Congo Free State (History and governance)

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.

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.

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

In my paper I discussedthe development of the construction of individual whiteness amongst female colonials after these women moved to either the Belgian - the Congo Free State - or the German colony - German East Africa - in sub-Saharan Africa. In order to analyse female aspects of whiteness in a colonial setting my database founds on the use of egodocuments by Belgian, German, and Swedish women. First findings show that a notion of European female whiteness was highly increased the longer these women in question remained in the colonies. Their attempts to (re-)enforce their white identities went as far as to keep pet dogs and wear three underskirts despite the hot climate. In one case only was a degree of africanisation visible.

Les études historiques sur la colonisation belge en Afrique centrale demeurent méconnues du grand public voire du monde scientifique.
Cet ouvrage collectif rassemble les travaux de chercheurs qui souhaitent dépasser les images et les messages stéréotypés ou peu nuancés mêlant l’histoire aux enjeux politiques et mémoriels. Leurs contributions diversifient les approches pour appréhender une histoire coloniale qui, loin d’être uniforme, se déploie dans des champs, des modes d’action et des réseaux multiples sur le terrain.
Introduit par deux études insérant ces nouvelles recherches sur l’Afrique belge dans une perspective plus large (Courants et historiographies), l’ouvrage trace un parcours historique qui va de la rencontre de l’Autre (Supports scientifiques et savoirs locaux) à son contrôle dans un processus marqué par la recherche de l’efficacité coloniale (Contextes et situations socio-économiques entre 1940 et 1960). La rencontre de l’Autre engendre une violence (État indépendant du Congo : guerre et droit) et suscite l’émergence d’un contrôle par un appareil judiciaire peinant à imposer l’État de droit sur la raison d’État (Justice coloniale). Enfin, l’ouvrage interroge la manière dont le binôme métropole-colonie se positionne face à de grands défis de l’ordre international : Eurafrique, nationalisme et communisme (Entre concepts et mouvements politiques).

"Les études historiques sur la colonisation belge en Afrique centrale demeurent méconnues du grand public voire du monde scientifique. Cet ouvrage collectif rassemble les travaux de chercheurs qui souhaitent dépasser les images et les messages stéréotypés ou peu nuancés mêlant l’histoire aux enjeux politiques et mémoriels. Leurs contributions diversifient les approches pour appréhender une histoire coloniale qui, loin d’être uniforme, se déploie dans des champs, des modes d’action et des réseaux multiples sur le terrain. Introduit par deux études insérant ces nouvelles recherches sur l’Afrique belge dans une perspective plus large (Courants et historiographies), l’ouvrage trace un parcours historique qui va de la rencontre de l’Autre (Supports scientifiques et savoirs locaux) à son contrôle dans un processus marqué par la recherche de l’efficacité coloniale (Contextes et situations socio-économiques entre 1940 et 1960). La rencontre de l’Autre engendre une violence (État indépendant du Congo : guerre et droit) et suscite l’émergence d’un contrôle par un appareil judiciaire peinant à imposer l’État de droit sur la raison d’État (Justice coloniale). Enfin, l’ouvrage interroge la manière dont le binôme métropole-colonie se positionne face à de grands défis de l’ordre international : Eurafrique, nationalisme et communisme (Entre concepts et mouvements politiques). "

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.