Congo Free State (History and governance)

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.

Lucas Catherine poursuit son travail à propos du Congo dit précolonial entamé il y a quelques années, en s’attardant ici sur la figure de Mwenda Msiri/Mushidi Ngelengwa Shitambi (vers 1830 – 1891), l’empereur du Katanga. Historien revendiqué des vergeten zaken (« affaires oubliées »), l’auteur entend remettre le public belge en contact avec le passé colonial, « dont il ne [lui] reste que des bribes et des préjugés » de par son parcours scolaire.

Plunderde een meedogenloze Leopold Congo met geweld leeg om zijn honger naar macht, prestige en geld te stillen? Of is enige nuance aan de orde? Hoe werd Congo in de praktijk bestuurd en geëxploiteerd? Werd er echt zoveel geweld gebruikt en zo ja, waarom? En wat was de impact hiervan op de bevolking? Welke rol speelden Congolezen in dit koloniale systeem? En hoe wist een Belgische koning eigenlijk een koloniale staat uit te bouwen in het midden van Afrika?

Starting out as founder of several financial institutions, Alexandre de Browne de Tiège became one of the main financers of Leopold II's rule in the Congo Free State. This article investigates his rol in the Congo concession societies, as politician and his local meaning to the community of Beveren. Published in Het Land van Beveren LIII (2010), nr. 1.

D'une grande figure héroïque belge, Léopold II est devenu le méchant de l'Histoire, jugé coupable de crimes contre l'humanité. Croqué par la plume, le crayon et fixé sur la pellicule, le Roi est de plus en plus réduit aux traits romanesques et caricaturaux de sa vie comme de son règne.

Ce livre aborde pour la première fois le fonctionnement de l'État indépendant du Congo et le rôle de Léopold II en vue de mieux comprendre les atrocités liées à la récolte du caoutchouc ainsi que les actions du souverain.

Enrichie par de nombreux témoignages inédits, de documents confidentiels et même d'anecdotes, cette étude nuance notre vision du Congo léopoldien, tout en n'évitant pas les questions qui fâchent, telles le nombre de victimes, la responsabilité de Léopold II ou encore son enrichissement personnel.

Recent work by scholars on the early colonial history of the Congo basin has made reference to the subject of customs and contraband. Their work has focused mainly on how smuggling networks operated across the borders of the Congo Free State (CFS). As a result of this perspective on traffickers, the role of Leopold’s administration has tended to be oversimplified. Illicit trade is usually presented as an issue that the Free State attempted, but failed, to curb. This representation of the colonial attitude towards trafficking is at odds with the general literature on contraband, which paints a rather different picture of the relationship between the state and smugglers. Rather than trying to stop trafficking, states usually tolerated contraband and had no knowledge of the majority of trafficking operations. Smuggling was tolerated because monitoring and taxing cross-border trade effectively was not considered to be cost-effective or was thought to be impossible. State rule also had to be negotiated in border regions with local elites who monopolized most local economic resources: a further reason why trafficking was often tolerated. States were unaware of most trafficking because the same officials that were supposed to monitor cross-border trade were usually involved in smuggling themselves.
By focusing on customs and contraband in the M’Bomu basin this article aims to fill in the gaps in current research on smuggling and border control in the CFS. Firstly, I examine to what extent colonial agents were involved in trafficking. Secondly, the article investigates whether Leopold’s administration was aware of smuggling and how far illicit commerce was tolerated. Finally, the article tries to explain why the Free State dealt with contraband as it did. I explore to what extent customs practices in the M’bomu borderland were based on a cost-benefit analysis and how far the attitude towards contraband might be explained by the negotiation of colonial rule with local elites.
This article demonstrates that the Free State and its agents were involved in trafficking in various ways. The CFS established a system of rule and exploitation that encouraged European officials to smuggle for the benefit of the state. Whether Leopold’s men and their African soldiers also trafficked on their own account is less clear. We do have a lot of information about the contraband activities of the sultans who ruled and exploited the majority of the M’Bomu basin in Leopold’s name. The Free State understood little about the smuggling that went on in the M’Bomu basin. Gradually, however, there was growing awareness amongst colonial officials. Nevertheless, tolerance usually prevailed with only a few futile measures taken to curb contraband. The CFS was convinced that the cost of controlling the uncontrollable M’Bomu border would exceed the benefit. Nevertheless, this cost-benefit analysis only partly explains the colonial attitude towards smuggling. This article argues that the Free State and its agents were involved in trafficking and were either unaware of contraband or tolerated illicit commerce because colonial rule in the M’Bomu basin was organized so as to extract as much revenue as possible, as fast as possible, and at the lowest possible cost. The pressure to maximize revenue led the Free State to establish a system of rule and exploitation that encouraged its local agents to extract a surplus by all means possible, including through trafficking. At the same time the M’Bomu region had to be ruled and exploited at the lowest possible cost. The very limited administration was unable to detect, understand or curb trafficking. Moreover, administering the M’Bomu basin at the lowest possible cost forced the Free State to outsource the rule and exploitation of the majority of the borderland to local rulers. These local rulers, however, had large stakes in cross-border trade and continued to smuggle on a wide scale despite their incorporation into the colonial administration. Because colonial rule was negotiated with the local elite, their smuggling had to be tolerated.

Approximately one thousand sailors and maritime experts from the Nordic countries worked for King Leopold II under the Congo Free State and the groundwork leading up to its establishment (1879–1908). This article discusses the various forms of river vessels that the Nordic mariners served on, how the vessels evolved, and what this might reveal about the phases in the colonization of the region. A sequence of waterfalls and rapids along the Cataracts, close to the Atlantic Ocean, represented a deterrent to steamboat navigation on the Upper Congo River and its tributaries. In the early years of colonization steam launches and barcasses, as well as Congolese canoes and steel barges, were used for the exploration and mapping of the territory. They were followed by relatively small flat-bottomed, shallow-draft steam-driven sternwheelers in order to estab- lish a rudimentary system of administration and occupation. In 1898 a railway circumvented the Cataracts and arrived at Léopoldville (Kinshasa), making it possible to launch larger sternwheelers on a river system that could reach 60% of the colony. The larger vessels would transport troops, ammunition, supplies and trade goods to a growing network of stations, from where the Congo Free State could reap the rich resources and make a profit. The fleet of river vessels was a necessary tool for building a civil and military infrastructure, and for controlling and dominating the Congolese, who repeatedly rebelled against the intruders. The brutal exploitation of people and resources in the Congo Free State has been described as one of the darkest chapters in colonial history.

The British and American Congo Reform Movement (ca. 1890-1913) has been praised extensively for its ›heroic‹ confrontation of colonial atrocities in the Congo Free State. Its commitment to white supremacy and colonial domination, however, continues to be overlooked, denied, or trivialised. This historical-sociological study argues that racism was the ideological cornerstone and formed the main agenda of this first major human rights campaign of the 20th century. Through a thorough analysis of contemporary sources, Felix Lösing unmasks the colonial and racist formation of the modern human rights discourse and investigates the ›historical work‹ of racism at a crossroads between imperial power and ›white crisis‹.

This article analyses the annual budgets of the Congo Free State to examine whether the broader fiscal patterns observed for British, French and Portuguese Africa can be found in Leopold’s colony; often considered a fiscal exception. The fiscal history of the Free State was unique. A history of the income composition of the state however reveals that Leopold’s revenue-raising strategies showed a lot of similarity with colonial taxation in British, French and Portuguese Africa. Leopold’s administration faced the fiscal challenge of ruling a vast, thinly populated, inaccessible colony that produced little taxable surplus, with little metropolitan support and limited access to international lending. To deal with this challenge, the Free State developed a minimalistic fiscal system that was based on the taxation of international trade and the African subject. Only during a commodity boom did this system generate sufficient income to cover colonial expenditure. The study of the not so exceptional case of the Free State hence supports the claim that the colonial scope to tax African colonies was fundamentally determined by local economic conditions and power relations, global demand for commodities and Metropolitan pressure to be financially self-sufficient.

Dans les contextes des pays du sud, quels sont les conditions d'accès, les compétences et les usages des
étudiants au niveau secondaire? Cet article présente les résultats d’une enquête effectuée auprès des
étudiants africains et analyse les conditions d’accès, des usages des technologies de l’information et de
la communication (TIC) et de leur diffusion en milieu éducatif au Burkina-Faso et en République
Démocratique du Congo1
. La démarche croise, la territorialité du phénomène et le jeu des acteurs
concernés en milieu éducatif, spécifiquement dans les écoles secondaires. L'article est structuré comme
suit : la première partie présente le cadre théorique ainsi que la méthodologie. La seconde partie de
l’article décrypte les résultats à l’issu de l’enquête effectuée auprès de 1 854 répondants et s’achève
par une discussion. Cette partie traite des coûts d’accès consacrés par les étudiants, les compétences, la
durée moyenne de l’usage d’Internet et dresse un portrait des pratiques en milieu scolaire dans le
contexte des pays subsahariens d'Afrique francophone.
Mots clés : TIC, éducation secondaire, Afrique francophone, Internet

Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing (US)
Translated from the French by Roland Glasser
Published: 2015
ISBN-10: 1941920047
ISBN-13: 978-1941920046
pp 224; Price: $12.37
Reviewed by: Olatoun Gabi-Williams

http://bordersliteratureonline.net/books/Tram-83

Biography (in French) of Félix Fuchs, Governor General of the Congo Free State and Belgian Congo.
Le présent ouvrage ouvrage, conçu comme une biographie, analyse essentiellement la carrière coloniale de Félix Fuchs, qui couvre environ les années 1888 à 1915. Au niveau même de celle-ci, l'accent est mis sur les moments où Fuchs exerce les fonctions de Gouverneur Général. A ce propos, soulignons dès l'abord que Fuchs, s'il ne porte le titre officiel de Gouverneur Général du Congo belge que du 20 mai 1912 au 31 décembre 1915, a néanmoins déjà exercé cette fonction de manière intérimaire dès 1891, c'est-à-dire sous l'Etat Indépendant du Congo.

This article deals with a key constraint on the ability of African colonial states to tax international trade. In the Congo Free State and Belgian Congo, tariff policies were always the result of a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, the colonial state depended on customs receipts to make ends meet. On the other hand, policymakers feared the counterproductive effect of tariff policies: excessive taxation would cause customs receipts to decline because it slowed down commerce and encouraged traders to smuggle or to relocate. Sometimes, this fear held back policymakers from increasing the tariff burden – even when the colony was in dire financial straits. On other occasions, budgetary necessity forced policymakers to implement customs measures which they believed would cripple the colonial economy and jeopardized future fiscal revenue.

Western imaginings and colonially scripted images of the Congo as barbaric, savage and the Heart of Darkness have dominated understandings of events in the DRC since its colonial inception (Dunn 2003). The contemporary global focus on sexual violence in the armed conflict of eastern DRC has only reinforced such framings. While sexual violence has always captured the social imagination before the Congo, the political frame through which it is articulated has made sexual violence " the major horrendous crime of our time " and " an exceptional form of brutality " 1. Drawing on largely unused archival material, obtained at the Royal Museum of Central Africa and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgium, this paper sheds light on how sexual violence prefigured our own times in King Leopold II's Congo Free State (1885 – 1908). The vivid memories and testimonies of the grotesque and spectacular violence inflicted upon the Congolese are similar to the sexual atrocities that have taken place in the current conflict in eastern DRC. These memories are in Mbembe's (2007) words " traces and fragments " of colonial violence and excessive abuses. Yet, today's international security discourses occur in the midst of an almost complete absence of such history and its memories. Ultimately it is argued that the memories and testimonies as traces from a violent past, reshape historical understandings of colonial violence and open new avenues for rethinking past abuses and their endurance into the present.

The collapse of the state and its erosion from below by warlords and militias, informal markets, networks of solidarity based on ethnicity and alternative forms of social organisation on the one hand and a greater awareness of the role played by international or global actors and processes on the other has transformed the study of Central African politics and society as sub-and supranational perspectives replaced the study of state policy. This collapse of state-centered research has done much to enrich our understanding of the area’s economic, social, and political difficulties and dynamics, but has now reached the point where the call to bring the state back in, both as a reality and as a subject of enquiry, is again gaining strength.
The historiography of the Congo’s colonial political economy has been largely unaffected by these developments and has continued to be dominated by state-centered narratives. In this paper, I will argue that historians of colonialism stand much to gain from also integrating local and international perspectives in their work. To do so fruitfully paradoxally requires a closer engagement with the state, thinking through its organisation, complexities, conflicts and shortcomings to question its position within a wider complex of causality.
By way of two case-studies, during which some of the major structural characteristics and social repercussions of natural resource exploitation in the early colonial period will be sketched, I will illustrate possible ways in which thinking with and beyond the state offers a fresh perspective on the social transformations which accompanied the Congo’s incorporation into the international economy. The first case-study discusses the violence of the Etat Indépendant du Congo (EIC). While traditional explanations, from contemporary critics as well as historians, have taken the state’s legal system as their starting point, I will highlight how the structural and financial weakness of the EIC, a ‘failed state’ in its own right, engendered a warlord economy displaying the familiar characteristics of local militias parasitizing on their environment, displaying remarkable efficiency in extracting the country’s natural resources while causing terror which was systemic without being centrally directed. The second case-study looks at the early development of a labour policy for the copper mining industry in Katanga. Taking the debate on the possible importation of Chinese Labour from roughly 1906 to 1914 as a starting point, I demonstrate how company and state policies were firmly imbedded in a series of local, regional and international contexts.

Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies offers a new comprehension of colonial history from below by taking remnants of individual agencies from a whiteness studies perspective. It highlights the experiences and perceptions of colonisers and how they portrayed and re-interpreted their identities in Africa. The transcolonial approach is based on egodocuments from Belgian, German and Swedish men and women who migrated to Central Africa for reasons like a love for adventure, social betterment, new gender roles, or the conviction that colonising was their patriotic duty.

L'impitoyable Léopold pilla-t-il le Congo avec violence pour assouvir sa soif de pouvoir, de prestige et d’argent ? Ou bien faut-il nuancer ce tableau ? Comment le Congo a-t-il été administré et exploité en pratique ? La violence était-elle vraiment répandue à un tel point, et, si oui, pourquoi ? Et quel en a été l’impact sur la population ? Quel rôle ont joué les Congolais dans ce système colonial ? Et comment un roi belge a-t-il su bâtir un État colonial au cœur de l’Afrique ?

The Congo Free State is generally considered as the personal property of King Leopold II, over which he ruled as absolute monarch. Similarly blame was put on those responsible for mass violence triggered by the harvesting and processing of rubber. If these atrocities have been condemned from the beginning of the twentieth century in international campaigns, none have described these as a genocide. This fact lead to two lines of research. The first focuses on the institutional mechanisms within the CFS, which is studied within this work as a colonial state. This approach gives a better understanding of the scope of Leopold’s autocracy and its limits. It definitely questions the image of the pyramid on which the King reigns as an individual. The second line of research goes in depth into the atrocities linked to the ‘red rubber’ scandal. The facts draw out the paradox that exists within Leopold’s reign: that between profit-making and the maintaining of the philanthropic reputation, essential leitmotiv of Leopold’s Congo. Not ruling out the question of the number of victims, this perspective helps us discern the motivations behind such acts and the responsibility of its authors, including that of the king himself. This analysis of Leopold’s reign promotes, in the end, a better understanding of the colonial politics of Leopold II

Colonization fundamentally reconfigured African space and hence fundamentally restructured the lives of Africans. In order to control local populations, resources, and markets, European colonizers drew borders, established centers of power and implemented administrative hierarchies that linked power to territory. The colonizers reconnected the continent through the development of transport and communication infrastructure and tried to direct the mobility of people, goods, and ideas. However, Europeans did not simply impose a new spatial order in Africa. Colonial administrations lacked the capacity to evenly implement their spatial strategies throughout their territories. Moreover, colonial spatial policies and practices were incoherent. “The colonial establishment” consisted of a diverse set of public and private institutions that operated on different levels. These different colonial institutions and administrative levels did not necessarily agree on spatial policies and practices. More importantly, colonial spatial strategies were negotiated with the different segments of African societies that contested, appropriated, and transformed space as conceived and shaped by Europeans. In addition, alternative spatial formations and narratives continued to exist or arose alongside the dominant colonial order.
This article studies the early colonial history of the western part of the Central African Mbomu Basin through a spatial lens. It examines how this small region was subsequently incorporated into a series of African and European trade networks and empires and hence became part of different overlapping worlds. In particular, it examines the interaction between the local elite—more specifically the Djabir-clan—and the merchants and agents of empire that sought to control the people and resources of the western Mbomu region.
Each of the three sections of this article juxtaposes the power relations and interests of the Djabir-clan with strategies and connections of outside agents on different scales. In the first section, I demonstrate how outside conquerors and merchants provoked a reconfiguration of the western Mbomu region long before the agents of the Congo Free State and France entered the stage. In the 1870s and 1880s Sudanese merchants established a network of fortified camps from which they governed Mbomu indirectly through divide and rule strategies, substantially shaking up local power relations and established connections between the region and North Africa. In the late 1880s Swahili-Arab merchants briefly established a similar network, this time linking Mbomu to the East African coast. Despite some ups and downs, Djabir—an initially insignificant Abandia noble—managed to lay the foundation of his power and wealth as agent of these trade networks.
The second section highlights the key role of local elites in the formation of a colonial territorial order. As usual in colonial settings, the administration of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo relied on local elites to rule and exploit Mbomu. I substantiate this truism by focusing on the agency of the Djabir-clan, which managed to instrumentalize, challenge, or adapt the colonial strategies in order to expand and consolidate their own realm. Particular attention goes to the interplay of colonial attempts at territorial control and organization on the one hand, and the actions and strategies of Djabir on the other hand.
The third section shows how the Mbomu region was gradually incorporated into multiple worlds, as Figure 1 demonstrates. The Djabir-clan gained much of its power and wealth through its ability to skillfully navigate the different spaces that overlapped in the Mbomu Basin. The Belgian empire was but one of these worlds.
Reflecting this three-tier argument, this article contributes to the spatial turn in African history in three ways. First, it demonstrates that it is impossible to understand how the colonial spatial order was established without taking the spatial legacies of pre-colonial connections and interactions into account. In this regard, the Mbomu region resembles other parts of Africa such as Hereroland, where Afrikaner colonization significantly altered how the Herero perceived and organized control over their territory long before Germany laid claim to the region. Second, this article, drawing inspiration from case studies on Southern Gabon, Ovamboland and the Lake Kivu Region, applies an actor-oriented approach to the formation of a colonial territorial order, consistently interpreting colonial policies and the actions of local elites in relation to each other. Finally, in order to understand these actions, the local scale of colonial interaction in the Mbomu region is interpreted in relation to other scales of analysis or “worlds,” between which Djabir and his clan skillfully navigated.

The "Domaine de la Couronne" is known in the history of the Congo Free State as the symbol of Leopold II's lucre and the violence associated with it.
However, the foundation and purpose of this Ancien Régime-type institution is more complex than the current literature suggests.
On the one hand, this study seeks to understand the process of the development of the "Domaine de la Couronne". On the other hand, this insitution provides a better understanding of the management of mass violence by the government of Leopold II.

Omdat de Koning aangevallen wordt voor de gruwelijkheden in Kongo, is het opmerkelijk de snelle afkeer vast te stellen door een groot deel van de Belgische publieke opinie gedurende het laatste decennium. Deze eenvoudige vaststelling nodigt uit om twee elementen te bestuderen. Ten eerste dient de oorsprong van de polemiek betreffende het Leopoldaanse Kongo beschouwd te worden en de invloed ervan te vatten in een Belgisch kader. Vervolgens moeten de daden gekwalificeerd als Congolese gruwelijkheden en de standpunten van de Koning in deze context begrepen worden. Deze dubbele benadering laat tevens toe om de verschillende gemeenschappelijke vergissingen te benadrukken die zich verspreid hebben tot heden.

Even though the (official) legacy of King Leopold II’s reign remains controversial in Belgium, the violent and deadly history of the Congo Free State (CFS) is well established and documented. We are equally well informed about the influx of massive profits from colony to metropole. The distorted memory of Leopold's legacy in official discourse has more to do with a complex configuration of "durable" colonial myths about the CFS than with an apparent lack of specialist historical production. However, as Pierre-Luc Plasman points out in his new book, very little is known about the genesis, development, operation, and evolution of the state that Leopold created. Plasman's book proposes a twofold study: “une étude systématique sur la structure politique et les institutions du Congo Léopoldien”; and an analysis of the extreme mass violence and murders for which the colony would become internationally synonymous. The result is primarily a political and institutional history of the CFS, with a strong legalistic and administrative focus. While the author repeatedly reminds the reader that Leopold’s private colony originated in, and could only be maintained through violence, and gives numerous examples of how local populations were systematically subjected to colonial terror, this is not a history of Congolese peoples. Their perspectives remain conspicuously absent. Plasman does succeed in lucidly unraveling the complex Leopoldian colonial apparatus. Averse to older sensationalist studies of a caricatural absolute monarch that departed from axioms about a hegemonic state, he shows instead how the Leopoldian Congo was a disjointed and precarious structure, riddled with paradoxes.

Version française de : « Stanley and Conrad, founders of Alternative Discourses about Central Africa », in Remembering Africa. Edited by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi. Portsmouth (NH) : Heinemann, Studies in African Literature, 2002, 339 p. ; pp. 56-73.

The Congo Free State is generally considered as the personal property of King Leopold II, over which he ruled as absolute monarch. Similarly blame was put on those responsible for mass violence triggered by the harvesting and processing of rubber. If these atrocities have been condemned from the beginning of the twentieth century in international campaigns, none have described these as a genocide. This fact lead to two lines of research. The first focuses on the institutional mechanisms within the CFS, which is studied within this work as a colonial state. This approach gives a better understanding of the scope of Leopold’s autocracy and its limits. It definitely questions the image of the pyramid on which the King reigns as an individual. The second line of research goes in depth into the atrocities linked to the ‘red rubber’ scandal. The facts draw out the paradox that exists within Leopold’s reign: that between profit-making and the maintaining of the philanthropic reputation, es...

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) are two entirely different stories written almost exactly 100 years apart, in a global environment that had monumentally changed from days of telegraph lines and horse-drawn carriages to high speed internet and gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles. Despite their aforementioned differences Conrad’s and Krog’s literary works are very much alike as they depict white colonial powers oppressing native black populations for financial gain while brutalizing and terrorizing the indigenous black peoples in hopes of instilling fear and maintaining unlimited control.

In history it is a fait accompli that the more things change the more they stay the same and that history will usually repeat itself somehow and somewhere. For the purpose of this paper we will examine how King Leopold II’s 19th century white colonial power in Central Africa’s
Congo Free State and apartheid’s 20th century white colonial power in South Africa under its first Prime Minister Dr. D.F. Malan featured similar antagonists, protagonists and literary dualities.

The Congo Free State regime of King Leopold II of Belgium was undoubtfully one of the worst crimes in human history. An African Holocaust was committed, in which 10 million innocent lives were destroyed, under the false pretext of humanitarianism. There were, however, some brave people that helped expose this horror to the world. Among them were several famous writers. This presentation reminds of that forgotten history and introduces six different genre of literature by famous quthors used to tell the world about the tragedy of Leopold's rule in the Congo.