Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  The housing provided for the first generation of mineworkers was often abominable. The miners were placed in work camps, far from where the whites lived in the city center. This spatial segregation was established by law from 1913.44 Their neighborhoods looked more like military encampments than urban districts: rectangular and almost without shade. Traditional huts were arranged in serried ranks. Four workers were assigned to each hut, with four square meters (about forty-two square feet) of living space each. Latrines were provided, at least in theory. In reality, the exhausted miners were forced to live under harsh and unsanitary conditions. At the Kambove mine, the camp inhabitants sometimes literally had to wade through the dreck. Drinking water was scarce. With its steam engines and drilling installations, the mine itself used up most of the water. During the dry season, workers drank from stagnant ponds or muddy streams.45 And the diseases arrived. Dysentery, enteritis, and typhoid fever took their toll, and local influenza epidemics broke out at Elisabethville, at the Star, and in Kambove. At those three places in 1916, 322 workers out of a total of 5,000 died. Hard labor in the dusty mines also caused many workers to contract pneumonia and tuberculosis. One quarter to one third of them fell ill, but health care remained minimal.46 In 1920 there were some seventy physicians and one dentist for all of Congo: they were there largely to serve the white population.47 The miners worked long hours and were paid a pittance. Many of them became apathetic and depressed and longed for home. They organized themselves only in ad hoc fashion and often along ethnic lines, to care for their sick, bury their dead, to drink, and to sing. Some of them deserted, others did not dare. Until 1922 corporal punishment was allowed.

  It was, all things considered, a grim situation. Southern Katanga had never been bothered much by the Free State’s rubber policies, but now the region was dragged along by a relentless wave of industrial capitalism. This caused André Yav, the retired boy, to draw an extremely remarkable but also very telling conclusion: he decided that King Albert I was far worse than Leopold II, who had at least “honored the laws of Africa and Congo”! That called for a bit of explanation: “In the days of King Leopold II, the ‘boys’ ate with the white people at the same table. The white people saw them as employees. They were not like the whites who came after Leopold II. When he died, he was succeeded by King Albert I. Those whites made hard decisions, and those decisions were really very bad. They were the ones who brought a bad kind of slavery for us, the Congolese.”48

  No less trying were the conditions at the Kilo-Moto gold mines in Orientale province. Only one out of every eight workers was there voluntarily, the rest had been press-ganged in local villages: human trafficking, in other words, and forced labor. Recruiters would pay a local chieftain ten francs for each laborer and take the young men away in chains. They were bound together at the neck by a wooden yoke or a noosed rope. In 1908 there were eight hundred workers, by 1920 more than nine thousand.49 In 1923, in diamond-rich Kasai, some twenty thousand Africans were working in the service of two hundred whites.50

  Between 1908 and 1921, in other words, Congo experienced its first wave of industrialization, thereby prompting the proletarianization of its inhabitants. Men who had once been fishermen, blacksmiths, or hunters became wage laborers for a company. Even in this earliest phase, their numbers were large. In Katanga, where 60 percent of the laborers worked for Union Minière, the body of mineworkers grew from 8,000 in 1914 to 42,000 by 1921, and the number of railroad workers from 10,000 to 40,700. Together, Kasai and Orientale province were good for 30,000 workers, while another 30,000 migrant workers lived in Kinshasa and Léopoldville. The reason for this massive recruitment of African workers was simple enough: sweat costs less than gasoline.51

  This proletarianization was not limited to industry alone. Agriculture too had need of manual laborers, especially now that white farmers had started coffee, cacao, and tobacco plantations. The most extensive agrarian employment of all, however, was in the palm oil sector. In Liverpool in 1884, a man named William Lever had started making soap on an industrial scale. The bars rolled from the production line, and he christened his product Sunlight. This company’s rise to become the Unilever multinational was due in part to the contribution of Congo. At first, the soap was made from palm oil that Lever purchased in West Africa. But when the British colonial administration there stopped providing favorable conditions, the Belgian state granted Lever an extremely sizeable concession in Congo in 1911. At his own discretion, he was allowed to stake out five circles with a sixty-kilometer (about a thirty-five-mile) radius in those areas where wild palms flourished, for a total holding of some 7.5 million hectares (about 29,000 square miles), two and a half times the size of Belgium. This was the start of the Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB), an enterprise that was particularly active in the south of Bandundu and grew to become a massive concern. Close to Kikwit, the town of Leverville arose. For the harvesting of palm nuts the company made use of thousands of Congolese, who climbed the trees in the traditional manner to cut down the clusters. Lever had a reputation as a great philanthropist, but very little that his company did bore witness to that in Congo. His employees earned a miserable twenty-five centimes a day and lived under primitive conditions. Press-ganging and the bribing of village chieftains took place. Dozens of villages had to pack up and move for the industry’s purposes. People today in Kikwit think back on that period with bitterness: this was worse than what the region had experienced under the rubber regime.52 It was something King Albert could hardly have suspected in 1912, when William Lever presented him with an ivory box containing the first bar of Sunlight soap manufactured with Congolese palm oil.

  “I EARNED THREE FRANCS A MONTH,” Nkasi had told me. It was the first time in his life that he earned a wage, which was why he remembered it so clearly. The budding industrialization of Congo led not only to an initial form of urbanization and proletarianization, but also to a far-reaching process of monetization. For the first time, on a major scale, the population became involved with a concept as abstract as money. Formal currencies were nothing new: in Bas-Congo people had been paying with white seashells since time immemorial; in Katanga the currency took the form of crafted copper crosses; in other parts of the country they paid with mitakos, the copper bars introduced by the first colonizers. But such currencies were brought to bear only for very special transactions. There was as yet nothing like a widespread monetary economy. But that changed soon enough. In the year 1900 no more than few hundred workers in Bas-Congo, most of whom worked on the railroad, were on a payroll; by 1920, when Nkasi moved to Kinshasa, there were already 123,000 such employees scattered across the country. And that was before the real employment boom began: in 1929 there were some 450,000 paid workers. Congo became a monetary economy.53

  That monetization had a major impact. Once again, the state was overtly intruding into everyday life. One could no longer buy a chicken from the neighbors without symbolic government involvement. The centuries-old barter system, a transparent system of exchange between individuals, was pushed out by an abstract system imposed by the state. People had no choice but to assume that these strange pieces of paper showing a white woman in a white tunic had any effective value at all. “Banque du Congo-Belge” one read, printed in stately letters on that first Congolese banknote, “un franc”—at least, for those who could read. The woman, who had rather Hellenic look to her, wore a tiara. Her left arm rested on a big wheel, and with her right she embraced a sheaf of wheat.54 This was obviously intended as an allegory for agriculture and industry, but the average Congolese was not very familiar with neoclassical graphics and kitsch. In the early 1920s, however, the local coins came one step closer to local reality: they bore the imprint of an oil palm, m’bila in a number of the native languages.55 The people recognized it as a literal link between state and industry: Lever’s concern soon became known as Compagnie m’bila. Money, that was barter with the factory. You gave them your body, they gave you your wages.

  An adva
ntage of all this, however, was that it now became much easier to collect taxes. One no longer needed to pay in kind or with labor for his mandatory membership in the state. Gone were the days of toting burdens, paddling upriver or collecting rubber to serve the white man; gone was the rule that one had to serve the state for forty hours each month. When Belgium assumed control of Congo, it first introduced a system whereby goods other than rubber could serve as tax—the colonial revenue department was equally pleased to received bars of manioc, copal, palm oil, or chickens—but went on after a time to express its preference for taxation in the form of hard cash. When a missionary asked him in 1953 to describe the course of his long life, Joseph Njoli, a man from Équateur, remembered that quite clearly:

  After rubber, they imposed on us a tax in fish and manioc. After the fish came the palm oil and wood that we had to bring to the regional administrator at Ikenge. His name was Molo, the white man who lived at Ikenge with the river people. The chores we were given to do took many forms . . . . Then there came another white man, Lokoka. He stopped the work we had been doing and brought us money. He said: “You people may now pay taxes with money. Everyone has to pay four-and-a-half francs.” That was how money was introduced to the black people. And now we still live in slavery to the Belgians.56

  Four and a half francs a year: that was not particularly exorbitant. The tax burden was kept light on purpose. In 1920 that sum was the equivalent of six kilos (thirteen pounds) of rubber, or forty-five kilos (a hundred pounds) of palm nuts, forty-five kilos of palm oil, thirty-five kilos (seventy-seven pounds) of copal resin, nine chickens, half a goat, or a few dozen loaves of manioc.57

  On paper, the Belgian Congo wished to put an end to the noxious practices of the Free State, but in actual practice things went quite differently. In those zones where international big business had settled, new forms of exploitation and bond service arose. Migratory waves were set in motion that did more to disorganize the country than to help it recover. Young men ended up in shabby workers’ camps, while only women and old people remained behind in their villages. Much of the misery in the period from 1918 to 1921 could be blamed on the four long years of World War I, but a great deal of misery had already gone before. It would be a mistake to pass the blame off on that accursed conflict. The Great War was not the cause, but it did make the situation worse.

  ON NOVEMBER 11, 2008, the rain was pounding down over Kinshasa. This was, even by equatorial standards, an unusually heavy downpour. What fell were not drops, but rivulets of glass, liquid test tubes. Traffic in the city ground to a halt, horns honked incessantly as though ordering the puddles to dry up, and the courtyard of the Maison des Anciens Combattants was reduced to a swimming pool. During the 1950s this building had been an open-air movie theater; now it served as a club for the veterans of the many wars Congo has seen, a daily gathering place for its members. “It’s unbelievable,” a Belgian soldier in uniform remarked, “nothing in this country is watertight, the rain gets in everywhere, but here it just collects, no problem.” He looked at the tiled courtyard. Seemingly without success, a dozen boys with buckets were trying to bail it out. The water must have been a foot deep. “You could raise goddamned koi carp here.”

  Meanwhile, the crowd flowed in. Women wrapped in beautiful robes: the heels of their dress shoes made little indentations in the ground. Men with glistening brass instruments. Gentlemen in three-piece suits. Former military men in green uniforms. This of course was their big day. There weren’t many of them left anymore. They stood beneath the shelter of roofed-in gallery, assaying each other’s medals, seizing them from each other. “Saio? You weren’t even there. Give here.” Amid petulant grumbling, medals changed jackets. That went on for a long time, until everyone who wanted to wear something shiny actually had something to pin on. André Kitadi told me: “None of these people were there. There are only four veterans of ’40–’45 still alive in Kinshasa.” He was one of them, I had interviewed him already. He didn’t give a hang about medals.

  Today was the ninetieth anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.

  The invitees waited beneath awnings until the courtyard was dry again. The ceremony was supposed to have begun at eleven, but it was already twelve-thirty. Finally someone showed up with a pump. Half an hour later they found the diesel fuel as well and fifteen minutes later the pump actually kicked over. After five minutes of noisy slurping, the courtyard was dry and the garden behind the Maison des Anciens Combattants had become a mud puddle. The ceremony could begin.

  In 1914 Congo was as neutral as Belgium. They had to be: both countries had been conceived to serve as a buffer state between rival powers. For Congo, that neutrality proceeded from the final act of the Berlin Conference. But that neutral stance came to an end on August 15, 1914, eleven days after the German attack on Belgium. Across from the village of Mokolubu, on the Congolese side of Lake Tanganyika, a steamboat suddenly appeared. It was coming from the far shore, the German shore. The ship opened fire on a local café and sank fifteen canoes. A detachment of German soldiers landed and cut the telephone lines at fourteen places.58 One week later, the port of Lukuga was attacked as well. That was how World War I began in Congo. The country’s territorial integrity was threatened, the imperative of neutrality no longer applied.

  Colonialism made it possible for an armed European conflict to become a world war. Large parts of Africa therefore became caught up in the international conflagration. The German colonies in East Africa (later Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania) and West Africa (later Togo, Cameroon, and Namibia) were bordered on all sides by French, British, Portuguese, and Belgian overseas property. In the northwest, Congo shared a few dozen kilometers of border with Cameroon, to the east more than seven hundred kilometers (430 miles) with German East Africa. Little wonder then that, for quite some time already, Berlin had been showing interest in the Belgian Congo. It wished to establish a bridgehead between its eastern and western colonies, in part at least to squelch the British axis “from Cape to Cairo.” After all, wasn’t colonization a task that should be left up to the major powers? Could one really leave such responsibility in the hands of piddling dwarf states like Belgium?59 As early as 1914 Germany had approached Britain with the formal proposal to divide the Belgian Congo between them. The English, however, were not interested: they knew all too well that the French, with their historical droit de préemption (right of first refusal) to Congo, would never allow that.60 But there were those, even in Belgium, who wondered whether Belgium might not appease its ravenous eastern neighbor by giving it half of Congo as a present. An area of 680,000 square kilometers (265,200 square miles) of jungle: wouldn’t that allay the Teutonic hunger just a bit?61

  But war was what came, in Africa as well. Not a single native knew who Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg was or why a lucky shot in Sarajevo had to lead to bloodshed on the savanna, but they saw the whites acting very serious about the whole thing. The military operations in Africa, however, in no way resembled the immovable war of positions to which Europe was to be submitted. There was no clear and continuous front, not like the line extending from Switzerland to the North Sea. There were no trenches, no mustard gas attacks, no fortifications undermined with dynamite, no Christmas truces with soccer matches in no-man’s land. The sheer scale of the African continent, the lack of roads, the shortage of troops, and the often extremely trying topography led to a very different kind of warfare. It was not regions that were conquered, but strategic spots. One did not break through a solid front line, but defeated a local regiment. Zones were not seized but roads were controlled. The intensity of the conflict was much lower. In German East Africa, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck made a four-year stand with three thousand German troops and eleven thousand Africans, numbers that were run through at Verdun in the course of a morning.

  From Brussels, the governor general heard that he was allowed to make use of the Force Publique to defend the colony. Later, when the Belgian government in exil
e was staying at Le Havre, France, intensive communication took place with the colonial administration at Boma. But the one-way flow of governmental directives from Europe was interrupted: while Belgium was more or less completely overrun by German troops, the territory of the colony itself remained virtually intact throughout the war. The balance had suddenly shifted.

  The Congolese troops fought on three fronts: Cameroon, Rhodesia, and German East Africa. The first two called for relatively small-scale efforts. In 1914 six hundred soldiers and a handful of white officers came to the aid of Allied troops in the battle for Cameroon. One year later, when Germany threatened Rhodesia, 283 Congolese and seven Belgian soldiers joined forces with the British colonial troops. But the most intense show of military strength by far took place in the east of the colony. In the region of Kivu the border between Belgian and German territory had been established only in 1910. As from 1915, however, German troops made repeated attempts to invade Kivu, from where they could move to the Kilo-Moto gold mines in the Ituri rain forest. Those attempts failed. They did, however, succeed in gaining control over two of the Great Lakes: Lake Tanganyika and the much smaller Lake Kivu. Their gunboats—the Kingani, the Von Wissman, and most notably the (one-hundred ton) Von Goetzen— patrolled the Congolese shores. On Lake Kivu they took control of the island of Idjwi, the only part of the Belgian Congo to fall under German occupation.