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Belgian Administration in the Congo
... 10 New plans for social engineering were announced. The ambitions of the many newcomers in the Congo's research institutions were at times extraordinarily highbut their blind spots were also large (e.g., Brausch 1961). ...
At the turn of the twentieth century, Belgian sociology and Belgian colonialism in Congo developed into a small political and academic elite that shared the same ideological stances. Colonialism played a more significant role. Colonization provided a new stage for emerging disciplines such as geography and sociology – which played their part in creating a brand new Belgo-African ethnology. Despite being a work in progress, sociology (which mainly involved jurists and lawyers) found a key place in the new institutional colonial sciences network. A colonial consensus was reached between Catholic and Liberal elites during the colonial crises and polemics that were also theoretical battles. Colonial sociology aspired to become the encyclopedic ethnology of the last African Terra incognita, as well as the government’s modern science of the indigenous people. Missionaries, colonial magistrates and administrators carried out field research. It gradually generates a significant output on the scale of the social sciences of the time. But it was more closely linked to the institutions of colonial power than to academic institutions. As colonial sociology partially freed itself from the colonial context during the 1950s, under the banner of professional ethnology, on the one hand, and the sociology of development on the other, it had to contend with a dramatic decolonization process. Quite rightly considered colonial sociology but not sociology of colonization, its success can, however, not be summed up in a single ideology. Colonial sociology never was an effective instrument of domination or tool for liberation; it has never entirely succeeded in influencing the dominant institutions and ideologies. The discipline has a rather uneven and unstable timeline due to the physical and moral distance between the field and the Belgian metropolis.
... At the same time they were confronted with political instability and rapid urban growth in the years following independence. This volatility was especially the case in Congo, where the Belgian colonizer granted independence almost overnight, without training leaders capable of managing the country competently (Brausch, 1961). As a consequence, only some years after the liberating decolonization and despite all claims of self-reliance, Congo and Tanzania applied for foreign aid. ...
After independence in the early 1960s, new nation states in Africa started a long and often ambiguous process of nation-building. This process of nation-building was also literally a process of building as the newly independent states initiated large-scale building projects by which they aspired to represent their power in the urban space, as well as break with the material legacies of the colonial past. Yet, even though the new regimes strived for new norms and forms to express their identity as new and independent Africans states, because of a lack of expertise and funds, they mostly commissioned foreign architects within the framework of development programs, thereby clearly mirroring colonial practices. This article retraces the intricate web of foreign development experts and networks of aid underpinning the ‘architecture of nation-building’ in two post-independence capital cities: Kinshasa (DRCongo) and Dodoma (Tanzania). This comparative analysis brings to the fore the various motives behind the foreign investments in the African nation-building projects in an era dominated by Cold War antagonism, as well as the diverse strategies deployed by African states to turn the competing networks of Cold War solidarity to their own advantage. Considering the vast reliance on development aid, I argue that the ‘architecture of nation-building’ in Kinshasa and Dodoma is not primarily representing national identity, but is foremost an expression of the new ‘partnerships in development’ concluded in the post-independence years, as well as the failure of these partnerships in terms of achieving the initial development goals. Moreover, bearing in mind China’s role in the implementation, I state that while the ‘architecture of nation-building’ in both cities clearly represents the regime of development aid, it does so in a way that profoundly differs from what was originally intended.
... It was duly decided that the Belgian Congo would be granted oicial independence on 30 June 1960. 60 New Contree, No. 62 (November 2011) he irst president of the independent Congo was Joseph Kasa-Vubu and Patrice Lumumba became the prime minister. When the Belgians left the DRC, they did not train Congolese civil servants how to manage the afairs of government. ...
One of the central demands of the feminist movement (which started in the 1880s globally [but first arose in France in 1870]) has been and continues to be women’s exercise of their full and active citizenship, which they consider was denied them as a result of not being recognised as equals at the moment of the definition and construction of citizenship in the eighteenth century. Since then, the women’s movement and feminist movement have denounced this exclusion, calling for equal citizenship for women. At first, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the feminist movement demanded the right to vote along with other civic, civil, and political rights, considered as a first wave of feminism.1 The second wave of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s continued to demand the expansion of women’s citizenship in the case of the African continent as a whole, and called for a redefinition of the private sphere in which women were isolated. In this sphere they were excluded from certain human rights and were thus unable to fully exercise rights expressing an equal citizenship.2 In for example the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as the focus for this discussion, the participation of Congolese women in the decision making of the country by 2011 was supported by the recently promulgated constitution of the DRC in 2006. The constitution promotes equal opportunity for men and women, but the current government has to date not yet achieved what was promised then. This paper is a critical historical reflection of women’s status and political participation in the DRC. It also argues that the DRC government should encourage women to become actively involved in political parties so that they are eventually able to achieve the highest office in the country in order to serve justice to human rights. Furthermore, the government should take the initiative to introduce a quota system for women in the different state structures. The paper also calls upon political parties of the DRC to encourage the participation of women in party politics.
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This is the first of four chapters that constitute the empirical section of the book. It applies the conceptual and theoretical views in Chapter 3 to the historical development of the labour market in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by tracing the country’s past labour market and its contribution to the current shape of the market. Hence, the chapter analyses the implementation of the forced labour regime in the Congo Free State (1885–1908) and the racialised dual labour market in the Belgian Congo (1908–1960) and shows how wars in the country balkanised its post-independence labour market (1960–1965) and how the labour market experienced endless regress during President Mobutu (1965–1997) and President Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s (1997–2001) respective administrations. The chapter further examines factors that conditioned and inhibited attempts by the state to achieve post-war labour market reconstruction between 2003 and 2019 in President Joseph Kabila’s administration (2001–2019).KeywordLabour market institutionsTrade unionsInfluence of the international systemPost-war labour market policy reformsNew Labour Code of the Democratic Republic of the CongoForced labour regimeRacialised dual labour marketPost-war power-sharing political regimeLegal politicisation of labour marketInformal labour marketParallel government
This research focuses on the staged contrast between atomic modernity and colonial backwardness at Expo 58 in Brussels, as a strategic promise of the peaceful nuclear, powered by Congolese uranium. I analyze the management of nuclear power – ranging from household technologies to European (post)colonial infrastructures of uranium resources and nuclear power plants – to reveal architecture as a geopolitical technology. The article argues that the ‘domestication of the atom’ goes hand in hand with the domestication of power, exercised through architecture on various levels, affecting the politics of visibility, knowledge, and imagination. The article examines Expo 58 as a case study, where global uranium agents such as the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), the US Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC), the Belgian Centre d’Études pour les applications de l’Energie Nucléaire (SKC-CEN), and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) met in a setting that constructed both a Western scientific gaze and colonial backwardness.
This article deals with the way urban planning during colonial times affects the mobility of pedestrians today. In Kinshasa, a green belt cuts the oldest part of the city right in two, and this hinders a smooth traffic flow. The belt is what remains of the neutral zone the colonial authorities implemented to separate the European from the African neighborhoods; it consisted of several large walled-off facilities, such as a zoo, a park, and a hospital. In this article, we explore how pedestrians in Kinshasa deal with these obstructions to their mobility. We show that they forge their pedestrian itineraries through walls designed to be impermeable, in particular by shortcutting through a hospital. These alternative itineraries have solidified through time, revealing the effectiveness of their persistent daily walks. As we argue, the pedestrians actively redefine the mobility patterns of their city.
This chapter revisits the different humanitarian interventions since the Berlin Conference of 1885. Throughout the past century, the Congo has continually been the subject of ‘humanitarian’ intervention by various Western powers. First, Leopold II of Belgium intervened to end the slave trade; then the Belgian government intervened to end Leopold’s atrocities; then the UN intervened to promote a certain kind of ‘self-determination’; and finally the UN intervened again to end a civil war. In all of these cases, the fundamental reality behind the interventions was always an economic one. Control of the Congo’s mineral and natural resource wealth has been the primary role of intervention. Because humanitarianism has always been the mask for economic intervention, true humanitarian efforts in the country are continually fruitless. INGOs, governments and local people have vastly different priorities in the provision of humanitarian assistance and the conflicting goals lead to stagnation, corruption and ineffectiveness of intervention.
Der ehemals belgische Kongo liegt geographisch zwischen Britisch Westafrika und Britisch Ostafrika; während der westliche Teil über Leopoldville Zugang zum Atlantik hat und eine ähnliche wirtschaftliche Struktur besitzt wie der vormals französische Kongo, grenzt Katanga als Bergbaukombinat — vor allem Kupfer, Gold, Diamanten und Uran — nach Osten unmittelbar an Nordrhodesien an. Diese Zwischenlage hat die belgische Kolonialpolitik stark beeinflußt. In seiner kolonialen Haltung stand Belgien aber auch »zwischen« Frankreich und Großbritannien: Manche Aspekte seiner Administration und Doktrin sind eher mit dem französischen Bereich, andere mit dem britischen zu vergleichen. Die »Originalität« Belgiens lag ähnlich wie diejenige Hollands darin, sich weder von der Integration noch von einer Entwicklung zum Self-government leiten zu lassen und sich der Hoffnung hinzugeben, mit Hilfe eines konsequenten Paternalismus eine Dekolonisation umgehen zu können und sich dank eines viel gerühmten Empirismus nicht auf eine »unaktuelle« Diskussion über Methoden und Endzielvorstellungen einlassen zu müssen.
They grabbed what they could get just for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a grand scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. -Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Popular memory of the ravages of King Leopold II's rule of the Belgian Congo have made the colonial history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo a byword for colonial extraction. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1902 and inspired by the author's voyage up the Congo River in 1890, portrayed the rapacious plunder of the territory through the eyes of the ivory trader, Kurz. Conrad's account added to the growing international pressure for reform in the territory, which ultimately lead to the Belgian government taking control of the colony in 1908. 1 In 1956, Lord Hailey noted that 'The adverse impressions which were formed in the outside world during the regime of the Congo Free State have proved to be long lived, and there are still those who have in their minds a picture of the Belgian Congo as a country of which the Administration lives on an iniquitous traffic in ivory and rubber.' Since then, horror stories about the exactions of 'red rubber' and ivory during the Free State period have remained common images of Congolese history. 2 This emphasis gives a misleading picture of the colonial fiscal system of the Congo and, in consequence, the institutions inherited by the independent Congolese government in 1960. The infamous rubber and ivory taxes were just one part, albeit an important one, of the Free State's tax system. The Belgian government eliminated the payment of tax in-kind but retained many other features of the fiscal system, including: 1) high levels of spending on administration and policing; 2) a tax system shaped by the limited 1 For more on the pressure for reform which faced Belgium, see Cookey, Britain and the Congo Question, and; Louis and Stengers (eds.), E.D. Morel's History of the Congo Reform Movement. 2 The best known popular work in this field is perhaps Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost.
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In the late nineteenth century, Catholic missionaries among Tabwa southwest of Lake Tanganyika (now Zaire) sought to create a cohesive community of African Christians. The priests prohibited communal practice of Tabwa religion in the vicinity of their churches (established at points of densest population) and appropriated important means of food production like river-fishing grounds, for their own exploitation or to reward those loyal to them. As they enhanced their own economic and political influence, they contributed to Tabwa anomie, rather than community.
Studies of the economic legacy of European colonialism have typically distinguished between European settler colonies, such as New Zealand or the United States, which are stable, democratic and wealthy, and countries in which an indigenous or slave population was made to work in extractive industries, such as Haiti or Bolivia, which remain unstable, undemocratic and poor. However, many settled colonies do not fit this dichotomy, as since 1500 more territories have been peopled by Indian, Chinese, and free African migrants than by Europeans. Such countries exhibit widely varying degrees of economic development and forms of governance, ranging from authoritarian developmental states such as Singapore, to failing states such as Equatorial Guinea, from pluralist democracies such as Israel, to Islamic republics such as the Comoros. Using both population survey data on norms of public behavior and perception-based indices of governance, this paper explains such variation as a function of population flows. Chinese settlement is associated with significantly lower public tolerance of bribery and tax evasion and better bureaucratic quality and rule of law, while both Jewish and Indian settlement are predictive of greater respect for the rules of democratic procedure. We consider the hypothesis that Eurasian migrants bring beneficial norms due to earlier state formation in Eurasian civilizations. Two historical case studies, Trinidad and Taiwan, are examined in depth as illustrations of how settlement flows determine patterns of institutional evolution.
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate some of the contending issues associated with economic underdevelopment in sub-Saharan African states. Specifically, this thesis focuses on the combined effects of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic austerity programs, the increased spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the continuous democratic deficit on the sluggish economic performance within four sub-Saharan African countries Ghana, Kenya, Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The research questions are: are there any unique political, cultural, and economic issues that underscore and determine the path of sub-Saharan African development? What are the potentials for sub-Saharan Africa going beyond its present state of socioeconomic and political underdevelopment? Can sub-Saharan African nation-states truly claim the 21st century? It is hoped that what is learned from examining the situation in these four countries may be generalizeable to other sub-Saharan African states. This thesis has been written with the conviction that sub-Saharan Africa, although it has missed opportunities over the past thirty years, has not completely closed the door on economic development. Although sub-Saharan African conditions have not favored development and there is no simple solution for sub-Saharan Africa's economic and social ills, there are a number of 'common sense' approaches toward sustainable economic and social development. This thesis examines why sub-Saharan Africa's economic crisis has persevered for three decades, and why efforts to establish and uphold more effective economic policies and functioning public institutions have been so much more difficult in sub-Saharan Africa than elsewhere. My account concentrates on political and institutional factors: I explore how the predicament has progressed over the last thirty years, and the repercussions of the long-term nature of this predicament. The focal purpose is to identify and explain the causes which have kept sub-Saharan Africa for several decades mired in an ostensibly permanent crisis. The general theme of the thesis emphasizes that politics and economics are interconnected in sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, the thesis focuses on the changing role of politics and markets in the process of economic development since the 1970s and prospects for the future of this region.
Taking the transformative potential of education as its starting point, this thesis analyses Belgian attempts to use schools policy to strengthen the hegemony of the colonial state in the Congo during the interwar years. Through an empirical treatment of the development of the colonial school system, based largely on archival research, the study pursues two main contentions. The first is that the Belgian colonial authorities played a far more direct role in formulating and implementing education policy than is often believed. The second is that the state authorities’ interest in education was defined both by the economic imperative of colonial exploitation, which compelled them to train skilled workers, and the fear that access to education would fuel potential sedition. Six thematic chapters demonstrate that this paradox of necessity and fear shaped Belgian education policy in the Congo, looking at the reasons behind the fear of potential unrest, and at its ramifications. This thesis argues that these pressures caused the Belgian colonial authorities to try to mould Congolese society using education as a tool, by using specific streams of instruction to inculcate certain groups of Congolese, such as auxiliaries, healthcare workers, and women, with the principles of colonial rule. The thesis also considers how these policies were put into practice, focusing on relations between the colonial authorities and the Catholic and Protestant mission societies, and evaluates their efficacy. Moreover, this thesis attempts to establish, where possible, the reactions of colonized Congolese to European educational provision. Having analysed these issues, this thesis concludes that the colonial education system in the Congo during the interwar years failed to fulfil its main purpose and perpetuate Belgian colonial rule.
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