Throughout the project’s life span, we will regularly publish notes written by team members and guest researchers. These short pieces offer reflections on the methodologies, concepts, findings and experiences of scholars working in environmental humanities and Central African studies. The second research note, written by FORAGENCY student-intern Paul de Vos, is based on his archival enquiries about chieftainship, migration and colonialism in the territory of Isangi.
Research Note #2: Inferring Intent: Navigating Complex Colonial Networks in the Northern Congo Basin
This research note is a short overview of some of the ideas that I develop in my Master thesis, where I use a ‘contested coproduction’1 approach to research colonial political systems. In applying this method to the study of indigenous mobility and its regulation by colonial authorities in the Northern Congo basin, I have been confronted to several (metaphorical) roadblocks. In this post, I discuss some of these roadblocks, such as handling archival silences, and the subsequent issue of inferring intent to poorly documented movements by indigenous communities.
In its 1926 Rapport Annuel, the Aruwimi District Commissioner made an interesting remark regarding the Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB), one of the region’s main employers : “les difficultés de recrutement que [l’on] rencontre lorsqu’il s’agit d’entreprises éloignées, ont eu pour resultat [de] maintenir une main-d’oeuvre importante toute prête à s’offrir au travail sur place, afin de s’éviter l’expatriement.“2 The Commissioner thus suggests that HCB has been succesfully expanding its oil-palm concessionary operations within his District. This expansion was further supported by active efforts on the administration’s part to assist the HCB (and other concessions) by providing them with workers. Simultaneously to this reported success, however, indigenous informants to administrative agents reported a great animosity towards the HCB. Fleeing the company’s recruiter was, according to them, the most important reason for ‘illegal’ emigration – that is, unauthorised and unsupervised by the colonial administration. These movements were perceived by public servants as very concerning and were even labelled as a true ‘exodus’.3 This was by no means an isolated event. Throughout the colonial era, indigenous people migrated outside of their assigned chieftaincies and administrative regions without permission or documentation, settling on the margins of colonial control.
In a 2015 article on palm oil labour in interwar Southwest Congo, Henriet for instance examined the ways in which indigenous people manoeuvred grey areas in colonial law to their advantage, by living and working on the HCB Leverville palm groves in Western Congo, where they enjoyed greater freedom than in the villages in which the colonial administration expected them to reside. He also importantly problematizes the idea that these are necessarily new practices, stating that: “the lack of data encourages us to exercise caution in our perception of past events. Rather than resistance, adaptation seems to be a more suitable term to define the practices of elusiveness used to thwart the colonial schemes for surveillance and control.”4 For the 1926 Aruwimi District, a similar lack of data also complicates research on mobility and its regulation: can these actions, being the voluntary participation in colonial capitalism in order to maximize freedom, or the ‘illegal’ migrations to concessions in other administrative entities, be considered as “resistance”? What are the underlying opportunities, reasonings and decision-making processes that led some people to work for the HCB rather than facing expatriation, or to flee their ‘chefferie d’origine’ for remote clandestine villages? It is not immediately clear what conclusions can be drawn based on the sparse and one-sided source documents at my disposal. If reaching a comprehensive understanding of the diverse network of indigenous actors and their intentions is out of reach, minor archival details can nevertheless be enlightening, even and sometimes especially when administrators seemingly find them unimportant.
While the initial impulse for indigenous people to migrate in ways that breached colonial regulations might partially be a continuation of pre-colonial mobility in practise, the act of illegally emigrating multiple times in a row, despite being pursued and punished every time, is no longer just a continuation of precolonial practices. This extends to indigenous elites, intermediaries between the state and colonized subjects, and all others working within colonial structures. Customary authorities turning a blind eye to unsanctioned mobility in return for a bribe, is a clear example of manoeuvring their position as intermediary between the state and indigenous population, ignoring colonial duties when they ran against their interests.5 Not all indigenous adaptations could be called ‘resistance’; finding employment as pagayeurs and fisherfolk seems like an organic adaptation of pre-colonial riverine societies, for example.6 However, when ‘illegal’ migrants consciously and consistently go against colonial regulations, couldn’t they effectively be regarded as intentional resistance?
Let us take the following example. Throughout 1927, the Territorial Administrator of Modjamboli, District of of Bangala, made multiple reports to his superior, claiming to have expelled 15 Lokele families in November and 50 families in March. Among the 50 families expelled in March, half had already faced expulsion in August. The families who had previously been charged with illegal emigration, apparently had their confiscated documents returned to them after paying a notable from Basoko7 a small bribe after which they once again left their assigned Territory. The TA reported that these Lokele have since been expelled a second time, after the adult men being fined 50 francs each and condemned to 7 days of peine de travail. Despite this second conviction, and their papers being sent to Basoko once again, the TA reported that: “Peu après j’apprenais que ces indigènes s’étaient installés dans les îles entre Yakata et Bumba. Je fais effectuer des recherches, les coupables seront condamnés et expulsés à nouveau.”8 It is impossible to argue that these Lokele families would have been unaware of the ‘illegal’ nature of their movements, after their many run-ins with administrators’ ire. As such, they seem to have favoured ‘resistance’ over adaptation.
Figure 1: Letter on ‘Lokele Fugitifs’, to the District Commissioner of Aruwimi, by Territorial Administrator Sterckx of Bumba, 24/02/1928, Yambinga.9
While colonial government use of indigenous people’s names could possibly lend them some sense of individuality, particularly during interpersonal contact with field agents, this not why this information is conveyed in the letter above. In this February 1928 letter, the Territorial Administrator of Bumba communicates to the District commissioner of Aruwimi the identities of the ‘illegal migrants’ he had sent to Basoko, during administrative attempts to reverse the ‘Lokele Exodus’. The provided information on repatriated migrants, serves to label them as ‘illegals’, to track them by reporting on their location and trajectory, to judicially prosecute and sentence them, and to control their future movements. In short, indigenous personal traits served a mostly functional role as a series of unique identifiers. However, most were infrequently and poorly documented, with mentions rarely adding much detailed information on individuals. If a colonial subject was not a chieftain, a ‘notable’, or an otherwise influential person, chances are that there is no mention of them anywhere other than in administrative documents such as tax rolls, transfer passes, labour contracts, inoculation campaigns, or potentially judicial transcripts. Indigenous women had an even lower chance of being recorded; they were seen as being dependent of their male guardians, in the same way as children. They were merely labelled as ‘units’ in their husbands’ households? in colonial documentation, and were exempted from paying taxes10, and forbidden from performing wage labour without permission from her husband.11
Figure 2: Letter on ‘Exode Lokele, to the District Commissioner of Bangala, by Territorial Agent Daxhelet J. of Bumba, 26 March 1931.12
The above letter is an example of the aforementioned lack of documentation of indigenous women; the letter names 24 Lokele men, and states that they, along with their unnamed wives and children, have been sent back to their ‘chefferie d’origine’.
Would it then be possible to trace an indigenous individual’s history through colonial documentation? Theoretically, an adult male’s tax records, run-ins with the colonial courts (if any), transfer passes, and work contracts could broadly sketch his movements, occupation, genealogy, and major events, but collecting all of these documents poses an even greater problem. Archivists organize documents into archival files based on perceived important connections in content. Colonial archives are far from neutral. As Ann Laura Stoler famously argued, the ’archival grain’ fosters both intentional ‘silences’, where subaltern voices have been consciously excluded, and silences forming on the margin of colonial interest.13 Even if, by no small miracle, a reasonable amount of documentation concerning a single indigenous individual would thus have survived, chances are that it would be spread between different archival files and collections.
Some individuals, however, are easy to trace. Administrators, missionaries, businessmen, agents of the state, and other colonial stakeholders are granted with personal archival records. For instance, there are exactly 4 results for the name ‘Daxhelet’ in the Belgian State Archive database of people, who were involved in the colonies. Two of these results regard the same person, as indicated by a shared birth date, while the other two are unconfirmed. A close examination of these archives’ documents would demonstrate whether all four of these mentions refer to a single person. In practice, once that one holds the full name and birth date of a public servant, they are traceable.14 As such, even the lowest administrative tier of colonial agents, can be contextualized and studied more easily than almost any indigenous individual. By combining both along and against the archival grain analytical methods, we can mine Eurocentric sources for indigenous perspectives. These perspectives are usually brought up functionally, or to critique them in some way, an example of which can be found in administrative communications regarding the ‘illegal’ emigration of Lokele people from the District of Aruwimi between 1926 and 1931.
According to Lokele notables from the relevant chieftaincies, who were Isangi’s Territorial Administrator’s informants, the main driver for emigration was a reluctance to mandatory labour for the Isangi post, or the Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB). In a letter to his superior, the public servant disputes this, arguing that “J’ai organisé le pagayage qui nous est nécessaire de façon à ce que cette charge soit répartie aussi équitablement que possible parmi les différents villages avoisinant Isangi; d’autre part ils sont suffisamment rémunérés à cet effet. Les Lokele aiment d’un autre côté à aller travailler dans la Loleka, nous n’avons du reste pas à intervenir dans le recrutement de ces travailleurs.”15 While the original context of this paragraph serves to dispute these notables’ claims, it now provides a preciously scarce inclusion of indigenous voices, thus laying groundwork for inferring intent.
My ongoing work on the contested coproduction of mobility and its regulation is an experiment as much as a case study. One of the main roadblocks I am facing is the problem of deducing intent and reasoning from poorly documented actions and processes, in a contested space16. Despite this caveat, I think there is much potential in presenting one or several individuals’ trajectories in parallel with a more focused study on mobility, which is not as pre-occupied with visualizing a network of actors. Alternatively, it might be worth experimenting with building an archival file (using copies), with the connecting element being the involvement or mention of a single individual. No doubt this would be a major challenge, with no certainty of success or a worthwhile conclusion, and much room for error, but there is something cathartic about the concept, as a practical experiment in decolonizing an archival file.
Paul De Vos
Footnotes
1 ‘Contested coproduction’ refers to the understanding that an (eco-)system is complicated, and constantly rearranged as the outcome of ongoing and ephemeral multilateral ‘negotiations’ between a complex and heterogenous array of actors. These negotiations are not necessarily verbal, written, or otherwise ‘official’; acts of resistance and structural processes are examples of more abstract
2 This refers to enterprises in other Territories, Districts, or Provinces struggling to acquire sufficient labour from the region they are based in, requiring them to look for recruitment opportunities in other places. This labour was frequently involuntary and forced, as evidenced by the requirement for avoiding expatriation.
3 ‘Exode 1927-31 Emigrations Illegales’, AIMO FIN, GG 8775, Africa Archive, Belgian FPS Foreign Affairs.
4 Henriet, Benoît “Elusive natives”: escaping colonial control in the Leverville oil palm concession, Belgian Congo, 1923–1941, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 49:2, 2015, p. 339-336.
5 ‘Exode 1927-31 Emigrations Illegales’, AIMO FIN, GG 8775, Africa Archive, Belgian FPS Foreign Affairs.
6 Cooper, Frederick, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History.” The American Historical Review, vol. 99, no. 5, 1994, p. 1516–1545.
7 Administrative capital of the District of Aruwimi, seat of the District Commissioner.
8 ‘Exode 1927-31 Emigrations Illegales’, AIMO FIN, GG 8775, Africa Archive, Belgian FPS Foreign Affairs.
9 ‘Exode 1927-31 Emigrations Illegales’, AIMO FIN, GG 8775, Africa Archive, Belgian FPS Foreign Affairs.
10 Impôt indigène, 02/05/1910, BOCB 1910.
11 Contrat de louage de services et recrutement des travailleurs, 17/08/1910, BOCB 1910.
12 ‘Exode 1927-31 Emigrations Illegales’, AIMO FIN, GG 8775, Africa Archive, Belgian FPS Foreign Affairs.
13 Stoler, Ann Laura, Along the Archival Grain : Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton (N.J.): Princeton university press, 2009, p. 32-39.
14 State Archives of Belgium, Search for people, accessed 04/05/2024.
15 ‘Exode 1927-31 Emigrations Illegales’, AIMO FIN, GG 8775, Africa Archive, Belgian FPS Foreign Affairs.
16 ‘Contested space’ is used both to discuss a geographical area in which contested coproduction takes place, and a more abstract concept such as mobility in a colonial setting.
Photo credits: Village in the Stanleyville Territory, EP.0.0.2152, collectie KMMA Tervuren; foto R. Planche, 1907