The land tenure system in the Congo, 1885–1960: actors, motivations, and consequences

Abstract

As a result of the 1885 decree, the state held vast tracts of land in its own hands (domanial land), and was at liberty to give hundreds of thousands of hectares of land in concession to a handful of commercial companies and to the missions. This proved a decisive factor in luring these companies and missionary societies to the Congo. But there was another reason why the colonial state was so keen to lay claim to Congolese land. The 1885 Berlin Conference had imposed a free trade regime on the Congo basin, and Leopold II could therefore not rely on customs duties as a source of revenue. Land ownership provided an alternative source of wealth extraction to help fund colonization. The resulting land expropriations on behalf of the colonial state set the Congo Free State apart from many other colonies – including the Netherlands Indies. In the early 1890s, at a time when the Congo Free State was facing financial bankruptcy, the colonial administration went one step further. By virtue of the 1885 decree on land, the state and the concessionary companies may have enjoyed nominal ownership of vast expanses of Congolese land, but these did not generate revenue unless they were effectively exploited. To help kick-start profitable (i.e., low-cost) exploitation it was argued that any natural produce derived from the domanial lands fell exclusively to its lawful owners. Thus, anything the villagers gathered or hunted on vacant lands, as they were wont to do, suddenly belonged no longer to them but to the state or the concession holder. The principle that the colonial state had the exclusive right to the produce of the domanial lands – particularly rubber, ivory, and copal – was enshrined in a number of decrees promulgated in 1891-3. The consequences were devastating. The Congo Free State’s land legislation was directly at the basis of the “red rubber” tragedy that was played out over the 1890s-1900s (Boelaert 1956). The local population was forced, under appalling conditions, to collect everincreasing quantities of wild rubber in the forests of the Congo basin, for the sole benefit of the state and the concessionary companies. The rubber campaign allowed Leopold II to turn the losses he had initially suffered in his colonial enterprise into huge profits, but it also led to an international outcry over the humanitarian tragedy taking place in the Congo Free State.6 Eventually, Leopold II was forced to allow an international commission of inquiry access to the Congo. In its report (1905), this commission singled out the land legislation, and the way in which it had been put into practice, as one of the main causes of the abuses and as a continuing threat to the livelihood and future development of the indigenous communities (EIC, Bulletin Officiel 1905: 152).