Tales from the Rift: Images of the Four Congos

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Images of the Four Congos

Modern Congo: 1960-2013

Belgian Congo: 1908-1960

Congo Free State: 1880-1908

Kingdom of Kongo: 1375-1665

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Tales from the Rift is my bullhorn, an organ for what really beats my drum, and no matter how tone deaf or rhythmically challenged I get, I'll play on.

Gorillas are holding me captive in their mountain lair, preventing my escape with strong-arm tactics and giant stinging nettles. In the valley the humans are revolting, turning tradition on its head, transforming the future in ways incomprehensible to even the most sophisticated ape. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide! The situation calls for a hominid hybrid...

“These shy apes and their Afro-montane habitat form a unique part of our planet's bio-diversity. But more than that, they are almost literarily our cousins. Anyone who can look into a gorilla's eyes without feeling a sense of kinship, is to me less human than the gorilla itself.”

- Sir Arthur C Clarke

“These animals are not only so closely linked to us and have similar trains of thought, but they took over 7 million years to develop into these perfections of nature and we cant afford to wipe them out in the blink of an eye”

- Leonardo DiCaprio

“I had been around other great apes, and I had never had such a feeling. Yet here, among a group of gorillas, creatures that did not look or smell like human beings, I had the distinct sense that we all understood one another. It was overpowering, and sad. When I left them, it was like awakening from a dream.”

- Michael Crichton

“I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.”

- Douglas Adams