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The Interpreter Foundation\u2019s small team of filmmakers \u2014 Jeffrey Mark Bradshaw, James Jordan, and Russell D. Richins \u2014 is now back in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after being out in Kisangani and Wagenya, where they had very little Internet.\u00a0 They spent much of Thursday at a school for the blind and went to see some of the students practicing for an upcoming \u201cspecial olympics\u201d event.\u00a0 Jeff promises \u201cMore on that and other things related to the growth of the church here later.\u201d\u00a0 Taking advantage of the improved connection back in Kinshasa, Jeff sent me a trio of photographs, which I\u2019m sharing with you here.<\/p>\n
In the photograph above, a Wagenya fisherman is preparing the ingenious traditional fish snare that is used in the area:\u00a0 In the rapidly-moving rapids the fish are drawn into the wide part of the snare and are then caught in the narrow portion from which they can\u2019t escape.\u00a0 Jeff reports that some of the men were out fishing in the middle of the river, where one misstep means that it would be all over. He also reports that virtually all of Kisangani \u2014 like all of Kinshasa \u2014 has restricted air space.\u00a0 Fortunately, though, James Jordan was able to get some great drone shots there, while Russ Richins got some great footage from the shore.<\/p>\n
The Wagenya Falls were, Jeff says, formerly called \u201cStanley Falls\u201d in honor of the Welsh-American explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904).\u00a0 They are part of the last of a series of seven rapids that mark the place where the Lualaba River merges into the Congo River. The combined rapids of the river are reputed to be the second largest waterfall, by volume of annual flow rate, in the entire world<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n I now quote directly from Jeff\u2019s \u201cgeneral notes\u201d about the area, which he sent to accompany his photographs:<\/p>\n The region surrounding Kisangani has a rich and complicated history that has been explored and romanticized in films, books, and plays \u2014 including Joseph Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness<\/em>, Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn\u2019s The African Queen<\/em>, \u00a0and A Bend in the River<\/em> by the late Nobel prize-winner V. S. Naipaul.<\/p>\n Mobutu Sese Seko, the ruler of DR Congo from the 1960s through the 1990s, restored the native name of Kisangani \u00a0to the city as part of his Africanization movement. Before that, it was known as Stanleyville. The name Stanleyville comes from the intrepid explorer and journalist for The New York Herald<\/em>, Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904). Stanley is well known for having found the Christian medical missionary, explorer, and anti-slavery crusader David Livingstone, who had disappeared into the jungle near Lake Tanganyika, Stanley purportedly greeting him with the absurd question, \u201cDr. Livingstone, I presume?\u201d \u00a0The 1939 film Stanley and Livingstone<\/em> featured Spencer Tracy as Stanley and Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Livingstone.<\/p>\n Stanley was eventually hired by the cruel Belgian King Leopold to establish trade and transportation routes down the Congo River from east to west from Stanleyville (now Kisangani) to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). Because of Kisangani\u2019s location at the confluence of two major rivers, including the uppermost section of the navigable waters of the Congo River that lead to Kinshasa, it was a natural trading center. Stanley had the influential ivory and slave trader from Zanzibar, Tippu Tip, appointed as governor of the Stanley Falls district.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The risible discussion of the supposed colonialist ambitions in the Congo of both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a> and the Interpreter Foundation continues, by the way, on the Peterson Obsession Board.\u00a0 I was amused by an entry this morning in which one of that board\u2019s foremost commentators on international trade and economics notes that, thanks to the entry into Africa of the People\u2019s Republic of China (which, to his credit, he admits is not an unambiguously good thing), the economic prospects of the DR Congo are improving.\u00a0 \u201cBut then as the momentum accelerates, the Mormons<\/a> storm the land the [to?] reap the harvest. . . .\u00a0 The greedy Mormon church<\/a> is taking its cut of the prosperity, they aren\u2019t the impetus to the prosperity.\u201d\u00a0 Honestly, it feels (to this outside observer, at least) as if one has entered some sort of bizarro alternate universe.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And, while we\u2019re (somehow) on the subject of the finances of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, here\u2019s a really good episode of Let\u2019s Get Real with Stephen Jones<\/em> entitled \u201cMormon\u201d Church: Taxes, Trust, Transparency: Deeper Context<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 It\u2019s an hour and thirteen minutes in length, but I commend it highly to anybody who is actually interested in understand this matter.<\/p>\n Stephen Jones<\/a>, the host of the Let\u2019s Get Real<\/em> podcast, is involved in a host of things and is a very funny guy.\u00a0 (When he was a student, he was a member of BYU\u2019s \u201cHumor U.\u201d)\u00a0 Aaron Miller holds both a law degree and a master\u2019s degree in public administration and is a member of the faculty at Brigham Young University.\u00a0 He specializes in nonprofit management, social entrepreneurship, and business ethics \u2014 precisely the fields that are relevant here.\u00a0 Back in December 2019, in Public Square Magazine<\/em>, he published \u201cThe $100 Billion \u2018Mormon Church\u2019 Story: A Contextual Analysis: Major headlines this week left a vivid impression in the public mind of a major scandal uncovered in the Church of Jesus Christ. A closer, more careful look suggests otherwise.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 It remains a must-read.\u00a0 His calm, lucid, reasonable approach to what has been a very contentious topic is, to coin a phrase, a much needed breath of fresh air.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 The Interpreter Foundation\u2019s small team of filmmakers \u2014 Jeffrey Mark Bradshaw, James Jordan, and Russell D. Richins \u2014 is now back in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after being out in Kisangani and Wagenya, where they had very little Internet.\u00a0 They spent much of Thursday at a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":100245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17971,4159,975,4156,36141,36138],"class_list":["post-100242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-colonial","tag-congo","tag-interpreter","tag-kinshasa","tag-kisangani","tag-wagenya"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a><\/a>