Congo. David Reybrouck van
often felt perfectly healthy. Swollen lymph glands in the neck were often their only complaint. The characteristic symptoms arose only during their stay at the field hospital itself. The lazarettes therefore developed a bad reputation: people believed they were camps where colonial officials had one intentionally infected with the sickness. Riots broke out and guards cracked down, but many patients ran away and went back to their villages.
When Belgium took over Congo, for the first time in colonial history a medical service was set up … in Brussels. The chain of command to the local post administrators in the bush was extremely long, yet policy was successfully tailored to fit the new situation. Field hospitals alone were not enough. From now on, the movements of all Congolese had to be monitored. A 1910 decree stated that all natives fell under a specific chefferie or sous-chefferie (territory administered by a chief or smaller unit).7 The boundaries of those areas were carefully demarcated, and existing territorial limits were taken into account. Anyone wishing to move over a distance of more than thirty kilometers (about nineteen miles) for the duration of more than one month, another decree from 1910 said, were obliged to carry with them a medical passport that stated their region of birth, state of health, and any treatments received to date. A passport could only be obtained with the approval of the village chief or sous-chef. Those already infected were kept under village arrest. Anyone traveling without the proper documents risked a fine.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of this measure, which had five far-reaching consequences. First, all Congolese, even those in perfect health, were no longer able to come and go as they pleased; their freedom of movement was severely curtailed. For a region with a permanently high degree of mobility, that took some getting used to. Second, each inhabitant was from now on pinned to a spot on the map, like a beetle to a piece of cardboard. The sense of belonging in the native communities had always been great, now it became absolute. One’s identity was from then on chiseled in granite. Third, the local chefs became part of the local administration. That process had started already in Stanley’s day (see the case of Makitu), but now it was formally confirmed. They constituted the bottom rung on the ladder of the official hierarchy and fulfilled an intermediary role between the state and its subjects. The colonial government, of course, preferred to work with docile local leaders. The officially appointed chief, therefore, was often a weak character with little moral authority; the real, traditional chieftain remained in the lee, in order to go on ruling as before.8 Fourth, because the average chefferie comprised no more than a thousand inhabitants, larger ethnic entities dissolved.9 The village fell directly under the authority of the state, and intermediate levels vanished. That too had an impact on tribal awareness: nostalgia arose for a former glory. And fifth, for many, the laws originating in faraway Brussels were their first immediate encounter with colonial bureaucracy. During the era of the Free State, hundreds of thousands of Congolese had been brought under the yoke of the distant oppressor; now, in principle, there was no one who remained out of reach. The number of Belgian colonials remained quite limited (a few thousand in 1920), but the colonial apparatus tightened its grip on the population and penetrated further and further into the life of the individual.
The state: in 1885 that had been a lone white man who asked the head of your village to fly a blue flag. The state: in 1895 that was an official who came to conscript you as a bearer or soldier. The state: in 1900 that was a black soldier who came to your village, roaring and shooting, all for a few baskets of rubber. But in 1910 the state was a black assistant nurse on the village square who felt your lymph glands and said that it was good.
The colonial administration hoped to get started quickly with a large-scale medical examination of the population; King Albert allocated more than a million Belgian francs to that end, but World War I delayed the process. Starting in 1918, however, teams of Belgian physicians and Congolese nurses began traveling from village to village, and many hundreds of thousands of villagers were tested. The state: that was the men with microscopes who frowned gravely as they looked at your blood. The state: that was the gleaming, sterile hypodermic needle that slid into your arm and injected some kind of mysterious poison. The state literally got under your skin. Not only was your countryside colonized, but so was your body and your self-image. The state: that was the medical pass that said who you were, where you came from, and where you were allowed to go.
Lutunu’s life, in any case, became much more domestic as a result. The man who had been to every corner of his country, in addition to making trips to Europe and Ámerica, now remained in his village year after year. As assistant to an adolescent village chieftain, he probably advised the white supervisor about who was eligible for a travel pass and who was not. It need come as no surprise that this system left the door wide open for abuses. Passports were highly coveted, and some chiefs, clerks, and nurses were open to bribes. In the hope of obtaining a new, blank passport, villagers who wished to travel but had only recently been treated for sleeping sickness claimed to have lost their medical papers. Many people viewed the white man’s medicine with profound suspicion. Atoxyl could blind you and the spinal taps used to treat the worst cases were very painful. Yet this is not to say that the people lived in irrational fear of everything wearing a white coat. Some treatments met with general approval, such as the operative removal of tumors caused by elephantiasis, but hypodermic needles were commonly seen as a way to spread diseases. The colonizer clearly underestimated the deep attachment to traditional medicine and rejected it out of hand as quackery and mumbo-jumbo. For many Africans, this made sleeping sickness the white man’s disease, part and parcel of military domination, economic exploitation, and the political reshuffle.
And in all of this, physicians had power, a great deal of power. Doctors decided who could go where. They established the boundaries of those areas where travel was forbidden. They could force recalcitrant individuals to undergo treatment, and even punish them. They even had the authority to have entire villages moved, should there be sound public-health reasons for doing so. Village communities in areas where the tsetse fly flourished could be forced to pack up and move collectively. And should such a village refuse, doctors could call in the assistance of colonial officials and the Force Publique. More than healing individuals, this brand of medicine was intended to keep the colony on its feet.
After such mandatory migration, local communities often became disjointed. Bakongo tribespeople forced to leave their village behind sang with nostalgia and the blues: “Hey! Look at the village of our forefathers. / The shady village of palms that we were forced to leave. / Hey! The old folks? Hey! Hey! Hey! Our dead have vanished! / Hey! Look at our abandoned village! / Too bad!”10
Lutunu’s village was allowed to stay put. In order to reduce the risk of sickness, however, he did something no one in his village had ever done before: he built a house of stone. From then on he no longer slept beneath a thatched roof, between walls of clay, but in a brick hut with galvanized iron for a roof. By then, after all, there were enough carpenters and masons to be found in nearby Thysville. They knew how to make bricks from earth and how to nail down corrugated iron. Sleeping sickness had destroyed Lutunu’s family, but now he lived more or less like the white man did. Were his new brick walls hung, as a Belgian cabinet minister noted after a visit to a village chieftain in eastern Congo, with “extremely middling portraits of our rulers, as distributed everywhere by the colonial administration, and a few illustrations torn from magazines from Paris or London”? Did the occasional white visitor leave behind “a few pretty prints and a few tins of caramels” as a present?11 No one knows. What we do know is that a few years later the colonial administration appointed him chief of the region, and that, a former slave, he was given authority over no less than fifty-two villages.
THE SECOND GROUP OF SCIENTISTS to turn their attention to the colony were the ethnographers. If the scandal of the Free State had made anything clear, it was the total lack of understanding of native culture. Félicien Cattier, the eminent Brussels scholar and a virulent critic of Leopold, had been quite explicit about that: “How can one hope to carry out useful work in the colonies, if one fails to first submit the native institutions, their customs, their psychology, the conditions of their economic existence and their societies to careful study?”12 Some explorers and missionaries had shown interest in local customs, but many officers and agents of the Free State entertained rudimentary views, to say the least, about what they called “the