French Congo Research Articles

Freedom of movement versus freedom of work? Coping with the mobility of indigenous workers in a palm oil concession in French Congo (1910-1940)

ABSTRACT In colonial French Congo, one of the main challenges for labor relations was the need to reconcile contradictory efforts to promote the mobility of native workers while also stabilizing (or immobilizing) the workforce. As the interests of colonial employers and officials overlapped and merged, so did the status of indigenous workers evolve according to how administrative and economic leaders categorized indigenous work. Indigenous workers were therefore progressively categorized as migrant workers, deserters or vagrants. The political instruments which were supposed to ensure the circulation of migrant workers particularly (the laissez-passer, worker logbooks, orders regulating the flow of the workforce within the colony, etc.) were perversely used to constrain worker movement. Drawing on the archives of the French colonial administration and the private archives of the Compagnie Française du Haut-Congo, this article tries to grasp the relation between freedom and (im)mobility in the context of a colonial concession. In that context, colonial leaders sought to control of mobility for purposes relating to the construction of a local labor market, the consolidation of governmental rationality and the stabilization of colonial order.

Resistance and exclusion in matsouanist narratives of decolonization in French Congo

The decolonization of French Equatorial Africa (AEF) has long been viewed as a smooth and peaceful process. However, this master narrative may be challenged be examining the history of decolonization of a small religious minority in Congo-Brazzaville, the Matsouanists. This article will revisit the process of decolonization in Congo as experienced by the Matsouanists. It is a perspective from the margins through which a different reality of decolonization in Congo can be seen—one of violence and exclusion. This piece will argue that Matsouanist representations of decolonization give historical validation to their feelings of victimhood and social exclusion. The research therefore engages with the broader, and urgent, problem of the politics of remembering and forgetting in Congo, and the impact thereof on social division in present-day Congo.

The politics of atrocity: The scandal in the French Congo (1905)

On February 15, 1905, the mass-circulation Petit Parisien reported that one Georges Toquet, a colonial administrator, had been charged with “assassination and violence against several natives” from the French Congo. The following day all the major Parisian papers and several provincial ones led with a much larger story of what the Petit Parisien was already calling France’s “Scandales Coloniaux”. Two colonial administrators “laid their hands on a young black man, whom they bound tightly with rope”. They then inserted “a stick of dynamite… in the African’s anus and blew him up”. The structure and style of these stories closely resembled the typical fait divers, or miscellaneous (crime) story, of the Belle Epoque. Only, unlike most mainland faits divers , the Congo story had potentially serious political consequences. “It was the prelude”, as the Petit Parisien declared, “to an enormous scandal in the colonial world”. Sociologists define scandal as an event that implicates important people and often members of the government. It involves transgressions, or perceived transgressions, against widely accepted moral standards and as such could call the reputations of key individuals into question. Scandals could change the relations of power in a society, or reaffirm existing values and mores. Although the Congo scandal would ultimately serve to reinforce prevailing ideas about the merits of colonialism in France, government officials could not, at the outset, be confident that such would be the case.

Customs in the Two Congos: A connected history of colonial taxation in Africa (1885–1914)

Fiscal history is a booming field of research that shines a new light on colonial state formation, the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and the political economy of colonialism in Africa. The fiscal history of colonial Africa has been interpreted on different levels: local, colonial, imperial and global. This case study on colonial taxation in the Congo Basin emphasizes the importance of an additional historical layer. I argue that trans-colonial and trans-imperial connections are essential to take into account in order to fully understand the fiscal histories of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo, and the French Congo. The two Congos continuously had to adjust their customs policies to fiscal decision-making across the border.

‘Unwanted Scraps’ or ‘An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People’? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo

AbstractIn the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese workers to complete their railway line. The employment of Chinese indentured labor had already become the subject of considerable international criticism. The Chinese government was concerned that the French could not guarantee worker health and safety and denied their application. However, the recruitment went ahead with the help of the government of French Indochina. This article explores the nature of Chinese worker protest during their time in Africa and their struggle against French notions of what constituted appropriate treatment of so-called “coolie” labor.

Tracing the Itineraries of Working Concepts across African History

This essay takes as its starting point a question: do historians of Africa's early and more recent pasts need each other's histories when studying the relationship between work and mobility?1 A response in the negative foregrounds the differences between the economic and political worlds of Africans living before the fifteenth century and the economic and political worlds of merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, colonialism, independence, and neoliberalism.2 This answer suggests that as people moved for the purpose of work from the early modern period, the ties forged (and severed) between people and with objects were dramatically changed from the strategies of earlier communities. We may well ask whether labor is even an applicable concept for periods before interactions between Africans and Europeans.It is easy to agree that there are great differences in the histories of movement and work across the chronological divides that structure African historiography. But we might also imagine these divides as thresholds through which we peer, gaining a rich but necessarily partial view of each other's knowledge about the common problems and questions that animate our scholarship in different ways. When we survey each other's fields to (at the very least) keep abreast of trends that impact our teaching, we recognize change and continuity differently: what is foreign on one side of the threshold is often well-known and well-studied on the other side. Practices that appear novel in the early modern and modern periods might look like an iteration of a durable strategy from the perspective of the medieval and early African pasts, not the least because specialists in these periods tend to write about much longer periods of time.Some of the articles in this issue already straddle such chronological thresholds, looking both forward and back to draw out continuities and changes. Martino, for example, recognizes parallels between the colonial regimes of the plantations of Spanish Fernando Po and earlier regimes of slavery. These similarities have inspired some scholars, Martino explains, to suggest the emergence of neo-slavery in West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, Martino also insists that the legal framework of the contract changed significantly the strategies of touts, recruiters, who would have been responsible for enslavement in an economy based on neo-slavery. The efforts of touts were, Martino argues, a unique, non-violent form of banditry that was entirely dependent on the skill and savoir-faire of trickster-recruiters. In contrast, Keese looks forward in time. He describes the complex history of forced in the French Congo and compares the strategies of the colonial state to those of the post-colonial state. Keese uses Jean-Francois Bayart's argument that political control and control depended on corporeal punishment in independent Africa, seeing in Bayart's thesis great continuity with the colonial period, even while keeping open the possible influence of Soviet regimes on post-colonial practices.3Like Martino and Keese, this essay seeks to peer across chronological thresholds, albeit from the perspective of a student of earlier periods. The insistence that precolonial pasts matter is by no means a new perspective. For well over a decade historians have called for (and demonstrated the significance of) greater attention to histories that predate colonialism in efforts to understand the twentieth century.4 The success of the earliest such calls have, themselves, been called into question, as historians increasingly focus on writing postcolonial histories and as fewer train in the methods of recovering earlier, undocumented pasts.5 But it is possible to perceive in recent scholarship a (perhaps growing) interest in connecting the recent past to much older histories. New work tracks across centuries and sometimes millennia how earlier ideas about race and ethnicity, perceptions of the environment, and changing practices of faith, motherhood, and politics inform the histories of colonialism and even the decades after Independence. …

Genetic diversity and population structure of Plasmodium falciparum in Thailand, a low transmission country

BackgroundThe population structure of the causative agents of human malaria, Plasmodium sp., including the most serious agent Plasmodium falciparum, depends on the local epidemiological and demographic situations, such as the incidence of infected people, the vector transmission intensity and migration of inhabitants (i.e. exchange between sites). Analysing the structure of P. falciparum populations at a large scale, such as continents, or with markers that are subject to non-neutral selection, can lead to a masking and misunderstanding of the effective process of transmission. Thus, knowledge of the genetic structure and organization of P. falciparum populations in a particular area with neutral genetic markers is needed to understand which epidemiological factors should be targeted for disease control. Limited reports are available on the population genetic diversity and structure of P. falciparum in Thailand, and this is of particular concern at the Thai-Myanmar and Thai-Cambodian borders, where there is a reported high resistance to anti-malarial drugs, for example mefloquine, with little understanding of its potential gene flow.MethodsThe diversity and genetic differentiation of P. falciparum populations were analysed using 12 polymorphic apparently neutral microsatellite loci distributed on eight of the 14 different chromosomes. Samples were collected from seven provinces in the western, eastern and southern parts of Thailand.ResultsA strong difference in the nuclear genetic structure was observed between most of the assayed populations. The genetic diversity was comparable to the intermediate level observed in low P. falciparum transmission areas (average HS = 0.65 ± 0.17), where the lowest is observed in South America and the highest in Africa. However, uniquely the Yala province, had only a single multilocus genotype present in all samples, leading to a strong geographic differentiation when compared to the other Thai populations during this study. Comparison of the genetic structure of P. falciparum populations in Thailand with those in the French Guyana, Congo and Cameroon revealed a significant genetic differentiation between all of them, except the two African countries, whilst the genetic variability of P. falciparum amongst countries showed overlapping distributions.ConclusionPlasmodium falciparum shows genetically structured populations across local areas of Thailand. Although Thailand is considered to be a low transmission area, a relatively high level of genetic diversity and no linkage disequilibrium was found in five of the studied areas, the exception being the Yala province (Southern peninsular Thailand), where a clonal population structure was revealed and in Kanchanaburi province (Western Thailand). This finding is particularly relevant in the context of malaria control, because it could help in understanding the special dynamics of parasite populations in areas with different histories of, and exposure to, drug regimens.

Volatile constituents from leaf, inflorescence and root oils of Ocimum americanum L. grown in north‐eastern Brazil

AbstractChemical composition of essential oils obtained by microwave and steam distillations from several parts of Ocimum americanum L. growing in north‐eastern Brazil were determined by GC–MS and retention time analysis. (E)‐Methyl cinnamate was found to be the major constituent in the leaves (82.7–82.7%) and inflorescence (87.1–97.5%), respectively, while eugenol, which was not traceable in these parts, reaches 88.2% in the root essential oil. In view of these data O. americanum from north‐eastern Brazil today represented a novel chemotype and would appear to be akin to the African, Commodore Island and French Congo plants, as well as to the US and Nigerian plants. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Ustilago trichophora . [Descriptions of Fungi and Bacteria

Abstract A description is provided for Ustilago trichophora . Information is included on the disease caused by the organism, its transmission, geographical distribution, and hosts. HOSTS: Echinochloa spp. including E . colonum, E. crus-galli, E. crus-galli var. frumentacea, E. crus-galli var. zelayensis, E. holubii, E. turneriana, E. walteri ; occasional records on Panicum spectabile, Paspalidium geminatum, Sacciolopis striata, Tricholaene teneriffae . DISEASE: Loose smut or node smut of Echinochloa . Field symptoms vary from relatively inconspicuous infection of a few ovaries in an inflorescence, through node and culm infection with normal inflorescence production, to infections that result in production of rosettes of short leafy axillary shoots and no inflorescence or distortion of the entire shoot system. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION: Africa: Egypt, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, 'French Congo'; Asia: Azerbaijan, Burma, China, Republic of Georgia, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Turkestan, Turkey, Uzbeckistan, 'Far East'; Australasia: Australia (NSW, NT, Qld.), New Zealand; Europe: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, Yugoslavia; North America: Canada (Quebec), Mexico, USA (range of E. crus-galli , Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Washington DC, Delaware, Florida, IA, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, MD, Manitoba, Montana, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington State, Wisconsin, Wyoming; 69, 2765); Central America and West Indies: Cuba; South America: Argentina, Venezuela. TRANSMISSION: The dusty spore mass is readily disseminated by wind or rain, enabling infection at various times in the host vegetative cycle. Infection is also sometimes seedborne.

Tilletia ayresii . [Distribution map

Abstract A new distribution map is provided for Tilletia ayresii Berk. Hosts: Panicum maximum, Panicum spp., Setaria spp. Information is given on the geographical distribution in AFRICA, Cameroon, Congo (French Congo), Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali (French Sudan), Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zaire (Belgian Congo), Zambia, Zimbabwe, ASIA, Sri Lanka, CENTRAL AMERICA, Costa Rica, SOUTH AMERICA, Brazil, Colombia.

Kuyu Sculpture at the Powell-Cotton Museum

O0n November 16, 1926, the English naturalist and traveler Major P.H.G. Powell-Cotton' arrived in Leopoldville on the Elizabethville. This heralded the beginning of one of the many expeditions he mounted to the remoter parts of Africa and Asia. On this trip he was in pursuit of, among other things, specimens of gorilla and of the sitatunga and bongo antelopes for the museum he had established at Quex Park near Birchington-on-Sea in east Kent. The expedition through the equatorial rain forests of what was then French Congo ended, in effect, in Yaounde, Cameroun, on October 14, 1927, prior to the Major's departure shortly afterward from Douala to England.

The Concession Policy in the French Congo and the British Reaction, 1898–1906

In 1899 the French Colonial Ministry parcelled out the greater part of the French Congo among various concession companies in imitation of a similar policy adopted earlier by the Congo Free State. British companies which had pioneered the trade found themselves being treated as squatters and interlopers subject to legal prosecutions. They claimed that the French government had infringed the provisions of the Berlin Act and called for the diplomatic support of the Foreign Office. Their call was backed by the British Chambers of Commerce.For long British humanitarians had been decrying the treatment of Africans in the Congo basin whose lands were being expropriated, and they had repeatedly appealed to the British government to ensure that the provisions of the Berlin Act were enforced. Consequently, the British merchants and the humanitarians found common ground for agitation.In the face of such a powerful combination the Foreign Office had to act and protracted Anglo-French negotiations ensued. They were brought to an end in 1906 when the French government, while maintaining the principle of concessions, agreed to compensate the British firms for their losses.

The ICRC Tracing Service in the Congo

As soon as the ICRC had set up a delegation in Leopoldville (July 1960), it was seen that a Tracing Service similar to the Central Agency in Geneva was urgently required. The disturbances had led to an abrupt exodus, and it was impossible to keep check of whole families leaving to seek asylum in the former French Congo, Angola, Northern Rhodesia, Tanganyika or the newly formed Central African Republic. These unexpected events, for which the host countries were not prepared (especially as far as a systematic registration of the refugees was concerned), and the disruption or complete break-down of means of communication, transport and postal services, had resulted in great and in many cases justifiable anxiety on the part of those obliged to leave, and their relatives.

Ancient Glass-Paste Beads from Zanaga (Middle French Congo)

Ancient Glass-Paste Beads from Zanaga (Middle French Congo)

232. A Mask Style from the French Congo

232. A Mask Style from the French Congo

INTRADERMAL LEISHMANIN TEST (MONTENEGRO TEST) IN DIAGNOSIS OF CUTANEOUS LEISHMANIASIS

LEISHMANIASIS is usually divided into two main groups according to the organs primarily involved, namely, visceral and cutaneous leishmaniasis. Visceral leishmaniasis, also known as kala-azar, is caused by a protozoan named Leishmania donovani after its discoverers. Leishmaniasis affecting the skin is again subdivided into the Old World, or cutaneous, leishmaniasis and the American, or mucocutaneous, leishmaniasis. The Old World leishmaniasis has been given a variety of names, the best-known of which are oriental sore, Dehli button, Aleppo boil and Biskra button. It is endemic in parts of Europe (Sicily, Greece, France, and Spain), Asia (Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Persia, Turkestan, India, and China), and Africa (northern part, Abyssinia, and French Congo). The initial lesion is a papule, often resembling an insect bite. Later an elevated buttonlike nodule of dusky-red color forms. Crusting with or without ulceration develops. The end-result is a depressed radiating scar, making it possible to diagnose leishmaniasis decades after the acute stage. Lesions are often single

On the Dioncophyllaceae, a Remarkable New Family of Flowering Plants

Many friends and correspondents have assisted in the work, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge here their kind and generous help. Mr. F. C. Deighton, assisted by his colleagues Messrs. T. S. Jones, A. F. Mackenzie and W. F. Steven, of the Department of Agriculture, Sierra Leone, went to great trouble to obtain additional (including spirit) material of Dioncophyllum peltatum and D. Dawei, and loaned all the material of this genus from the Herbarium of their department at Njala. M. Georges Le Testu, of Caen, formerly of the Service Forestier in the French Congo, and M. Frangois Pellegrin, of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, furnished me with much information regarding D. Tholloni and were instrumental in procuring for me the loan of all the material of this rare species in the Paris Herbarium. Mr. A. C. Hoyle, of the Department of Forestry, Oxford University, kindly loaned the material from the Herbarium in his charge. Dr. J. T. Baldwin, Jr., kept a special look-out for Dioncophyllum during his journeyings in Liberia and sent several collections of D. peltatum from that country, while Mrs. W. J. Harley, of Ganta, Liberia, forwarded an exceptionally good fruiting specimen of the same species from that area. Through the intermediary of Dr. C. R. Metcalfe, M. Jacques Midge forwarded material of D. peltatum from the extreme eastern limit of its range in the western part of the C6te d'Ivoire.

International Conference on Sleeping Sickness

AT a conference convened jointly by the French, Belgian and British Colonial authorities and recently held at Brazzaville, French Congo, to which the Governments of Portuguese territories in Africa, of Southern Rhodesia and the Union of South Africa also sent delegates, arrangements were made for the uniform mapping of the whole of Africa south of the Sahara to show the incidence of trypanosomiasis in man and domestic animals and of the various species of tsetse fly which transmit it. It was also agreed to establish, at Brazzaville and Leopoldville, a joint bureau for the rapid exchange of information on methods of controlling the disease, and to set up in Europe a scientific committee on an international basis to supervise the organisation of research. These conclusions will now be forwarded to the Governments of all the African territories as recommendations for a concerted effort to control the disease and to work towards its gradual elimination.

Mr. G. L. Bates

MR. G. L. BATES, who died on January 31, was born in the State of Illinois in 1863. He was the eldest son of a large family, and inherited his love of natural history from his mother. He was educated at Galesburg and Chicago, and it was his father's wish that he should enter the Church. However, he had a great desire to travel and study Nature, and he persuaded his father to send him to West Africa in 1895. His first years were spent in Gabon and the French Congo, and later he settled in the former German colony of Cameroon.

Les rites secrets des primitifs de l'Oubangui

M. VERGIAT, an experienced observer and skilled recorder with the camera of native life and custom in more than one part of Africa, has taken advantage of the opportunity afforded by a botanical excursion to the French Congo to investigate the esoteric beliefs and rites of the tribes of the region. More fortunate than most Europeans who attempt, usually with indifferent success, to penetrate these arcana, he won the confidence of a native sorcerer, who accom panied him when he was collecting botanical speci mens, and passed on to him much of his knowledge. For this indiscretion, it would seem, the informant paid the penalty with his life. In the meantime, however, the author had not only acquired a detailed knowledge of the religious and spiritual beliefs of the people, but also had secured full particulars of the initiation ceremonies and circumcision rites practised at puberty, as well as of the ceremonial of admission into the principal secret societies. His account of the female ceremony of clitoridectomy, which is illustrated by photographs, is exceptionally full. In recording such matters as these, the author no doubt has good reason for making no explicit statement as to how such valuable detailed information was obtained.