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'''Kassongo Lutela''' (born c. [[ | '''Kassongo Lutela''', also known as '''Kassongo Lusuna''' or '''James Kassongo''' (born c. [[1881]] in Lusuna, Congo Free State; died [[September 19]], [[1902]] in [[Birmingham]]) was a native Batetela (Tetela) youth, brought with another boy, [[Kondola]], to the United States by a Presbyterian missionary. | ||
Kassongo related that he was the son of an important man related to the chief of his village of Lusuna, in Batetela (Tetela) territory between the Lomami and Lualaba rivers in the Congo Free State, then the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium. Kassongo was considered a nephew to the chief, and was taught all the skills that pertained to his station. His name may have signified "tall and lean"<sup>1.</sup>, and recalled the name of a trading post, Piani Kasongo, founded and operated by ivory and slave trader Afro-Omani Tippu Tip, newly appointed Governor of the Stanley Falls District. | Kassongo related that he was the son of an important man related to the chief of his village of Lusuna, in Batetela (Tetela) territory between the Lomami and Lualaba rivers in the Congo Free State, then the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium. Kassongo was considered a nephew to the chief, and was taught all the skills that pertained to his station. His name may have signified "tall and lean"<sup>1.</sup>, and recalled the name of a trading post, Piani Kasongo, founded and operated by ivory and slave trader Afro-Omani Tippu Tip, newly appointed Governor of the Stanley Falls District. | ||
During the Congo Arab war, Kassongo, still quite young, traveled as a bearer and servant to the older warriors from his village who fought under Belgian commander Francis Dhanis against Tippu Tip and other traders. He remained with the village warriors as part of a militia aligned with the ''Force Publique''. Belgian officials soon determined that boys spending idle days in the company of militiamen could be detrimental to good order, and rather than return them to their home villages, considered them wards of the state and distributed them to the Christian missions operating in the region. Captain Commandant Paul-Amédée Le Marinel delivered Kassonga, Kondola and eight older boys to Luebo, the site of a school and church operated by the American Presbyterian Congo Mission | During the Congo Arab war, Kassongo, still quite young, traveled as a bearer and servant to the older warriors from his village who fought under Belgian commander Francis Dhanis against Tippu Tip and other traders. He remained with the village warriors as part of a militia aligned with the ''Force Publique''. Belgian officials soon determined that boys spending idle days in the company of militiamen could be detrimental to good order, and rather than return them to their home villages, considered them wards of the state and distributed them to the Christian missions operating in the region. | ||
By [[1895]], Captain Commandant Paul-Amédée Le Marinel delivered Kassonga, Kondola and eight older boys to Luebo, the site of a school and church operated by [[William Sheppard]] for the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM). | |||
The APCM had attracted many Black Americans already, but church leadership insisted they be supervised by white managers. In 1895 Samuel Phillips Verner, then 22, and without seminary training, answered an advertisement for a white missionary to accompany the mission. He arrived at his station in Luebo in September 1896 and prepared to work among the Baluba (Luba), a group well-represented in the village as laborers whose territory extended far to the south. | The APCM had attracted many Black Americans already, but church leadership insisted they be supervised by white managers. In 1895 Samuel Phillips Verner, then 22, and without seminary training, answered an advertisement for a white missionary to accompany the mission. He arrived at his station in Luebo in September 1896 and prepared to work among the Baluba (Luba), a group well-represented in the village as laborers whose territory extended far to the south. | ||
Verner recounted that in Luebo, the boys were given beds and assigned to work alongside the Luba laborers prevalent in the community to earn their keep. For an hour a day they were taught by | Verner recounted that in Luebo, the boys were given beds and assigned to work alongside the Luba laborers prevalent in the community to earn their keep. For an hour a day they were taught by [[Lillian Thomas]] and [[Maria Fearing]], graduates of [[Talladega College]], and [[Lucy Sheppard]] of [[Birmingham]], learning the Luba language along with some arithmetic, and memorization of scripture and hymns. The boys gravitated toward Verner, who treated them as personal servants. He assigned them various household tasks and had them assist in his fishing trips, and sent them on errands to neighboring villages. He paid them in cowries and cloth, which they could trade for food. Verner and the other missionaries carried out corporal punishment for misbehavior; primarily for fighting and gambling. | ||
<!--During their time there in Luebo some of the older boys were married to girls of nearby villages. The growth of an anti-colonial insurgency by the Tetela. | <!--During their time there in Luebo some of the older boys were married to girls of nearby villages. The growth of an anti-colonial insurgency by the Tetela. | ||
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==Notes== | ==Notes== | ||
# Likaka-2009 | # Likaka-2009 | ||
<!--https://tavm.omeka.net/items/show/1113--> | |||
<!--When he left the Congo and headed first to Antwerp to request a concession from Leopold and then back home to the United States, Verner brought Kondola and Kassongo with him. As the Batetela boys headed out from Sheppard’s mission led by this white man of God, they carried with them “chickens, goats, peanuts, palm wine,” and the multilayered meanings of a black New World vision of salvation.--> | |||
<!--However, if they believed that the entire United States would be a comfortable extension of Sheppard’s | |||
mission, they had to have been sorely disappointed as early as their first night in New York. Verner had left them alone in a rooming house while he visited with an old university chum he had run into in the city. When the hotel’s manager found two black teenagers in his establishment, he evicted them, leaving the boys to wander the city streets shivering in the February chill. When Verner returned from his visit to find them hungrily gazing in a nearby storefront, he quickly secured them better lodging, but his initial disregard for them foreshadowed the ways his commitment to saving Africans withered as he focused on his own entrepreneurial and exploitative ventures once he arrived back home. He later tried unsuccessfully to rent the young men as models to the Smithsonian Institution, where he had deposited some artifacts, | |||
and while he made sure they eventually arrived at Stillman, he did not provide sufficient funds for their education. Rather he argued that they preferred to support themselves, even though Kondola wrote to him as late as 1939 asking for a small sum to buy shoes.--> | |||
<!--In the first months after their arrival, however, the young men also encountered a lively black American world that perhaps signaled for them the presence of Gods’ Towns in the United States. After leaving New York, but before enrolling the boys at Stillman, Verner left them for a time in the care of the Thornwell Orphanage and then at the house of his family’s butler in Columbia, South Carolina. For the month of their stay in the southern city, Kondola and Kassongo met local African Americans who had turned the butler’s home into a sort of Mecca as black South Carolinians sought an audience with the young Africans, who, in turn, demonstrated a keen interest in America’s ideas about their homeland. For a time, the boys also labored on a Verner family plantation, and when Kassongo fell ill, he received care at a black hospital in Charleston from Dr. Alonzo McClennan, an African American physician well known in both black and white | |||
communities.62 --> | |||
<!--Once enrolled at Stillman, Kondola and Kassongo studied alongside their African American student colleagues, and in September of 1902, Kassongo, along with “several thousand” black Alabamians, headed off to the Shiloh Negro Baptist Church in Birmingham to hear Booker T. Washington speak. Washington may even have been discussing his various exploits in Africa since he was a few years into a project in Togo where German officials had invited him to bring his methods of cotton farming to the colony. Additionally, just the year before, Zulu educator John Langalibalele Dube, who had been inspired | |||
by his time at Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, had founded a similar industrial school in Durban, South Africa.63 Quite possibly Washington was even going to share his views on the Batetela homeland, since he would soon join the Congo Reform Association and became rather vocal in his opposition to Leopold, even though he had worked alongside German colonialists in Togo. Kassongo left no clues as to what had prompted his interest in Washington, and Kondola later reported that he had misgivings about the event so did not join his friend in Birmingham that night.--> | |||
<!--Tragically, the only evidence that Kassongo attended this speech exists because he lost his life there in a stampede | |||
that occurred after a fight broke out between two men over a vacant seat on the stage. A woman in the choir had yelled “fight,” which the crowd heard as “fire,” and the rush for exits left Kassongo and more than one hundred others dead.64 | |||
Still, during his relatively brief time in the United States, Kassongo became outspoken in critiquing the multiple contradictions in Western ideas about race and civilization. He once asked for special permission to make an impromptu speech at Stillman’s morning service, and “arose from his seat among the colored students with great gravity of manner” to berate them along with the Presbyterian leaders. “You stop talking about civilized man and savage before you be civilized.” He pointed out that many of those present did not “sweep their rooms clean,” did not “wash their face” before coming down to breakfast, and made “plenty noise in their room”—behaviors he claimed his people would run them out of town for in Africa. It was Verner who quoted Kassongo’s speech in an issue of the Christian Observer, and he did not | |||
mention what prompted the attack or how his audience responded, but, along with the interest in Booker T. Washington’s politics, the denunciation hints that these young men from Africa actively engaged a diverse black American population as they grappled with the complicated bonds of Africans in the New World. (Rev. S. P. Verner, “What Is a Civilized Man? Kassongo’s Speech at Stillman Institute,” Christian Observer, Box 2, Folder 145, Newspaper Clippings, SPV-SC. )--> | |||
==References== | ==References== | ||
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* Likaka, Osumaka (2009) ''Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870–1960.'' University of Wisconsin Press ISBN 9780299233631 | * Likaka, Osumaka (2009) ''Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870–1960.'' University of Wisconsin Press ISBN 9780299233631 | ||
[[Category: | [[Category:1881 births]] | ||
[[Category:1902 deaths]] | [[Category:1902 deaths]] | ||
Revision as of 14:09, 7 January 2022
Kassongo Lutela, also known as Kassongo Lusuna or James Kassongo (born c. 1881 in Lusuna, Congo Free State; died September 19, 1902 in Birmingham) was a native Batetela (Tetela) youth, brought with another boy, Kondola, to the United States by a Presbyterian missionary.
Kassongo related that he was the son of an important man related to the chief of his village of Lusuna, in Batetela (Tetela) territory between the Lomami and Lualaba rivers in the Congo Free State, then the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium. Kassongo was considered a nephew to the chief, and was taught all the skills that pertained to his station. His name may have signified "tall and lean"1., and recalled the name of a trading post, Piani Kasongo, founded and operated by ivory and slave trader Afro-Omani Tippu Tip, newly appointed Governor of the Stanley Falls District.
During the Congo Arab war, Kassongo, still quite young, traveled as a bearer and servant to the older warriors from his village who fought under Belgian commander Francis Dhanis against Tippu Tip and other traders. He remained with the village warriors as part of a militia aligned with the Force Publique. Belgian officials soon determined that boys spending idle days in the company of militiamen could be detrimental to good order, and rather than return them to their home villages, considered them wards of the state and distributed them to the Christian missions operating in the region.
By 1895, Captain Commandant Paul-Amédée Le Marinel delivered Kassonga, Kondola and eight older boys to Luebo, the site of a school and church operated by William Sheppard for the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM).
The APCM had attracted many Black Americans already, but church leadership insisted they be supervised by white managers. In 1895 Samuel Phillips Verner, then 22, and without seminary training, answered an advertisement for a white missionary to accompany the mission. He arrived at his station in Luebo in September 1896 and prepared to work among the Baluba (Luba), a group well-represented in the village as laborers whose territory extended far to the south.
Verner recounted that in Luebo, the boys were given beds and assigned to work alongside the Luba laborers prevalent in the community to earn their keep. For an hour a day they were taught by Lillian Thomas and Maria Fearing, graduates of Talladega College, and Lucy Sheppard of Birmingham, learning the Luba language along with some arithmetic, and memorization of scripture and hymns. The boys gravitated toward Verner, who treated them as personal servants. He assigned them various household tasks and had them assist in his fishing trips, and sent them on errands to neighboring villages. He paid them in cowries and cloth, which they could trade for food. Verner and the other missionaries carried out corporal punishment for misbehavior; primarily for fighting and gambling.
Kassongo was trampled to death during a mass stampede from the crowded Greater Shiloh Baptist Church prior to Booker T. Washington's scheduled address to the 1902 National Baptist Convention.
Notes
- Likaka-2009
References
- "More Than One Hundred Negroes Crushed to Death as a Result of a Panic Following a Cry of 'Fire.'" (September 20, 1902) The Birmingham News, pp. 1, 7
- Verner, Samuel Phillips (1903) Pioneering in Central Africa. Richmond, Virginia: Presbyterian Committee of Publication.
- Likaka, Osumaka (2009) Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870–1960. University of Wisconsin Press ISBN 9780299233631