Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  Most of those who packed their bags and went to work for a boss were young people. What made working in a mine, on a plantation, or in a factory so attractive to them? Often they were anxious to get out of the village with its poverty, its corrupt chieftain and powerful elders who married all the young women. Away from a miserable farming existence and the raising of state-ordained crops. Away from mandatory road building and primitive village life. Away from that world of deprivation, with no future in store for them.32

  What’s more, the cities and mines were no longer the horrors they had been until recently. The mortality rate at Union Minière in Katanga fell dramatically. In 1918 20.2 percent of the workers had died of the Spanish flu; one year later the mortality rate had fallen to 5.1 percent and by 1930 to only 1.6 percent.33 Mineworkers also contracted fewer illnesses.34 They were inoculated against smallpox, typhoid fever, and meningitis. Hospitals and medical centers were built. Housing, clothing, and nutrition improved considerably. The same went for the diamond pits in Kasai. A worker in the gold mines of Kilo-Moto in those days received a daily ration of 179 grams (about 6.25 ounces) of fresh meat or fresh fish, 357 grams (about 12.5 ounces) of rice, 286 grams (about 10 ounces) of beans, and one and a half kilo 3.3 pounds) of bananas, in addition to salt and palm oil.35 In his village, he could only dream of such a rich and varied diet.

  In addition to health standards, the pleasure quotient also improved. Life in the workers’ camps of Katanga took a major turn for the better from 1923, when Union Minière began allowing workers to bring along their wives and children. In 1925 18 percent of the mineworkers were married; by 1932 that proportion was 60 percent.36 The feeling of being uprooted, which had characterized an earlier generation, was dwindling rapidly. Many chose to prolong their contracts voluntarily. Beginning in 1927, mineworkers were allowed to sign three-year contracts, as opposed to the six-month maximum only a few years before. Many workers took advantage of that: by 1928, 45 percent already had a longer-term contract; in 1931 it was 98 percent.37 Working in the mines was no longer an ordeal. When the economic malaise of 1929–33 forced the company to lay off three-quarters of its personnel, the protests were aimed not so much against the sudden unemployment, but against the prospect of having to return to the villages. The laid-off workers had to leave their company houses, but rather than return home they chose to settle in the immediate vicinity of Elisabethville, where they cleared fields and turned to farming until the economy recovered.38

  The Katangan mining industry was no longer peopled by overworked young men who lodged for a few months in gruesome workers’ camps, but by young families who felt quite happy in their new surroundings. Wages rose; in the camps children were born who knew the village of their parents and ancestors only by word of mouth. Elsewhere in Elisabethville, the cité indigène swelled to become a lively, multiethnic universe with a dynamism and atmosphere all its own. Unlike the neat, increasingly comfortable workers’ camps housing the employees of the big mining companies, the cité was inhabited by a ragtag population: carpenters, masons, woodworkers, smiths, and craftsmen, as well as nurses, clerks, and warehouse foremen. The operators of small- to-medium-sized businesses lived next door to government personnel.39 The population density there was five times that in the white city center.40 There arose, in other words, an extensive and permanent urban population of African origin. The colonial administration, at first, was less than enthusiastic. Wouldn’t such a protracted gathering of proletarians lead to a subversive or, even worse, Bolshevist climate? Fear of the red menace was deeply rooted within the colonial government. Or, to put it more succinctly: “The fear of the black went in the guise of fear of the red.”41

  In 1931, however, the colonizer realized that communities had now been formed that were no longer traditional villages and would not become such. Their existence was recognized with a monstrous bit of officialese, a fit of jargon at which the colonial administration was, in fact, quite expert: the centre extra-coutumier, the extra-legal center, as it were. Those centers were given a structure similar to that of the classic chefferie, and a chief was appointed to act as intermediary between the masses and the powers that be.

  The new lifestyle that arose in the cities was different from village culture, but it was also more than simply a copy of European urban culture, if only because the new African agglomerations in no way resembled their European counterparts. The colonial city was an entirely new experience, even for Belgians! There was more space and freedom, the distances were greater, the lanes broader, the lots roomier. From the very start, these cities were planned with the automobile in mind. It had something American about it, many whites felt. Léopoldville with its various urban nuclei but no clear city center looked more like Los Angeles than like the medieval towns of Belgium or the nineteenth-century middle-class neighborhoods of Brussels or Antwerp. The colonial city did not trot along in pursuit of the European model, but took the lead over it. When a Belgian journalist saw white women in Congo taking a plane to Léopoldville to have their babies, he crowed that in the colony “a new society, a new Belgium with new ideas is being born.”42 In the Congo of the 1920s, it seemed as though the 1950s had already begun.

  For the Congolese as well, the colonial city constituted a new universe with a material culture of its own. An imaginary young family from Kasai who moved to Elisabethville, where the father went to work in the mines, moved into a brick house. The wife began preparing meals in enameled pots and pans rather than in terra-cotta, even though she retained her preference for cooking out of doors rather than in the dark kitchen at the back of the house. The family began using tables, chairs, and cutlery. New ideas arose concerning care of the body and personal hygiene: people wore European clothes, sometimes even shoes; they washed themselves with soap and used latrines. The parents slept beneath blankets that came from England; if their children fell ill they were given medicines from Belgium. If the woman became pregnant, she went to have the child in a maternity ward run by black nurses or white nuns. When the family on rare occasions visited their former village, they took their relatives such novelties as needles, thread, scissors, safety pins, matches, mirrors, and money. But during those visits it also became clear how much distance had grown up between them. As a salaried employee, the young father had acquired a new sense of autonomy. He was less impressed by what the village chieftain and elders told him. They listened to him now! He told them about the iron discipline in the mine, about the siren that called the workers in each morning, about working six days a week. His audience laughed at that, of course. Six days a week? He would have been better off staying in the village, then his wife would have worked the fields! They were only envious, he knew. Everyone viewed his clothes admiringly; he had noticed that already. On the way back to town he felt more energetic and motivated than ever. If he could only make his way up in the hierarchy of Union Minière, he may have thought, as a mechanic or machine operator for example, then after saving for a long time he could buy his family a bicycle, a sewing machine, or even, imagine that, a gramophone! On Sunday morning they could ride to church together, on the bicycle. He would sit on the saddle, his wife on the baggage carrier, the children on the crossbar and the handlebars. That was what was called prosperity, and it felt good.43

  The moment in the week when the new lifestyle was truly celebrated was on Sunday afternoon. In Elisabethville, the miners went to watch the white man’s teams play soccer.44 In Boma, the dockworkers went out strolling, wearing starched collars and straw hats and carrying canes. Their wives wore flowery cotton textiles and hats that had long been out of fashion in Europe.45 In peaceful Tshikapa, close to the diamond mines of Kasai, the tenor voice of Enrico Caruso could be heard coming from some of the huts.46 Someone else played jazz records and Cuban tunes on his gramophone. At four o’clock in Léopoldville, the Apollo Palace quickly filled with dancers.47 Western trousers were all the thing: the men gathered there in long trousers, short trousers, cycling shorts, jodhpurs, or soc
cer shorts, as long as they wore trousers. And the women wore dresses, long skirts and fancily draped pagnes (skirts), all of them dancing in heels, sometimes twelve centimeters (just over four and half inches) high. The occasional male wore a tuxedo with patent-leather shoes, but most of them went barefooted. The dancing proceeded carefully and in great earnest, fearful as they were for all those spiked heels. An orchestra played merengue or rumba music, complex, syncopated African rhythms beat out on bottles and drums. But one could also catch snippets of fandango, cha-cha, polka, and Scottish music, in addition to echoes of martial music and hymns.48 The most important influence of all, however, was Cuban: 78 rpm records brought back music that felt somehow vaguely familiar to the Congolese. It was the music the slaves had carried with them across the ocean centuries before and that now, enriched with various Latin influences, had come home again. Singers in Léopoldville liked to sing in Spanish, or in something that passed for it. The clear vowels sounded like the phonetic patterns of Lingala: all you had to do was toss in a corazón or a mi amor now and then. The guitar became the most popular instrument, in addition to the banjo, the mandolin, and the accordion. Camille Feruzi, the greatest accordion virtuoso of Congolese music, composed peerless melancholy melodies. And aboard the boats bringing people from the interior to Léopoldville, young Wendo Kolosoyi tirelessly strummed his guitar: he would grow to become the founder of the Congolese rumba, the most influential musical style in the sub-Saharan Africa of the twentieth century. Léopoldville in those years was a kind of New Orleans where African, South American, and European popular music fused to form a new genre: the Congolese rumba, irresistible dance music that would wash over the rest of the continent, but that could be heard at that time only in the bars of the new capital. It was music that made people laugh and forget, that made them dance and flirt, that made them happy and horny. It was Saturday Night Fever, but on a Sunday afternoon. Why would you want to protest against such a dazzling, uproarious life?

  BUT THE ADMINISTRATORS STAYED ON THEIR TOES. At a table in Elisabethville’s Cercle Albert in the 1930s, one could often see three men engrossed in conversation.49 Three white men. They spoke quietly and their expressions were serious. Their voices: basso continuo. Their conversation: completely inaudible. Above their heads floated clouds of cigar smoke, occasionally dispersed by a burst of good-humored laughter from their own midst. Officially, Africans were not forbidden to eat in European restaurants, but the extremely chic Cercle Albert was an exception. Still, it was here that decisions were made about the lives and futures of the black population. The three men were Amour Maron, provincial commissioner of Katanga, Aimé Marthoz, director of Union Minière, or one of his successors, and Félix de Hemptinne, bishop of Katanga. Hemptinne’s stately white beard had the African population convinced that he was the son of Leopold II. Three Belgians. Each of them stood at the head of one of the pillars of colonial power: government, finance/industry, and church. The “blessed colonial trinity” it was sometimes called in jest. Who knows whether the bishop was able to laugh about that.

  These three men had joined forces to ensure that life in the mining town of Elisabethville was run in an orderly fashion. Their respective agendas converged in many ways: industry wanted submissive, loyal employees; the government wanted no repeats of the Kimbangu affair or the Pende uprising; the church wanted to deliver pure souls in the hereafter—and that meant producing obedient citizens on this side of the divide. At other places in the colony, the three administrations became tightly intertwined as well. Although there were often tensions between the pillars of the colonial triad, there was one thing about which they were in full agreement: if the step from a tribal to an industrial lifestyle was not to end in bitter defeat, they had to keep a close eye on their black fellow man. Gradually, and above all circumspectly, the new urban Congolese citizens would be kneaded into willing workers, docile subjects, devout Catholics.

  If no large-scale uprisings took place in the cities, then, that was due not only to the pleasurable prosperity experienced by the workers, but also and above all to the sophisticated arsenal of strategies employed by the colonial trinity to keep tabs on, to discipline, and if need be to punish the population. There may never have been anything like a grand master plan, but in actual practice church, state, and big money frequently toed one and the same line. Their philosophy—how do we keep them under control? how will they produce best? how must we instruct them?—manifested itself in a host of ways. In Léopoldville, the authorities were anxious about all that dancing and strongly advocated illuminating the streets of the cité at night, for how else could they “effectively supervise an agglomeration of twenty-thousand souls, with a handful of policemen lost in the dark?”50 At Elisabethville they succeeded in imposing a lingua franca, Swahili, a language that was not indigenous and almost no one’s native language, but which made it easier to exercise control over the ethnic melting pot.51

  Schooling was still a privilege held exclusively by the missionaries, and it became a powerful instrument to mold the masses in the desired shape: the pupils were taught everything about the Belgian royal family, but nothing about the American civil rights movement. Even the French Revolution had to be handled with utmost care. European textbooks were too inflammatory: “There, the revolution is often not regarded with a properly critical eye. Some reforms, liberties, etc., condemned by the church are applauded too readily,” wrote the influential missionary and school inspector Gustaaf Hulstaert. The pupils were in danger of becoming “liberal, then disinterested and atheistic.”52

  Meanwhile, African clerks also began reading French-language newspapers. Communist papers like the Belgian Le Drapeau Rouge were banned as from 1925, as were magazines with such evocative titles as Paris Plaisirs, Séduction, and Paris Sex-Appeal.53 A similar urge to excise content became manifest following World War I, when the first movie theaters appeared. Film was seen as a dangerous medium, one that could cause foment among the lower, unlettered masses. In 1936, therefore, a separate film censorship board was set up especially for African audiences, which resulted in separate showings for Europeans and Congolese. Usually this meant that those films considered unsuited for white children were forbidden for black adults as well.54 “Tous les coloniaux seront unanimes à declarer que les noirs sont encore des enfants, intellectuellement et politiquement” (All those in our colony are unanimous in stating that the blacks are still children, both intellectually and politically), said the official papers that set out the new media policy.55 In terms of civilization, as the recurring metaphor had it, the African was still a child: he could not be left to his own devices; his development had to be watched over carefully. Ultimately, the colonial trinity aspired to a form of emancipation, but only in the long term, in the very long term if need be. Things must not be allowed to become too exuberant. Dominer pour server was the motto of Pierre Ryckmans, governor general at the time: to rule in order to serve. Paternalistic? Far from it: that “to serve” sounded dangerously progressive to many. “To discipline” would have been better, or perhaps “to educate.”

  Growing up in the Léopoldville of the 1920s was an intelligent and sensitive boy who, after World War II, would develop into the first giant of Congolese literature: Paul Lomami Tshibamba. Shortly before his death in 1985, he looked back on the mood that dominated the interwar period:

  The colonizer did everything to convince us that we were big children, that we would remain that way, that we were under his guardianship and that we had to follow all instructions he gave, in order to educate us with an eye to our gradual integration into Western civilization, the most ideal civilization of all. And we, what else could we expect? My generation no longer knew our parents’ traditions: we were born in this city founded by colonials, in this city where the life of a man was subordinate to the power of money . . . . Without money you ended up in prison. Money was used to pay taxes, to clothe yourself, and even to eat, which was unknown in the villages. It was the blank colonizer
who supplied that money, so you had to submit to whatever he said. That is the world into which I was born and in which I lived: you had to bow to what others asked of you.56

  Yet monitoring the urban workers’ environment alone was not enough; one had to intervene actively as well. In addition to the schools, club life and family policies were the instruments of choice. The decision to allow women and children into the work camps had a utilitarian motive: it was intended to boost the general willingness to work, to impede prostitution and alcohol consumption, to stimulate monogamy, and to promote the general tranquility of camp life. In addition, children in the work camps would grow up within the company culture. That, with the aid of the mission schools, would help groom them to become the next batch of disciplined employees.57

  The church wielded an exceptional amount of political power. Around 1930 there were as many Catholic missionaries in the Belgian Congo as there were colonial officials.58 Ecclesiastical authority and worldly power meshed seamlessly, as Lomami Tshibamba well knew:

  In the day-to-day life in which we grew up, the priest demanded our submission: the representatives of Bula Matari, in other words of the government or the territorial administration, all had authority and that authority came from God. As a result, total obedience was expected from us. That is what the priest advised! Being good, both to God and to the people of this new society, which was created by Bula Matari, required obedience, subjugation, and respect. We were reduced to servility—that was not the term they used, but that is what it came down to.59