowder could easily take five years to make its way from the Atlantic coast to a village in the interior. 11
    And then the journey began, downstream. For months the captives floated down the broad, brown river through the jungle, until they arrived at the section that was no longer navigable. There arose the huge and supremely important market of Kinshasa. People gathered there from all over. One heard the bleating of goats, dried fish hung on racks, manioc loaves were piled beside textiles from Europe. You could even buy salt there! The air was filled with shouts, prayers, laughter, and argument. There was as yet no city, but the activity was in full swing. Here the trader from the interior would sell his slaves and ivory to a caravan leader, who would take his goods overland to the coast, three hundred kilometers (185 miles) farther. Only there would our twelve-year-old boy see a white man, for the first time in his life. He would be haggled over for days.
    We do not know how his crossing to the New World went. But a rare eyewitness account by a West African slave who wasshipped to Brazil in 1840 provides a bit of a picture:
We were thrown naked into the ship’s hold, the men close together on one side, women on the other; the ceiling of the hold was so low that we could not stand up straight, but were forced to squat or sit on the floor; day and night were the same to us, the close quarters made it impossible to sleep, and we grew desperate with suffering and fatigue . . . . The only food we were given during the journey was grain that had been soaked and boiled . . . . We suffered greatly from a lack of water. Our rations were one half liter a day, no more than that; and a great many slaves died during the crossing . . . . If one of them became defiant, his flesh was cut with a knife and pepper and vinegar were rubbed into the wound. 12
    The international slave trade had an enormous impact on Central Africa. Regions were torn apart, lives destroyed, horizons shifted. But it also brought with it an extremely intensive network of regional commerce along the river. If you had to go down the Congo River anyway with a shipment of slaves and tusks, you might as well fill your dugout with less luxurious goods to sell along the way. And so fish, manioc, cane sugar, palm oil, palm wine, sugarcane wine, beer, tobacco, raffia, baskets, ceramics, and iron were taken along as well. Each day, some forty metric tons (forty-four U.S. tons) of manioc were transported along the Congo, over distances of no more than 250 kilometers (155 miles). 13 Usually this was in the form of manioc loaves, chikwangue : boiled manioc gruel cleverly packaged in banana leaves. A hefty meal in itself, leaden on the stomach, but not perishable and easy to transport.
    The importance of this regional trade should not be underestimated. In a world of fishermen, farmers, and hunters, a new professional category arose: that of merchants. People who hadtraditionally lived by tossing their nets discovered that a greater catch could be obtained by plying the river. Fishermen became merchants, and fishing villages marketplaces. Trading had