Chartered Companies and the Development of the Tin Industry in Belgian Africa, 1900-1939

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n 1891 a major step toward consolidating the tenuous control of Leopold II's Congo Free State over the wealth of Katanga was taken with the creation of a chartered company, the Compagnie du Katanga (CK). While the controversies generated by Leopold's predatory exploitation of rubber and ivory along the Congo river basin forced him to relinquish power to the Belgian Government in 1908, the concessions granted to the CK and similar companies remained intact. As a result, the shift away from forest products towards minerals as the economic backbone of the new Belgian Congo' did not change the position of chartered companies as the dominant economic and political force in the life of the colony. The power of the chartered companies based upon mineral exploitation meant that the Belgian Congo followed a distinctive pattern of colonial economic development which generated its own controversies. Excessive concentration of power in the hands of a few companies, weakening of the autonomous power of the state, coercion of labor, and the draining of resources back to the metropolis, have all provided a basis for severe criticism of Belgian colonial rule.2 This paper will address some of these issues by examining the course of the development of a hitherto neglected mineral, tin. Unlike the deposits of all the other major minerals in the Congo, copper, gold, and diamonds, those containing tin-bearing cassiterite3 are found in geographically quite diverse regions throughout the whole of the eastern half of the colony. Not only were these in the domain of different chartered companies, but they included Ruanda, administered under a League of Nations mandate which precluded the granting of such concessions. The history of tin therefore provides an opportunity to undertake a comparative examination of the effect of development policies pursued under rather different regimes. Such comparisons will permit a reconsideration of the question of state-corporate relations, and the level of concentration of economic power. Although tin always remained behind the other major minerals in its contribution to the Congo economy, it came to occupy a much more important position in its international market. Quite insignificant prior to World War I, by World War II the Congo had become the largest producer in Africa.4 Furthermore, the Congo was the only new producer of any significance to emerge during the interwar period. Paradoxically, this did not occur when prices were rising rapidly during the 1920s, but during the depression of the 1930s (see Figure 1). For those trying to regulate the world tin industry, the timing could not have been worse. The Congo became significant just at the point at which the production restrictions imposed by the International Tin Committee (ITC) on the established producers had re-