Kassongo
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