In the Forest of No Joy by J. P. Daughton

Author:J. P. Daughton [Daughton, J. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

A team of sick workers at Kilometer 61, Mavouadi, June 1925.

The pain of extreme hunger is notoriously difficult to describe, and few witnesses to the Congo-Océan tried. Even in the hands of the most talented writers, hunger often blends with metaphor. Many men and women on the railway lived with hunger, not simply constantly at their elbow as they worked but also when they woke in the night. In the darkness, as Richard Wright wrote of his own family in the 1920s, hunger stared at them gauntly. But reports and accounts from the railroad often tried to account for semistarvation in plain terms, which often provided eloquent testimony. In 1926, for example, a concerned doctor described an adult male worker whose “remarkable state of emaciation” had reduced him to 35 kilos (about 77 pounds), less than two-thirds his original body weight. The man had lost nearly 20 kilos (44 pounds) in a matter of weeks. All that remains to history of this man who watched helplessly as his flesh wasted away is the administrative identity given to him by the French: No. 8846.

Albert Londres witnessed firsthand the breakdown of food distribution in a contingent of men making the two-week trek from Brazzaville to the Mayombe. Only half of the time, he reported, did supplies arrive on schedule to feed the workers. For the other half, “the convoys wait in vain for millet and salted fish.” Sometimes the convoy encountered large stocks of supplies, but the gardien didn’t have the authority to let them eat, since regulations had not “provided for workers to be hungry at this stage. Hunger! Hunger!—this tragic word rose all along the route.” The men moved along the line, disintegrating until the orderly convoy looked like “a long injured snake” of dragging men, their capitas driving them on with the chicotte.

Londres was not the only witness to blend discussion of hunger with images of physical violence. Descriptions of starvation on the Congo-Océan often alluded to other, more visceral forms of torment. One worker remembered his experiences of malnutrition as indelibly linked to memories of brutality: “Tortured by hunger, pick or basket in hand, under the eye of a sadistic and blood-thirsty foreman, many workers got dizzy, fainted, and hurt themselves.” Deprivation, fatigue, and abuse were the mantra of the railroad worker.

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