Congo (30 page)

B
UT THE ADMINISTRATORS STAYED ON THEIR TOES
. At a table in Elisabethville’s Cercle Albert in the 1930s, one could often see three men engrossed in conversation.
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Three white men. They spoke quietly and their expressions were serious. Their voices: basso continuo. Their conversation: completely inaudible. Above their heads floated clouds of cigar smoke, occasionally dispersed by a burst of good-humored laughter from their own midst. Officially, Africans were not forbidden to eat in European restaurants, but the extremely chic Cercle Albert was an exception. Still, it was here that decisions were made about the lives and futures of the black population. The three men were Amour Maron, provincial commissioner of Katanga, Aimé Marthoz, director of Union Minière, or one of his successors, and Félix de Hemptinne, bishop of Katanga. Hemptinne’s stately white beard had the African population convinced that he was the son of Leopold II. Three Belgians. Each of them stood at the head of one of the pillars of colonial power: government, finance/industry, and church. The “blessed colonial trinity” it was sometimes called in jest. Who knows whether the bishop was able to laugh about that.

These three men had joined forces to ensure that life in the mining town of Elisabethville was run in an orderly fashion. Their respective agendas converged in many ways: industry wanted submissive, loyal employees; the government wanted no repeats of the Kimbangu affair or the Pende uprising; the church wanted to deliver pure souls in the hereafter—and that meant producing obedient citizens on this side of the divide. At other places in the colony, the three administrations became tightly intertwined as well. Although there were often tensions between the pillars of the colonial triad, there was one thing about which they were in full agreement: if the step from a tribal
to an industrial lifestyle was not to end in bitter defeat, they had to keep a close eye on their black fellow man. Gradually, and above all circumspectly, the new urban Congolese citizens would be kneaded into willing workers, docile subjects, devout Catholics.

If no large-scale uprisings took place in the cities, then, that was due not only to the pleasurable prosperity experienced by the workers, but also and above all to the sophisticated arsenal of strategies employed by the colonial trinity to keep tabs on, to discipline, and if need be to punish the population. There may never have been anything like a grand master plan, but in actual practice church, state, and big money frequently toed one and the same line. Their philosophy—how do we keep them under control? how will they produce best? how must we instruct them?—manifested itself in a host of ways. In Léopoldville, the authorities were anxious about all that dancing and strongly advocated illuminating the streets of the
cité
at night, for how else could they “effectively supervise an agglomeration of twenty-thousand souls, with a handful of policemen lost in the dark?”
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At Elisabethville they succeeded in imposing a lingua franca, Swahili, a language that was not indigenous and almost no one’s native language, but which made it easier to exercise control over the ethnic melting pot.
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Schooling was still a privilege held exclusively by the missionaries, and it became a powerful instrument to mold the masses in the desired shape: the pupils were taught everything about the Belgian royal family, but nothing about the American civil rights movement. Even the French Revolution had to be handled with utmost care. European textbooks were too inflammatory: “There, the revolution is often not regarded with a properly critical eye. Some reforms, liberties, etc., condemned by the church are applauded too readily,” wrote the influential missionary and school inspector Gustaaf Hulstaert. The pupils were in danger of becoming “liberal, then disinterested and atheistic.”
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Meanwhile, African clerks also began reading
French-language newspapers. Communist papers like the Belgian
Le Drapeau Rouge
were banned as from 1925, as were magazines with such evocative titles as
Paris Plaisirs, Séduction
, and
Paris Sex-Appeal
.
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A similar urge to excise content became manifest following World War I, when the first movie theaters appeared. Film was seen as a dangerous medium, one that could cause foment among the lower, unlettered masses. In 1936, therefore, a separate film censorship board was set up especially for African audiences, which resulted in separate showings for Europeans and Congolese. Usually this meant that those films considered unsuited for white children were forbidden for black adults as well.
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“Tous les coloniaux seront unanimes à declarer que les noirs sont encore des enfants, intellectuellement et politiquement” (All those in our colony are unanimous in stating that the blacks are still children, both intellectually and politically), said the official papers that set out the new media policy.
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In terms of civilization, as the recurring metaphor had it, the African was still a child: he could not be left to his own devices; his development had to be watched over carefully. Ultimately, the colonial trinity aspired to a form of emancipation, but only in the long term, in the very long term if need be. Things must not be allowed to become too exuberant.
Dominer pour server
was the motto of Pierre Ryckmans, governor general at the time: to rule in order to serve. Paternalistic? Far from it: that “to serve” sounded dangerously progressive to many. “To discipline” would have been better, or perhaps “to educate.”

Growing up in the Léopoldville of the 1920s was an intelligent and sensitive boy who, after World War II, would develop into the first giant of Congolese literature: Paul Lomami Tshibamba. Shortly before his death in 1985, he looked back on the mood that dominated the interwar period:

The colonizer did everything to convince us that we were big children, that we would remain that way, that we were
under his guardianship and that we had to follow all instructions he gave, in order to educate us with an eye to our gradual integration into Western civilization, the most ideal civilization of all. And we, what else could we expect? My generation no longer knew our parents’ traditions: we were born in this city founded by colonials, in this city where the life of a man was subordinate to the power of money . . . . Without money you ended up in prison. Money was used to pay taxes, to clothe yourself, and even to eat, which was unknown in the villages. It was the blank colonizer who supplied that money, so you had to submit to whatever he said. That is the world into which I was born and in which I lived: you had to bow to what others asked of you.
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Yet monitoring the urban workers’ environment alone was not enough; one had to intervene actively as well. In addition to the schools, club life and family policies were the instruments of choice. The decision to allow women and children into the work camps had a utilitarian motive: it was intended to boost the general willingness to work, to impede prostitution and alcohol consumption, to stimulate monogamy, and to promote the general tranquility of camp life. In addition, children in the work camps would grow up within the company culture. That, with the aid of the mission schools, would help groom them to become the next batch of disciplined employees.
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The church wielded an exceptional amount of political power. Around 1930 there were as many Catholic missionaries in the Belgian Congo as there were colonial officials.
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Ecclesiastical authority and worldly power meshed seamlessly, as Lomami Tshibamba well knew:

In the day-to-day life in which we grew up, the priest demanded our submission: the representatives of Bula Matari, in other words of the government or the territorial ad
ministration, all had authority and that authority came from God. As a result, total obedience was expected from us. That is what the priest advised! Being good, both to God and to the people of this new society, which was created by Bula Matari, required obedience, subjugation, and respect. We were reduced to servility—that was not the term they used, but that is what it came down to.
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Cultivating servility was also the motive behind the social policies of the big companies. Union Minière went furthest in that. Granted, the company built schools, hospitals and leisure clubs for the workers and their families. And yes, in the late 1930s a start was made with a system of retirement benefits. And indeed, the miner was surrounded from cradle to grave by the solicitousness of the company, more than with any other mining operation in Central Africa. But there can be no doubt about the fact that the company’s paternalistic benevolence was prompted more by matters of efficiency than of philanthropy. The objective was to raise perfect workers: happy and tractable.

More than an employer, Union Minière was a state within a state, on occasion even a state with totalitarian features. Every facet of life in the workers’ camp was supervised by the white camp boss. He kept a file on each worker and his family; he was responsible for the housing, the supplies, the salaries, and the schools; he mediated in conflicts and imposed disciplinary measures. The wife of a Union Minière worker who needed to go back to her native village first had to ask the camp boss’s permission, even though she was not a company employee! From the age of ten, her children were obliged to follow classes in manual training, a matter of preparing them for their work later. If they were boys, the company helped them to save for a dowry. Union Minière was a total company, with the backing of church and state.
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Native organizations were regarded with great apprehen
sion as potential breeding grounds for social unrest: “The club feeling is discouraged in as far as possible. The camp leadership keeps a close eye on all activities organized by the natives.”
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The Union Minière found sewing circles, choirs, and home economics courses preferable to the employees’ own initiatives. The missions had churches in the working neighborhoods and were well-suited to the task. In Léopoldville this was organized largely by the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in Elisabethville by the Benedictines. The cathedral at Elisabethville was graced on Sundays by an excellent Gregorian-chant boys’ choir, made up exclusively of African children.

In the cities, beginning in 1922, Belgian priests saw to the setting up of the first Boy Scout troops. The paramilitary character of Scouting, a movement originally secular in nature and, so, more in line with the state than with the church, was an exclusively Catholic phenomenon in the colony. It allowed the missionary to exercise control over his best pupils even after school hours. With activities such as trailblazing, tree climbing, knots, camping, and Morse code, the young people were taught both pride and discipline. The young Scout collected badges, said his pledge and cared for his uniform. The membership was never extremely large (around one thousand members in all of Congo), but it helped to cultivate a native elite with a sense of discipline and fidelity.
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A much larger group was reached through what was probably the most successful part of Belgian missionary work: soccer. Here too, Léopoldville and Elisabethville took the lead, starting around 1920. Missionaries in their cassocks explained the rules of the game, and in no time saw children and young people practicing with homemade balls and grapefruits in the dusty streets of the
cité
. The first teams were set up: Étoile and League in Léopoldville, Prince Charles and Prince Léopold in Elisabethville. In 1939, Léopoldville alone had fifty-three teams and six divisions. There were teams with shoes and barefoot
teams—playing in bare feet entailed milder passes, but greater agility. The matches were held on Sunday afternoons. In addition to hundreds of players, this also attracted thousands of supporters. Friends, colleagues, wives, and children screamed themselves hoarse from the sidelines. Soccer was more than recreation. It also had a formative side. A Flemish Benedictine noted contentedly: “Rather than spending their Sunday afternoons squatting in their huts and drinking
pombo
, or going out drinking in bars amid women of dubious virtue, they participate freely and out of doors in the sports that interest them.”
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A Marist brother was equally enthusiastic: “It keeps them, at least for a few hours, away from dancing and lolling about and, after benediction, allows them to spend a pleasant Sunday afternoon.”
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Just as soccer was propagated at the Flemish academies and boarding schools as a pressure valve for the excess sexual energy of boys, in the colony it was introduced to quell possible social unrest. In addition to an exuberant game, soccer was also a form of discipline. One had to attend training sessions, develop skills, control one’s reflexes, obey the rules and listen to the arbiter. Festive, yet restrained: an ideal colonial training ground. “Sport teaches the native . . . to comply with a discipline he takes upon himself,”
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was the way it was put.

In the streets of Kikwit in 2007 I occasionally saw a timeworn, yellow scooter race past, driven by an old white man. In itself that was quite exceptional: the few Europeans one saw always went by car, particularly the elderly among them. The scooter rider in question turned out to be Henri de la Kéthulle de Ryhove, a Jesuit of noble origin, well into his eighties and still tirelessly in action—for the last few years in particular in the fight against sickle-cell anemia, a hereditary illness. Père Henri was also the nephew of Raphaël de la Kéthulle, perhaps the most famous missionary in all of the Belgian Congo. His uncle owed that fame not to heroic proselytization deep in the jungle and not to the evangelical brightening up of a miserable leper
colony, no: Père Raphaël spent his life working in Kinshasa, teaching his people to play soccer. He was a Marist educator, part of the first batch of urban missionaries. The scion of an aristocratic Francophone family from Bruges, he himself had attended Sint-Lodewijks College. (It is a detail that makes me smile: I myself attended a former branch of that same college. At my school, too, three-quarters of a century and a Dutchifying shift later, soccer was still the major religion next to Christianity. Our paved schoolyard had the outlines of five or six soccer fields painted on it, there were five volleyball nets and two basketball hoops. We had four rather than two hours of mandatory gym each week. West Flemish Catholicism, despite the influence of Guido Gezelle—our own Gerard Manley Hopkins—still had more affinity with sports than with poetry.)