Introduction
Historians have long known that free labor was rarely practiced in the Congo River Basin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 1 This article extends the above argument by suggesting that state personnel continued to enforce unfree labor practices in the Congo until the late twentieth century. Scholars such as Crawford Young, Thomas Turner and Thomas Callaghy observed the continuation of state-led violence to enforce labor obligations among the various administrations that occupied the Congo during the modern period.Footnote 2 However, in conjunction with focusing on the continuities involved in the evolution of the Congolese political economy, this article also examines the changes in the different discourses that these states used to legitimize unfree labor. While such justifications were occasionally targeted at Congolese people, they were usually directed to external audiences due to the extraverted or outward-looking nature of the Congolese economy.Footnote 3
This article borrows from Michel Foucault's genealogical approach to interrogate the discourses that Congolese states deployed in relation to unfree labor.Footnote 4 As Margaret McLaren explains, the genealogical method focuses on the discursive formations that “govern what can be said” during a particular historical period.Footnote 5 Yet, unlike Foucault's earlier archaeological method, it focuses on “discontinuities and ruptures, rather than continuities.”Footnote 6 Correspondingly, this article asks what kinds of conceptual language was used to facilitate the actions of exploitative states, be they colonial or postcolonial, and, crucially, at what times. It argues that state justifications for the continuation of forced labor evolved from abolitionism into paternalism during the colonial period and, finally, to developmentalism in the postcolonial era. Unfree labor was masked, first, by colonial authors who ignored the forced aspects of Belgian labor policies in their publications and repeatedly emphasized instead how local people would gain from them. After independence, the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID's) “bottom up” developmentalist rhetoric obscured the Zaïrian administration's coercive labor practices to the outside world. During the Cold War, the United States viewed Zaïre as a major ally, given its uranium stocks, and, in turn, the Mobutist administration was dependent on USAID to shore up its patchy presence in the hinterland. Like abolitionism and even paternalism before it, though, developmentalism was also used by Africans in ways the state did not anticipate in order to mediate its labor demands, not least to claim rights and even freedom on occasion.
Given the ambiguities and contests involved in labor relations in the Congo, this article understands the concepts of free and unfree labor not as typical, lived realities, but instead as two distinct poles at opposite ends of a broad spectrum that encompassed working conditions there. Put differently, completely free labor was rarely, if ever, practiced just as there were innumerable gradations of forced labor in the modern Congo. “Unfree” and “free” labor are therefore ideal-type categories that on their own do not capture the messy historical realities in which Africans lived and worked. Unfree labor, for example, would imply constant coercion and violence in order to compel peoples to work. Likewise, the concept of free labor is also a normative category that indexes very specific relations of production and labor conditions.Footnote 7 It suggests that “waged workers were never forced to perform their labor agreements.”Footnote 8 Free labor was actually an ideological conceit as well as a practical response to a specific set of social conditions that arose in early modern Europe.Footnote 9 A significant rise in the region's population, particularly evinced in industrializing Britain, meant that employers could more readily entertain the idea of contractual labor. An army of rurally displaced and impoverished workers were willing to toil for minimal wages thereby allowing bosses to avoid paying for the coercive instruments that featured so prominently in slave societies, such as Brazil, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote 10 The practical considerations also conjoined with philosophical ones in the northwestern European mind. Jean Bodin, the French jurist and political philosopher, prefigured many abolitionist arguments by claiming that slavery was unnatural and unprofitable.Footnote 11 Although neither completely free nor forced labor was practiced consistently in the Congo, it is striking how the threat of violence against rural workers never left the Congo—even in the postcolonial period.
To reconstruct the political economy of the former Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over the course of a century, this article relies chiefly on colonial reports, development papers, and, wherever possible, oral testimonies. The sources authored by Americans and Europeans naturally bring their own very particular agendas to bear on what their authors saw, not least the early colonial obsession with the construction of chieftainship, to the detriment of other themes that might have been relevant to this investigation. Yet external sources were attentive to events and as such were able to illuminate significant historical patterns even if their insights into the domestic sphere, for example, were very limited.Footnote 12 Correspondingly, the written record retains predominance in this article given that the recent tumultuous events that have shaken the DRC have meant that very few who remember the colonial period or the Mobutist era are still alive. Yet some who can remember these periods have survived, and their testimonies have been used wherever possible.
Rather than concentrating on the Congo River Basin as a whole, an area purportedly the size of Western Europe, this paper focusses specifically on the southeastern former province of Katanga. Katanga is an instructive and in some ways surprising example of the continuation of unfree labor practices because it is better known for being a mining economy rather than an agricultural one and so it has been associated predominately with free, waged labor.Footnote 13 But the longstanding scholarly focus on southern Katanga wherein the mines were located, and which was actually far from being an oasis of free labor itself, has obscured the unfree labor performed by those who fed the miners who lived in the northern parts of the province.Footnote 14 In this article, northern Katanga will be defined as encompassing the territories of Kongolo, Nyunzu, Kabalo, and Manono, which together now comprise the province of Tanganyika.Footnote 15
The argument that paternalism and later developmentalism took over from abolitionism as the main languages through which unfree labor was downplayed—while at some points also used by Africans to further their freedom—is structured chronologically. The first section argues that a complex array of discourses undergirded unfree labor practices in pre- and protocolonial Tanganyika. As the colonial conquests began, soldiers who wanted to make a profit from their travails used abolitionism as a cover for the acquisition of unfree laborers from slavers in the region. Yet some former slaves were actually freed by abolitionist missionaries, such as the Holy Ghost Fathers (Spiritans) and the White Fathers, who wanted to build their congregations by ransoming them from their old masters. During the Depression, the language of abolitionism fell away from the public colonial record as forced labor was increasingly justified through paternalistic discourses. While there was somewhat less unpaid labor after independence, the Zaïrian government still coerced farmers into harvesting produce for little or no remuneration, and, secondly, it forced rural people to build roads even in the harvest season. The true extent of coercion used by the Zaïrian government was hidden from those outside Tanganyika due to the involvement of US-sponsored development initiatives in the 1970s and early 1980s. USAID preferred “bottom up” development, which did not involve unfree labor, yet it had to work with a Zaïrian government that strongly disagreed with giving farmers autonomy over their work. Farmers in northern Katanga responded to coercive forms of labor both in the late colonial and postcolonial periods by emigrating to cities in a pattern that continued throughout the Cold War and even beyond.
Discourses of Unfree Labor and their Purveyors in Precolonial and Early Colonial Tanganyika
Before the advent of Belgian rule, unfree labor was tied to notions of civilization, respectability, and nobility. Owning slaves was a sign of conspicuous wealth and status that in turn was justified by way of a bewildering array of origin myths and king lists. The most important purveyors of unfree labor in northern Katanga were, initially, the Luba of Katanga, hereafter referred to as the “Luba.” The exact origins of the Luba are unknown, but the culture most likely dates from the fifteenth century.Footnote 16 As Sean Stilwell notes, slavery was absolutely pivotal to the enlargement and profitability of a significant series of Luba estates in the Upemba Plateau during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 17 Slaves were used, first, to cultivate fields and, secondly, as hostages taken for the purposes of extortion. As Thomas Reefe has suggested, there was nothing benign about slavery in the Luba polity.Footnote 18 Slaves were typically branded and were unable to integrate fully into the lineage of the Luba sacred king, or mulopwe (Balopwe in the plural form), or whichever aristocrat had abducted and/or bought them.Footnote 19 During the seventeenth century, another series of immigrants, called the Báhêmbá, from what are now the Kivu provinces, came to northern Katanga. The Báhêmbá aristocracy adopted a number of Luba traditions to demonstrate their status with one of the most important of these being slavery.Footnote 20
New means of justifying unfree labor were introduced in the nineteenth century even as the idea of using ancestral ties, origin myths, and wealth to legitimize the holding of slaves remained intact in certain pockets of Tanganyika. Islam in particular became a significant rhetorical justification for the procurement and use of unfree labor. The most important social aggregate using Islam in this way was a group of slaver-merchants from the East African coast known as the Swahili. The Swahili intensified preexisting patterns of raiding and slavery in northern Katanga when they arrived in the region. As Melvin Page and Jean-Luc Vellut have argued, there was considerable prejudice on the part of the Swahili against those who were not Muslims and non-Muslims were sometimes pejoratively referred to as washenzi as a result.Footnote 21 The aim of the slavers was not to convert the slaves—for if they did they would theoretically have to free them. Instead, the Swahili wanted to use their religion as a means of distinguishing between them and their bonded labor force. Yet as historians have observed, slaves converted to Islam as a means of ameliorating their servile status.Footnote 22 The ambiguous social category of the waungwana (“children of God”) arose precisely from this tension between the slavers’ need to differentiate between them and those they captured and the desire on the part of the slaves for better treatment by assimilating into Swahili culture.Footnote 23 Once they got to the coast, the waungwana often formed a privileged and pious class.Footnote 24 Much as abolitionism would do later on, Islam thus served the dual purposes of justifying slavery while acting to help slaves gain social mobility if they converted.
Despite the immense arms advantage their coastal trading networks gave them, the Swahili were not able to enforce their hegemony across the entirety of Tanganyika. Some local chiefs were able to resist them, particularly on the peripheries of the networks of Swahili fortresses, or boma, in which their slaves were kept. The estates that had been such a feature of Luba and to some extent Báhêmbá aristocratic wealth were therefore not entirely destroyed during the late nineteenth century, neither was Luba culture completely eviscerated. Likewise, as the Swahili did not wish to pay high prices for the slaves that the Luba ironically took for the purposes of selling onto the Swahili, they had to expand their slave raiding ventures to find more slaves to sell.Footnote 25 However, many precolonial estates were indeed destroyed by the “military revolution” that accompanied the Swahili slavers and their proxies’ ascent to power with many slaves who were captured in northern Katanga being carried off to the East African coast.Footnote 26 The very first colonial censuses tell of a small population in the territories that would eventually constitute Tanganyika.Footnote 27 Although such population data would not differentiate between those who died through violent means and those who were simply taken away from the area, we know that the population of northern Katanga was extremely slight when the First World War broke out. Slaving must, therefore, have had a significant impact on the relatively small population given that the land that they lived on was so fertile.
The first Europeans to enter the eastern savannah in the late nineteenth century, immediately after the Swahili slavers, came as conquerors. They were armed not only with weapons but with abolitionist rhetoric and so with the intention of destroying the Swahili slave trade outlined above. Yet at the same time, Belgian soldiers had an urgent need for labor–first, to staff their army, the Force Publique, and, secondly, for porterage so that their goods could be carried from a range of coastal ports to inland areas.Footnote 28 One of the most significant ways in which the Free State, the administration for which the Force Publique worked, negotiated this urgent need to recruit labor was to redeem slaves taken by the Swahili.Footnote 29 So, as David Northrup suggests, despite their rhetoric of abolitionism, the agents of European rule relied heavily on redeeming slaves in the first instance and so they indirectly propelled the very trade they sought to end.Footnote 30 It is hard to find references to the payment of redeemed slaves in the documentary evidence left from this tumultuous period and it is likely no such evidence exists. David Northrup, quoting a source from 1895, suggests that a Tanganyika commander had “two villages of former Arab slaves who belong to the state” engaged in agriculture, including “around 150 youths suitable to be soldiers in two to three years.”Footnote 31 Certainly the language used by the commander suggests that these former slaves were not being paid. Yet this Belgian reliance on unfree labor was never made explicit to the international community given that Leopold II had been granted stewardship of the Congo River Basin partly on a disingenuous claim to be supporting abolitionism there. So, unsurprisingly, colonial officials’ use of unfree labor is often obscured in the archival records. Yet it is impossible to explain how the armies necessary to invade the eastern savannah were assembled so rapidly and subsequently maintained without paying some heed to explanations involving the use of redeemed slaves.
Force Publique commanders deliberately blurred the lines between “free” and “unfree” labor in order to secure a supply of agricultural labor at the turn of the century. That they were fighting against slavery in many respects gave them the perfect cover to exploit the slaves that they had redeemed. Even the degree to which Force Publique recruits were free, which is to say had contracted working hours, payment, and conditions, is open to question. A category of “freedmen” (libéré) temporarily existed within the Force Publique but this class was often supplemented “with substantial numbers of other ex-slaves.”Footnote 32 Even the term libéré was suppressed after 1892 as all recruits became known simply as militiamen.Footnote 33 As important an institution as the Force Publique was to the Free State administration, it made other uses of slave labor also. Male slaves in particular were often rounded up and put to work on state projects such as “the lower Congolese railroad from 1890 and the Stanleyville-Ponthierville railroad from 1902.”Footnote 34 The degree to which these former slaves were free is, again, open to question given that it is not at all clear they were paid for these works. Instead, they were often described as “apprentices” in a manner that echoed, first, the paternalist rhetoric that the Free State administration relied on to justify its use of forced labor as well as, secondly, the term the British Empire used when it began to abolish slavery in 1834.Footnote 35
The nineteenth-century history of northern Katanga, in short, meant that slavery in practical terms was never entirely overturned even if the Force Publique had established Belgium, an ostensibly abolitionist power, as the preeminent political force in the Congo River Basin. As Northrup has argued, the Belgians had few practical answers to the question of how to establish a society based on free labor in central Africa, yet they continued to profess their abolitionist credentials. Like other cases in protocolonial sub-Saharan Africa, abolitionist campaigns in the Congo went hand in glove with the continuation of coercive forms of labor as well as some new forms of it. Unfree labor was masked in terms such as “militiamen” and “apprentices,” and high-ranking Belgian officers thrived on the ambiguity that these terms created. Even the Katanga Company (KC), and its successor, the Special Committee for Katanga (Comité Spécial du Katanga) (CSK), which ran Katanga nearly independently from the seat of the Free State in Boma, co-opted a number of Swahili slavers into their administration(s).Footnote 36 Undoubtedly, much like Derek Peterson has observed in the Ugandan, Kenyan, and Tanzanian contexts, “subject peoples [exerted] political leverage over local colonial authorities by representing themselves as slaves.”Footnote 37 Some of the only records pertaining to such instances, though, come from missionaries who arrived in Tanganyika only after the end of the Free State era. And so, for the vast majority of those living in Tanganyika during the turn of the century, unfree labor was the rule even if it was rhetorically hidden by a bewildering array of different labor categories following the colonial conquests.
The Great Depression and the Origins of Late Colonial Developmentalism, 1909–1936
Following its annexation by the Belgian parliament in 1908, the Congo Free State became known as the Belgian Congo. Leopold II's fiefdom had left very little infrastructure in Tanganyika even if large proportions of its population had been subdued by its forces. The Belgian administrators’ first priority, therefore, was to make northern Katanga pay for its own occupation by turning their military power into a civilian government capable of taxing its populace. Initially, state officials had used the region as a breadbasket for the whole province in that cheap maize was shipped from the region to mining centers in Upper Katanga (Haut Katanga). Much of the farming labor was performed freely, albeit not with the aid of any form of contract and with most agricultural land nominally owned technically by the CSK. However, the Great Depression reconfigured the political economy not just of northern Katanga, but of the Belgian Congo as a whole.
When copper prices plunged in the late 1920s and early 1930s, mining bosses began to discharge staff and even closed some of their facilities.Footnote 38 At the same time, Belgian policymakers had to confront the fact that they had failed to install a substantial European settler population (colonat) that could extract high surplus value from the land without African production intervening.Footnote 39 This confluence of circumstances during the Depression meant that the Belgian regime had to find another way to make Tanganyika pay for its occupation. The answer to this problem was to try to reorientate the foodstuffs economy, under which relatively free agricultural labor environments had begun to emerge, toward the imposition of a very oppressive system of cotton production. Cotton farming would be enforced by the agents of the colonial state together with their African intermediaries, which included local chiefs. There would be few cash incentives for African farmers to grow cotton freely given the fact that once cotton farmers got to market they would find themselves being grossly underpaid by the marketing boards. Yet this did not stop the colonial administration's keeping faith that it would ultimately justify and fund—even if only in part—their continued occupation.
Cotton farming predated the Great Depression given that it was first conceived of as a crop to produce in the Belgian Congo as early as 1917.Footnote 40 Cotton was not new either to the Belgian administration or to Katanga itself since many cotton companies, endowed with a good deal of state investment, had been formed before the economic downturn. The Cotonco Company, for example, had been founded as early as 1920.Footnote 41 What changed during the Depression, though, was the extension of these cotton concession zones to northern Katanga, which occurred at a time in which the cotton companies’ lands in the colony were expanded. A new company called the Tanganyika Cotton Company (Cotonnière du Tanganyika) (Cotanga) was created during the 1930s specifically to extend production of the crop across the Tanganyika district.Footnote 42 Likewise, a network of new dirt roads (pistes) was erected across Tanganyika to transport cotton from the hinterland to the major markets in the area, such as Sangwa.Footnote 43 The wide network of roads was also meant to integrate a new complex of ginneries into the political economy by allowing African producers to access them as quickly as possible.Footnote 44 As well as private plots, colonial officials also oversaw the construction of plantations to further the production of cotton, most notably the one at Katompe in the chieftainship of Bena Paye.Footnote 45
The colonial state was intimately involved in the cotton industry because it had shares in all the major marketing boards, not least Cotanga. Consequently, Osumaka Likaka has documented how the state and Cotanga joined forces to try to convince the local African populations of the merits of cotton farming given that the state in particular needed to pass the burden of the Depression onto African rather than Belgian subjects.Footnote 46 Such was the volume of the propaganda produced by Cotanga and other cotton companies that colonial publications focusing on agriculture even referred to a “cotton culture” of sorts developing in the Congo at this time.Footnote 47 In theory, cotton culture was not meant to involve forced labor. The director of the Belgian Department of Agriculture, who had introduced it, Edmund Leplae, did not believe that cotton cultivation should always involve unfree labor even if he was not averse to the reality that it might. Rather, he was a paternalist who believed that Africans were lazy and needed cotton to integrate them more fully into the world of colonial capitalism. Ideally, in Leplae's mind at least, Africans would grow cotton of their own accord and sell it at markets not unlike those that had developed on the northern Katangese railscape. In so doing, the areas that he considered unprofitable would soon turn a profit.Footnote 48 The whole cotton enterprise would be based on free trade, according to Leplae, since once Africans saw the profits they could derive from cotton, they would quickly up their production of the crop.
As Allen Isaacman and Osumaka Likaka have persuasively argued, however, cotton rarely, if ever, produced wealth for Africans and it did not in northern Katanga. There were a variety of reasons why, in Allen Isaacman's view, cotton was in fact “the mother of poverty.”Footnote 49 First, it was and is an extremely demanding crop to grow and one that required a considerable amount of the available water in any given African household.Footnote 50 The pressures cotton exerted on African households meant that it was rare that Africans chose to grow cotton given that, if they did, they would struggle to grow their own subsistence crops. Secondly, for all the colonial propaganda about the merits of capitalism, Africans in fact were rarely paid the market rates for the cotton they produced.Footnote 51 Colonial marketing boards, such as Cotanga, argued that they wanted to pay Africans a fixed (often low) price for cotton so as to maintain a surplus cash reserve in case of a crash in the value of cotton. Yet Africans could not opt out of the cotton regime for fear of punishments meted out on them by the officials. The surplus could both be invested in wages for cotton producers during hard times but could, so the theory went, be reinvested into infrastructure to improve the means of production. But the most common reason why Africans were not paid the market rates was simply because marketing boards cheated Africans of gaining a fair price for their produce. In any case, Africans were acutely aware that they were not being remunerated for their work and so they had hardly any inclination to grow cotton of their own accord as Edmund Leplae had envisaged.
Given Belgium's pressing need to extract surplus capital from the Belgian Congo during the Depression, colonial officials quickly developed a regime of coerced labor in northern Katanga to force farmers to grow cotton against their will. The people I met during my fieldwork who could remember the colonial period in northern Katanga knew about what would happen if they did not grow cotton—even if they themselves were never whipped or imprisoned.Footnote 52 Both they and the colonial archives attest to a regime of terror being imposed on farmers whose brief foray into a more free kind of labor in the 1920s was swiftly ended by the imposition of cotton culture. The apparatus of colonial control placed on farmers in the local milieu was organized as follows. At the bottom of the cotton hierarchy, but just above African farmers, were agricultural monitors. By 1937, there were twenty-six agricultural monitors in the Kongolo territory alone.Footnote 53 In theory, as Osumaka Likaka suggests, agricultural monitors would aid local farmers and educate them in the ways of cotton production.Footnote 54 In reality, given that many were poorly trained, they simply beat farmers who struggled to produce cotton in sufficient quantity.Footnote 55 Above agricultural monitors in the cotton hierarchy stood the cotton police. These officials patrolled cotton plots and ensured that the agricultural monitors were protected should any violence flare up between them and the farmers. Alongside the regular colonial police, cotton police could imprison those who they deemed not to have produced enough cotton or who did not produce it to the standards required. Chiefs were also important overseers of the cotton industry and were more than motivated by the remuneration they could get if their subjects produced the crop in large numbers.Footnote 56 Chiefs thus tended to report those who they saw as disrupting cotton production to the relevant authorities as much as they could.
Given the depth of the oppressive infrastructure involved in cotton farming, it is difficult, if not impossible, to conclude that it constituted a form of free labor as defined in the introduction of this article. Much like freed slaves in the American South, Africans did not envisage a system of freed labor to comprise of “labouring under the authority, and for the profit, of another.”Footnote 57 In fact, colonial authority impeded sharply on the autonomy of African farmers—especially before the Second World War when many did not own the land they farmed. The farmers who had worked, often for little recompense, to produce foodstuffs were now obliged to produce cotton at cut-price rates when money changed hands at all. Rather than a servile class, which had been avowedly oppressed by the sultani and their followers, being liberated under Belgian rule, the picture was far murkier. In fact, the Belgians had quite literally fought in some cases to maintain a servile peasant class and retain most, if not all, the mechanisms that kept them in their place—not least the brutal sultani. As such, it is not surprising that historians of cotton in the Belgian Congo have drawn attention to the wide repertoire of resistance strategies used by farmers to try to offset the onerous demands of their work.Footnote 58 These strategies included working slowly, deliberately poisoning one's crops and trying to pass it off as an unknown tropical disease or simply running away. Likewise, and unsurprisingly, contemporary colonial reports from the early 1930s are strewn with references to Africans migrating to the mining facilities in Manono in search of more favorable terms of employment.Footnote 59 Colonial officials, such as the Territorial Administrator of Kongolo, René Wauthion, along with his colleagues, fought hard to stop this migration but with little effect. At times migration to more securely waged employment was actually legal, as in the case of the migration of 1,500 Africans to work on the Kongolo-Kabalo CFL rail junction in 1937, and so the local territorial administration could not stop it.Footnote 60
The hardships of cotton farming thus pushed many Africans to emigrate away from the cotton plots and plantations to mining centers, legally or otherwise. Typically, single men migrated given their lack of family ties and domestic labor obligations that thenceforth fell upon women and girls. Tanganyika was not wholly dominated by cotton, though. The crop was imposed on large areas of the Luba and, to some extent, Songye lands that straddled the most fertile parts of the Lualaba River basin. An exception to the monoculture of the cotton regime was in some of the areas populated by the Báhêmbá that produced palm oil, which fetched relatively high prices on world markets. Yet palm was frequently grown in addition to cotton and in periods when the cotton fields needed less attention—for example, when it was not harvest time.Footnote 61 Palm oil was not organized into plantations in northern Katanga as it had been in western Congo in part because of the significant productivity of the Báhêmbá and in part because palm could be harvested alongside cotton in the region.Footnote 62 A mixed economy thus developed in some places, such as eastern Kongolo and Nyunzu. Yet, unfree labor reared its head there much as elsewhere when cotton needed to be planted, the plots required weeding, and the crop eventually needed harvesting.
“Allieviating the Material and Moral Conditions of the Natives”: The Depression and Late Colonial DevelopmentalismFootnote 63
The Depression economy that had revolved around a patchwork of large concessions owned by a few powerful and well-financed European companies stitched together by a network of dirt roads changed in the postwar context, even if this change was slow. The cotton regime that had arisen from the Depression reversed the relative gains that farmers experienced in northern Katanga after the First World War.Footnote 64 The impoverished state of farmers who were forced to labor under state-capitalized cotton companies was not lost on King Leopold III as he toured the Congo in 1933.Footnote 65 So, he suggested that a means of improving farmers’ economic positions could be to give them individual titles to collectivized land holdings that they farmed with their respective kinship groups.Footnote 66 This scheme, which eventually became known as Paysannat Indigène (PI), or “indigenous farmer” in English, by 1936 was meant to create a yeoman class of producers in the Belgian Congo.
PI was discursively Janus-faced in that it was not initially presented in explicitly developmentalist terms, yet its supporters argued that it would improve “material and moral conditions of the natives” in the colony.Footnote 67 Rather than simply donating money to rural people, G. Malengreau, professor at Louvain in the 1950s and a prominent member of the Indigenous Welfare Fund, couched PI in terms of what we would understand today as the language of sustainable development in that it would empower farmers to earn enough to invest in their own communities.Footnote 68 He was keen to promote the work he and his colleagues had done in his 1949 pamphlet Vers un Paysannat Indigène (Towards an Indigenous Peasantry). Under PI, farming was collectivized and placed into the hands of what officials thought were extended-kin groups known as “clans.” But the clan in colonial ethnographic parlance bore only a passing resemblance to the precolonial unit that had formed part of what Jan Vansina termed the Equatorial African political tradition.Footnote 69 The intrusion of Swahili slavers, warfare, and early colonial capitalism had made sure that clans had to be reconstituted and did not closely resemble the precolonial units they sought to mirror. Nonetheless, colonial agents were enjoined to identify what clans they could in northern Katanga in an effort to collectivize agricultural labor.
The former agronomist of the Tanganyika district, René Chambon, remembered PI in a particularly positive light. In a book he published before I met him, he argued that this experiment in collectivization “allowed increased acreage to be placed under cultivation due to the mechanisation of labour.”Footnote 70 He went on to write that the implementation of PI was “done with great enthusiasm” by all those involved, be they Cotanga officials or those in the territorial service.Footnote 71 It is true that PI scored some very big successes by the end of the colonial period. In 1959, colonial officials reported that Tanganyika exported twenty thousand metric tons of foodstuffs to Upper Katanga.Footnote 72 Under PI, therefore, northern Katanga intensified the production of a number of cash crops of which the most important were cotton, groundnuts, and palm oil. Báhêmbá groups in the eastern parts of Kongolo and Nyunzu continued to specialize in palm oil while cotton had been slowly introduced to most, if not all, societies by the end of the 1930s. The production of cash crops was accelerated by a new generation of seeds that were grown in an experimental outstation in Kaseya in southern Kongolo after 1955. The experiments conducted in Kaseya had ramifications for the whole of Katanga as seeds produced there were exported across the province. Kaseya was thus integral to much of northern Katanga's status as being on the vanguard of an agricultural revolution that occurred in the Belgian Congo in the post-Second World War period.Footnote 73 The agricultural innovations PI offered, as well as the production figures it garnered, meant that far from remembering the episodic violence that accompanied the installation of PI, Jonas Mwilambwe Mukalay and André Kalenga, writing in 2007, suggested that “it is unfortunate that the [PI] that was practiced in Kongolo was not extended to Ankoro.”Footnote 74 Even one of the most ardent critics of Belgian colonial agricultural policies, Osumaka Likaka, suggests that “peasant household income increased significantly … under the paysannat scheme in the 1950s.”Footnote 75
But while PI had some notable benefits, there were substantial downsides to it too. Congolese farmers might have begun to own land, but the conditions of their labor were hardly appealing or free. If one reads René Chambon's memoirs closely, a far more nuanced picture emerges than that of the coming of a tranquil, bucolic, colonial modernity. He observed that during “the important moments of clearing, planting and processing crops [Cotanga agents, agronomists, territorial officials, African subordinates (animateurs rurals)] roamed the villages at dawn, knocking on doors, encouraging people to go to the fields … [but] the villages were usually only constituted of old people and children …did the adults not realise the benefit of living and working in peace?” Chambon's writing invites two major questions, though more, of course, could be added. First, what happened if Africans did not heed the agents’ “knock at the door”? Secondly, why were there so few working-age people in the villages? Belgian coercion forms a large part of the answer to both these questions, though unsurprisingly the “colonial library” is unforthcoming about the details about it.Footnote 76
In an interview with me, Mouthedba Lambert, who was trained as an agricultural monitor, said that chiefs were required to rubber-stamp agronomists’ plans before colonial agents were officially able to create an allotment.Footnote 77 Local leaders would be asked several times if they agreed to PI being imposed among their people and, if they refused, they would simply be asked until they accepted.Footnote 78 Exactly as Marie-Bénédicte Dembour suggests, chieftainship councils in general, which consisted of colonial officials, notables, and the relevant chief, were not a forum of deliberations between equal parties.Footnote 79 Some chiefs needed less “persuasion” to adopt PI than others. For example, the chief of the Bena Nyembo, Lubembe Lambert, was supposedly open to it whereas many of his counterparts were less so.Footnote 80 According to Mouthedba Lambert, Lubembe Lambert went to a mission school whereas a number of other chiefs had not received much of an education; hence a possible reason why Lubembe Lambert was more open to PI than many of his peers.Footnote 81
As much as chiefs, such as Lambert, consented to PI, there were a number of Africans who were more sceptical about it. It is still unclear exactly how the administration dealt with those who, no matter how many times they were asked, still refused to take part in PI. Naturally, the colonial archives in Brussels are coy when it comes to referencing violence and, in particular, the coercion used to displace Africans from their lands. The word that was typically employed by the administration when it referenced violence in its reports was persuasion.Footnote 82 Henri Headrick, a colonial agent working in 1946, used this word when he was writing about bringing Africans back to seven key villages that year.Footnote 83 His example does not refer directly to PI but gives an indication of the way in which violence was euphemized in the territorial reports. Typically, it is also difficult to tie any colonial official to any act of violence in these documents. One example of convenient omission is in another territorial report written in 1946 in which the author, unnamed, acknowledges that “since the natives do not wish to regroup voluntarily, which would be better, it is in their own best interest to force them to do so” [my emphasis].Footnote 84 Yet, there was no sudden shock of colonial violence that affected every community and all at the same time as, instead, PI was “drip-fed” into communities and consequently never inspired a concerted revolt. In some respects, PI was an extensive exercise in unintentional divide and rule tactics. Communities rarely fought for others as they were forced off their land. Instead, violence against Belgian officials and their African subordinates was confined to skirmishes as opposed to a fully fledged anticolonial movement that would accompany the nationalist movements that engulfed Tanganyika later on.
USAID and World War Developmentalism, 1960–1985
Most of the PI plots that had been established in the 1950s were rent asunder as the independence process in the Congo lurched violently from one catastrophe to another. Many of those who worked on cotton fields were killed as the Katanga province became embroiled in an ultimately unsuccessful secession attempt that lasted from 1960 to 1963.Footnote 85 During the Katangese secession, a government that was militantly hostile to it took over Tanganyika and declared its allegiance to Antoine Gizenga's administration in Stanleyville and, once that had been defeated, to Cyrille Adoula's government in Léopoldville.Footnote 86 The Tanganyika government called itself simultaneously the Lualaba Province and the Province of Northern Katanga (hereafter simply the “Lualaba Province”).Footnote 87 The Lualaba Province was extremely coercive and used spectacular displays of violence to inspire terror in the minds of the Katangese army that opposed it and that was considerably better armed than its own.Footnote 88 The inauguration of the Lualaba Province depleted labor stocks in the region it controlled as farmers either were killed or simply fled the territory. Not only did the establishment of the Lualaba Province in October 1960 have a catastrophic effect on laborers themselves, but it also meant that the infrastructure that surrounded and supported cotton production was eviscerated as its administration tried to defend itself from the Katangese army.Footnote 89 By 1965, the quasi-separatist government of the Lualaba Province had been defeated, and the territory it occupied once again became known as Tanganyika; yet all was by no means well.
It is hard to underestimate the damage that was done to industry and farmland in the former Tanganyika Province following the secession and the fall of the Lualaba Province. However, the general who took over the Congo in a coup d’état on November 25, 1965, Joseph Mobutu, demonstrated scant concern to resurrect it.Footnote 90 Instead, like many postcolonial African leaders, Mobutu saw the city as the vanguard of modernity and sought to bend those working in the hinterland to its needs. Yet developmentalism was still important to Mobutu in two key respects. First, he wanted to legitimize his hegemony to his citizenry by undertaking grandiose projects. Secondly, it was a rhetoric that Mobutu used to justify projects that were in fact political attempts to subdue those he considered potential enemies. The best example of him using developmentalism in this way was the infamous Inga-Shaba high-voltage intertie.
Shaba, or Katanga, could clearly provide electricity for its own industry and had precious little need for outside power emanating from Lower Congo.Footnote 91 However, Mobutu, having fought the Katangese secession of 1960–1963, wanted to ensure he had absolute control of Katanga. The Inga-Shaba intertie meant that he could literally turn off the power in Katanga at will thereby forestalling the effectiveness of any potential rebellion there. Rather than developing the Congo in a manner that distributed wealth more equally, Mobutu's understanding of development was therefore bound up in the propagation and legitimation of his own regime. Likewise, the Inga-Shaba project was very much a top-down affair with Mobutu seeking little, if any, consent from those communities who would have to move to accommodate the intertie. The similarity between Mobutu's top-down approach and that of colonial officials is striking.Footnote 92 Although nationalism had dealt a blow to the marriage of racist paternalism and developmentalism that had existed during the final days of Belgian rule, Mobutu believed that he and his urban acolytes inherently knew more than their rural citizens and this belief was clear to his citizenry.
While statist developmental discourse might have supported Mobutu's rule politically in some instances, it weakened his regime financially and not least because the Inga-Shaba project relentlessly sucked up funds.Footnote 93 To ensure he could legitimize his regime to the Zaïrian left and grease the wheels of his kleptocratic regime as copper prices fell, Mobutu inaugurated a policy of nationalism in the 1960s and, later, Zaïrianization in 1973. Zaïrianization involved the parcelling out of the industries he had previously nationalized to well-connected members of his party: the Popular Movement of the Revolution (MPR).Footnote 94 Yet most of the big firms that operated in Tanganyika seemed to have escaped Zaïrianization mainly because they were simply not as profitable as the mining companies in southern Katanga.Footnote 95 Likewise, most of the firms that had existed in the colonial period had fled Tanganyika as a result of the tumultuous independence process. We have little economic data for Tanganyika during the first year of Mobutu's rule or the year before, but it seems reasonable to assume that farmers experienced the trials of warfare more than a state takeover of their assets. Yet the situation changed after 1966, when Mobutu nationalized the mines in southern Katanga that were previously held by the Mineral Union of Upper Katanga (Union Minière du Haut Katanga) (UMHK). The newly nationalized firm was known as Gécamines, and, given that it was owned by the state, Mobutu had a big interest in ensuring it was as profitable as it could be. Gécamines had an important relationship with maize farmers because it owned a number of mills, including some of the most productive in the country, notably the one in Minoka.Footnote 96 Just as in the colonial period, therefore, the state had every incentive to force farmers to sell their produce for low prices and, also, to produce maize rather than other crops that might have been more profitable. The state had to coerce farmers into selling at low prices when the global price of maize was high, but, conversely, they did not have to exercise such violence when prices were already low.
Both Zaïrianization and nationalization were failures, and so Mobutu soon had to allow at least some foreign investment and even management of many of the companies he had previously brought under state ownership.Footnote 97 It was in this context that many of the foreign cotton firms returned to Tanganyika. One of the first to come back was the one that was to become one of the main engines for post-colonial development in the region—the African Spinning and Weaving Society (Société de Filatures et des Tissages Africains, hereafter simply FILTISAF).Footnote 98 FILTISAF began life in 1946 and was the result of American investment in the region. Its first tangible presence was the construction of a cotton refining factory in Kalemie, the headquarter city of Tanganyika, in 1947.Footnote 99 The factory hired 1,500 people in the first instance, though more would be added during the 1950s. FILTISAF fled the Congo in the 1960s as the secession began but had returned to the country during the 1970s to once again take up residence in Kalemie. It hired a number of local people to help resurrect, first, the infrastructure surrounding the ginnery as well as, secondly, many of the roads nearby. As the crises surrounding the nationalization of the mining corporations in southern Katanga rumbled on, Mobutu seemed willing to leave the lion's share of capital investment in the province's hinterland and its reconstruction to these American firms.
American investment coincided with US Cold War policy in that the United States feared that the radical, left-wing administrations, not unlike that of the Lualaba Province, might gain power once again if Mobutu continued to neglect the region. A radical left-leaning movement taking Tanganyika might at first seem a rather trivial prospect in terms of US global policy as a whole except when the fact that the US needed the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in southern Katanga for its nuclear program is considered.Footnote 100 If a Soviet proxy government, arguably resembling that of the Lualaba Province, got into power in Tanganyika this important southern mining facility would be directly threatened in the official mind of the United States. The name of the project that the US initiated to shore up Mobutu's role in Tanganyika was the North Shaba Project (Projet Nord Shaba) (PNS), as Mobutu renamed the Katanga province “Shaba” (a Swahili word for copper) in the early 1970s.Footnote 101 The PNS prima facie aimed to resurrect Tanganyika's infrastructure and begin to make Zaïre able to feed itself without being reliant on other countries whose allegiances to Mobutu were not always secure. Exactly as in the 1920s, Tanganyika would once again become a breadbasket not only for Shaba but for the country as a whole with maize rather than cotton as USAID's crop of choice. The line between PNS and FILTISAF, which became ESTAGRICO in 1981, was extremely blurred to the extent that the two organizations became nearly indistinguishable from each other by the 1980s. Put another way, PNS became the capital intensive branch of ESTAGRICO and a means to ensure the latter could profit from the investment of the former.
That a country would invest in a development program that largely benefitted a corporation headquartered in that very country is hardly unknown in the world of development, and this pattern was largely replicated in the PNS context. America therefore had every incentive, first, to help FILTISAF resurrect the infrastructure in Tanganyika and, secondly, to invest in shoring up the presence of Mobutu's regime there. For its part, the Zaïrian administration was keen to continue using forced labor to build roads so as to allow the maize being produced under the PNS to get to any restive urban workers as quickly as possible. Correspondingly, the Zaïrian administration's use of forced labor is referenced in the initial PNS Project Paper (PP) that was published in 1976. The PP mentions the fact that the Zaïrian army wanted to use violence to force farmers to take part in road-building projects with soldiers supervising the gangs of unfree laborers involved.Footnote 102 Likewise, farmers routinely complained about local chiefs trying to co-opt their labor, typically for use in the abovementioned road-building gangs.Footnote 103 Since the passing of the Bakajika Law in 1966, which sought to put all lands in the hands of the state, chiefs felt that any titles individual farmers possessed to their lands were void—their labor in effect belonged to the state.Footnote 104 As chiefs were chosen increasingly because they were loyal to Mobutu, they had every incentive to enforce unfree labor practices. The PNS documentation dovetails with what the historical literature suggests about Mobutu's use of forced labor. Allen Roberts, for example, suggests that: “various forms of forced labour continued … throughout the Mobutu years … cash crops were demanded and labour recruitment was enforced.”Footnote 105 While their development agency, USAID, contested the Zaïrian administration's explicit use of coercion on occasion, it was not prepared to let it prevent their involvement in the area.
PNS was eventually successful on US terms in that it increased maize production and so continued to provide cheap foodstuffs to urban centres in the Congo, it maintained the Mobutist administration's presence in a then-neglected area, and, finally, it provided cheap capital for FILTISAF. Yet the Project was not always viewed positively by the farmers themselves. In its early stages at least, the price that farmers could expect for their maize was determined to a large extent by the government and this was understandably upsetting for them.Footnote 106 The state always tried to keep maize prices low in order to prevent an urban revolt by hungry mine workers. Likewise, low food prices were also a means of keeping urban workers’ wages down.Footnote 107 Rather than cooperate with the PNS in every instance, therefore, farmers sometimes sold their maize locally “for the manufacture of alcohol.”Footnote 108 The palm producers in particular, typically the Báhêmbá, often found it more profitable to manufacture palm wine “than undertake [other] agricultural activities.”Footnote 109 It was noticeable that farmers upped their production before the PNS began when a state cadre who came to the region in 1972 told them that maize prices would rise from 40 Zaires to 75 Zaires per ton.Footnote 110 While the PNS team understood the importance of paying high prices to producers, they were not always able to enforce their principles on a state that did not agree with them. The Mobutist state did not want to see rising prices for maize, and so it made sure its army and police enforced a low-price regime regardless of what the market rate for the crop was.Footnote 111 In short, there was a strong relationship between the labor enforced by the Mobutu regime and the low prices it passed onto its urban citizens. Even if it had wanted to, the state could not pay higher maize prices after the copper crash of 1974–1975 because it had to go to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan to keep itself afloat.Footnote 112
In addition to frequently not being paid market rates for their maize, the Mobutist administration could more easily survey the political intentions of farmers using the PNS institutional infrastructure.Footnote 113 Alongside political party meetings of the MPR, the PNS farmers’ councils, prima facie designed to share technical innovations and equipment, were also a forum in which political allegiances could be assessed and, if necessary, reported to the relevant authorities. When I spoke to Mamba Tabu Marie-Jeanne and Kamwanga Ilunga Justin, who worked for USAID in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were clear about what the agency was doing in Tanganyika. They said that the development work the United States did at that time became “the eyes and ears of Mobutu.”Footnote 114 And Mobutu needed to get eyes on the ground in Tanganyika given the paucity of state infrastructure there following the traumatic upheavals of the 1960s.
In sum, while it was a very modern, “bottom-up” project, PNS indirectly served to reproduce authoritarian rule in the hinterland despite Mobutu's lack of investment in Tanganyika. Rather than changing labor relations, which were defined through the coercion of farmers by Zaïrian police and soldiery, PNS staff had to work around unfree labor. There was some overlap, therefore, between Mobutu's developmentalism, which necessitated the resurrection of Tanganyika as a breadbasket, and that of USAID, which wanted to pursue its strategic objectives while finding a means of initiating a self-sustaining development program in Zaïre. The two developmentalisms rarely clashed with each other, and, as such, unfree labor in the hinterland continued—particularly with regard to the state's road-building projects. In the early 1980s, the PNS was transferred to ESTAGRICO, and USAID involvement in the PNS ceased nearly entirely, meaning that Mobutu's coercive and politically illiberal developmentalism ultimately won the day. Many Zaïrians, such as Odon Mugalu, who had worked on the PNS throughout its lifespan in Tanganyika, continued working for ESTAGRICO in the hope that the state would pay them for their trouble.Footnote 115 Yet he and his colleagues were to be disappointed in their expectation of payment by the state firm and would ultimately look for foreign NGO patronage elsewhere by the early 2000s.
Conclusion
This article has surveyed the increasing use of developmentalist rhetoric by state administrations and external agencies in Tanganyika. It has suggested that after the Great Depression, an extremely arbitrary and coercive form of capitalism was imposed on the province that was based on the forced production of cotton. While few subsequent labor regimes were as oppressive as the cotton industry of the 1930s, unfree labor remained in Tanganyika and was masked, first, by the language of Belgian paternalism and, secondly, by that of bottom-up development, as per USAID. Although there were moments in nearly every phase of modern Congolese history in which the state straightforwardly requisitioned the labor of its citizens, especially when it came to road and railway construction, for most of the time labor was presented as being free by powerful internal and external institutions. Yet neither the colonial nor postcolonial states revised their attitude that urban prosperity needed to be built on the backs of the rural poor. The corresponding assumption that African farmers were backward and lazy accompanied rural oppression as Belgian and Zaïrian officials retained control over the framework in which rural labor was performed by retaining their control of the means of production and refinement, such as mills and mining complexes. Colonial and postcolonial agents typically set agricultural commodity prices lower than the going market rate, meaning farmers were underpaid for their travails if they were paid at all. In short, the arrival of contracted and adequately remunerated labor in Tanganyika was considerably retarded by the continued subordination of farmers’ interests to those of urban workers, foreign companies, and powerful but arbitrary political imperatives. Rather than change patterns of unfree labor, developmentalist discourses served more to ameliorate them at best and obscure them at worst.
