Recalling the Belgian Congo

Conversations and Introspection

Marie-Bénédicte Dembour

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780857457127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

When the author embarked on her study, her aim was to approach former colonial officers with a view to analyzing processes of domination in the ex-Belgian Congo. However, after establishing a rapport with some of these officers, the author was soon forced to revise her initial assumptions, widely held in present-day Belgium: these officers were not the "baddies" she had expected to meet.

Exploring the colonial experience through the respondents' memories resulted in a far more complex picture of the colonial situation than she had anticipated, again forcing her to question her original assumptions. This resulted not only in a more differentiated perspective on Belgian colonialist rule, but is also sensitized her as regards the question of anthropological understanding and of what constitutes historical fact.

These two aspects of her work are reflected in this study that offers specific material on the way Belgian colonialism is remembered and reflects on its conditions of production, thus combining ethnographic analysis with a theoretical essay.

1: INTRODUCTION

Writing about colonialism

This book is based on interviews I conducted in the late 1980s with senior men in Belgium. Middle-class and generally retired, they lived in comfortable homes, spoke of trips abroad they had taken or were about to take, had pictures of their grandchildren displayed in their living-rooms, could have been experiencing family, health or financial worries which they did not share with me. They were both tall and short, large and slim, intelligent and dull, prompt to smile and severe, listening to themselves or attentive to comments expressed by others. Nothing in their dress, speech or demeanour distinguished them as a group from their peers of the same nationality, class and generation. They share¹ one thing, however, and this is that they began their adulthood as colonial officers in the Belgian Congo.

A few decades ago when they were in their early twenties, they had joined the main branch of the Belgian colonial administration, i.e. the territorial service, more commonly known as the Territoriale.² The oldest among my interviewees had become territorials in the late 1920s, but the great majority had done so soon after the Second World War had ended. The latter left the service ten to fifteen years later, at a time when they had not completed a full territorial career. The riots which broke out in January 1959 in the capital, Leopoldville, triggered the unforeseen process towards independence, which was declared on 30 June 1960. Most territorials then returned to Belgium, often in a precipitous way and sometimes narrowly escaping the violence which erupted a few days after the declaration of independence.³ They were not prepared for this sudden and stressful return. By all accounts, the first months in Belgium were difficult. But, in time, they found good jobs, moved into proper accommodation, developed a social circle of friends and acquaintances. They blended back into Belgian society. When I met them, most were in their late sixties, some older and a few slightly younger.

I was asking them to talk about a subject which they normally avoid today. (When I say ‘today’, I refer loosely to the period during which this research was conducted). The Congo is no longer an active part of their present. It has become less and less relevant to their day-to-day concerns, less and less worth talking about. As one interviewee said without any apparent nostalgia, ‘it has ceased to interest anyone.’ One could simply say that time has passed on. But this fading-away process, arguably common to all past events, is combined with a definite reluctance on their part to talk about a period which many qualify as the most beautiful time of their life. Such reserve can be attributed to a double bitterness. On one hand, these men watch the continual disintegration of the country in which they worked, and this fills them with sadness and regret.⁴ On the other, they prefer to ‘shut up’ rather than expressing reminiscences aloud and thus risking being labelled colonialists.

‘Colonialist’, the big word has been uttered. It obviously derives from ‘colonialism’. The latter term is one which I had carefully avoided in the first draft of this work, for I had sensed my informants would instantly and persistently object to it. Instead, I had used the term ‘colonisation’, presuming that it constituted an appropriate translation of the French ‘colonisation’. I was wrong. The two words differ more than by their respective pronunciation. The French term can refer to the ‘colonial regime’, i.e. the set of institutions put in place in order to ensure the effective governing of a colony. By contrast, the English term can only refer to the action of ‘colonising’. In other words it connotes the idea of moving in and establishing oneself where one has yet to set foot, without being able to encompass the idea of a colonial regime already in place. To express this idea in English, one needs to turn to the term ‘colonialism’. Thus the Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘colonialism’ in the following way: ‘1.a. The practice or manner of things colonial…2. The colonial system or principle’ (1989). The Concise Oxford Dictionary similarly offers a ‘down-to-earth’ definition of ‘colonialism’: ‘a policy of acquiring or maintaining colonies’ (1989). Both dictionaries go on to note that ‘colonialism’ has acquired a derogatory sense and is now frequently used to refer to an ‘alleged policy of exploitation of backward or weak peoples by a large power’. However, they do not present this definition as the first meaning of the term. By contrast, the Lexis-Larousse (1989) provides the following definition of ‘colonialisme’: doctrine which only considers the interest of the coloniser in colonial practice.⁵ Considering the way in which the term ‘colonialisme’ is predominantly used in French today,⁶ the reader will not be surprised to hear that the interviewees who read my work were not happy with my repetitive use of the term ‘colonialism’.

My explanation that ‘colonisation’ did not offer an appropriate English translation to its apparent French equivalent failed to satisfy them. For them, my insistence on using the word which ended in ‘ism’ proved that I held the colonial experience in a negative light. The semantic discussion above could suggest otherwise. At the same time, I have to accept that the pejorative connotations of the term ‘colonialism’ cannot be brushed aside. Furthermore, I cannot but see that we, the former territorials on one hand and me on the other, hold different and perhaps irreconcilable memories of colonialism.

Discordant colonial memories

The juxtaposition of two texts can usefully introduce our respective memories of colonialism. The first text comes from the degree thesis of a Belgian historian graduate who had worked on the Territoriale. As she explains in a subsequent piece of writing, she considers herself to be the ‘faithful interpreter’ of the former territorials she interviewed (Tancré-Van Leeuw 1992: 410). The second text is extracted from a book written by two leading political scientists on Zaire. They would probably wish to dissociate themselves from the group of the colonisers. To quote them in turn:

[The territorial administrators] were up early and late to bed. Their nights were sometimes interrupted to perform duties as judicial police officers. Holidays could not always be respected, annual vacations not always taken. Touring took about half their time, and they were sometimes the only Europeans amongst the Africans. Confidences shared at night around the fire, storytelling…Moments of grace which made it possible for them to know, understand and value the African auxiliaries and the administered populations…. The territorial administrators were always a principal driving force behind the colonising enterprise (Tancré-Van Leeuw 1992: 401–02).

Basically, Africa was called upon to organise and finance its own subjugation and exploitation. The only reproductive resource for accomplishing this purpose was African labor. Very quickly, colonial states directed their attention to self-financing means for its expropriation.

The primary instrument for accomplishing this end was direct taxation. Although its revenue yield was not great, in the early stages it made a significant contribution to colonial budgets. More importantly, the fiscal obligations coerced rural populations into cash crop production, the exported portion of which could be taxed again. In addition, young men were driven into the labor market (Young and Turner 1985: 23).

The first quotation conveys a sense of territorial devotion, genuine interest in the Africans, and indispensible presence in the colonial machinery; the second places oppression at the centre of the colonial project. One could say that each emerges from a different memory of colonialism: the first from a memory of ‘colonisation’ (as in colonial days), the second of ‘colonialisme’ (as in colonialist pursuit) – to return to the distinction made by the French language. One can further suggest that these two memories correspond, broadly speaking, to the different memories with which the interviewees and I entered the research project. The text of Tancré-Van Leeuw would represent the memory of the interviewees, that of Young and Turner mine.

It may seem strange to refer to my holding a memory of colonialism. Considering I was born one year after the Congolese independence, I obviously do not have any personal reminiscences of the colonial days. Nevertheless I have heard about the Congo since I was a child, and this has shaped my memory of colonialism. By the time of my young adulthood, I possessed the ‘knowledge’ that colonialism was synonymous with domination and oppression – two concepts I did not bother to distinguish. This I had learnt by accepting, and associating myself with, a discourse prevalent in various circles of society, but most visibly among leftist activists, journalists and scholars. I would readily have denounced colonialism for its presumably absolute and unredeemable imperialistic, exploitative and racist evils. In other words, my memory is an emanation of a collective memory, a personal variation on a theme widely shared in society.

By contrast, my informants obviously have reminiscences of the years they spent in the Congo. In this sense, they hold plural memories of the colonial experience. I nonetheless feel entitled to suggest that they share a distinctive, and almost single, memory. This is so not only because they worked in broadly similar conditions in the Congo, but also because they have been confronted since their return to Belgium with the same judgment on colonialism, against which they have had to react. In other words, their memories are organised along sufficiently similar lines to be contrasted, as a whole, to my own memory of colonialism.

The ever-transforming process of memory

When the interviews took place in the late 1980s, a minimum of three decades had elapsed since the events they evoked had occurred. After such a time, the interviewees' accounts could only take the form of general statements and allegoric stories about ‘what the Congo was like’. Of course, each territorial experience had been unique. A territorial career had led a man through a series of posts which all had a specificity of their own. Each post had been inscribed in a particular geographical milieu. It regrouped smaller or greater numbers of Whites, was inhabited by long-rooted or migrant populations, which all held diverse traditions. Africans were engaged in different economic activities, ranging from ‘traditional’ agriculture, to work on plantations and in the mining industry, to trade and services. There must have been a real diversity of places,⁷ but also of times. The 1930s, for example, had little to do with what happened in the Second World War, or these years with the 1950s (to mention but three periods). However, the interviews hardly unravel this diversity. What emerges from them is a fairly uniform sketch. Listening to the interviewees, the singularity of each individual history can easily be missed. The minute details of what had happened here and there, at such and such a time, are most often lost. This lack of contextual and historial contours need not be seen as a defect, even though it must be reckoned with. In particular, I think one would be ill-advised to attempt to reconstruct the histories of the social configurations which constituted the, ‘terrain’ of the colony solely from interviews of the kind I conducted. This is why I like to stress that this book is about memory, the act of recalling the past, rather than being about the past as such.⁸ Let me therefore say a few words about the way memory works. More will be said about it in chapter 5.

The first crucial fact about memory is to recognise that its primary function is not to store and keep the past intact, but to help the individual adjust to the requirements of the present (Hunter 1957). To live in the present, we need to be aware of our past (as well as our future). Memory organises our past for us. It does so through processes such as structuration and synthetisation, which can only distort the past reality. The interviewees obviously presented me with a transformed vision of their past experiences. I did not conceive this as a major problem though, for I am not attempting to provide the reader with a historical account of the Congo. Instead I wish to discuss the ways in which we remember the Congo today and what these ways tell us about ourselves – our visions of life, ethics, self and other.

The second crucial fact about memory is that it is not a process that takes place internally in the mind of an individual, as if in isolation. The social environment in which it takes place directly influences its direction and outcome. In his seminal work on collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs (1925) had already noted that it is most often an external request which prompts us to remember. His observation applies to the interview situation where the interviewer asks the interviewee to recall events, atmospheres, situations. Were it not for me, the former territorials I interviewed would not have searched their memory for reminiscences the way they did. There is more, however, to the social dimension of memory than the mere prompting of answers through questions. The overall social context influences how things get remembered. Thus, both the memory of colonialism of the former territorials and my own developed in response to the way in which the colonial past is talked about, reflected upon, and remembered in Belgium today.

That memory is a social process comes through in chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 3, I describe the way the memory of colonialism I built in my childhood and young adulthood influenced the way I formulated my research project. I also discuss the unexpected influence which meeting and listening to former territorials had on the original project. In the following chapter, I concentrate on the interviewees' memory. I show that what they told me was as much shaped by the present memory of colonialism in Belgium, coming through the media, as by their original experience – which itself combined individual and social elements at the moment it was originally lived. In other words, their memories were not made up of reminiscences directly dating back to the 1930s, 40s or 50s. It was also a response to the way in which the Congo has been talked about in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

This has to be so, for memory is never static. It is constantly transformed through the present lens, which soon becomes a past layer to be reckoned with in the next act of remembering. Adopting such an approach is not to deny that ‘facts’ occurred in the past – as they do in the present and will in the future. The development of revisionist theories regarding the Second World War poignantly demonstrates the need to recognise the existence of facts which cannot be interpreted, reinterpreted, or simply erased.⁹ To try to get out of this conundrum, I could say that I am leaving to historians the task of questioning informants' statements before considering them as evidence. But this would amount to an unacceptable cop-out. I somehow have to assess the plausibility of the statements I have heard. What I can say is that I have attempted to write this book with historical awareness. At the same time, my main interest nonetheless lies with what both myself and the former territorials have to say, or feel like saying, about colonialism, how this is in tune with our respective memories of colonialism, and what this in turn can tell us about the anthropological project.

A reflexive and diaological ethnography

The debates about colonialism which recurrently take place in Belgium made me acutely aware that I was ‘in the way’ of the material I was setting out to collect (Agar 1980). On that count only, I felt my influence on the interviews was worth examining. This exercise could be assimilated to a critical assessment of the sources of my work. While necessary, I would argue that this kind of reflexivity would not be going far enough. My ‘voice’ also deserves scrutiny because it is as socially determined as the voice of the interviewees (Kapferer 1988: 95). In my view, this made it compelling to consider myself as a personage whose immediate role in the interviews and position in the prevailing discourse on colonialism must be an object of analysis (cf Spencer 1989: 157). This task, which I tackle throughout the book but especially in chapter 3, can be seen as the hallmark of a reflexive approach. To me, however, my reflexive intention is most crucially expressed in my attempt to elucidate the way my involvement with the former territorials made my thoughts evolve.¹⁰

In the last paragraph, the reference to ‘my voice’ or ‘personage’ is misleading in that it conceals the fact that there were various ‘I’s in the course of the research – and in the text. At least three can be distinguished: the naively anti-colonial at the outset of the research, the almost converted to the view of the informants during the early and most intense interviewing period, the analytically critical at the time of writing. But even this typification is a simplification, for these three different persons were not as chronologically situated as the description above seems to indicate. In effect, they did not so much succeed each other as co-exist in various degrees at all times, with all the contradictions this implies. How and why they had, and have, to overlap, is a central concern of this work. To demonstrate the impossibility of a definite synthesis between the various ‘I’s of the research – and thus between the conflicting memories of colonialism, I adopt a reflexive approach, which pays explicit attention to my succeeding states of mind(s).¹¹

Reflexivity is sometimes heralded as a guarantee of transparency. There is no reason why this should be the case. Jules Romains recognised exactly that, some sixty years ago, when he remarked in one of his novels that the author of a scientific essay never allows his reader to share the whole process which led him to his results. To quote him, speaking through the main character of the novel: ‘In fact, [the scientist] has done the real work for himself, previously, and we shall only ever know of it...