Pub Date : 2021-06-07DOI: 10.1515/9783110652734-011
This book has taken the Leverville concession as a starting point to study the experience of colonialism in the Kwilu basin, a region which has often been neglected in the historiography of Central Africa. Leverville was positioned on the margins of the great “arteries” through which power, peoples and commodities flowed in Belgian Congo. However, Leverville remained connected to the colony’s circulatory system and its skeletal network of strategic enclaves and corridors by its very own vessel, the Kwilu river. HCB steamboats were practically the only ones that navigated this waterway, building a bridge between the remote tropical utopia of Lord Leverhulme and the wider world. Although relatively isolated and certainly peculiar in its strategies of ruling and exploiting, Leverville can nevertheless be used as a vantage point to (re)consider the deployment of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. The concession was a tropical outpost of Lever Brothers, which was already a prominent player in interwar global capitalism. Furthermore, Leverville can be connected with other early 20 century utopian projects fostered in the global South, where private entrepreneurs attempted to build model, “orderly” societies in what they perceived as “savage” environments. Finally, the daily exercise of governance and capitalist extraction in Leverville epitomises the complex and often conflicted relations of European administrations and private companies in colonial settings. In this book, I employed the overarching concept of colonial impotence in order to articulate Leverville’s historical idiosyncrasies with the discernible patterns of colonial intervention it could help illustrate. Colonial impotence forms a red thread, which runs through this book; it is a metaphor that is reflected in the many facets of the daily experience of colonialism I sought to investigate. Colonial impotence speaks of the gap between the virtuous and the violent guises of the Leverville project; of the refusal of Europeans in the field to conform to the behaviours and attitudes demanded from them; of the agency of indigenous communities which hampered HCB’s project; and of the impossibility for the company to bend the Kwilu’s environment to its designs. Archives and memories collected through this research implicitly spoke of the Leverville concession’s impotence by shedding light on the contradictions, frustrations, angers and fears of those who worked and lived in it. However, such conflicted feelings and emotions not only saturated Leverville; they also played a key role in determining the course of many other colonial endeavours. The micro historical study of this enclave can, therefore and hopefully, contribute to a better understanding of the joint deployment of colonialism and capitalism in the field.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-07DOI: 10.1515/9783110652734-010
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Pub Date : 2021-06-07DOI: 10.1515/9783110652734-007
The present chapter focuses on how the autonomous actions of Congolese communities effectively hindered both HCB and the administration’s ambitions, and therefore played a key part in making their respective agents “impotent” (see introduction and chapter 2). I share three case studies, which shed light on the agency deployed by indigenous HCB employees and their families to both counter and make sense of colonial demands. I first document the unsupervised mobility of fruit cutters and their families in and out of the Leverville concession. I then explore how elders attempted to deceive field public servants during official enquiries. Finally, I delve into the ways villages that provided workers to HCB harboured and propagated a forbidden animist cult. Taken together, these phenomena shed light on how inhabitants of the Kwango district both attempted to evade the grip of the Huileries and the state and endeavoured to bring back a form of order to social dynamics, which were profoundly disrupted by colonial demands. In the spring of 1933, squads of colonial functionaries roamed through the villages of the Kamtsha-Lubue territory. They were on the lookout for any information related to Lukusu, a secretive and rapidly disseminating anti-witchcraft practice. For about twenty years, Lukusu spread along the waterways of the Congo basin before reaching Kamtsha-Lubue, a recruitment pool of the Leverville concession, in late 1932. For Belgian functionaries, Lukusu was difficult to grasp. Its goals, devices and performances seemed to be constantly morphing. Lukusu remained shrouded in mystery; most Congolese were reluctant to disclose any specifics about Lukusu’s inner workings or about the communities which had already adopted it. Less than two years had passed since the brutal repression of the Kwango uprising when Lukusu was first spotted in villages which previously embraced the Tupelepele (see introduction and chapter 2). Public servants feared that Lukusu would also turn into a new millenarian revolt, which would be even more difficult to suppress than the last. In December 1932, the Congo-Kasai Governor had already stated that local communities were “only waiting for a signal, in this case the passage of large herds of wild animals or flocks of birds, to begin a bloody but victorious insurrection.”1 Therefore, for Kamtsha-Lubue’s functionar-
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Pub Date : 2021-06-07DOI: 10.1515/9783110652734-004
“Congo Atrocities
standardised means of palm oil production, engineered in public agronomic stations, did not reap their expected yields once implemented in Leverville. These three case studies show how attempts to make colonial and capitalist endeavours “ legal ” and “ rational ” could overlook local particularities. They illustrate how projects imagined to be enforced in a vacuum of undiscerned “ otherness ” bore the fruits of their own failures.
{"title":"Introduction: “Congo Atrocities!!!”","authors":"“Congo Atrocities","doi":"10.1515/9783110652734-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110652734-004","url":null,"abstract":"standardised means of palm oil production, engineered in public agronomic stations, did not reap their expected yields once implemented in Leverville. These three case studies show how attempts to make colonial and capitalist endeavours “ legal ” and “ rational ” could overlook local particularities. They illustrate how projects imagined to be enforced in a vacuum of undiscerned “ otherness ” bore the fruits of their own failures.","PeriodicalId":132940,"journal":{"name":"Colonial Impotence","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116093629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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