The great river that loops through Central Africa, the world's deepest recorded river and one of the largest by discharge, usually ranked second after the Amazon when counted as a single river — artery of the Congo rainforest, and the channel through which one of history's most brutal colonial extraction systems was driven, making its name a European byword for a darkness that was largely European-made.
The lower Congo should have been an open door into Central Africa. Instead it drops to the Atlantic through the Livingstone Falls, a staircase of cataracts so fierce that no ship can sail up from the sea. That single fact sealed the interior off for centuries, then made it a prize. When King Leopold II finally pried it open, the river carried out rubber and carried in a regime of forced labor whose death toll is still counted in the millions. Joseph Conrad sailed it once and called the place the heart of darkness. The phrase stuck to Africa. The darkness was mostly Europe's.