When you think of bike tours, your initial thought is smiling faces rolling through a carefree country, feeling the environment with nothing separating them from it. Finding and becoming the rhythm of the earth.
You think of a still lazy, yet adventurous summer fueled by curious eyes and hungry hearts.
This is romantic. Of course our motives for doing this tour on bikes don’t exclude these reasons, they aren’t the sole motivation. But our goals run deeper.
We are, as I mentioned before, becoming a part of a legacy. Two years ago, three men biked from St. Augustine, Florida to Los Angeles, wanting their voice to be heard by anyone who would listen. When I was an intern in the garageoffice, one of the walls was completely taken over by a map of the United States tracking their progress.
Last summer, five men biked from sea to sea, from North Carolina to Venice California.
Now it’s our turn. With the help and knowledge of our predecessors, we have learned from both their successes and mistakes, while we experience our own. Already, although I have only just begun the tour, we have experienced the highs of affecting people’s minds and hearts, selling whistles, acquiring signatures on the petition and meeting beautiful people who have so generously taken us into their homes. We have experienced a lot of pain as well as our bodies try to get used to the heat, our muscles to the strain and our minds to the magnitude of this tour.
Each day we know that we accomplished something we would not be able to the day before.
We are building on the legacy that initially inspired us.
Still, though. apart from wanting to experience our country in a slow, more organic way and becoming a member of a most-empowering group of people, there is still a greater drive.
In the 1800s, when King Leopold had successfully infiltrated the Heart of Darkness, his Congo, he found incredible wealth in natural resources in the region. They were valuable and previously untouched. Although Leopold never actually physically stepped foot in the Congo, he knew that, for its time, the greatest untapped resource in Congo was rubber.
This was at a time when Europeans were beginning the popularize the bicycle and the automobile, unknowingly beginning over a century of colonial rule and neocolonial business practices, all resulting in the exploitation and massacre of millions. From 1891-191, 10 million people were killed.
Rubber. It could be found raw, in the rubber trees. It works a lot like maple syrup, leaking out of the tree like sap. The enslaved Congolese (under Belgian rule) were given a required amount to collect daily. If the standard wasn’t met, they would face brutal torture by their white superiors.
When they learned of this, a coalition of whistleblowers rose up. Mark Twain, William Shephard, Arthur Conan Doyle and E.D. Morel campaigned for over a decade and successfully ended the rubber trade.
Now.
As you might know, the main natural resources that come out of Congo now are coltan, tin, tantalum and tungsten…all which go into our electronics. It affects the Congolese in a similar way. And most westerners re unknowingly funding the largest war in the world since World War II.
We are trying to emulate the same movement as our activist forefathers.
So why bikes?
The bike is an amazing vehicle, so simple in engineering and so simple in function. It requires human power and force to build momentum, and drive to keep moving. And that’s our goal—to use our own drive to reach out to more people to help change elections in Congo this November.
If our wheels are moving, the Falling Whistles wheel will move and together they will build a collective momentum. We are the advocates. We can work to keep the wheel moving toward education, congregation, dissemination and rehabilitation.
Unlike its origin, it doesn’t have to be used in vain, instead we are reversing the once malicious intent of material for the bicycle to use it instead as a symbol of hope, a tool for advocacy.
Keep the wheel moving,
Mallory
@FWfreetour
