Congo
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Cultivating servility was also the motive behind the social policies of the big companies. Union Minière went furthest in that. Granted, the company built schools, hospitals and leisure clubs for the workers and their families. And yes, in the late 1930s a start was made with a system of retirement benefits. And indeed, the miner was surrounded from cradle to grave by the solicitousness of the company, more than with any other mining operation in Central Africa. But there can be no doubt about the fact that the company’s paternalistic benevolence was prompted more by matters of efficiency than of philanthropy. The objective was to raise perfect workers: happy and tractable.
More than an employer, Union Minière was a state within a state, on occasion even a state with totalitarian features. Every facet of life in the workers’ camp was supervised by the white camp boss. He kept a file on each worker and his family; he was responsible for the housing, the supplies, the salaries, and the schools; he mediated in conflicts and imposed disciplinary measures. The wife of a Union Minière worker who needed to go back to her native village first had to ask the camp boss’s permission, even though she was not a company employee! From the age of ten, her children were obliged to follow classes in manual training, a matter of preparing them for their work later. If they were boys, the company helped them to save for a dowry. Union Minière was a total company, with the backing of church and state.60
Native organizations were regarded with great apprehension as potential breeding grounds for social unrest: “The club feeling is discouraged in as far as possible. The camp leadership keeps a close eye on all activities organized by the natives.”61 The Union Minière found sewing circles, choirs, and home economics courses preferable to the employees’ own initiatives. The missions had churches in the working neighborhoods and were well-suited to the task. In Léopoldville this was organized largely by the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in Elisabethville by the Benedictines. The cathedral at Elisabethville was graced on Sundays by an excellent Gregorian-chant boys’ choir, made up exclusively of African children.
In the cities, beginning in 1922, Belgian priests saw to the setting up of the first Boy Scout troops. The paramilitary character of Scouting, a movement originally secular in nature and, so, more in line with the state than with the church, was an exclusively Catholic phenomenon in the colony. It allowed the missionary to exercise control over his best pupils even after school hours. With activities such as trailblazing, tree climbing, knots, camping, and Morse code, the young people were taught both pride and discipline. The young Scout collected badges, said his pledge and cared for his uniform. The membership was never extremely large (around one thousand members in all of Congo), but it helped to cultivate a native elite with a sense of discipline and fidelity.62
A much larger group was reached through what was probably the most successful part of Belgian missionary work: soccer. Here too, Léopoldville and Elisabethville took the lead, starting around 1920. Missionaries in their cassocks explained the rules of the game, and in no time saw children and young people practicing with homemade balls and grapefruits in the dusty streets of the cité. The first teams were set up: Étoile and League in Léopoldville, Prince Charles and Prince Léopold in Elisabethville. In 1939, Léopoldville alone had fifty-three teams and six divisions. There were teams with shoes and barefoot teams—playing in bare feet entailed milder passes, but greater agility. The matches were held on Sunday afternoons. In addition to hundreds of players, this also attracted thousands of supporters. Friends, colleagues, wives, and children screamed themselves hoarse from the sidelines. Soccer was more than recreation. It also had a formative side. A Flemish Benedictine noted contentedly: “Rather than spending their Sunday afternoons squatting in their huts and drinking pombo, or going out drinking in bars amid women of dubious virtue, they participate freely and out of doors in the sports that interest them.”63 A Marist brother was equally enthusiastic: “It keeps them, at least for a few hours, away from dancing and lolling about and, after benediction, allows them to spend a pleasant Sunday afternoon.”64 Just as soccer was propagated at the Flemish academies and boarding schools as a pressure valve for the excess sexual energy of boys, in the colony it was introduced to quell possible social unrest. In addition to an exuberant game, soccer was also a form of discipline. One had to attend training sessions, develop skills, control one’s reflexes, obey the rules and listen to the arbiter. Festive, yet restrained: an ideal colonial training ground. “Sport teaches the native . . . to comply with a discipline he takes upon himself,”65 was the way it was put.
In the streets of Kikwit in 2007 I occasionally saw a timeworn, yellow scooter race past, driven by an old white man. In itself that was quite exceptional: the few Europeans one saw always went by car, particularly the elderly among them. The scooter rider in question turned out to be Henri de la Kéthulle de Ryhove, a Jesuit of noble origin, well into his eighties and still tirelessly in action—for the last few years in particular in the fight against sickle-cell anemia, a hereditary illness. Père Henri was also the nephew of Raphaël de la Kéthulle, perhaps the most famous missionary in all of the Belgian Congo. His uncle owed that fame not to heroic proselytization deep in the jungle and not to the evangelical brightening up of a miserable leper colony, no: Père Raphaël spent his life working in Kinshasa, teaching his people to play soccer. He was a Marist educator, part of the first batch of urban missionaries. The scion of an aristocratic Francophone family from Bruges, he himself had attended Sint-Lodewijks College. (It is a detail that makes me smile: I myself attended a former branch of that same college. At my school, too, three-quarters of a century and a Dutchifying shift later, soccer was still the major religion next to Christianity. Our paved schoolyard had the outlines of five or six soccer fields painted on it, there were five volleyball nets and two basketball hoops. We had four rather than two hours of mandatory gym each week. West Flemish Catholicism, despite the influence of Guido Gezelle—our own Gerard Manley Hopkins—still had more affinity with sports than with poetry.)
“My uncle was the founder of the Association Sportive Congolaise, Congo’s first sporting club,” Père Henri said once we were seated. His white hair was still blown back from his forehead after his scooter ride. A Kikwit coiffure, as it were. “He was the greatest promoter of soccer in Kinshasa.” But that was not the whole story. “His club also promoted gymnastics, track and field, swimming, and even water polo.” Raphaël de la Kéthulle must have been every bit as indefatigable as his nephew. Besides all manner of sporting initiatives, he also founded a number of schools. He was one of the original initiators of colonial Scouting and school drama programs, and founded a brass band and an alumni association. But above all he was the driving force behind the development of a decent sporting infrastructure in Léopoldville. Père Henri knew the story by heart. “He built three soccer stadiums, a huge sports park, tennis courts, and an Olympic swimming pool, which even had its own five-meter board. In that same pool, he also organized canoeing matches!” The absolute apogee of his urge to build was the Stade Roi Baudouin, later renamed the State du 20 Mai, a soccer stadium that seated 80,000 supporters and that, at its opening in 1952, was the biggest in all of Africa. It was here, in 1959, that the riots broke out that would ultimately lead to independence. It was here that Joseph-Désiré Mobutu addressed the people after his 1965 coup. It was here that Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in their famous 1974 bout. Today, every Kinois still knows about Tata Raphaël, Daddy Raphaël, even if that is only because the huge stadium is named after him these days and because his image, which bears a striking resemblance to the logo of Kentucky Fried Chicken, sprawls across the front of the Collège Saint Raphaël. “Yes, he was quite energetic,” Père Henri concluded, “though he did have something of a bottine légère.” A light boot? “That’s right, he was known to deal out a swift kick now and then, when necessary.”
The club life facilitated by the Catholic missions offered the urban worker not only health
y recreation, but purposefully altered the social topography as well. Out of fear for ethnically tinted revolts like those among the Pende, tribal boundaries were broken down—the very same boundaries delineated so sharply before by mission-school education! Henri de la Kéthulle told me: “In the sports, my uncle mixed up the various peoples. His football competitions always consisted of mixed teams. He organized inter-Congolese matches, even the first international soccer match. A Congolese team played against a Belgian one. Beerschot it was, I believe.”66
BLOOD, HOWEVER, WOULD NOT BE DENIED. Despite the well-intentioned sports initiatives and patronizing family policies, a certain hunger remained among parts of the Congolese urban population. The colonial administration may have shown a friendly face, but that lasted only as long as one toed the line. The masses were steered beneath the smiling countenance of the colonial trinity, but anyone stepping out of line was punished without pardon.
And so native organizations continued to exist.67 The Kitawala religion spread among the mineworkers and infiltrated large parts of the countryside. From Katanga it reached Kivu, Orientale province, and Équateur. Operating clandestinely, it provided a mixture of mysticism and revolt. When adherents were arrested in Jadotville in 1936, they said of the Bible: “This book clearly states that all people are equal. God did not create the whites to rule over the blacks . . . . It is unjust that the black man, who does all the work, must continue to live in poverty and misery, while the wages of the whites are so much higher.”68 Many followers were banished, but exile served—just as it had with the Kimbaguists—only as a stimulus to the movement.
Ethnic organizations in Katanga, like those among the Lulua or the Baluba, featured a conviviality and hominess unrivaled by any Scout troop. They provided assistance to newcomers and helped young people to pay their dowries. There even arose certain forms of solidarity between people with the same first name. An old man from Lubumbashi explained: “If my name is Albert and your name is Albert, then you become my brother . . . . We take care of each other. We help each other to get food, we play sports together, we support each other in every way.”69 Starting in 1929 the financial crisis resulted in intensive forms of solidarity among the Congolese. André Yav, the former boy from Lubumbashi, said of that: “Everyone was very hungry back then. Unemployment rose incredibly. But this is what we did: if a man had work, then he was the father and mother of all his friends. They came to eat at his house and they came there to get clothes.”70 Such forms of spontaneous self-organization were ineradicable.
In the 1920s there were groups that called themselves Les Belges. With no lack of humor, the members decked themselves out with titles borrowed from the colonial administration (“district commissioner,” “governor general,” “king”) and in their dances imitated white officials and missionaries. In addition to satire, they also engaged in finding housing for newcomers, distributing food, and organizing funerals.71
Following the financial crisis there also rose the first associations of Africans who had risen through the ranks. Organizations with names like Cercle de l’Amitié des Noirs Civilisés and the Association Franco-Belge brought together Congolese who had attended school, who enjoyed a decent income, and who spoke French together. They represented the start of a Congolese middle class, with all of the hopes and snobbism that went along with that. Their members often looked down on the life of the street, which they themselves had left behind only recently, and longed for a more European lifestyle, for cufflinks and respect. But if frustrated, that longing could backfire in the form of irritation and protest—which is precisely what happened in the 1950s. During the interbellum, however, their activities were not yet overtly political, although some wished to organize themselves independently of the church.
STARTING IN THE 1930S, at the border post with Rhodesia, a fascinating phenomenon could be observed several times a week.72 Whenever a train arrived from the British dominions, it would stop with a loud hiss to allow the white engineer to step down. His colleague from the Belgian Congo would then climb aboard to continue the journey to Elisabethville. Those witnessing this for the first time must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief: was that new engineer really an African? Yes, he was. In the Belgian Congo, unlike in South Africa and Rhodesia, people prided themselves on the lack of a “color bar.” Africans in the mines and factories were allowed to operate expensive and dangerous machines, albeit under the watchful eye of white foremen. Dedicated Union Minière employees could, to a certain extent, work their way up in the company. Hotels, restaurants, and cafés were, in theory, open to everyone. Only in the movie theaters was there a clear racial division. There was no formal ban on sexual relations between whites and blacks.
But the absence of a legal color bar did not mean that there was no invisible color bar.73 And that latter phenomenon was perhaps the most stubborn of all. Africans could not build their careers in a way that admitted them to the top levels of a company. In administrative service, the position of clerk or typist was the highest achievable level. The cities consisted of strictly delineated white centers and black, outlying neighborhoods, supposedly to prevent the spread of malaria. But that was a specious argument. Graveyards, too, were racially segregated, and there one ran little risk of contracting malaria. There were also no Scouting troops of mixed race. And Congolese soccer teams were not allowed to compete against European ones, out of fear for riots after a defeat or humiliation after a victory. One of the most acute observers of the colonial period wrote of this: “Remarkably enough, the fact that there was no official color bar only aggravated the racial reflexes of the whites. Denied by law, racism confirmed itself with full force in the facts.”74 And that was true enough. Today, anyone reading the colonial papers published between the wars will notice how much the thinking was determined by an us/them logic, and how much fear went hidden behind their forceful rhetoric. After a white man was murdered by a Congolese, L’Avenir Colonial Belge, one of the colony’s most popular papers, wrote:
Is our personal safety, the safety of the Whites, still ensured in Léopoldville?
One can reply in all sincerity: No! The acts of insubordination by the blacks are multiplying; their insolence is great and strikes fear into the hearts of even the bravest among us. Thefts are increasing in number and scope; the arrogance of the blacks towards the Whites is at times staggering; the fear we instill in them is null; the respect for the mundele is a thing of the past.
That is how things stand in the Year of Our Lord 1930.
But, we hear you say, is Stanley Pool a region once again in need of pacifying?
Well, why ever not?
What that repacification entailed, the paper felt, was clear enough: any African threatening the life of a white person, for whatever reason, should face the death penalty.75 Valid self-defense, mitigating circumstances, involuntary manslaughter, irresistible compulsion; none of that mattered. The courts, fortunately, were more subtle in their thinking, but that a newspaper flogging such humbug could become one of the most influential in the colony shows how the majority of whites thought about the racial question. Les noirs, that was printed in lower case; les Blancs, that took a capital.
In essence, colonial society between the wars was ruled by mutual fear: the white rulers were terrified of losing their respectability in the eyes of the Congolese, while a great many of those same Congolese were afraid of the white man’s authority and did all they could to earn his respect. It was a stranglehold of fear. How long could this be kept up?
ALBERT KUDJABO AND PAUL PANDA FARNANA spent four long years as prisoners of war in Germany, years that included much more than singing songs for ethnographers in Berlin. Years of sickness and forced labor. Years of mockery and humiliation. Kudjabo had been forced to work on a farm outside Stuttgart, where the farmer cheated him out of money. Panda ended up in Hannover, and was taken from there to Romania.
But now they were back in Belgium, the country for which they and a few other Congolese had ri
sked their lives. And what did the veterans’ magazine Le Journal des Combattants write about them? “Let us repatriate them and send them back to the shade of their banana trees, where they will certainly feel more at home. There they can relearn their Negro dances and tell of their war experiences to their families, who sit around them on chimpanzee skins.”76
Is that what they had fought and suffered for? They weren’t about to let it go at that. A reply came: “In the trenches the soldiers never tired of repeating that we were brothers and we were treated as the whites’ equals. Nevertheless, now that the war is over and our services are no longer required, people would rather see us disappear. In that regard we are in complete agreement, but then under one condition: if you insist so vehemently on the repatriation of blacks, it would be only logical for us to demand that all whites now in Africa be repatriated as well.”77
What nerve! No one in Congo dared to adopt such a self-assured tone. The reaction was written in a French more elegant than that of the original article. A new voice was truly being heard. A few weeks before the article in question appeared, on August 30, 1919, the Union Congolaise had been set up in Brussels, “an association for the assistance and the moral and intellectual development of the Congolese race.” It resembled the organization André Matswa had set up in France. The association originally had thirty-three members, almost all of them veterans. The central figure was the former prisoner of war Paul Panda Farnana; his companion-in-arms Albert Kudjabo became its secretary. They set about helping the poor and sick, assisted in paying funeral costs, and arranged for free night-school training. But theirs was also an explicitly political line. As early as 1920 the Union Congolaise demanded that forced labor regimes be relaxed, that workers’ wages be raised, and that schooling be expanded. Above all, they called for the Congolese to have more say in the colonial administration. Once again: this was 1920! In those days the authorities consulted at most with individual village chieftains they had appointed themselves. Much better, Paul Panda suggested, would be for the Congolese themselves to elect a council to advise the colonial government in Boma.