The Lumumba Generation begins and ends with a photograph of a Congolese evolué at home in Leopoldville in 1952. At the opening of the book, this image is examined as an object of colonial propaganda, mined to explore the contradictions of this social group. By the end, however, we understand it as a careful performance of a Westernized domestic habitus by people who were engaged in a struggle for civic rights. It is not just that the image, and the moment it records, can be read from many perspectives; it is that the central subject of the book, the problem of the evolué, is inherently slippery. This important book not only offers a sophisticated portrait of Belgian colonialism and the Congo in the twentieth century; it also provides a masterclass in social and cultural history and how they can be brought together to make sense of status identities. Tödt makes a significant contribution to global historical sociology from an African historical perspective.

How did a figure such as Lumumba journey from being a young man who wrote essays in praise of the Belgian civilizing mission to being the scourge of the despotic and violent Belgian colonial order? Through a sophisticated examination of print and documentary sources, The Lumumba Generation charts how a small intermediary group, who began as agents of the colonial state, became its disappointed critics and ultimately enemies. They were shaped by the central contradiction of colonial rule: its attempt to create indigenous collaborators who would not demand civic and economic equality. For the Belgians, this took an extreme form: they did not envision creating, except as exceptions, Black Belgians. They did not seek to bring the colonized to their universities or even allow them the right to migrate to the colonial metropole. Compare this to France or Britain, where Césaire’s Légitime Défense and Padmore’s International African Service Bureau organized anti-colonial sentiment and politics from the imperial centre. Tödt, all the same, does remind us that, while Belgium refused most of its African subjects access to universities, it also created a system of primary education in Congo that was far more extensive and inclusive than its equivalent in French colonial Africa.

Tödt argues that we should see the evolués as a species of ‘bourgeoisie’. Such a characterization can be questioned: for while they are certainly people of the ‘bourg’ (the town), from other perspectives they are quite anomalous. A Marxist might raise objections: this is not a group defined by relations of production as they do not derive their wealth from rent, profit or interest, nor their social interest and power from capital. And, indeed, they are not a bourgeoisie in the strict economic sense: they are a Mittelstand who derived their interest, power and social location from their relationship to the colonial state and their performance of a particular repertoire of Western cultural behaviours. I wondered whether thinking of them as a caste, rather than a social class, might have been a more productive alternative. But I was ultimately persuaded that their forms of social capital could justifiably be understood within the register of the bourgeoisie.

Tödt’s argument raises a significant theoretical issue: do our social analyses need to consider how operations of class and status in colonial and metropolitan spaces were mediated by bureaucracy, regimes of association and office holding – as per the early modern noblesse de la robe – and not just by the structures of work and property? This is particularly important when race is a key component of social status. Perhaps it is not enough to think of ‘racial capitalism’, per Cedric Robinson, but rather of racial state capitalism, where forms of civic rights, subordinations and different articulations relative to state power are as critical to the social order as the organization of economic life.

Arguments about intermediaries within European colonial projects have a long history. The so-called Cambridge school of Indian history (which Christopher Bayly kept some distance from) sought to understand Indian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s as the result of disillusioned collaborators. Ronald Robinson extracted the key argument of this body of work in his famous 1970s essay on collaboration. Writing about the Portuguese empire, Alexander Keese similarly examined the role of assimilados in the functioning and disruption of the political system. And in the 1960s, Fanon (who is mentioned by Tödt) and Amilcar Cabral and Walter Rodney (who are not) examined the contradictions and problems posed by these social classes from a radical anti-colonial perspective.

But Tödt offers something quite different. His intelligence and compassionate historical sensibilities are sensitive to the predicaments of these Congolese colonial elites and how their options, cultural and political, were constrained by the violence and interventionism of Belgian colonialism. Aspiring to be an evolué and choosing to perform European norms was as ineluctable a choice as the turn to opposition for Congolese confronting a colonial order that refused to fully acknowledge their humanity. Tödt’s achievement is to rescue the everyday heroism of these forgotten or ignored figures from, to use E. P. Thompson’s phrase, ‘the condescension of posterity’. The Lumumba Generation, as a result, is able to offer African tools to the emerging field of global social history.