The Concession Experience Power, Ecology and Labour in the Leverville circle (Belgian Congo, 1911-1940)
(2016)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Tousignant, Nathalie
- Abstract
- The present thesis aims at investigating the enforcement of colonial authority and the deployment of capitalism in a rural area of interwar Belgian Congo. It consists in a case study focused on the Leverville concession, a space leased to the Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB) – a branch of the Lever Brothers consortium – for the exploitation and transformation of oil palm fruits. It was used in the making of the Sunlight soap, iodely distributed on global markets. The author relied on two different kinds of sources. First, written documents, administrative archives of the Belgian colony, of the company and of private individuals. Second, oral testimonies gathered in the former concession and its surrounding pool of recruitment, situated today in the Kwilu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The objective is to craft a historical anthropology of everyday life, to try understanding what colonisation meant for those who experienced it in an isolated enclave of colonial presence on the fringes of the Congolese rainforest. This research is articulated around three main themes : power, ecology and labour. Each part consists in an in-depth analysis of the concession’s actors – Africans and Europeans alike – to a specific dimension of the concession experience. First, the making of a political entity. Second, interactions between human communities and their environment. Third, the implementation of wage labour and private paternalism. “Power” opens on a presentation of the different agents of authority exerting their influence on the Leverville concession. Some belong to the colonial administration, as territorial agents and “medal chiefs”, “traditional” authorities designated by the public power. Others, no less influent, are placed outside the official hierarchy, such as missionaries, Congolese catechists and “messengers”. The latter were recruited among local communities to become communication bearers, yet they practically acted as informal mercenaries obeying to field administrators. Together, these different groups and individuals exert a form of shared sovereignty over the concession’s inhabitants, where informal solidarities prevail over the respect of the law in the everyday excercise of power. The second chapter consists in a series of case studies related to the daily exercise of power. For instance, the animosity and the spirit of competition sometimes existing between magistrates and public servants weakened the State’s authority. On the contrary, Jesuit missionaries active in the concession built a symbiotic relation with the HCB. In exchange of their material support, clerics sometimes closed their eyes on coercive practices illegaly performed by company agents over local populations. The third chapter focuses on indigenous restistance against colonial actors and on the deployment of legitimate violence. It shows how the respect of legality played a limited part in the concession’s everyday policing, as well as in the repression of Congolese rebellions. The structural weakness of the colonial power, incarnated by few and scattered agents, generated anxieties in European communities. Anxieties to which colonial actors responded by overstepping the legal boundaries of State violence in dealing with uprisings, as well as by obstinately looking for inexistent agitators at the marges of the European society : secret agents working for Germany or communist propagandists. Taken together, these three chapters highlight how informal relations between field actors and local socio-economic particularities had more influence on the exercise of everyday power in the concession than the corpus of rules and laws supposed to preside over the conduct of authority. The second part focuses on the concession’s ecology, that is on the relations between its human communities and their environment. The fourth chapter opens on the methods of land grabbing put in place in Leverville. In dire contradiction with the principles of the Belgian Congo’s land laws, the HCB ambitioned to exert a monopole over all valuable lands within their zone of exploitation. However, indigenous communities benefitted of the inalienable ownership of a restricted perimeter of land around villages. A series of contractual dispositions were crafted to allow the company to circumvent the law and gain an exclusive right to exploit natural resources in the concession, even on those situated on so-called “native” lands. The fifth chapter focuses on the exploitation of oil palms. At the turn of the 1920s, extremely efficient Elais plantations started to prosper in Southeast Asia, menacing the HCB’s already thin profit margin. The company tried to emulate their success by shifting from the harvest of natural palm fruits to the making of large-scale plantations of selected palm seeds. The program failed to reach its goals, and provided disappointing yields. These two case studies tend to demonstrate the inapplicability on the field of models imagined elsewhere, either legal or commercial. Land laws impeded the profitability of companies such as the HCB, while the elaboration of “rational” and “scientific” cash cropping was unadapted to the concession’s ecosystem. The last part is dedicated to the experience of labour. The sixth chapter sheds light on how fruit cutters’ recruitment, the company’s linchpins, flargantly contradicts the legal forbidding of forced labour. As indigenous men refused to be hired, private recruiters and territorial agents constrained them to engage by resorting to menace and violence. The seventh chapter deals with the company’s paternalist policies. The State expected the HCB to take in charge the alimentation, medical care, clothing and education of its workers and their families. These costly obligations were effectively neglected by its management. Moreover, they were also impeded uncooperativeness of local communities, who often refused to submit to medical examinations or to accept the insufficient rations provided by the company. The eighth and final chapter is dedicated to the gendered distribution of labour. Officially, the company only had to hire so-called “able-bodied males”, preventing women and children to engage in wage labour. However, the practical labour organisation in the palm groves rested on the informal resort to women for the porterage of fruits and of young children for kernel crushing, as all adult men were mobilized by fruit cutting. The distance between objectives, laws and principles on the one hand, and the reality of labour on the other, echoes similar observations made on power and ecology. To conclude, this thesis highlights the failure of colonialism to abide to the objectives and goals set by its metropolitan pundits. It details the inapplicability of models of power, labour and exploitation on the field. It insists on the importance of longings and self-representations in the effective deployment of imperialism. It is essentially in their faith in European superiority that colonial actors found the strength to overlook the often visible failure of their endeavours.
- Affiliations
Citations
Henriet, B. (2016). The Concession Experience Power, Ecology and Labour in the Leverville circle (Belgian Congo, 1911-1940).