This may be Vansina's best book yet although, as the author himself might say, there are so many factors to be carefully evaluated that one should suspend judgement. He has trodden the Kuba ground, talked to the people, and collected data for half a century, giving the book greater intimacy and authority than anything else he has written, including his other books about the Kuba. The book is written for ‘students and a general public’, so it is not loaded with footnotes, but neither does it tell its story ‘refracted through the prisms of multiple abstract concepts’ that would probably have rendered it unreadable. In African historiography we are all Vansina's students, even when we argue with him. Being Colonized is written with the assurance of a master. There is also an edge of passion to the writing, because the Kuba were and are at the centre of a literature of high dudgeon concerning the civilizing mission: its arrogance, hypocrisy and brutality. Vansina pulls no punches in his descriptions of colonial oppression and folly, but he is impatient with broad-brush treatments and self-righteous judgements. The reader is introduced to named people, places and events, placing African experiences at the heart of the tale. Nobody escapes critique – not colonial agents, Catholic and Presbyterian missionaries, Frobenius the collector of artefacts, even the Kuba themselves – although at the same time the author gives credit for decent, prudent and generous acts wherever he finds them.

‘The colonized’, Vansina points out, is a collective noun, encompassing ‘myriad points of view, experiences, voices and agents’. His subject is not even the Kuba but ‘the middle Kuba’, comprising the heartland, one of the kingdoms in Africa most distinguished for its royal pomp and its decorative arts but also central to the story of red rubber, forced labour and Belgian atrocities. At the same time he insists that the Kuba and Congo are broadly representative of other colonial histories. The story does not begin with Leopold's ambition but with Angola in the mid-nineteenth century, when the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade ruined the economy. Traders turned to ivory, which the Kuba had in abundance but which they refused to exchange for European textiles – accepting slaves instead, supplied cheap by African dealers linked with the Arab trade in the east. As the colonial presence intruded and gradually intensified, the story becomes one of forced labour, not only rubber collection but food production to supply the invaders and eventually forest clearance to make way for the Kasai–Katanga railroad. The railroad in turn transformed the economy, created new ‘tribes’, and helped to bring education and other traits of ‘modernity’ to some of the most disrupted populations. A parallel story is that of the internal politics of the kingdom, the Kuba kings and their relations with successive administrators and changing policies, culminating after the Second World War in the development of the kingdom as the outstanding example of indirect rule in Belgian Congo, thanks to the astute manoeuvres of King Mbop Mabinc ma Kyeen.

Vansina devotes a chapter to religious movements, regarded with great suspicion by Belgian authorities, by which the Kuba attempted to restore ‘harmony’ in the midst of their experience of apparently arbitrary but extraordinarily burdensome impositions. Methodologically, the most interesting chapter is the one in which he evaluates strident claims and counter-claims about genocide and population decline. He concludes that the data are so unreliable that one can use them to prove anything and nothing, but at least he has cleared the deck for future research and shown how one should go about it. Other chapters, complemented by indigenous texts, deal with village life, education, conversion and Westernization; ‘the leading actors’, he points out, ‘are not always the same. They vary from chapter to chapter and even within chapters’, and ‘there have been winners and losers among them’. Most Congolese now remember the good times they experienced in the late colonial period, but they do so out of their experience of drastic decline after independence, a decline that indirectly reveals that the colonial system was founded on coercion, justified by racist condescension.

Each chapter is supplied with a short list of supplementary readings amounting to a compact library, whose study can provide a whole education in itself.