Congo. David Reybrouck van
kind of slavery for us, the Congolese.”48
No less trying were the conditions at the Kilo-Moto gold mines in Orientale province. Only one out of every eight workers was there voluntarily, the rest had been press-ganged in local villages: human trafficking, in other words, and forced labor. Recruiters would pay a local chieftain ten francs for each laborer and take the young men away in chains. They were bound together at the neck by a wooden yoke or a noosed rope. In 1908 there were eight hundred workers, by 1920 more than nine thousand.49 In 1923, in diamond-rich Kasai, some twenty thousand Africans were working in the service of two hundred whites.50
Between 1908 and 1921, in other words, Congo experienced its first wave of industrialization, thereby prompting the proletarianization of its inhabitants. Men who had once been fishermen, blacksmiths, or hunters became wage laborers for a company. Even in this earliest phase, their numbers were large. In Katanga, where 60 percent of the laborers worked for Union Minière, the body of mineworkers grew from 8,000 in 1914 to 42,000 by 1921, and the number of railroad workers from 10,000 to 40,700. Together, Kasai and Orientale province were good for 30,000 workers, while another 30,000 migrant workers lived in Kinshasa and Léopoldville. The reason for this massive recruitment of African workers was simple enough: sweat costs less than gasoline.51
This proletarianization was not limited to industry alone. Agriculture too had need of manual laborers, especially now that white farmers had started coffee, cacao, and tobacco plantations. The most extensive agrarian employment of all, however, was in the palm oil sector. In Liverpool in 1884, a man named William Lever had started making soap on an industrial scale. The bars rolled from the production line, and he christened his product Sunlight. This company’s rise to become the Unilever multinational was due in part to the contribution of Congo. At first, the soap was made from palm oil that Lever purchased in West Africa. But when the British colonial administration there stopped providing favorable conditions, the Belgian state granted Lever an extremely sizeable concession in Congo in 1911. At his own discretion, he was allowed to stake out five circles with a sixty-kilometer (about a thirty-five-mile) radius in those areas where wild palms flourished, for a total holding of some 7.5 million hectares (about 29,000 square miles), two and a half times the size of Belgium. This was the start of the Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB), an enterprise that was particularly active in the south of Bandundu and grew to become a massive concern. Close to Kikwit, the town of Leverville arose. For the harvesting of palm nuts the company made use of thousands of Congolese, who climbed the trees in the traditional manner to cut down the clusters. Lever had a reputation as a great philanthropist, but very little that his company did bore witness to that in Congo. His employees earned a miserable twenty-five centimes a day and lived under primitive conditions. Press-ganging and the bribing of village chieftains took place. Dozens of villages had to pack up and move for the industry’s purposes. People today in Kikwit think back on that period with bitterness: this was worse than what the region had experienced under the rubber regime.52 It was something King Albert could hardly have suspected in 1912, when William Lever presented him with an ivory box containing the first bar of Sunlight soap manufactured with Congolese palm oil.
“I EARNED THREE FRANCS A MONTH,” Nkasi had told me. It was the first time in his life that he earned a wage, which was why he remembered it so clearly. The budding industrialization of Congo led not only to an initial form of urbanization and proletarianization, but also to a far-reaching process of monetization. For the first time, on a major scale, the population became involved with a concept as abstract as money. Formal currencies were nothing new: in Bas-Congo people had been paying with white seashells since time immemorial; in Katanga the currency took the form of crafted copper crosses; in other parts of the country they paid with mitakos, the copper bars introduced by the first colonizers. But such currencies were brought to bear only for very special transactions. There was as yet nothing like a widespread monetary economy. But that changed soon enough. In the year 1900 no more than few hundred workers in Bas-Congo, most of whom worked on the railroad, were on a payroll; by 1920, when Nkasi moved to Kinshasa, there were already 123,000 such employees scattered across the country. And that was before the real employment boom began: in 1929 there were some 450,000 paid workers. Congo became a monetary economy.53
That monetization had a major impact. Once again, the state was overtly intruding into everyday life. One could no longer buy a chicken from the neighbors without symbolic government involvement. The centuries-old barter system, a transparent system of exchange between individuals, was pushed out by an abstract system imposed by the state. People had no choice but to assume that these strange pieces of paper showing a white woman in a white tunic had any effective value at all. “Banque du Congo-Belge” one read, printed in stately letters on that first Congolese banknote, “un franc”—at least, for those who could read. The woman, who had rather Hellenic look to her, wore a tiara. Her left arm rested on a big wheel, and with her right she embraced a sheaf of wheat.54 This was obviously intended as an allegory for agriculture and industry, but the average Congolese was not very familiar with neoclassical graphics and kitsch. In the early 1920s, however, the local coins came one step closer to local reality: they bore the imprint of an oil palm, m’bila in a number of the native languages.55 The people recognized it as a literal link between state and industry: Lever’s concern soon became known as Compagnie m’bila. Money, that was barter with the factory. You gave them your body, they gave you your wages.
An advantage of all this, however, was that it now became much easier to collect taxes. One no longer needed to pay in kind or with labor for his mandatory membership in the state. Gone were the days of toting burdens, paddling upriver or collecting rubber to serve the white man; gone was the rule that one had to serve the state for forty hours each month. When Belgium assumed control of Congo, it first introduced a system whereby goods other than rubber could serve as tax—the colonial revenue department was equally pleased to received bars of manioc, copal, palm oil, or chickens—but went on after a time to express its preference for taxation in the form of hard cash. When a missionary asked him in 1953 to describe the course of his long life, Joseph Njoli, a man from Équateur, remembered that quite clearly:
After rubber, they imposed on us a tax in fish and manioc. After the fish came the palm oil and wood that we had to bring to the regional administrator at Ikenge. His name was Molo, the white man who lived at Ikenge with the river people. The chores we were given to do took many forms … Then there came another white man, Lokoka. He stopped the work we had been doing and brought us money. He said: “You people may now pay taxes with money. Everyone has to pay four-and-a-half francs.” That was how money was introduced to the black people. And now we still live in slavery to the Belgians.56
Four and a half francs a year: that was not particularly exorbitant. The tax burden was kept light on purpose. In 1920 that sum was the equivalent of six kilos (thirteen pounds) of rubber, or forty-five kilos (a hundred pounds) of palm nuts, forty-five kilos of palm oil, thirty-five kilos (seventy-seven pounds) of copal resin, nine chickens, half a goat, or a few dozen loaves of manioc.57
On paper, the Belgian Congo wished to put an end to the noxious practices of the Free State, but in actual practice things went quite differently. In those zones where international big business had settled, new forms of exploitation and bond service arose. Migratory waves were set in motion that did more to disorganize the country than to help it recover. Young men ended up in shabby workers’ camps, while only women and old people remained behind in their villages. Much of the misery in the period from 1918 to 1921 could be blamed on the four long years of World War I, but a great deal of misery had already gone before. It would be a mistake to pass the blame off on that accursed conflict. The Great War was not the cause, but it did make the situation worse.
ON NOVEMBER 11, 2008, the rain was pounding down over Kinshasa. This was, even by equatorial standards, an unusually heavy downpour. What fell were not drops, but rivulets of glass, liquid test tubes. Traffic in the city ground to a halt, horns honked incessantly as though ordering the puddles to dry up, and the courtyard of the Maison des Anciens Combattants was reduced to a swimming pool. During the 1950s this building had been an open-air movie theater; now it served as a club for the veterans of the many wars Congo has seen, a daily gathering place for its members. “It’s unbelievable,” a Belgian