Those were ambivalent times, a fact of which Drachoussoff was well aware. He walked the line between necessity and impotence, between international politics and the jungle, between anti-Axis commitment and colonial reality. As an agronomist in a time of administrative scarcity, he juggled many tasks. And when evening came, he wrote down his experiences.
Wednesday, November 10, 1943. Mekiri.
At four A.M. I leave for Kundu on a borrowed bicycle. Two soldiers accompany me on foot. My companions travel on to Mekiri with our baggage.
I arrive in Kundu just before dawn, and bolt down a chunk of bread as I wait for it to grow light. A little before six I knock on the door of the capita [a Congolese go-between] and ask him to call all the men together to show me yesterday’s harvest. The villagers are so surprised that they all show up, both those who have latex and all the rest. I hand out a few encouraging words and three fines, and around the necks of the four worst cases I lay the rope [that expression is symbolic: what one does in fact is to tie a twenty-centimeter (about eight-inch) length of kekele—a very sturdy cord made from tree bark that causes no pain but serves to symbolize the arrest—around the person’s neck]. Then I leave triumphantly with my “convicts” to catch up with the caravan.
There was no prison in the wide surroundings. Incarceration meant that you had to travel along with the colonial official for a few days. A hike as disciplinary measure, the freedom of nature as detention.
On the road to Ngongo I find the soldiers and hand the prisoners over to them. Justice has been done, Kundu shall make its contribution to the war effort.
A ways past Ngongo I catch up with the rear guard of our caravan. This leg of the journey covers twenty kilometers [about 12.5 miles], straight across huge sandy plains where only a few Borassus palms will grow, punctuated by wispy forest along the banks of the river. We monitor the rubber production in the villages we pass: it is none too impressive, and I write out a number of tickets.
In the village of Mekiri, the men to whom my arrival was announced last night are waiting for us with latex, so that I can demonstrate how they are to make it coagulate. As I give my little presentation, I send Faigne and Pionso out to check and measure the fields. That evening, as a downpour thrashes the place where we are to spend the night, turning the roof into a sieve and drenching beds, clothing, and food, I deliver verdicts and rapidly hand out a number of convictions and acquittals.
The proceedings require a sea of paperwork. I have been appointed a magistrate with limited jurisdiction (to wit, I am allowed to rule only on economic offenses) and ambulant prison guard (to wit, I am allowed to let those I convict accompany me as I go). The maximum penalty is seven days for not carrying out works of an educational nature, for the chopping down of protected trees, and for hunting violations, and thirty days for failing to contribute to the war effort. I am, of course, also an officer of the legal constabulary, with limited jurisdiction on the basis of my position as district agronomist.
Procedure demands that I, as officer of the legal constabulary, first report an offence and then address that report myself as magistrate. While I am changing costumes, I pass the verdict, after an interrogation that is often surrealistic in the extreme.
A man appears because he has failed to plant ten ares of peanuts. He either has a verifiable and valid excuse and I send him home (some substitute clerks even demand that we then draw up a verdict of acquittal), or he comes up with something. That results in the following dialogue, which is scrupulously included in the minutes of the court.
Why didn’t you plant any peanuts?
Because I was ill.
For how long?
Two days.
You had three months to prepare your field. It can’t be those two days that prevented you from doing what you had to do.
That is true, mundele. But there was something else . . . .
What?
My father’s second wife had a baby.
Good Lord, it’s impossible to be familiar with all the customs of the thirty or forty peoples who live around the lake, but birth celebrations certainly don’t last for weeks. So then:
Bon, that will be five days in jail for you.
Yes, mundele.
Some of them argufy. Others come right to the point.
Mpua na nini asalaki bilanga te? (Why didn’t you cultivate your fields?)
Mpua na koï-koï (Out of laziness) . . . .
I would dearly love to acquit him then, but if I do they will all give me the same answer tomorrow.26
Drachoussoff was part of the colonial administration but, unlike most of his contemporaries, he also felt empathy for the local point of view. These people are satisfied with the forest and the rivers, he noted; money interested them only marginally. “Because there is little monitoring in this area, most of the farmers prefer to trade eight days of mild imprisonment for 357 days of peaceful living. Can I really blame them?”27
As it had in the nineteenth century, the demand for rubber drove people farther into the jungle, despite the predators and tsetse flies. Sleeping sickness, vanquished in its earlier epidemic form, began claiming more victims. Perhaps as much as 20 percent of the population of the equatorial forest became infected. Many of them also suffered from intestinal parasites because, far from home, their only drinking water came from swamps.28
Drachoussoff’s diary is fascinating, because it allows us to hear the voice of a colonial whose worldview is being shaken. While most whites simply waited for the war to be over and then resumed their old lives, he realized that “Europe’s enfeeblement can only serve to elicit centrifugal forces.”29 Things would never be the same. Despair began creeping in. This child of Russian émigrés was much more sensitive than the average Belgian to sudden historical turnabouts. The most brilliant passage in his diary was nothing short of prophetic:
What have we come here to do, anyway?
To “civilize” in the name of a civilization that is falling apart and no longer believes in itself? To Christianize? . . . But then why are we here?
We bring peace and guard it, we fill the landscape with roads, plantations, factories, we build schools, we care for the people’s health. In exchange for that we use the riches of their soil and substrata and we let them work for pay . . . modest as it is. Service and a service in return: that is the colonial pact in its entirety.
And tomorrow? What will the black baby be like then, the baby bound tightly to its mother as she passes my barza, this young offshoot of a colonized Africa? Will he be willing to accept the power from our hands, or will he yank it away? How far away that seems today, deep in this jungle . . . but still, there are those moments when history accelerates: when my father was a child, he also believed in the eternity of the patriarchal world that surrounded him—and that was twenty-five years before 1917! Sooner or later—and I hope for Congo that it will not be too soon—a man will rise up. Will it be a chef coutumier who can deal with the modern techniques of exercising power, without falling back on the traditional ones? Will it be one of those boys who sing “Vers l’avenir” [Toward the future] at the graduation ceremony? Many colonials today don’t even think about that, even though our colonization will finally be judged less by what it has created than by what will remain of it once it has disappeared.
And he continued his lucid musings:
Let us suppose—a supposition that is consciously absurd—that Congo will be independent in 1970. But what problems would that create! In Europe, we have never known an insurmountable conflict between our social organization and our technical surroundings: both developed more or less hand in hand. But in Africa an archaic social organization collides with the supremacy of a technical civilization that causes the former to fall apart without replacing it.
Of course, Congo is moving bit by bit into the modern age . . . . But doesn’t that come at the cost of a traditional world that is obsolete but still needed and—for the moment at least—irreplaceable? In the name of what? In t
he name of that lovely civilization, the fruits of which we reap right now in Europe? . . . That is why it is so hard to keep a clear conscience. Simply by being ourselves, we destroy traditions that were sometimes hard but venerable, and we offer as a replacement only white trousers and dark glasses, in addition to a little knowledge and a vast longing.
But wasn’t education a form of emancipation? Didn’t colonization actually lead to a gradual growing-up, the way the colonial trinity liked to claim?
Do we have the right, even the most open-minded among us, to punish and to educate, when education is all-too-often synonymous with debasement?30
Drachoussoff’s diary is an unsung masterpiece of colonial literature: stylistically beautiful, subtle in tone, literary despite itself. For him, his war years in Congo were a lesson in humility. “Africa is a training ground for the character, but also a graveyard for illusions,” he wrote at the end of the war.31
WHEN THE THIRD REICH FELL IN 1945, André Kitadi, the wireless operator who had driven through the Sahel, was still in Palestine. What to do, so far from home? A chaplain took him and his comrades along on a tour of all the holy places. “We went to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth . . . . [S]ome of us even had ourselves rebaptized in the River Jordan.” Libert Otenga, medic at the military hospital in Burma, also took the opportunity to see a bit of the world, although he stuck to a worldlier brand of sightseeing. “After Burma we went back to India. To eat, to drink, and to dance. And to pick up girls.” He roared with laughter. “They were good.”
After every war, veterans are always a troublesome category. Anyone risking his life for a country hopes for something in return afterward. Recognition, honor, money. The toll the struggle has taken, it seems, is often felt only after it is over. Back in civilian life, veterans realize what they have endured. Injuries, mental as well as physical, have not nearly healed—if they will ever do at all. Young men have lost limbs and dreams. Memories come back, traumas smolder on in silence. They see how placidly those who stayed at home have gone on living. It’s for them that the veterans have suffered, the people who can never feel what it is they have been through. Veterans are always a fractious factor, but in a colonial army they are absolutely explosive. There they fight less for their own people than for a foreign ruler. Congo was no different. “We fought the war as a Belgian colony,” Otenga blared. And that called for generous compensation: “They should have made us Belgians afterward! That would have been fair.”32 Another person I talked to felt that they had been sent home after their glowing victories “like a mean dog the hunter sends back with nothing to chew on.”33
The veterans returned with a host of new impressions. They had become more worldly-wise and less prone to be impressed by the colonial regime in the Belgian Congo. They had taken white generals prisoner in Abyssinia! In Nigeria they had seen a different form of colonialism! André Kitadi expressed it with his characteristic forcefulness: “The British treated us very well. We were well-dressed and well-fed. In Lagos they cooked for us, for the soldiers. Tea, bread, milk, jam . . . While back in Congo we had to scavenge for our own food in the brousse! We also saw that the British already had African officers, even majors and colonels. They sent good pupils to secondary school in England. There was none of that in the Belgian Congo. Such discrimination! They kept us under their thumbs! That produced a lot of irritation and suspicion, yes, even a certain rebelliousness. After the war we said: ‘We want that too!’ We wanted a transformation, but we weren’t even allowed into their shops. We didn’t like that. We had learned English. We put on English suits. We pretended to be Americans and walked into the Portuguese restaurants, talking loudly. ‘So, what do you drink?’ we asked each other. ‘You want to eat?’”34
The whites’ authority was being challenged, albeit subtly. Something had changed in the balance of power. Many Congolese were very well aware that the colony had proved stronger than the metropolis. Belgium had been crushed; Congo had remained on its feet and achieved military triumphs. Just like in 1914–18, the Force Publique had been more successful than the Belgian national army. Occupied Belgium, via its government in London, had only survived thanks to its colony. When it came to postwar reconstruction, the shattered mother country would lean heavily on its colony as well. The Belgians, in other words, needed Congo more than Congo needed the Belgians.
In fact, the new postwar world order did nothing to prove the Congolese wrong. In Yalta, the victors chalked out the boundaries of a new world. America, as a former colony, had little sympathy for Europe’s colonial adventures. On the basis of a proletarian ideal the Soviet Union was against all forms of subjection. Colonies, once an inexhaustible source of noble daydreams and bombastic ideals, suddenly seemed to belong to another age, to be outdated. To say nothing of suspect. When fifty countries from all over the world gathered in San Francisco in 1945 to draft the United Nations Charter, the term colony was relegated to the wings of history. People spoke of nonautonomous territories. That term had something accusatory—for the countries with colonies—but also something hopeful—for the colonies themselves. Their subjugation would not go on forever. Article 73 left no doubt about that:
Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost, within the system of international peace and security established by the present Charter, the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories, and, to this end . . . to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement.
And then?
Was this the great turnaround? Against the background of such an international climate, one might expect things to suddenly take off. For the veterans to begin shaking the tree of power, for clerks to feel empowered by such international backing, for workers to raise their voices, and for farmers to wave their pitchforks, or perhaps more aptly, their machetes.
But none of that happened.
After the tumultuous strike in Matadi, everything suddenly fell silent. A remarkable stillness descended over the colony. For ten years, from 1946 to 1956, calm reigned in Congo. There were no religious revivals like in the 1920s, no farmer’s uprisings like those in the 1930s, no mutinies like the ones in the 1940s. There were no strikes.
How could that be? Had Belgian colonialism changed its standing overnight? Somehow, yes—at least in people’s minds. In his farewell speech in 1946, governor general Ryckmans said: “The days of colonialism are over,” by which he meant primarily the old system of overt exploitation. “Like integrity in diplomacy, altruism is the best policy in colonization.”35 The colony should at least reap the benefits of its own riches. This was not yet about the road to independence, but about “developmental colonialism.”36
This new spirit was also reflected in the overblown slogans that became popular. After the war, the colonizer could hardly stop talking about Congo as “Belgium’s tenth province.” It was an attempt to replace the condescension of old with a more egalitarian way of dealing with Congo. The colony was no longer some remote outpost, but had become an integral part of the mother country. But it was also a ridiculous notion: how could a gigantic country that a twist of fate had made the colony of a dwarf state become one of its provinces? Congo was a thousand times the size of the provinces of Limburg, Brabant, or Hainaut!
Another attempt at rapprochement was seen in the concept of a “Belgian-Congolese Community.” The idea came from Léon Pétillon, governor general from 1952, and was intended to obliviate the old dominer pour server, which by then sounded all-too paternalistic. Hand in hand, the Belgians and the Congolese wou
ld work together to build a new, modern world. Just as the British had transformed their empire into the Commonwealth, and the French had redefined their overseas territories as the Union Française, Belgium too would from now on strive for equality with this Belgian-Congolese Community.
Some politicians paid explicit lip service to the newfangled discourse about “native welfare.” The Permanent Commission for the Protection of Natives went further than others: “The future of the race and the happiness of our Congolese population groups are of an importance paramount to any other objective,” it said.37 Belgian opinion leaders from across the political spectrum chimed in in agreement. “Colonization must first of all entail a project of civilization on behalf of the peoples,” one Catholic said.38 “Whether we like it or not, our fate in Congo depends on that of the blacks,” a socialist had already realized.39 “Everything for, everything by the natives,” was the way one European Liberal politico summed it up.40 This unanimity may seem surprising, in light of the far-reaching socioeconomic compartmentalization in postwar Belgium. But many people had realized that the Congolese population had suffered greatly.
The Belgians set about assertively drawing up a new chapter in their colonization, optimistically and with greater pride than before. They would pilot the colony into the modern age, edify the population and, at the same time surpass themselves. Beginning in 1949 an ambitious ten-year-plan was to provide the colony with a modern infrastructure in all areas.
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