Zappo Zap Erotic

The Zappo Zap were a Songye warrior and trading band of the late nineteenth century in the Kasai region of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, remembered chiefly as armed auxiliaries of King Leopold's Congo Free State; their descendants, the Nsapo, still live around Kananga. The name is a European mangling of Nsapu Nsapu, the chief who led them. They began in eastern Songye country as one of several armed groups dealing in ivory and slaves along trade routes that Swahili and Arab merchants had pushed in from the east coast. Pressed by rival warlords, they moved west in the 1880s, several thousand strong, and settled beside the new state post at Luluabourg, today's Kananga, under Free State protection.

That arrangement defined them. The Free State had few European officers and a large appetite for rubber, ivory and taxes, so it armed local allies and sent them out to collect. The Zappo Zap had guns, discipline and a fearsome reputation, including persistent accusations of cannibalism, and they worked as tax collectors, slave raiders and enforcers among the Luba, Lulua and Kuba. They were also farmers, traders and skilled ironworkers. Songye smiths are known for ceremonial axes with openwork blades studded with small forged faces, and collectors still call the type a Nsapo axe.

The 1899 massacre

In 1899 a Zappo Zap force sent to collect tribute in the Pyaang country of the Kuba burned villages and killed large numbers of people who could not pay. William Henry Sheppard, an African American missionary of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission, walked into their stockaded camp to investigate. The commander, taking him for a friend of the state, showed him around. Sheppard counted 81 severed right hands drying over a slow fire, kept as proof for state officers who wanted an accounting for the cartridges they issued. His report was published abroad and became one of the early eyewitness documents of the Congo reform campaign. Mark Twain drew on it in King Leopold's Soliloquy.

The Zappo Zap fit no simple story. They were Africans who profited from a European regime's violence, and they were also refugees who had traded one patron for another to survive in a region torn apart by the ivory and slave trades. After Belgium took over the colony in 1908 and rule through armed auxiliaries wound down, they faded as a military force. The community did not vanish. It settled into the ordinary life of Kasai as the Bena Nsapo, speaking Songye alongside the Tshiluba of their neighbors.