Belgian Congo Research Articles

Colonial education in the Congo - a question of “uncritical” pedagogy until the bitter end?

Our approach is a historical, and not a theoretical or a philosophical one. But such an approach might be of help to understand the complexities and ambiguities of the pedagogical mentalities in the course of the twentieth century. As is usually the case in historical research the groundwork has to precede the formulation of hypotheses, let alone theories about the nature of pedagogical practices. Therefore, since the 1990s, “we” (as a team) have been busy studying the history of education in the former Belgian Congo. Of course since then we have not only closely monitored the theoretical and methodological developments in the field of colonial historiography, but have ourselves also contributed to that history. This article tries to give an overview of some of our analyses, concentrating on the question to what extend the Belgian offensive of colonial (i.e. mainly Catholic) missionary education, which was almost exclusively targeted at “paternalism”, contributed to the development of personal life, individual autonomy and/or emancipation of the natives. From the rear-view mirror of history we are, among other things, zooming in on the crucial 1950s, during which decade thoughts first turned to the education of a (very limited) “elite”. The thesis we are using in this respect is that the “mental space” of colonialism was not of a nature as to have a very great widening of consciousness among the local population as its effect.

Roger Casement in the Belgian Congo: Translation, Travel Writing and Fiction

Roger Casement in the Belgian Congo: Translation, Travel Writing and Fiction

Modernity and the Belgian Congo

This article will explore the intellectual context in which French-Belgian colonial writing developed from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1930s. This period is marked by a gradual shift from evolutionism to cultural relativism. The analysis will first focus on the Tervuren colonial exhibition of 1897 and the progressive emergence of Belgian africanism in the early twentieth century. Secondly, it will account for the ways in which this overall context bore witness to new and somewhat less Eurocentric conditions of possibility. Subsequently, the article will attempt to draw parallels between these more inclusive and seemingly less orientalising anthropological paradigms and the advent, first in France and then in Belgium, of a rejuvenated brand of colonial literature (or indigenous realism) which, for all its openness and eagerness to embrace modernity, did not result in radical rejections of colonialism on the part of its promoters. Finally, two Belgian novels in French – M. L. Delhaise-Arnould’s Amedra (1926) and H. Drum’s Luéji (1932) – will be analysed to appraise whether or not their authors’ objective to reconstitute Congolese indigeneity is a strategy to oppose Belgian modernity against Congolese supposed pre-modernity.

The sins of the fathers: The missionary in some modern English novels about the Congo

This essay offers a discussion of some novels written in English in which the (Belgian) Congo forms the historical background to the fictional world, and that were published after that country became independent. Works by internationally well-known authors like Graham Greene (A Burnt-out Case, 1961) Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible, 1998), Robert Edric (The Book of the Heathen, 2000) and John le Carré (The Mission Song, 2006), fall under the spotlight, though references are also made to other and earlier relevant works. The texts represent different eras in a history of just more than a hundred years and all of these narratives relate, in a direct or implied manner, the nature and impact of a Christian missionary presence. Whilst genre, story line and narrative tone differ considerably in the individual books, the reader is exposed to a remarkable analogous range of subject matter and theme: amongst others the disappointments of the missionary ideal, the corruptive power of authority and the subservient part played by the female devotees. The plight of the Congo is narrated from a postcolonial point of view, though the story lines indicate that this vast country has always been, and still is, at the mercy of colonial exploitation, in which the missionary set-up played a crucial part. The novels also display a remarkable intertextual relationship through recurring motifs, titles, images and names and thus contribute to that body of work forming a tradition of (English language) Congo literature.

‘The Congo must have a presence on Belgian soil.‘ The concept of representation in governmental discourses on the architecture of the Ministry of Colonies in Brussels, 1908–1960

While parliament buildings and governor‘s palaces have been studied as embodiments of governmental or colonial power, the architecture of the often more mundane state administrative office buildings has only received scant attention from architectural historians. In this article, we seek to demonstrate that political discourses concerning such buildings can nonetheless reveal important conceptions of colonial power. Rather than focussing on how such power was accommodated in and shaped by state-built architecture overseas, this article draws attention to the representational aspects of colonial governance in a mother country through an analysis of various projects proposed for the Belgian Ministry of Colonies (1908–1960). In the 1930s, when it was still housed in an eighteenth-century neoclassical building in Brussels, the Ministry of Colonies was included in a visionary but unsuccessful civil service reform, which was aimed at a modernisation of the Belgian state bureaucracy and its office buildings. After the Second World War, when colonialism became increasingly criticised in international fora, successive Belgian Ministers of Colonies pleaded for the construction of a new, grandiose ministerial complex, which was supposed to symbolise efficiency, modernity, and—above all —the permanence of the colonial undertaking. Even though important steps were taken to realise this complex, the project was outrun by the global decolonisation process, of which the independence of the Belgian Congo (1960) was an inevitable outcome.

Continuity and Change in the Luba Christian Movement, Katanga, Belgian Congo, c.1915–50

This article studies the Christian movement that occurred amongst the Luba of Katanga, Belgian Congo, from about 1915 to 1950, paying particular attention to how it was received by different social categories and mediated by local religious enthusiasts. The notion of conversion is examined across two generations with reference to ageing, revival and reprise via a case study of the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM), a Pentecostal faith body. The paper shows how the CEM's literary and pneumatic practices were understood both in terms of ruptures with what had gone before and through establishing continuities with pre-existing culture, particularly the search for social harmony.

Continuity and Change in the Luba Christian Movement, Katanga, Belgian Congo, c.1915–50

This article studies the Christian movement that occurred amongst the Luba of Katanga, Belgian Congo, from about 1915 to 1950, paying particular attention to how it was received by different social categories and mediated by local religious enthusiasts. The notion of conversion is examined across two generations with reference to ageing, revival and reprise via a case study of the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM), a Pentecostal faith body. The paper shows how the CEM's literary and pneumatic practices were understood both in terms of ruptures with what had gone before and through establishing continuities with pre-existing culture, particularly the search for social harmony.

‘Travail et progrès’: Obligatory ‘Educational’ Labour in the Belgian Congo, 1933–60

The authorities of the Belgian Congo imposed a series of compulsory workloads to the local communities under the argument that these tasks contributed to the ‘education' of the native populations, which they called ‘Travaux d'ordre éducatif' (TOE). Such workloads represented the main legal form of forced labour which existed in the Belgian Congo from their creation in 1933 until independence in 1960. Unlike what happened in most colonial empires, these workloads were not abolished after the Second World War. This article shows, through the case study of the province of Equateur, how these workloads were conceived and organized by the Belgian colonial administration. It seeks an answer to the question of why this form of forced labour remained legal in Congo until its independence.

Politique Colonial D’enseignement Et Integration Scolaire Des Femmes Congolaises En Periode Coloniale Au Congo Kinshasa Exemple De Kisangani (Ex. Stanley Ville)

The setting up of a teaching layman system in view of the local (work hand) colonizer of the Congo Belge, constitute the way of entry of Kisangani (former stanley city) women in order to benefit the school formation, This, however, is in spite of the traditional reticence that was observed. As for what concerns the social consideration, this opportunity seems to have promoted the man more to the woman’s detriment. In fact, the documentary analysis and interview carried out with agents charged the archives of the primary and secondary education. Some women who were witness during the colonial time have helped in analysing this work. It comes out again that the minority which were considered to be the women of the city of Kisangani (former stanley city) was not neglected (disregarded). This means that some women were integrated into the school environment in the course of this period. However, in Kisangani, former Stanley city, girls’ schools which existed since 1924 such as Mapendano Secondary school and Grison primary school (domestic school) were created in 1935. Later in 1954, one of them gave attention to the creation of the primary girl’s schools amerced by the Mary missionary in the indigenous cities. However, these schools do not have an official objective to prepare the woman to participate in public life. This is because their objectives were not to prepare colonizer’s charging, but to offer him an auxiliary staff and maneuver (housewife, PP5 and D4 instructress). The bound factors of women experiences are not to be negligent based on their school integration. Nevertheless, this formation allowed auxiliary staff to widen their field of action to the public life involvement. This also is seen as a victory on the traditional brakes.

Medical Orders: Catholic and Protestant Missionary Medicine in the Belgian Congo 1880-1940

The history of religious missions and the provisioning of western medical care in the region that was known as the Congo Free State and later the Belgian Congo reveals the complicated dynamics between competing religious missions vis à vis the Belgian colonial state. This essay highlights divisions between identities and purposes of different religious groups in medical care provisioning, focusing on the divide between the Catholic and Protestant churches. Because most Protestant missions in the Congo were American or British, the medical care provided by the Protestant church was outside of, and sometimes at odds with, the Belgian colonial state until the 1920s. In contrast, the Catholic Church served in an auxiliary role in the colonial state’s medical infrastructure. This was not an ideal situation, leading Catholic leaders to attempt to rework the church’s role in medical provisioning. Ultimately, mission, medicine, and empire were not always comfortable bedfellows. This article is part of the special issue 'Blurring Boundaries: Towards a Medical History of the Twentieth Century'. Medische Orders: katholieke en protestantse missiegeneeskunde in de Belgische Congo 1880-1940De geschiedenis van de religieuze missies en het voorzien in westerse medische gezondheidszorg in de Congo Vrijstaat – later de Belgische Congo – onthult de ingewikkelde dynamiek tussen de concurrerende religieuze missies vis à vis de Belgische koloniale staat. Dit artikel belicht verschillende religieuze groepen die medische zorg verleenden in deze regio en hun verdeeldheid inzake identiteiten en doelen. Hierbij wordt vooral gefocust op de tweedracht tussen de katholieke en protestantse kerk. Omdat de meeste protestantse missies die in de Congo gevestigd waren uit Amerika of Engeland kwamen, werd de medische zorg die zij verstrekten vaak buiten de Belgische koloniale staat om geleverd en leefden staat en protestantse kerk tot in de jaren 1920 soms op gespannen voet met elkaar. Dit staat in sterk contrast tot de katholieke kerk die wat betreft medische infrastructuur juist een ondersteunende rol had in de koloniale staat. Dit was voor de katholieken geen ideale situatie, waardoor de katholieke leiders probeerden om de medische rol van de kerk te veranderen. Het moge duidelijk zijn dat de missies, de geneeskunde en de staat niet altijd even goede bedgenoten waren. Dit artikel maakt deel uit van het themanummer 'Blurring Boundaries: Towards a Medical History of the Twentieth Century'.

A World Laboratory: Framing the Albert National Park

AbstractThe Albert National Park in Belgian Congo was founded in 1925 on the initiative of a small but well-connected transnational network of naturalists, diplomats, and royals. Throughout the par...

Cutting the Flesh: Surgery, Autopsy and Cannibalism in the Belgian Congo.

Within the colonial setting of the Belgian Congo, the process of cutting the body, whether living or dead, lent itself to conflation with cannibalism and other fantastic consumption stories by both Congolese and Belgian observers. In part this was due to the instability of the meaning of the human body and the human corpse in the colonial setting. This essay maps out different views of the cadaver and personhood through medical technologies of opening the body in the Belgian Congo. The attempt to impose a specific reading of the human body on the Congolese populations through anatomy and related Western medical disciplines was unsuccessful. Ultimately, practices such as surgery and autopsy were reinterpreted and reshaped in the colonial context, as were the definitions of social and medical death. By examining the conflicts that arose around medical technologies of cutting human flesh, this essay traces multiple parallel narratives on acceptable use and representation of the human body (Congolese or Belgian) beyond its medical assignation.

Über Waldelefanten

An attempt is made to provide a survey of the African Forest Elephants kept in various zoological gardens between 1882 and the present. Due to the very mixed quality and reliability of sources, and the difficult question which elephants from the northern part of their range may have been hybrids, I do not offer the data as a table. The two main areas of origin were today‘s Gabon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, specifically the elephant training stations at Api and Gangala-na-Bodio or Wando and Aru. In the elephant training centers, four calves were born in 1930, of which three survived. From Gangala-na-Bodio, Forest Elephants, Savannah Elephants and hybrids between both have been exported. There are also exports for which data are available, but not on their final destination.I also discuss the possible existence of Pigmy Elephants, coming to the conclusion that there is no proof. Growth tables and photographs of Forest Elephants in zoological gardens offer too little support for the thesis. Studies of the anatomy and the genome and observations of free-living Forest Elephants suggest that Pigmy Elephants do not exist as a taxonomic unit.In many cases, the health of Forest Elephants kept in zoological gardens was poor. This was largely due to insufficient housing and management, preventing breeding in Europe and in America. This would have been only theoretically possible in a few cases anyway. Most Forest Elephants were kept as single individuals, either alone or together with African Savanna or Asian Elephants. Unlike those kept in the elephant training centers in what was then the Belgian Congo, most Forest Elephants in zoos were short-lived. With the current knowledge of elephant management, a new start in keeping and breeding Forest Elephants could be made outside their native home. They are critically endangered due to loss of habitat and severe poaching.

Uma coleção-documento: estudo da coleção de cópias em gesso de arte centro-africana do Museu Afro-Brasileiro-UFBA- primeiras notícias de pesquisa

This post-doctoral research deals with the study of a collection of twelve copies of important works to act as a reference of the Center African Art, highlighted in the main specialized books and catalogs. Copies belong to the Afro-Brazilian Museum collection of the Federal University of Bahia (MAFRO / UFBA), were donated by the Royal Museum of Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium). To understand the trajectory and the history of this collection of plaster copies, like collection-document, we had to work with institutional and personal stories, and live with lacunars spaces of the various files. This museum plot refers to the background of the creation of the great ethnographic museums, since the trajectory of the copies does not dissociate the trajectory of their original. The original pieces were taken from the former Belgian Congo, with productions of people in the geographic regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the North East of Angola. The colonial-slavery history, with its institutions and characters, is intertwined with parts in different contexts, since the withdrawal of their places of origin, nullifying their functions and uses, processing in ethnographic collections and later in art collections, serving material support for the dissemination of racial and racist ideas of cultural and social inferiority of African people. It is intended, at the end of the study process, produce a written narrative with several voices (book and catalog) and a expographic narrative, which will deal with matters relating to the implications and intertwining of stories involving the original collection and prints, different individuals and institutions that are particularly marked by their identity characteristics. Keywords: art central African, memory, patrimony, museums.

Operation Torch, 8 November 1942: America’s Encounter with a Divided France and Africa and the Middle East in Transformation

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 42, 2, 2017 © The Maghreb Review 2017 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources OPERATION TORCH, 8 NOVEMBER 1942: AMERICA’S ENCOUNTER WITH A DIVIDED FRANCE AND AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN TRANSFORMATION ALLAN CHRISTELOW* On 8 November, 1942, American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria. It was the first step toward an Allied victory in Europe. But it also marked the beginning of the end of the French colonial empire. Studies of Operation Torch by Western scholars have largely focused on how it fit into the conflict between the Allied and the Axis powers.1 Yet it was less than three years later that we see the first event of the conflict leading to Algerian independence – the brutal suppression of Algerians calling for independence following VE Day in May of 1945.2 American President Franklin D. Roosevelt stressed the importance of self-determination, but he was ambivalent about where and how soon this principle should come into effect. One needs to recognise that Operation Torch was not a single, isolated event. It fit into other military campaigns in Africa: the movement of British forces into the Italian colonial territories of Ethiopia and Libya, and the movement of Free French forces from Equatorial Africa through Chad into Libya.3 Also, just three years after Operation Torch, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. The uranium used to make it had come from the Belgian Congo, just to the south of the Free French base in Equatorial Africa – a story fully examined only recently.4 Part of the problem is that scholars focusing on the European conflict and using conventional sources fail to recognise the magnitude of the social and cultural changes that took place among French colonial populations in the early 1940s – in Africa, Indochina, and the West Indies. This includes looking at the psychological impact of new military technology, above all aeroplanes, on these * Idaho State University, Idaho, USA 1 Among such studies are Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: the War in North Africa, 1942– 1943. New York: Picador, 2002; Andrew Buchanan, America’s Grand Strategy in the Mediterranean During World War II. Cambridge University Press, 2004 and Anthony Verrier, Assassination in Algiers: Roosevelt, Churchill, De Gaulle and the Murder of Admiral Darlan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. 2 Studies focusing on how this period helped pave the way for the Algerian revolution include Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, Aux origines de la guerre d’Algérie, 1940–1945: de Mers-El-Kebir aux massacres du Nord Constantinois. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2001; and Mahfoud Kaddache, Histoire du Nationalisme Algérien: Question Nationale et Politique, 1919–1951. Algiers: Société Nationale d’Édition et de Diffusion, 1980. 3 Eric T. Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: the African Resistance. Cambridge University Press, 2014. 4 Susan Williams, Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War II. New York: Public Affairs, 2016. 100 ALLAN CHRISTELOW populations. Another part of the problem is that these scholars tend to view Algeria and Morocco as individual ‘nations’ separate from others, rather than considering their connections to other parts of the Arab world through migration, study, travel, and Arabic language media – which became a lot more important with the development of printed material in Arabic starting in the late 1800s. Also, there is a lack of historical perspective. To understand Operation Torch it can be useful to go back to the early 1900s when the French and the British finally ended their rivalry in Africa, and began building the Entente Cordiale, and when the United States made its first appearance on the scene with President Teddy Roosevelt sending battleships to Tangier, and America helping to promote a solution to Morocco’s problems at the Algeciras Conference in Spain in 1906. Morocco had become, in effect, the door through which America entered North Africa as a mediator. Algeria’s most important ties were with Syria, where there was a large population of Algerian refugees centred on the family of Amir `Abd al-Qadir, leader of the Algerian resistance against the French invasion...

From coercion to compensation: institutional responses to labour scarcity in the Central African Copperbelt

AbstractThere is a tight historical connection between endemic labour scarcity and the rise of coercive labour market institutions in former African colonies. This paper explores how European mining companies in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia secured scarce supplies of African labour, by combining coercive labour recruitment practices with considerable investments in living standards. By reconstructing internationally comparable real wages, we show that copper mine workers lived at barebones subsistence in the 1910s–1920s, but experienced rapid welfare gains from the mid-1920s onwards, to become among the best paid manual labourers in Sub-Saharan Africa from the 1940s onwards. We investigate how labour stabilization programs raised welfare conditions of mining worker families (e.g., medical care, education, housing quality) in the Congo, and why these welfare programs were more hesitantly adopted in Northern Rhodesia. By showing how solutions to labour scarcity varied across spaceandtime, we stress the need for dynamic conceptualizations of colonial institutions, as a counterweight to their oft supposed persistence in the historical economics literature.

The creation of Lubaland: missionary science and Christian literacy in the making of the Luba Katanga in Belgian Congo

This work was supported by the Nuffield Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council [RES-00023-1535].

The Extremities of Racial Meaning

The Extremities of Racial Meaning

The cult of order: in search of underlying patterns of the colonial and neo-colonial “grammar of educationalisation” in the Belgian Congo. Exported school rituals and routines?

An analysis of the history of primary education in Belgium by Depaepe et al. in 2000 has demonstrated how the idea of “order” structured classroom reality in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This “order” is not only visible in the internal organisation of schooling (e.g. division into year classes, a structured timetable, the use of the didactics of teacher-centred instruction), but also in the design of the curriculum. Good behaviour and moral decency were consistently prioritised over “intellectual knowledge”. Very similar paternalising practices – including the cult of order – were transported to the Belgian colony. The implementation of these practices, however, did not go smoothly, because the African context of missionary education was totally different from the Belgian educational context. Precisely as a result of these difficulties, the core characteristics and likewise mistakes of the transported “grammar of educationalisation” become even more apparent. On the basis of a variety of sources, this paper demonstrates that secondary education for boys in the Belgian colony of Congo was founded on the same educational norms and values that characterised nineteenth-century Belgian education. In this respect, order was considered the conditio sine qua non for discipline and self-discipline. But, in contrast to what Nikolas Rose has argued, the Foucaultian paradigm – although attractive and interesting – is not imperative in explaining the educational strategy of order. On the contrary, the development of the history of education as a science could benefit from a theoretical framework coming “from within” the discipline. Until today, the history of educational practice has been explained from a history of education perspective only to a limited extent. By exploring the duality of a didactic grammar of schooling, on the one hand, and an educational semantics of moralisation, on the other hand, this paper contributes to the development of a theoretical framework from within the history of education.

Toward a Second World Third Cinema: anti-colonial internationalism in Tadeusz Jaworski's 80 Days of Lumumba

ABSTRACTDrawing upon a concept first elaborated by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in 1969, in this paper I develop a concept of Second World Third Cinema that draws attention to both Second World solidarity with the decolonizing Third World, and the internal contradictions of the Soviet Union's anti-imperialist politics during the Cold War. I do so by examining the documentary short film, 80 dni Lumumby/80 Days of Lumumba (1962), a collaborative effort between Polish filmmaker Tadeusz Jaworski and the Polish journalists Ryszard Kapuściński and Marian Turski. This newsreel-style film documents the meteoric rise and tragic murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of independent Belgian Congo, at a time when the right to national self-determination within the Socialist Bloc (and of Poland in particular) remained dubious, at best. Although the political goal of a film like 80 Days of Lumumba was to build anti-imperialist consensus in socialist Poland in accordance with the demands of Soviet Union's official foreign policy, it also evinces a self-reflexive anti-colonial content in excess of this political agenda.