The rubble in the jungle: A fragmented biography of Lukala’s cementscape, DR Congo

Abstract

A close reading of Lukala—a small town that grew around a cement plant during the colonial rule of Belgium over what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo—demonstrates how scrutinizing spatial transformations of the African ‘hinterland’ can be an important analytical tool for studying colonialism. More than colonial cities (often planned along segregationist lines), these hinterland places can be conceptualized as the unplanned outcome of an everyday activity pattern, as landscape. Therefore, their spatial transformations expose the complexity of a colonial society beyond the standardized colonizer-colonized perspective. Confronting fieldwork observations with archival material, the case of Lukala serves as an example: fragments of the contemporary landscape are related to the frictions between different (unexpected) actors of the cement-making society. Although the archival research would probably have highlighted the same frictions, the analysis of these fragments of ‘imperial debris’ ground the historical narratives in the present.