Congo Free State (History and governance)

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The pioneering scope of the Congo Reform Movement as first international humanitarian campaign of the 20th century has been rightfully acknowledged by now, yet its commitment to racism and colonialism tends to be trivialized. This paper examines how the American and British reform movement opposed the Congo Free State largely due to the negative implications of the rubber atrocities for the white imperial community, which had invested immense symbolic expectations into the colonization of the Congo as so-called ›Darkest Africa‹. First, the open force of the rubber regime endangered an anticipated white hegemony in Central Africa and beyond, through inciting anti-colonial and anti-white resistance. Secondly, the cruelty of Congo colonialists shattered the philanthropic narrative of the ›civilizing-mission‹ as legitimation for imperial subjugation, as much as the implied claims of a superior white culture. Thirdly, the destruction of the Congolese workforce and the corrosion of the image of the ›white man‹ as heroic civilizing agent jeopardisedd both economic and symbolic wages of whiteness in the imperial societies. In illustrating how the Reform Movement understood Léopold's Congo colony as a menace to white supremacy as such, the racist and colonialist underpinnings of this influential and significant humanitarian discourse are exposed.

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‹.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Bezug auf den Organisationsgrad, den Mobilisierungserfolg und die diskursive Reichweite gilt die Kongo-Reformbewegung (1890-1913) gegen Gewalt und Willkür im Kongo-Freistaat zu Recht als erste große internationale Menschenrechtsbewegung des 20.Jahrhunderts, und wird für ihre zukunftsweisenden Protestmethoden besonders gewürdigt.  Im hier vorliegen-den Vortrag wird hingegen zunächst vertreten, dass die Gefährdung rassistischer Vergesell-schaftung und Vormachtstellung durch die koloniale Gewalt im Kongo zentraler Beweggrund der britischen und amerikanischen Reformbewegung war. Diese rassistische und imperialis-tische Dimension der Kampagne bleibt jedoch bisher unzureichend erforscht und häufig bagatellisiert. Diese Unschärfe wird anschließend auch als Ausdruck der dominierenden methodischen und theoretischen Perspektiven bisheriger Analysen verstanden. Dabei wird sowohl der mangelnde postkoloniale Blickwinkel der historiographischen Untersuchungen der Reformbewegung, als auch die mangelnde historische Fundierung postkolonialer Kritik an Reformliteratur thematisiert. Durch die hier vertretene Perspektive einer historisch-soziologischen Rassismusanalyse hingegen wird es möglich, Gehalt, Struktur Äußerungs-formen und Zentralität von Rassismus in dieser einflussreichen Menschenrechtsbewegung zu erfassen.

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.

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.

Este artigo busca compreender alguns aspectos da comercialização de “fetiches” entre os Bateke e a expedição de Frederick Starr na estação de Leopoldville no ano de 1905, utilizando como fontes dois dos diários de campo redigidos por Starr. Por meio de uma leitura crítica deles, foi possível entender as intenções que se colocaram durante o momento da compra e venda dos “fetiches”. Essas intenções provinham tanto do antropólogo estadunidense quanto dos Bateke, que decidiram por vontade própria vender artefatos de sua cultura de origem. Empregando a perspectiva da história social, foi possível devolver a historicidade às referidas relações comerciais e constatar que, em grande parte delas, os centro-africanos conseguiram tirar vantagens sobre Frederick Starr e sua expedição

Every colonial state in Africa faced the fiscal challenge of ruling vast, inaccessible and thinly populated territories that produced relatively little taxable wealth, without metropolitan grants-in-aid and with limited access to international bond markets. How colonial states dealt with this challenge determined how much resources could be invested in the administration of African colonies and how the colonizer interacted with the colonized. As such, taxation fundamentally shaped colonial rule. Thus far, most scholars have either studied the practice of “native” taxation or the general spending and revenue-raising patterns of colonial administrations. This thesis shines a new light on the fiscal history of colonial Africa – as well as the colonial history of the Congo – by focusing on customs, the second fiscal pillar on which African colonial states were founded.

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.