Stanleyville

An African Urban Community Under Belgian Administration

Valdo Pons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429944369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1969, this is a study of the Congolese community of Kinsangani (formerly Stanleyville), as it was in 1952-3 under Belgian administration. It pays particular attention to the tribal heterogeneity of the community, and to the processes of absorption of urban-dwellers who made up substantial proportions of the population. Although by comparison with Kinshasa and Lubambashi, Kisangani was a minor boom-town and by far the largest and most diversified urban centre in a vast and varied region. The book analyses the diversity and growth of the community and traces some of the many social implications for day to day life of ethnic heterogeneity and rapid population increase, developing concepts of cleavage and solidarity in changing urban communities in Southern and Central Africa. It emphasizes similarities as well as differences in the varied patterns and processes of African urbanization.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

I

SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY

I

For many years interest in the sociology of African towns lagged far behind that accorded to the institutions of African tribes. This was perhaps natural as long as colonial policies tended to restrict the African’s role in economic development to peasant agriculture and to low-paid manual work in other industries. African towns remained essentially European—and in some regions partly Asian—centres. They did of course have some permanent African urban-dwellers but in most regions of sub-Saharan Africa the truly permanent townsman was the exception rather than the rule, and the vast majority of new immigrants normally returned to their tribal areas after varying periods of wage-earning in town. Under these circumstances African urbanism attracted little systematic study. A few pioneer urban studies were conducted by social anthropologists in the 1930s and these have often been cited. But they were exceptions.

During and after World War II the situation changed rapidly. By the mid-1950s urbanization was, in the considered opinion of Davis and Golden, ‘probably going ahead faster (in Africa) than anywhere else in the world’.¹ Many African urban-dwellers were still essentially migrant labourers, as indeed many are today, but substantial communities of permanent and semi-permanent town-dwellers were growing rapidly at the very time that the African colonial world was becoming increasingly involved in a spiral of economic expansion and momentous political change. This naturally led to a much greater interest in African towns. A number of social anthropologists followed the lead given by the few who had pioneered urban studies in the 1930s, and they were in turn joined by numbers of social surveyors, sociologists, political scientists, labour economists, urban geographers, and others. As a result the literature on African towns grew rapidly in the 1950s and, as early as 1958, it was possible for Denis to compile a bibliography of nearly 400 items on one or other aspect of urbanization in Central Africa alone.² Moreover, since the early 1950s we have had periodic attempts to assess the progress made and to compare reports from different regions of the continent.³

In spite of this increased interest, however, Epstein’s assessment of African urbanism as largely virgin territory is to some intents and purposes almost as valid today as it was ten years ago.⁴ There are two main reasons for this. The first is simply that Africa is large and diverse. A significant piece of analysis in one region may provide valuable insights and stimulus to research workers in another, but it also often serves to remind us how varied conditions are and how much exploratory work remains to be done. Secondly, progress has often appeared to be slow partly because much of the work conducted in the past consisted of social surveys which were often designed to do little more than gather basic data which sociologists in more ‘advanced’ countries do not normally have to collect for themselves.⁵ Yet there is some definite progress. As the more significant studies make their appearance, particular problem features of African urbanism are more clearly specified. It then becomes possible for investigators to select problems more meaningfully and thus to study problems of general relevance rather than simply to describe particular communities.

The above remarks are directly relevant to the aim and scope of the present study. The original field data used in this book were gathered in Stanleyville in the early 1950s either before or about the same time as researches such as those of Balandier and his associates in parts of French Africa, of Epstein and Mitchell on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), of Mayer in East London, South Africa, and of Southall in Uganda. The Stanleyville investigations carried out by my colleagues and myself were thus inevitably launched with very limited guidance from past work. We had certain notions of African urbanism derived from a few of the earlier studies such as Hellman’s and Wilson’s.⁶ Valuable as these were, however, they could not in the absence of other studies give us much sense of direction in approaching an urban situation which clearly differed very appreciably from a slum yard in Johannesburg or a mining compound in Northern Rhodesia. Moreover, not only had Stanleyville itself never before been visited by a sociologist, but its immediate hinterland had received virtually no attention from professional social anthropologists. We thus knew little about the main tribes in the town. As can be seen from our early field reports, we reacted to the difficulties confronting us by launching a series of investigations which struck us as obvious starting points.⁷ Our principal objective was to conduct a general community study involving research into household, kinship, and neighbourhood groupings, into associations connected with recreational, religious, political, and other activities, into the work situation, and into social mobility and social stratification.⁸

The present volume uses some of the data previously published by my colleagues and myself, but it is not an attempt either to re-analyse or to bring together all our findings. Nor is it an attempt necessarily to fill in any particular gaps. It is, more specifically, a study of the social implications of some prominent features of Stanleyville as it was in the early 1950s and an attempt to interpret these features of Stanleyville under colonial rule in the light of work reported from other regions of the continent since the time of our study. The main features of the town to which the study draws particular attention are its extreme tribal heterogeneity, the rapid growth of its immigrant population, and the system of urban administration established by the Belgians in centres specifically designated as centres extracoutumiers. All three features struck us forcibly as we began our researches and each clearly had far-reaching implications in all spheres of community life.⁹

Though focusing more particularly on the social implications of selected features of Stanleyville, I try throughout this book to maintain the ‘community study approach’ which was central to the original investigations. Although I do not attempt to give a comprehensive account of the community I constantly relate the observations reported to their overall community context. To enable me to do this, I devote the first chapter of Part II to a general description of the nature and growth of the town with special reference to the conditions under which Africans lived and worked, and in the remaining chapters of Part II, I concentrate on the analysis of a series of social and demographic data drawn from a random sample of the entire African population of the town.

Part III consists mainly of an account of certain aspects of social relations in one corner of the town. This account is in effect a small-scale community study on its own, though even here I do not attempt to give a detailed description of the ‘whole’ of social life as is commonly attempted in community studies. Instead I dwell primarily on the nature of social relationships between men. As explained in Chapter VII, however, relations between men were very directly affected by relations between the sexes. In Chapter VIII, I therefore analyse the salient features of the way in which men and women were paired in the town. To do this I once again use data gathered from a sample of the entire population and am thus brought back to the community as a whole and to a further comparison of the neighbourhood studied in detail and other parts of the town.

Parts II and III of the book are thus distinct but complementary. They can, I believe, be read independently of each other and in either order. They are linked by their common interest in tribal heterogeneity, in the rapid growth of numbers, and in the system of urban administration, but each is concerned with social phenomena of an intrinsically different kind. Part II is historical, demographic and sociographic; Part III is sociological and it studies aspects of the system of social relations. In Part II we are simply laying bare the way in which certain characteristics of the population were associated with each other; in doing this we are progressively defining the overall situation within which social relations were enacted, but we are not focusing on the nature of urban social relations as such. Data gathered by survey methods do not easily lend themselves to analysis of day-to-day behaviour. To move beyond the sociographic level we have to use field materials of a different kind; we need information not on the characteristics of individuals but essentially on their behaviour and on the build-up of incidents in day-to-day life. Part III is thus based largely on direct observations and on case histories, and its focus is not so much on categories of persons as on categories of social relations and of situations.

Finally, in Part IV, I attempt to bring together the main findings of Parts II and III and to assess some of the general features of social relations in the wider urban community.

II

The starting point of the study lies in the every-day observation that the population of Stanleyville was extremely heterogeneous in its tribal composition. At the beginning of the field work it was immediately apparent that this heterogeneity had a far-reaching influence on the system of social relations in the community. At the same time it was equally apparent that this influence was closely interrelated with other influences, and particularly with social differentiation seemingly based on education, occupation, and other experiences and achievements in the urban world. Following the usage of Mitchell in The Kalela Dance, I employ the terms ‘tribalism’ and ‘class’ to refer to these two broad principles of differentiation, but it will be seen that in the course of the study I tend to discard ‘class’ altogether and in many instances use ‘tribalism’ only as an indication of a general kind of differentiation. At the present stage, however, the use of the two terms is convenient.

The initial questions which struck me concerning ‘tribalism’ and ‘class’ in Stanleyville can be explained very simply by imagining two observers being conducted on casual visits to two different neighbourhoods in the town. One observer could well have been taken to an area where there was a marked tendency for members of the same tribe to live next to each other. Most of his observations here would have suggested the existence of discrete tribal neighbourhoods each with a relatively self-sufficient social life. Thus, for example, he might well have been told that the incidence of ‘mixed’ or non-tribal marriages in the area was low and that the inhabitants tended to organize the greater part of their neighbourhood and other leisure-time activities on a largely exclusive tribal basis.¹⁰ He might also have noticed that people habitually conversed in their tribal vernacular, and that at least some white-collar employees tended to mix casually with illiterate migrants and to participate with them in a whole series of encounters as diverse as casual drinking and gossiping in a bar to tribal dancing on the occasion of a mourning ceremony. On the basis of such observations our first observer could well have thought that ‘tribalism’ remained the predominant influence affecting day-to-day life in town.

The second observer could, however, have been taken to a neighbourhood where there was no readily discernible evidence of ethnic residential concentration, and where members of many different tribes lived side by side and commonly shared the same dwelling-compounds, and sometimes the same houses. Here he would have heard most inhabitants conversing in one or both of the linguae francae of Swahili and Lingala (and occasionally in French) and he would have seen people mixing in public places, such as bars and dance halls, where the use of a tribal vernacular would have sounded quaint. On inquiry he would have discovered that in this area the incidence of non-tribal marriages was high and that informal friendship groups and formal voluntary associations commonly consisted of members of different tribes. Moreover, in such a neighbourhood he might well have encountered a measure of anti-tribal sentiment and perhaps met people ready to argue that in Kizungu (‘in the place of the Europeans’) ‘tribe counts for nothing’, or that, ‘unlike our fathers, we no longer look at tribe nowadays’. This second observer could thus understandably have come away with the impression that the principle of ‘tribalism’ was no longer of major importance in the community. Indeed, he might well have been struck by quite another feature, namely the differing ways of life of French-speaking évolués and of the relatively uneducated masses of manual workers.

In general, then, our two observers might well have formed seemingly contradictory impressions concerning the importance of ‘tribalism’ and ‘class’. Had they been given the opportunity to wander around the town for any length of time, however, they would have been compelled to modify their first impressions. The fact is that the manner and the extent to which ‘tribalism’ and ‘class’ operated to bring people together or to set them apart varied markedly within the community. We are thus natural...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Plates
• Maps and Diagrams
• Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Postscript On a Return Visit to Kisangani in July 1967
• Part One. Introduction
• I Scope and Methodology
• Part Two. The Context of Social Relations
• II THE NATURE OF THE TOWN AND OF ITS AFRICAN COMMUNITY
• III Demographic and Social Selection
• IV Ethnic Colonies
• V Immigrants and Differentiated Neighbourhoods
• Part Three. The Nature of Social Relations
• VI Neighbourhood Relations
• VII The Social Relations of Three Men from Avenue 21
• VIII Relations Between the Sexes
• Part Four. Summary and Conclusions
• IX Avenue 21 and the Wider Community
• Notes on the Social Survey and on the Survey Tracts
• B Additional tables
• C Building a house
• D Extracts from Lusaka’s autobiography
• E Transcriptions of the official records of three matrimonial cases heard before the C.E.C. court
• F Some letters written from gaol by Kisubi to his brother Lusaka
• G Lusaka’s daily diary between 27.8.52 and 12.10.52
• H Lusaka’s recipts and payments from 31.1.53 to 31.3.53
• I Patrice’s daily diary between 14.9.52 and 31.1.53
• J Some letters by and to Patrice between 18.1.52 and 31.9.52
• K Some letters by Limela and Henri, the brother of Limela’s wife Rosina, between 2.10.52 and 2.1.53
• References
• Index