The Belgian governance of Congo and the birth of the Independant State, seen from the angle of the fight against Communism (1920-1961)
(2026) Governing the Colonial State: Law, Justice and State in Belgian Africa (1885-1962) — accepted/in-press
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- As any threat to the colonial order was almost automatically interpreted by the Belgians as connected to communist designs, the different forms of the anti-communist struggle in the Congo between 1920 and 1960 are indicative of the preventive and repressive mechanisms put in place by the Belgians to assert colonial hegemony. Of course, the more this domination was challenged and jeopardized as June 1960 approached, the more these stratagems had a tendency to radicalize. In this article, we will first draw up a representative panorama of the measures put in place by the "colonial bloc" to counter the red threat in the Congo between 1920 and January 1960, highlighting their motives and their consequences on the structures and logics of governance. Then, we will illustrate how the many suspicions progressively crystallized around one man, Patrice Lumumba, who became the focal point of all the traditional tactics of prevention, combat and, finally, eviction. That way, we propose new readings of the post-independence crisis and the birth of the Congo State, whose evolution continued to be profoundly influenced by the maneuvers linked to the long-term fight against communism. Our analysis shows that, despite its failure to ultimately establish itself in the Congo where it did not take ideological root among the population, communism nonetheless exerted an extraordinary mobilizing power, and served to exorcise the fears of colonial society when confronted with the “unknown” and “uncontrolled” between 1920 and 1961. It was obviously at the moment when its politico-economic interests were most seriously threatened that this cathartic process was most intensely felt and that the designation and eviction of the scapegoat proved to be the most compelling. Therefore, whatever was the reality of the ideological threat exerted by Lumumba, his eradication was enough to bring appeasement, since its detractors symbolically triumphed over him. The survival of the model of civilization embodied by Belgium and the West was at stake, and one of the conditions for its continuation was to place onto other shoulders, starting with Lumumba, the responsibility for a failed decolonization, a failure that the Belgians were unable to admit…
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Gijs, A.-S. (2026). The Belgian governance of Congo and the birth of the Independant State, seen from the angle of the fight against Communism (1920-1961). In Françoise Muller, Xavier Rousseaux, Nathalie Tousignant (ed.), Governing the Colonial State: Law, Justice and State in Belgian Africa (1885-1962). Palgrave Macmillan. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/238713