Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  And so it came about. In 1920 the colony yielded only 15.5 million Belgian francs in tax revenues. By 1926 that had already grown to 45 million. And in 1930, in the midst of the crisis, that sum had increased to 269 million. Within four years, tax revenues had increased sixfold. By 1930, direct taxation accounted for 39 percent of the colonial budget, while taxation on the profits of the big concerns, which had still booked enormous profits in the previous years, accounted for only 4 percent.16 What’s more, many ailing private firms were now receiving money from the colonial government, because they had originally been lured to Congo with financial guarantees: in the event of a downturn, they were to receive a fixed dividend of 4 percent from the colonial treasury.17 The hole generated by the crisis had to be filled, in other words, with money from the Congolese common man, in addition to a capital injection from the Belgian state treasury and revenues from the colonial lottery. This did not mean that every Congolese worker was suddenly required to pay six times as much (the tax pressure in the cities had already been increased gradually, but sorely), but that the tax department was now extending its tentacles farther into the interior. The bludgeon of personal taxation in this way drove thousands of people into the mines, onto the plantations, or into government service. In 1920 123,000 Congolese were on payrolls; by 1939 that had risen to 493,000.18 Anyone refusing regular employment and wishing to keep farming for themselves was forced to raise certain crops and sell them to private colonial companies. By 1935 an estimated 900,000 people were involved in the cultivation of cotton.19

  Nkasi, too, felt compelled to undertake something. “Well, and then the crisis came . . . . And the lack of money . . . [W]hen the administrator of Mbanza-Ngungu, Musepenje, came by Ntimansi I applied for a job with the provincial government.”

  One can hardly overestimate the portent of this. The Kimbanguists had gradually come to despise anything that reeked of the colonial government. They hid away in the forests and warmed themselves secretly at the glow of their religion. They wanted nothing to do with the whites. But now they had to go to work for them. Operation Tax Hike was a complete success.

  In no time, however, Nkasi would become enamored of European culture.

  He had been lucky to meet this fellow Musepenje. That, at least, was how I had scribbled down the name phonetically in my notebook. Musepenje. Muzepenjet? Whenever I heard a word that I didn’t understand during an interview, I tried to jot down the sound of it as faithfully as possible. And Nkasi was often hard to understand. “Monsieur Peignet?” I wrote next to it. At home, it took me days to figure it out. But in the colonial yearbooks for the 1930s I found a certain Firmin Peigneux, provincial administrator in Nkasi’s region, the colonial official in closest contact with the population. He traveled from one chefferie to the next, talked to village chieftains and ruled on conflicts concerning property rights. Monsieur Peigneux, in other words. Most Bantu speakers pronounce the eu as an è. I should have known. At the Africa archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels I was able to view his personal files.20 This man, I quickly realized, was cut from a very different cloth than a brute like Monsieur d’Alphonse.

  Peigneux, who hailed from the province of Liège, had gone to Congo alone in 1925 at the age of twenty-one. He quickly gained a reputation for his empathy. After his first year of service, his superior evaluated him as follows:

  This official truly possesses the qualities needed to become an elite administrator in the short term . . . . In his contacts with the natives, Monsieur Peigneux exercises a level-headed policy that has won him the confidence of the chiefs and notables. He is interested in the study of social affairs and already possesses to a high degree the art of dealing in a careful and well-considered fashion with the primitives who surround us, without snubbing their secular opinions and customs . . . . The government may rightfully entertain the highest expectations for this official’s future effectiveness.”

  That proved no exaggeration. Peigneux went on to build a brilliant colonial career and in 1948 was appointed to the post of provincial governor, the second-highest position in the official hierarchy after that of governor general. It reflects on his unceasing social involvement to note that, after he was sent back to Belgium for health reasons in the 1950s, he became a member of the board for the Fund for Native Welfare.

  Nkasi still spoke of Monsieur Peigneux with great affection. “Musepenje, c’était mon oncle. Musepenje was like an uncle to me. He even drank palm wine with us! He and Monsieur Ryckmans, those were the only friendly whites.” André Ryckmans was the son of Pierre Ryckmans, the best governor general the Belgian Congo ever had. He served from 1934 to 1946, and stood out by reason of his great intelligence and moral integrity. In terms of appearance he bore a great resemblance to Albert Camus; in terms of humanity he did in many ways as well. His son André was a provincial administrator who also got along very well with the local population. He learned their sayings and their dances and spoke fluent Kikongo and Kiyaka. Shortly after independence, he was murdered under tragic circumstances.

  And so Nkasi went to work for Monsieur Peigneux. He learned carpentry and became a cabinetmaker. A few years later, when Peigneux was transferred to the district of Kwango as assistant district commissioner, Nkasi went with him. He and his family moved to Kikwit, where they would stay for more than twenty years. His eldest son, Pierre Diakuana, himself eighty-four years of age now, confirmed that. I found him in one of Kinshasa’s back neighborhoods: “I was born in Ntimansi, but I was still young when we moved to Kikwit. The lower part of the city there, my father built that. We lived in the neighborhood for the blacks, at rue du Kasai, numéro 10. We had a big house made of unbaked brick. Papa became an évolué [Westernized African] then. I had Belgian friends.”21

  Nkasi himself thinks back on the period with great pleasure. “I worked for the state. I was the chief carpenter. It was my job to build le nouveau pays des mindeles, the new country for the whites.” That was accurate enough. Kikwit had only recently been promoted to capital of Kwango district. Before that the capital had been Banningville (today’s Bandundu), in the far north of Kwango. Social upheavals, however, prompted the administration to move to the district’s center. In personal terms as well, it was a remarkable time for Nkasi. “In Kikwit I had four children, one of whom died. In 1938 my father died, on Happy New Year’s Day. He was old, very old.” During his long stay at Kikwit he got to know European culture from nearby. “I was tout à fait mindele back then, completely white. I had one wife. I had a suit with a tie and white shoes, I ate at Monsieur Peigneux’s house. I interpreted for him, from Kikongo into French. Monsieur Peigneux even went to pick up my wife at the station. I was hired as an agent of the state, as a manager, just like a European manager. That’s why they gave me the carte civique.” From 1948 on, the carte de mérite civique (certificate of civil merit), was given to those Congolese whose lifestyle was considered sufficiently advanced. Thanks to the tax pressure of the 1930s, the follower of a subversive religion from the 1920s emerged in the 1940s and 1950s as someone who could speak proudly of his quasi-European status. And he still did today, even though very little is left of that prosperity.

  But Nkasi’s memories of Kikwit are especially interesting in another way. “In Kikwit I also built the prison,” he told me. “The warden at the time was Monsieur Framand, a fat man.” In the last few years I had visited the prison at Kikwit on a number of occasions. An altogether miserable place, it is still in use today. The prisoners wear rags, sleep on the floor, and can only eat because their chaplain, an elderly Flemish missionary, has set up a food-sharing system with a number of surrounding parishes. There are no toilets: the inmates squat on an empty stretch of concrete in an empty cell. Human feces lie to the left and right of them. The prisoners are all young men, with the exception of one young female, a beautiful, taciturn woman with a two-year-old child. No idea whether it was conceived before or after her internment. Chiseled in blue stone above the prison entrance is a d
ate: 1930. Almost all the prisons in Congo were built between 1930 and 1935, a period in which the judicial system was buttressed to deal with the growing number of uprisings. More courts came, more judges, more legal actions, and more prisons.

  “I built a gallows once in that prison,” Nkasi said. “It was for the hanging of two young boys. They had stolen clothing from a shop and murdered the owner, who was sleeping in the back. That was in 1935, I think.”22 In the Belgian Congo the death sentence was pronounced repeatedly and during the interwar years it was often carried out as well. In 1921, the same year in which Kimbangu was sentenced to death, a group of some ten leopard men from the Anioto sect were hanged at Bomili, in Orientale province. In 1922, in Elisabethville, a man named François Musafiri was strung up after having stabbed to death a white man who was reportedly his wife’s lover. The execution was attended by hordes of people. Some four thousand spectators arrived to see it, approximately half the city’s population: three thousand Africans, including children, and a thousand whites, almost a tenth of the entire European population of Congo.23 Public executions, it was felt, had an edifying effect. They caused the black man to toe the line and instilled in him respect for the colonial administration. One wonders whether it always worked out that way. In 1939, at the hanging of Ambroise Kitenge, things went wrong from the start. When the trapdoor fell open, the rope—borrowed from the local fire department—broke. Such bungling hardly jibed with the stern image the colonizer wished to project. How often was the death penalty carried out? The figures are incomplete, but we know that during the period 1931–53 some 261 individuals were sentenced to death and that the sentence was carried out in 127 of those cases.24 That comes down to an average of one execution every two months, but between the wars the frequency must have been higher. Important to note: not one Belgian was ever sentenced to hang.

  NKASI NEVER MENTIONED IT ONCE, but the reason Kikwit suddenly became the district capital had everything to do with an extremely serious popular uprising in the surrounding area, so serious that the government fearfully kept it hushed up. In 1931 a revolution was sparked off among the Pende, leading to the worst disturbances of the colonial period before the struggle for independence. The Pende were an ethnic group, many of whom were employed by Huileries du Congo Belge, the Unilever subsidiary. That company worked a region with an extreme abundance of palm trees but also an extreme paucity of workers. In the area where the Pende lived, however, the situation was reversed. The Pende were forced, often at gunpoint, to enter service as bearers or harvesters and transferred to another part of the country. The work was extremely strenuous. The men were expected to deliver thirty-six clusters of palm nuts each week; if they did so—on top of their measly wage of 20 centimes per kilo (2.2. pounds)—they were then given a 2.10 franc bonus and three kilos (6.6 pounds) of rice. This meant that they had to find five to eight ripe clusters each day; to harvest them they had to scale the branchless trunks of the palms to heights of sometimes more than thirty meters (nearly one hundred feet), and cut down the clusters with a machete. The Unilever operators assumed that all blacks had the ability to perform such acrobatics effortlessly, while in fact it required a highly specific set of skills not given to all. Fatal accidents occurred. And once the clusters were on the ground, the work was not over yet. The nuts had to be carried to the collection point; in actual practice, this meant that Pende women often had to cover up to thirty kilometers (about nineteen miles) on foot along forest trails, balancing a cluster of twenty to thirty kilos (forty-four to sixty-six pounds) on their head.

  When the economic crisis broke out, Unilever took a beating as well. A kilo of palm oil went for 5.9 francs in 1929; by 1934 that was down to 1.3 francs.25 The company felt obliged to recoup a portion of the losses from its workers. By the mid-1930s, they were paying only three centimes per kilo of palm nuts, rather than twenty.26 That led to a great dissatisfaction. The state boosted taxes while the company scuttled its compensation. Things could not go on that way for long.

  Here too, socioeconomic unrest manifested itself in the form of popular religion. After a woman named Kavundiji began receiving visions, the Tupelepele (literally: floaters) sect arose. The actual leader of the movement was Matemu a Kelenge, who went by the nickname Mundele Funji (White Storm). Its followers hoped for the return of the ancestors, who would restore balance and ring in a new era of prosperity. In anticipation of that, the followers were to throw off all things European. Identification papers, tax receipts, banknotes, and employment contracts were tossed into the river. On the banks the people were to build a shed in which the ancestors would leave behind goods for them, miraculous goods, such as peanuts so fertile that one needed to sow only one to cultivate an entire field. The hope of redemption could hardly have been expressed more poignantly. One inhabitant of the region at the time summarized the situation lucidly:

  The whites have turned us into slaves; to get palm nuts from us, they have not hesitated to whip or beat us. They entertained themselves with the women and girls from our villages. Our lives were no longer those of men, but of beasts. Our whole existence stood in the service of working for the white people: we slept for the whites, we ate for the whites, we got up for the whites and for the white man’s work. We were tired of always having to work for the white man, who subjected us to inhuman conditions. That is why we heeded and accepted the messages of Matemu a Kelenge, later known as Mundele Funji, when he asked us to stop paying taxes, to stop working for the white man and to chase him away from us.27

  Just as they had in the case of Simon Kimbangu, the colonial authorities sent in troops. The situation seemed under control until June 6, 1931, when Maximilien Balot, a young Belgian official, went to the region by car to collect taxes along with a few African assistants. In the village of Kilamba he drove onto the road leading to the shed where the ancestors were expected to return. There he happened upon Matemu a Kelenge, the sect’s leader. Kelenge shouted that there was no more money, and that he would kill the white man and his henchmen. At that point, Balot fired a shot in the air. Many of the people ran away, including most of his own assistants. A second shot wounded a villager. “You see? The whites want to kill us!” Matemu shouted. “So kill me!” Balot fired and missed. Matemu scrambled to his feet and slashed the white man across the face with a large knife. Balot then pounded him senseless with the butt of his rifle and walked away. But an arrow shot by one of the villagers caught him in the neck. Matemu ran after him and hacked with his machete at the white man’s shoulder. Balot’s arm was now dangling at his side. Three villagers, including a chieftain, took aim with their bows and shot at him. When Balot fell to the ground, the chieftain saw that he was still alive. He cut off his head and took it as a trophy. The next day Balot’s body was cut into pieces and distributed among the dignitaries of eight different villages. His bags were plundered.

  Never before had an official of the Belgian Congo been slaughtered so brutally in the execution of his duties. The colonial administration’s reaction was grim. It set out to grind the uprising beneath its heel. A punitive expedition, unlike anything seen since the worst years of the Free State, headed for the Kwango. Three officers, five noncoms, 260 soldiers, and seven hundred bearers occupied the region for months. Heavy fighting ensued. Rebels were captured and brutally tortured; even women were taken prisoner and raped. An investigative committee of the Belgian government later confirmed the gruesome tally. At least four hundred Pende had been murdered, perhaps many times that number. The Pende uprising had been broken, but the people’s frustration was none the less for it.

  When she arrived back in Brussels, Balot’s widow, with an almost preternatural mildness and grandiosity, said: “The agents of the private companies treat the blacks badly and exploit them. People need to know that. What happens there must stop, otherwise there will be uprisings everywhere. Private companies have granted themselves rights that should be reserved only for the government. What’s more, many district officials have not b
ehaved as they should. My husband has paid for those others.”28

  IT MAY COME AS SOMETHING OF A SURPRISE that the first forms of popular protest took place in the countryside, among the farmers of Bas-Congo and the palm-nut harvesters of the Kwango. A thoughtful observer traveling around the country in 1920 would probably have predicted that the fires of unrest would first ignite in the cities, with their rudimentary workers’ camps and their hard and unhealthy labor. But that was not the case. Why not?

  There are, roughly speaking, two answers to that: the quality of life in the cities was improving, so that many Africans had begun feeling at home there, and the European population did everything to keep the masses calm. For as long as it lasted . . .

  During the interwar period, the proto-urban agglomerations grew into real cities. Their populations showed a spectacular increase. Between 1920 and 1940, the population of Kinshasa doubled to fifty thousand inhabitants.29 The population of Elisabethville grew from sixteen thousand in 1923 to thirty-three thousand by 1929, a doubling in the space of only six years.30 More and more Congolese were moving to the cities. The forced recruitment of laborers was coming to an end, but many migrated of their own free will. In Kasai, Maniema, the Kivu, and, yes, even in Rwanda and Burundi, thousands of villagers let themselves be talked into going to the Union Minière mines in Katanga. In 1919 that company employed some eighty-five hundred local workers; by 1928 their numbers had grown to seventeen thousand.31 From Bas-Congo and Équateur, people went to Léopoldville; Stanleyville owed its growth largely to the arrival of workers from Orientale province.