A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo 9780822381365

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A COLONIAL LEXICON

BODY, COMMODITY, TEXT Studies of Objectifying Practice A series edited by Arjun Appadurai, Jean Comaro√, and Judith Farquhar

A COLONIAL LEXICON Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and

Mobility in the Congo

NANCY ROSE HUNT

Duke University Press

Durham & London

1999

This book is made possible in part by an award from the University of Michigan Publication Subvention Program funded by the O≈ce of the Vice President for Research, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; and the International Institute. ∫ 1999 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

CONTENTS

Illustrations vii Abbreviations xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction

1

1

Crocodiles and Wealth

27

2

Doctors and Airplanes

80

3

Dining and Surgery

117

4

Nurses and Bicycles

159

5

Babies and Forceps

196

6

Colonial Maternities

7

Debris

281

Departures

320

Notes 331 Glossary 413 Bibliography 417 Index 447

237

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

A delivery at an fbei-constructed maternity, Hôpital Demba, Kasai, 1957. 4 ‘‘A nursery at the maternity of the Fondation Symétain at Kalima,’’ Maniema district, Kivu province, ca. 1955. 5 A typical bicycle advertisement in cartoon form from Philips Congo, 1955. 16 ‘‘Tous en avant vers la santé pour tous,’’ ca. 1989. 19 ‘‘Components of a Rural Health Zone, Zaire,’’ 1985. 20 ‘‘Eso men and their big money,’’ ca. 1901. 37 ‘‘Group of Lokele types from the village of Yafungas,’’ 1898. 41 ‘‘Combat de Romée, 22 mai 1893’’ map. 48 ‘‘Five principal Lokele chiefs,’’ Stanleyville, ca. 1910. 51 ‘‘Lokele Currency,’’ Yakusu, ca. 1910. 54 ‘‘Saidi and Family—as he sometimes appears,’’ Yakoso, ca. 1910. 62 ‘‘Bridewealth.’’ In an Eso household, ca. 1910. 67 Two kanga in the Yakusu district, ca. 1927. 82 Likenyule with his phonograph and family, 1933. 83 ‘‘Lokele chief.’’ Lobanga, ca. 1910. 106 Lititiyo and his wife, ca. 1948. 107 ‘‘Chief Lobanga (of the Lokele),’’ ca. 1910. 109 ‘‘An operation’’ at Yakusu, ca. 1926. 118 ‘‘ ‘Mama’ & her boys,’’ ca. 1942. Nora Carrington with her ‘‘boys’’ at Yakusu. 129 Tata Tula with his automobile and family, ca. 1957. 142 Tata Tula, Yakusu, 1990. 143

viii 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Illustrations ‘‘The Fence,’’ ca. 1929. 145 Greasy pole festivities at Christmas, ca. 1927. 152 ‘‘A Christmas Feast, 1909.’’ 153 Yakusu nursing students and their band, ca. 1931. 163 ‘‘A group of native nurses,’’ likely working for Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, ca. 1930. 177 Congolese nurse with bicycle, 1914. 180 Dr. G. Fronville giving an open-air autopsy lesson to Congolese nurses in Elisabethville, ca. 1925. 190 Nurse Phyllis Lofts at Chopa Falls, ca. 1927. 203 Bolau, ca. 1932. 206 ‘‘Malia Winnie, Hana, Miliama,’’ three Yakusu midwives, ca. 1931. 212 ‘‘The prize baby’’ at a Yakusu baby contest, ca. 1929. 230 A set of ‘‘do-do’’ hygiene messages directed at Belgians wondering about living conditions in the Congo, 1948. 245 European woman in a maternity room in a hospital for whites in Katanga, 23 February 1931. 248 Convalescence room in a maternity ward for European women in Katanga, 23 February 1931. 249 Belgian Congo semi-charity postage stamp of ‘‘Nurse Weighing Child,’’ 1930. 253 ‘‘Hospital for natives at Elisabethville. The maternity,’’ 1945. 254 Ovulation lesson drawing from midwife student’s notebook, 1949. 257 ‘‘The Sainte Elisabeth Maternity at Yanonge, constructed with the aid of the Fonds du Bien-Etre Indigène,’’ ca. 1955. 262 Maternity at Fataki, ca. 1955. 263 Idealized image in didactic hygiene booklet for Congolese mothers, ca. 1953. 268 The labor and delivery room at the fbei-constructed hospital at Tongoni, Kasongo territory, Maniema district, Kivu, ca. 1955. 269 A set of ‘‘do-don’t’’ messages about the importance of regular clinic attendance for mothers and infants, ca. 1953. 270 A set of ‘‘do-don’t’’ messages about good housekeeping as opposed to the dangers of wale fires and smoke for infants, ca. 1953. 271 Pair of Belgian Congo semi-charity postage stamps celebrating medicalization, 1957. 272 Bicycles and maternity wards in Mbumbulu comic strip, 1955. 273 Yanonge maternity hospital building, 1989. 290 Front door of old Yanonge maternity hospital building, 1989. 290 Mobutu with walking stick, 1967. 319

Illustrations Maps 1.

Region of Ya-prefaced villages, indicating river names and colonialderived ethnic terms. With small map showing location of this map within the Congo and Africa. 9 2. Area of field research along the Congo River. 14 3. Local place-names mentioned in text. 17 4–7. bms Yakusu-operated health-care sites, 1925, 1935, 1946, 1956. 166

ix

ABBREVIATIONS

aa arsc arsom asbmt bms bmsa cfl cmc dd dpo ecz fomulac fbei foreami hcb ijahs imt ineac ircb jfc kadoc Ling. Lok. mdo

Archives Africaines, Brussels Académie Royale des Sciences Coloniales Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer Annales de la Société Belge de la Médecine Tropicale Baptist Missionary Society Baptist Missionary Society Archives, Regent’s Park College, Oxford Chemins de Fer du Congo Supérieur aux Grands Lacs Africains Congo Missionary Conference Dorothy Daniel District Pastor’s O≈ce, Yakusu Eglise du Christ au Zaïre Fondation Médicale de l’Université de Louvain au Congo Fonds du Bien-Etre Indigène Fonds Reine Elisabeth pour l’Assistance Médicale aux Indigènes du Congo Belge Huileries du Congo Belge International Journal of African Historical Studies Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp Institut pour l’Etude Agronomique du Congo Belge Institut Royal Colonial Belge John F. Carrington Katholiek Documentatie en Onderzoekcentrum, Leuven Lingala Lokele Medical School Director’s O≈ce, Yakusu

xii

Abbreviations

mpr mrac pl sanru sgb Sw. tba trstmh unaza usaid usia wbb yqn

Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (Africa-Museum), Tervuren Phyllis Lofts Santé Rurale or Projet des Soins de Santé Primaires en Milieu Rural (usaid-sponsored Rural Primary Health Care Project) Stanley G. Browne Swahili (Kingwana) traditional birth attendant Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Université Nationale du Zaïre United States Agency for International Development United States Information Agency Winifred Browne Burke Yakusu Quarterly Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I don’t know how others do it, but I do it through memories of places, homes, meals, laughter. The places that have served as temporary homes since I began the project that became this book easily tops fifty. And these homes only include those where I slept, not the tables where I ate meals, read sources, drank conversation, and shared my ideas, stories, news, images, and chapters. Only through these memories of places can I begin to remember all those who helped me fathom, cast, and end this study, from its earliest conjurings in Yakusu, Madison, central Illinois, Bujumbura, even Hyde Park to its vexed and last casting out as ‘‘that dear book caught with lokwamisa’’ in Tucson, Brussels, and Ann Arbor. The succession of spatial memories takes in all my mentors and coaches, friends and family, research assistants and guides, healers and midwives, and not least those who made me laugh when I was sick or uninspired, told me stories, invited me to be present as they gave birth, loaned me vehicles, photocopied and posted documents, sang songs, told stories, transcribed tapes, paddled me and my bicycle, took me in, sent me out again, and read and reread drafts. My greatest debt remains to the people of Yainyongo-Romée and Yakusu, as well as all my friends, informants, and assistants from Kisangani to Basoko and Opala in the country I knew as Zaire. I owe special thanks to my first family in Zaire, the BaTula, especially Mama Tula Sophie for being my first and last tutor, guide, and informant, and her son, Tula Rogier, for his work in transcribing interviews; Yainyongo’s three midwives, Mama Lisongomi, Mama Sila, and Shangazi Angelani; Tata Alikuwa and his kin, notably Bibi Bilefu Mari-Jeanne, who embraced me as a moseka wa Bokoto (a girl of the Bokoto house); and Pesapesa. The Yakusu mission also took me in and helped me out in a myriad of important ways; I especially thank Pastor Batondo, Drs. Chris and Mairi

xiv

Acknowledgments

Burnett, Pam Bryan, Susan Chalmers, Angela and Tim Hinchcli√e, Annie Horsfall, Kelekele, Papa Lokangu, Lombale-Botowato, and Mota Moya. Tata Tula and Tata Alikuwa have died since I left Yakusu and YainyongoRomée in 1990. Most everyone whom I knew then is certainly hungry now, unless they left for England and Scotland when the Baptist Missionary Society (bms) evacuated missionaries from Yakusu in 1991. The BaTula left for Kisangani after Tata died. Last I knew, Mama Tula had arthritis and was having trouble walking, and Rogier had gone o√ seeking diamonds. How have they experienced the presence of Serb mercenaries, refugees, Kabila’s and now Wamba-dia-Wamba’s men in their midst? I have had no letters since these latest rounds of war and tribulation, flight and death began. That those alive are praying and cursing, including about my expected but delayed and redelayed return to their homes and lives, this I know. That the history of childbearing in this book needs at least one more, post-1990 chapter, this I still hope to do. Now, from here, I have little more to o√er than this completion, their stories, memories, and names in print. May this book of a lokasa, in some manner, reach them and honor them and amuse them. Their trust and imaginations and care made it possible. My debts are forever. Professor Sabakinu Kivilu welcomed me to Kinshasa and gave important advice, as did Professors Kalala Nkudi, Mulyumba wa Mamba Itongwa, and Yamvu Makasu in Kisangani. Frère Jerry of Kisangani’s Catholic Procure gave me precious advice. Dani Frank, Toni Gierlandt, Marie Lechat, and Jean-Luc Vellut made Brussels possible. I concluded my fieldwork traveling in England, meeting former Yakusu missionaries as a guest in their homes. This book would not be the same without the documentation, photographs, and recollections that Mali Browne, Winifred Browne Burke, Nora Carrington, Dorothy Daniel, Mary Fagg, David and Gillian Lofts, and Margaret Pitt so generously shared with me. I thank them, and also Jo McGregor for the use of her car. I also thank John Sinclair of Roseville, Minnesota, who made papers of A. G. Mill available to me by post and who shared his own manuscript about Mill with me. I am grateful for the generous funding that made the original research possible: a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship; an International Doctoral Research Fellowship from the Joint Committee on African Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council; an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women; a Woodrow Wilson Research Grant in Women’s Studies; a grant from the Institute of Intercultural Studies; a Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellowship; a University Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin— Madison’s Graduate School; and a Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant for Research in the History of Europe, Africa, and Asia from the American Historical Associa-

Acknowledgments

xv

tion. I owe a large debt to the University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Vice President for Research, the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute, the Women’s Studies Advisory Committee, and especially my colleagues in the Department of History for generous research support, leaves, and inspiration during my five years of teaching there. I also am grateful to the University of Michigan’s O≈ce of the Vice-President for Research for a book subvention award, which was supplemented by generous funds from the Departments of History and of Obstetrics and Gynecology. I especially thank Tim Johnson and Rebecca Scott; this was only a small part in how they welcomed me to Ann Arbor. Archivists, curators, and librarians in Madison, Evanston, Tucson, London, Oxford, Brussels, Tervuren, Antwerp, Kinshasa, Kisangani, Yakusu, and Louvain-la-Neuve were first-rate, generous, and kind. I am grateful to the sta√s of the History Department at the University of Lubumbashi; the Baptist Missionary Society, Didcott; the Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford; the Archives Africaines, Brussels; the Ethnographic and Historical Sections of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (Africa-Museum), Tervuren; the African Library, Brussels; the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp; Katholiek Documentatie en Onderzoekcentrum (kadoc), Leuven; Centre Aequatoria, Bamanya, Congo; the Herskovits Library, Northwestern University; and Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin—Madison. I owe special thanks to F. Bontinck, Mme Dekais, Els De Palmenaer, Ed Duesterhoeft, David Henige, Susan Mills, P. Maréchal, Françoise Morimont, G. Roelants, Mette Sheyne, Gustaaf Verswijver, Boris Wastiau, and Honoré Vinck of these institutions. Patricia Hayes inspired me to think about the photographs and images in new ways, and David Lofts generously and enthusiastically had reproductions made of a whole set of them from the papers of Phyllis Lofts. Lest they be read as mere illustrations rather than juxtaposed signs, a few comments on the diverse archives from which they were extracted are in order here. Few colonial doctors included photographs in the qualifying reports preserved at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, but G. Fronville included a couple dozen of removed tumors and chalk-marked patient bodies in his report on surgery in Elisabethville. None captures the social context of teaching, the social realities of colonial medicine, as does the one of an open-air autopsy included here; it speaks to the kind of masculine bravado that shaped the practice of tropical medicine on the ground and in qualifying reports back to authorities in the metropole. In contrast to Fronville’s use of photographs as intrepid proof are the two sets of cherished photographs that I stumbled on in the living rooms of former Yakusu missionaries in England. Nora Carrington found some envelopes of

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photographs scattered around her home in Salisbury and told me to choose those that interested me, just please to return them to her when I was done. These were her memories; many were of her beloved John, almost all of people she knew and esteemed. I first saw nine of the photographs included here in the home of David Lofts, nephew of Phyllis Lofts. My first introduction to Phyllis Lofts was from Phyllis Martin, the central African historian, who told me one day in Brazzaville to go find out about this Yakusu missionary nurse because she had grown up on her stories of the Congo, and without them she might never have traveled from Scotland to Africa. I knew, then, that I was seeing a collection of mementos (including the piece of wood from the sacred tree of cruelty that became the hospital benches) that Lofts had shown to children as she regaled them with memories of leopards, Bolau, and Yakusu. Very di√erent archives these were, therefore, than those of a tropical surgeon. Even though there was a surgery scene among Lofts’s papers, it was quite in line with all my other clues about missionary mirth and precious moments, all suitable for public consumption. These missionary discoveries came after I was in the field. Before I went, I visited the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale’s (mrac) Historical Section’s photo archive at a time when they would give you free reign of the file drawers of Congopresse and other gifts classified by subject. Thus it was that I was able to see the extent and range of postwar propaganda on maternity care for Congolese, and the interwar—likely Union Minière—propaganda on maternities for Europeans. The discovery of the Mbumbulu comic strip and the centrality of maternity wards and bicycles came at about the same time at the Royal Library in Brussels. Semiotics was here to stay. The do-and-don’t Congolese imaged messages date back to my Bujumbura days, when I discovered a spare copy of the Swahili edition of this booklet in a foyer social (‘‘social home’’) closet. I located the do-do messages for Belgians in Madison, when the African Studies Program blessed me with some funds for slide reproduction. In Tucson, Doug Weiner inspired me to take on the semiotics of postage stamps and coins, and I found about forty hygiene postage stamps in all, and incredibly easily besides, once I found my way to Brussels’s stamp shop district a few years ago. One of my last stops was mrac’s Ethnographic Section as I sought out axheads and lances, first the objects themselves, and then images of Lobanga, Lokele chiefs, lances, and iron bridewealth. ‘‘Money,’’ ‘‘bridewealth,’’ and especially ‘‘Lokele’’: these were my key terms in this colonial ethnographic archive. And Poof !—out popped Lobanga and his colleagues in a set of photographs attributed to the provincial governor of the time, A. de Meulemeester. I am grateful to many persons and institutions for the invitations to present portions of what became A Colonial Lexicon in stimulating settings over the

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xvii

years. I especially thank Terence Ranger for the invitation to try out my work on colonial humor at the African History Seminar, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1991; David William Cohen for the first opportunity to present my work on postcolonial debris and childbearing at the 1993 Institute on ‘‘The Politics of Reproduction and Fertility Control,’’ Program on International Cooperation in Africa, Northwestern University; Charles Becker, Mamadou Diouf, and JeanPierre Dozon for the chance to present new work on colonial gynecology and stds to a codesria and orstom conference on ‘‘The Social sciences and AIDS in Africa,’’ Saly Portudal, Senegal, 1996; and Filip De Boeck and René Devisch for the opportunity to dig deeper into the history of currencies and wealth in preparation for their conference on money in central Africa, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven in 1996. Karen Tranberg Hansen’s invitation to write more on domesticity arrived before I went to the field and shaped my research immeasurably. Although substantially reworked via Christmas, humor, and surgery, portions of chapter 3 appeared earlier as ‘‘Colonial Fairy Tales and the Knife and Fork Doctrine in the Heart of Africa’’ in Hansen’s anthology, African Encounters with Domesticity (Rutgers University Press, 1992). Several paragraphs of my ‘‘Letter-Writing, Nursing Men and Bicycles in the Belgian Congo: Notes towards the Social Identity of a Colonial Category’’ appeared earlier in Paths toward the Past: African Historical Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina, edited by Robert Harms et al. (African Studies Association Press, 1994). Professor Osumaka Likaka of Wayne State University and Matthieu Yangambi of Providence, Rhode Island, made the Lokele text translations possible. Likaka was also a generous friend, comrade, and willing ‘‘native’’ after the fact and by telephone. I owe my Swahili to Magdalena Hauner and Chacha Nyaigotti-Chacha, my Kingwana to Asa Hale and Mama Tula, and my Lokele to the late John Carrington, Likaka, and Mama Tula. Beth Kangas, Moto Moya, Bonnie Ruder, Keith Shear, Rogier Tula, Sarah Womack, and especially Tristine Smart were fabulous research assistants. A Colonial Lexicon began as a dissertation project at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Jan Vansina assigned H. Sutton Smith’s Yakusu in a course, and if he had not, I might never have known about the place. He also wrote me wonderful letters while I was away in strange lands, and by return mail, no less. And when I came back to Madison, he answered all kinds of questions about crocodiles, rainbows, and Belgian nuns, at length and often by phone. He saved me from many an error, led me to countless sources, and let me do what I wanted, at the same time that he told me, astutely, what was problematic and what to do next. I am ever grateful to him, and for his imagination, generosity, and criticisms. Steve Feierman introduced me to symbolic anthropology and sent me on a research chase about birth spacing that led me to this topic. He

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also helped me design my field research and has been there as an important reader and friend at several critical junctures. Ann Stoler introduced me to the anthropology of colonialism and more recently of Ann Arbor; she told me to publish from day one in Madison and inspired me to write ‘‘Le bébé en brousse.’’ Judy Leavitt introduced me to the history of childbirth and obstetrics and made many important suggestions. Harold Cook, David Henige, and Michael Schatzberg were also excellent critical readers of Negotiated Colonialism. Some may know how much I owe them. Quite a few probably do not. Thus my wish for an exhaustive listing here. But I desist, knowing all too well that I will seem to get the order wrong, forget obvious names, never end. My major readers, editors, and critics though, let them be named and blessed. There would quite simply be no book without the readings, comments, and ideas of (and dispatched materials from) Karen Anderson, Mark Auslander, Jennifer Beinart, Bilusa, Tim Burke, Catherine Burns, Barney Cohn, Jean Comaro√, John Comaro√, Guido Convents, Anna Davin, Suzanne Desan, René Devisch, Paul Farmer, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Bruce Fetter, Deborah Gaitskell, Peter Geschiere, Jonnie Glassman, Donna Guy, Asa Hale, Eugenia Herbert, Douglas Holmes, Sharon Hutchinson, John Janzen, Diana Jeater, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Deborah Kallman, Ivan Karp, Pier Larson, Michel Lechat, Osumaka Likaka, Helma Lucker, Maryinez Lyons, Janet MacGa√ey, Kristen Mann, Achille Mbembe, Henrietta Moore, Mark Nichter, Christine Obbo, Tshonga Onyumbe, Hélène Pagezy, Hermann Rebel, Diane Russell, Meg St. John, Cathy Skidmore-Hess, Carl Strikwerda, Peg Strobel, Jan Thal, Megan Vaughan, Benoït Verhaegen, Luise White, Ann Whitehead, and Aziza Etembala Zana. For reading and providing comments on the entire manuscript in one of the many versions that became A Colonial Lexicon, I am forever grateful to Laura Briggs, Fred Cooper, Joel Howell, Timothy R. B. Johnson, Phyllis Martin, VinhKim Nguyen, Lyn Schumaker, Tristine Smart, Jan Thal, Lynn Thomas, and Jean-Luc Vellut. I could not have done it without them! For reading chapters, I thank David William Cohen, Sue Crane, Joan Dayan, Doug Holmes, Kali Israel, Paul Landau, E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, and David Schoenbrun. I am also grateful to the three anonymous readers who read the manuscript for Duke University Press; the two who first read this study in its dissertation form brilliantly elucidated the challenges of revising for me and made them seem worthwhile. So, too, did my old friend and generous, patient ally Ken Wissoker, Hyde Park course guide, South Woodlawn co√ee brewer, bookstore shopping consultant, latterly turned smashing editor, and video shrine visitor. His suggestions, as always, bolstered and inspired. David William Cohen asked me a question in an ssrc interview that influenced a fair amount of what I did in the field. I owe thanks to Grey Osterud for

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her warmth, imagination, generosity, and editing talent; she provided brilliant readings of each chapter and assisted immeasurably with my final revisions. My family was ba∆ed, though ever supportive. Joan Dayan and Jean-Luc Vellut were wonderful readers and remain the dearest of friends. Huge thanks, then, to all my wry accomplices and kin, colleagues and students, some mentioned by name here, some not. Many more hover in the notes and interview list that follow. The excesses and flaws are mine.

INTRODUCTION

‘‘I know how di≈cult it is to get hold of native bones, let alone female pelves,’’ a colonial missionary doctor commented in 1938. Dr. Albert Cook had developed a pioneering maternity care program in Uganda with his wife Katharine and, like other doctors practicing in British East Africa, was interested in obstructed labor among African women. A colleague had challenged Cook’s view that the high incidence of such obstruction was due to the flat shape of African women’s pelvic bones, itself a result of their having carried heavy loads on their heads as children. The argument became an occasion for the two doctors to share stories about their attempts, ‘‘fired by anatomical zeal,’’ to dig up African skeletons. According to Dr. J. P. Mitchell, ‘‘an investigation entailing the acquisition of the pelves of women who died from obstructed labour is not easy and takes time.’’ Cook admired Mitchell’s success in unearthing five women’s pelvises some of which were featured as a photographic frontispiece to the East African Medical Journal issue where their exchange was recorded. Dr. Mitchell had carefully supervised the women’s burial in and excavation from the Kampala hospital graveyard, and he later acquired seven other women’s pelvises for comparative purposes. Yet his colleagues questioned whether the total number of twelve pelvises was scientifically adequate. Dr. R. Y. Stones called for further investigation and more pelvic bones in eugenic terms: ‘‘As the nation becomes more advanced it is hoped this most important investigation will be permitted: the more intelligent coming to see it as a necessity for the future welfare of the race.’’∞ Dr. Cook recalled his experience during the Nubian Mutiny in 1897, when his ‘‘native boy’’ claimed he was sick to avoid digging up skeletons. I might have accepted the excuse, but unfortunately for him, I overheard him saying to his friends that if the Mazungu [white man] liked to emulate

2

A Colonial Lexicon a hyaena, he would not join in. As we were under military discipline, I laid him down, and gave him a half a dozen of the best for insubordination, and attained my object with the help of a native Christian teacher, and procured an interesting skeleton, but even forty years later it is not an easy thing to do.≤

This book lies at the juncture of this kind of evidence about colonial violence, medical research, and bodies in Africa. Such a source does not tell us as much as we would like to know about how colonized subjects interpreted the fixations and intrusions of colonial doctors. Yet to treat Cook’s anecdote as a discursive representation of colonial disciplining of the body alone would render unintelligible the social action contained in this tale of colonial doctors searching for pelvic bones, an ill domestic servant, and a compliant ‘‘native Christian teacher.’’ The harsh economy of colonial power is bared. The servant said he was too sick to dig up the dead, and the doctor whipped him for feigning sickness. Dr. Cook had greater social power, but the insubordinate ‘‘native boy’’ mocked and accused with an animal metaphor expressed behind the doctor’s back. Also present in Cook’s tale, however, was a ‘‘more intelligent’’ native. This Christian teacher’s mediating action remains unclear, as it likely was to Dr. Cook. But the source flags how basic a middle figure was to colonial representation and violence; this book argues that such middle figures were also central to processes of translation in a colonial therapeutic economy. This history seeks to mine such ‘‘tales of colonial folly,’’≥ while conceding limits as to how far one can read interpretations of the colonized into and out of such an account. It tests these bounds nevertheless, by reading and listening to ethnographic, spoken, and Congolese-authored sources, and by vying with (as with Cook’s anecdote) chronic narrative shapes, geographies, and closures in Africanist colonial histories.∂ This study’s central focus is ex-Zaire, the vast central African country formerly known as the Belgian Congo.∑ It, too, had Protestant missionaries among its colonial doctors and safe childbearing among its hygiene goals.∏ The Congo was known as the Congo Free State from 1885 until 1908, an empire evoked by Joseph Conrad in 1899 as the ‘‘heart of darkness.’’π This period, when the Congo was King Leopold II’s private colony, became notorious for ‘‘red rubber,’’ a brutal system of forced rubber collection and severed Congolese hands. When the Belgian parliament assumed control in 1908, the colony became the Belgian Congo. After independence in 1960, the new nation-state was called the Republic (later, the Democratic Republic) of the Congo until 1971, when Mobutu Sese Seko, who assumed power in 1965, changed the name to Zaire. In May 1997, after leading a new generation of rebels in a war that brought down the Mobutu

Introduction

3

regime, Laurent Kabila, the new head of state, renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo. This study primarily dates from the 1920s, a decade during which medicalization∫ at the British Baptist mission station of Yakusu coincided with colonial panic about depopulation and a falling birthrate in the Belgian Congo at large. Depopulation was central to controversies over the human repercussions of red rubber atrocities and sleeping sickness in Leopold’s Free State; by the 1920s, industrial labor requirements ignited a new round of outcries from mining companies and state authorities alike. Yakusu and its environs are the primary setting of this history. George Grenfell and other missionaries of the Londonbased Baptist Missionary Society (bms) founded Yakusu on the Upper Congo River, in the Leopoldian land they knew as ‘‘Congoland,’’ in 1896. The Free State period in the Upper Congo region was marked by struggle and war among the new colonial military forces and Zanzibari overlords, who initially entered the region in search of ivory and slaves about the time of Henry Morton Stanley’s epic journey downriver in 1877. The Zanzibari period resides in local social memory as the first of two colonialisms. Likewise, this history of reproductive idioms and practice begins during this first period of foreign rule. It concludes in the same setting with postcolonial birth routines in 1989–90, and considers them as forms of remembering during a postcolonial period of ‘‘scattered hegemonies’’ in the Congo and beyond.Ω No sub-Saharan African colonial regime took greater pride in relocating African childbearing to clinical settings than the Belgian Congo. When Raymond Buell toured Africa in 1925, he noted that the state-supported e√orts of the Church Missionary Society in Uganda (the Lady Croyndon Training School and rural maternity centers founded by Dr. and Mrs. Cook)∞≠ ‘‘lead the continent in this type of work.’’ Buell also praised maternity care e√orts in Tanganyika and French West Africa, and criticized Kenya for its ‘‘underdevelopment of maternity work.’’∞∞ The Belgian Congo had only just begun to organize maternity care as Buell traveled. He mentioned the colony’s midwife training schools and that was all. By 1940, however, Belgian colonial authorities were boasting that the Congo possessed a network of maternités, orphanages, and ante- and postnatal clinics that surpassed ‘‘in number and importance’’ those of any other African colony.∞≤ In 1935, it was estimated that about 1 percent of Congolese deliveries were medically supervised.∞≥ By 1952, o≈cial claims had increased that figure to 28 percent,∞∂ and in 1958, the colonial information agency announced that some 43 percent of Congolese babies had been delivered under biomedical supervision.∞∑ The Belgian Congo had the most extensive medical infrastructure in

4

A Colonial Lexicon

A delivery at an fbeiconstructed maternity, Hôpital Demba, Kasai, 1957. (Courtesy of kadoc, Leuven, Belgium.)

post–World War II Africa. The numbers of medically assisted Congolese births soared from 71,813 in 1947, to 110,000 in 1952, to 189,383 in 1956.∞∏ A massive program of construction, funded by the parastatal charity Fonds du Bien-Etre Indigène (fbei), accompanied this postwar expansion. By 1958, every administrative territory, ranging from 50,000 to 150,000 inhabitants each, was equipped with a medical center, a surgical section, a maternity ward, and prenatal and infant welfare facilities.∞π These numbers suggest the sweep of this Belgian colonial natalism, this reproductive policy intent on increasing the birthrate, hospitalizing deliveries, and reducing neonatal mortality. Yet medicalizing childbirth in the Belgian Congo was never simply about public health, nor was its pronatalism simply about ‘‘babies and the state.’’∞∫ Colonial employers used Catholic missionary routines to mark birth with bonuses, inscription books, and baby scales, long before there was money to fund the massive construction of maternity wards.∞Ω Natalist policy began as early as 1903, when a Congo Free State circular authorized territorial chiefs to give rations to pregnant or nursing wives of state workers. In 1910, Province Orientale authorities were exempting fathers of more than four from taxation, and Catholic missionaries in the city of Stanleyville were giving birth bonuses to city families with many children.≤≠ By 1935, one colonial doctor thought that Congolese women should be made to declare each pregnancy: ‘‘given the passivity of the native,’’ he argued, ‘‘such a measure would be perfectly applicable.’’≤∞ His proposal, though never realized, suggests how desires to increase the birthrate and medicalize motherhood became enmeshed in the growth of bureaucratic state forms and la paperasserie of colonized life. The safe childbirth preoccupation was equaled, if not prefigured, by

Introduction

5

bureaucratic formulas of counting and inscribing birth. In Belgian colonial Africa, maternities and the census went hand in hand.≤≤ When I began this study, my purpose was to understand why medicalized motherhood and childbearing became so prominent an agenda in the Belgian Congo. I also wanted to know why Congolese women complied with colonial desires in such great numbers, and if they did so with the ease—and, in Foucault’s words, the ‘‘docile bodies’’—that colonial documents imply. For a social and cultural historian of Africa, trained in a period when the shapes of colonial anthropology were laid bare and when bounded African worlds were no more, the question of what the unit of analysis should be was not obvious. The choice of Yakusu began as a likely counterpoint to medicalized maternity for workers’ wives as practiced by the Congo’s most important mining company, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga.≤≥ Yakusu, a British Baptist medical mission with a training school for midwives established in 1929, easily proved contrapuntal to this celebrated and aggressive program of imposed medicalization inside mining compounds. Yet Yakusu was not anomalous either, exempt from prevailing

‘‘The large mining and industrial enterprises with an important labor force have built their own hospitals, schools, maternities, etc. A nursery at the maternity of the Fondation Symétain at Kalima,’’ Maniema district, Kivu province. Congopresse caption and photograph by H. Goldstein, ca. 1955. (Courtesy of mrac, Historical Section [cid no. 72.44/7, inv. no. 56.32.34]. Courtesy of Africa-Museum, Tervuren, Belgium.)

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A Colonial Lexicon

maternalist trends in this Catholic-oriented colony. Yakusu’s ‘‘foreign,’’ evangelical missionaries invited the signs of Belgian royal favor. Its doctors became o≈cially recognized sanitary agents in a plantation sector of the Upper Congo from the 1920s on, responsible for hygiene surveillance and touring in an area as large as 10,000 square miles. This history demonstrates how the Belgian colonial desire to enumerate and increase its subject population influenced the development of missionary medicine—and obstetrics—in Yakusu’s district. In becoming state-associated doctors, Yakusu’s medical missionaries became agents of a hygienic form of ‘‘indirect rule.’’ (The ambivalence with which colonial authorities let significant powers devolve to these foreign missionaries makes this term accurate, even though it strains conventional definitions of indirect rule in colonial Africa as the necessary, but fraught, intermediary rule of African chiefs or ‘‘native authorities.’’) In turn, Yakusu received substantial subsidies for its medical mission and its doctors’ evangelical work. Belgian colonial hygiene was pronatalist, marked by social hygiene movements influential in Belgium and elsewhere at the time.≤∂ Interwar Catholic social eugenics proved significant in the way maternity care, increasingly the object of colonial perquisites, acquired prominence on this British, Protestant mission station. This microhistory is intended to contribute to the historiographies of medicine, missions, and gender in the Congo.≤∑ Yet it would be an error to confine its disclosures to the boundaries of this colony turned nation-state.≤∏ This study conjoins a Catholic-associated, pronatalist colonial state intent on medical, bodily, and demographic control, a British Baptist mission society engaged in evangelization, and a global profession of specialists in tropical medicine. Yakusu was a pocket of Protestant colonialism set down within a Catholicoriented, colonial, and increasingly global, public health field. A corollary, a historical ethnography of a state maternity hospital operated by European nuns, is suggested here, even if a full rendering must await another study. Thus this history of the translation of biomedicine within Belgian colonial Africa sits within—as it contains traces of—local, metropolitan, colonial, and denominational frames. Likewise, as a historical ethnography of British Baptist, Belgian, and global colonizing processes in and near Yakusu, it is a microhistory of a hybrid colonial situation. In the 1950s, British social anthropologist J. Clyde Mitchell studied a colonial dance form called kalela, developed and performed by Africans living in the mining areas of the Congolese and Rhodesian Copperbelts during the postWorld War II period. The presence in kalela of a medical doctor and a ‘‘nursing sister’’ as two of the three character types posing as Europeans (the third was a king) is testimony to how colonial health care became embedded in African social imaginaries. Mitchell saw kalela in 1959 as ‘‘a sort of pantomime of the

Introduction

7

social structure of the local European community . . . as the Africans saw it.’’ Terence Ranger read kalela as satire in 1975.≤π In the 1990s, some scholars might hedge with the word mimesis, in order to amplify the ambiguity of these postures and disrupt any analytic presumptions of defiance. Regardless, kalela reminds us that how Africans represent(ed) colonial medicine among themselves and perform(ed) it for diverse publics remains a di≈cult subject to discern. The way Africans routinely negotiate therapeutic economies within postcolonial Africa, as they move with their kin among healing possibilities, is well-known. What is not clear is the historical process whereby colonialderived forms of biomedicine may have come to reside, in John Janzen’s words, as a ‘‘separate therapy system in public consciousness.’’≤∫ A central argument here is that these processes were mediated by the new colonial categories of middle figures and the ‘‘entangled objects’’ of their work.≤Ω The record shows that Africans have often read colonial doctors, hospitals, and diseases with sinister metaphors. Influenza in 1918–19 was called ‘‘bombom’’ by many in Tanganyika because the coughing reminded them of cannons and the epidemic seemed to suggest a divine judgment on Europeans for making war.≥≠ Africans often used idioms of sorcery, power, and eating. European medicines were strong yet dangerous because they contained stolen human blood, they said, and tinned food was made from the bodies of the colonized.≥∞ In the Congo, Africans imaged the Yakusu hospital as a tinned food production site, and female bodies were imbricated within these representations. Women’s health care tended to be either neglected≥≤ or narrowly defined in colonial Africa. If mission-organized antenatal care programs ‘‘defined women as producers of Christian babies,’’≥≥ mining companies that pushed obstetric care on Congolese women defined miners’ wives as producers of workers. The eugenic reductionism of such formulations, though explicit in colonial discourse, warrants careful scrutiny. Some scholars have portrayed colonial maternal health care as a benevolent counterpoint to the coercive medical care insisted on by colonial states and companies for men. The ‘‘devoted, e√ective, firm, and courteous’’ work of Protestant-trained midwives, for example, emerges as an exception within Bernard Hours’s ethnography of contemporary Cameroon; he shows that most popular ‘‘representations’’ of public health since independence suggest that citizens image the postcolonial state as a vector of witchcraft, as an ‘‘Etat sorcier.’’≥∂ Some have asserted that colonial obstetrics was more readily accepted and actively sought than other forms of biomedical care, especially among an emergent African middle class.≥∑ Others have depicted midwifery programs as evidence of social control.≥∏ The problem is that arguments anchored in visions of either eugenically motivated social control or a soft, female exception to the terrors of colonial medicine conceal local forms of meaning-making. We need to know how middle figures and their subaltern

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A Colonial Lexicon

‘‘others’’—their ‘‘lows’’—translated and debated biomedicine in Africa, and what elements were subject to struggle. Rank among colonized subjects was nuanced and context-specific, malleable and contested; rank collapsed when middles identified as subaltern, aligning themselves with those whom they more often named as their ‘‘lows,’’ as uncivilized basenji. I prefer the more subjective locution of ‘‘lows’’ (indeed, ‘‘their ‘lows’ ’’), rather than ‘‘subaltern,’’ because it reminds us that claiming middle rank required naming a low. Thus, it suggests the insidiousness of acceding to colonial civilizing hierarchies, since their internalization necessitated their projection; this more subjective term for colonial identity also insists on the susceptibility of these rankings to social upset and transgression. The gender of medical practitioners a√ected attendance at maternity clinics in Africa, a continent where nurses tended to be male until after World War II.≥π Age mattered, too. Some Ugandan women actively avoided maternity centers managed by pairs of young, unmarried African women trained in the Cooks’ mission-operated school. I doubt that cost and fears of imprecation were the only reasons why.≥∫ Asking girls to handle the blood of childbirth would have transgressed living rationalities and habitus. In the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, two British nurses organized a state maternity program for training and certifying midwives, although it appears to have owed its success to their inclusion of older, already practicing midwives and their cautiousness about violating local bodily manners.≥Ω When Kongo women gave birth to twins in maternity clinics in the lower Congo, twin cult initiates gathered to perform necessary customs.∂≠ Shambaa peasants demanded midwifery programs from the colonial Tanganyikan state in the late 1940s.∂∞ Yet how colonized men and women interpreted what went on in maternity clinics a√ected their eagerness to attend. Some Kaguru men and women refused to have their babies born in Native Authority maternity clinics in Tanganyika because afterbirths were not turned over to the parturient’s kin for disposal; they feared hospital attendants might bewitch mother and child.∂≤ Likewise, the clinic-organized disposal of placentas in Dar es Salaam meant Zaramo women avoided maternity births in this city.∂≥ Maternity hospitals and clinics were—and remain—sites of debate and negotiation, translation and mistranslation, in Africa. Men and women challenged and transfigured the health care that they received through complex social processes of struggle, bargaining, and compromise. Colonial negotiation was occasionally succinct in time, visible in performance, and distinctly adversarial in form. More often it was less tangible, involving complex social processes of tentative navigation, secrecy and mischief, and theft and laughter. This study attends to how colonial medicine impinged on a local therapeutic and political economy in Belgian colonial Africa, and how local Congolese in the Yakusu region di√erentially translated and reshaped the opportunities that colonial

Introduction

9

Region of Ya-prefaced villages, indicating river names and colonial-derived ethnic terms. With small map showing location of this map within the Congo and Africa.

medicine o√ered according to preexisting logic and emerging formulas of authority and prestige. A word about the word local. If a specific ethnic designator is appropriate, I use it. When it is not, I refer collectively to whatever mixture of Lokele, BaMbole, Foma, Olombo, and Topoke (Eso) people is appropriate, after 1885, as ‘‘local Congolese’’ (and from 1966 as ‘‘local Zairians’’). The expression is not meant as a new euphemism for ‘‘the natives’’ or ‘‘les indigènes.’’ Rather, I want to remind readers that there was considerable fluidity and border crossing among these colonial-designated ‘‘tribes’’; and that they were subjects and citizens of states at least from 1885. Thus, Congolese and then Zairian is more specific, and less colonial in a discursive sense, than African. They also were not just any Congolese; there was historical and cultural specificity to this local world, however tangled it became in more global—colonial, national, denominational, and cold war—frames. Notions of birth and delivery resonate throughout this study. Childbirth, in its literal sense, motivated the original lines of research. It was a logical theme for the Belgian Congo and remains a little-studied topic in African history.∂∂ As

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A Colonial Lexicon

much as medicalization became a form of colony building in the Congo, it became a medium of church building at Yakusu. A key part of the argument concerns the centrality of intimacies and female bodies to imperial violences, fragilities, and chronologies. The Belgian Congo’s hygienic modality of colonial power is revealed as distinctly maternalist, enumerative, and positive in its eugenics, unlike other imperial regimes whose sexual and bodily fixations were more obviously directed at eradication, whether to end bodily and genital practices such as sati and female circumcision, or to halt signs of colonial degeneration such as miscegenation and venereal disease.∂∑ The eugenic modality ∂∏ of Belgian colonial power—concentrated on Congolese sexuality, fertility, childbearing, and mothering—influenced the expression of medicalized maternity in Yakusu’s district. How this influence happened as social process is central to this study. Thus, we must ask who performed, narrated, and subverted this mixture, how and with what objects, and why. Yet this book argues that powerful cultural representations—signs and narratives—interpolated social process at every turn. It contends that African histories need semiotics as much as they need sociologies. A history of delivery episodes within the mission’s maternity ward completes this mode of literary, historical analysis. To contextualize the significance of these deliveries as routines and transactions, stories and memories, the book’s scope is much wider than colonial childbearing and obstetrics alone. A history of mission domesticity proved important in shaping this book. The Baptist missionaries occasionally take center stage. A biblical sense of deliverance animated their undertakings, from daily investments in converts and medical trainees to their renderings of struggles over medicine, healing, and childbearing. Mission domesticity and medicalization were animated by and mediated through local Congolese reproductive codes. Idioms of food, fattening, and fertility were as integral to these mediations as they remain to body disposition and everyday practice in the Yakusu region. In order to bring a history of Congolese meaning-making to the core of analysis, the notion of birth work used here embraces the emergence and social reproduction of new colonial middle figures—evangelical teachers, nursing men, and midwives—who were key to the alteration of bodily practice and to the creolization and transcoding that were necessarily involved.∂π The work entailed in the birth and birthing of these ‘‘evolving’’ (évoluant ) social actors was simultaneously a method devised from above, a colonialdevised delivery of sorts, and a semiautonomous process of creative expression and brokered negotiations as these men and women labored, bearing new ‘‘hybrid’’ identities. It is through their presentation and performance of (a shared) self, through their writings and recollections, that it is possible to glimpse some of the mediation that was involved. Missionaries often exit from

Introduction

11

view, therefore, while the larger (and ‘‘lower’’) Congolese populace appears as audience, sometimes adversarial, to this kind of colonial delivery. The source material likewise alternates among missionary literary sources, texts in Lokele authored by Yakusu-trained evangelists and nurses, and memories (whether spoken, told, or shown) collected in Mobutu’s Zaire. A tale-telling genre of local social memory suggestive of Congolese popular imagination in the region is central; so are memories inscribed in the landscape and on the body. Each stream of evidence is vital to grasping the Congolese meaning-making that intervened in this history of hygiene and birth work, displacing the linearity of colonial evangelical plans for domesticating and reproducing a Yakusucentered realm. Georges Dupré has described colonialism as the destruction of an order. Kwame Anthony Appiah imagines instead ‘‘an essentially shallow penetration by the colonizer,’’ noting the enduring ‘‘cognitive and moral conceptions’’ still at play in postcolonial Africa’s streets. These ideas are not mutually exclusive, especially if one moves analytically from Appiah’s ‘‘topology of inside and outside’’ to a formulation of multiple architectures of morality and imagination. The dismantling of African social, therapeutic, and natalist orders by colonial medicine did not preclude new building and rebuilding, nor did it bar the sometimes concealed labor of colonial syncretisms.∂∫ That colonizing processes involved violence and negotiation, dismantling and refiguration, is my premise. That childbirth was an arena of colonial bargaining and strife, translation and mixtures, is a starting point of analysis here, not the conclusion. The central questions concern the terms of struggle and negotiation, not only what these terms were, not only how these terms entered and continue to enter into memory and performance, but why these terms were the lexicon of debate. The lexicon was both more capacious and specific than birthing and bodies. I seek a history of moral imagination and ‘‘a science of the concrete.’’∂Ω I take inspiration from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ideas about historical knowledge and lived practice being rooted in a ‘‘logic of the concrete’’ that works with the ‘‘remains and debris of events.’’ It is, he tells us, ‘‘a logic whose terms consist of odds and ends left over from psychological or historical processes and are, like these, devoid of necessity.’’ Such a logic produces a ‘‘system’’ that ‘‘is always lived.’’ This lived language, in ‘‘constantly being drawn in by history,’’ is ‘‘a grammar fated to degenerate into a lexicon.’’ It is precisely this transformation of language into lexical ‘‘odds and ends,’’ ‘‘remains and debris,’’ (of langue into parole), that I seek to revalue as historical processes of meaningmaking, of lexical mischief and debate.∑≠ Michel de Certeau provided an important revision of Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage with his ‘‘procedures of everyday creativity’’ and ‘‘making do,’’ while

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A Colonial Lexicon

cautioning against a focusing on ‘‘lexical units,’’ on ‘‘what is used, not the ways of using.’’ He assumed, however, with his emphasis on contemporary consumer consumption, that ‘‘what is used’’ is ‘‘imposed on everyone by production.’’ Such a formulation falls apart when it meets a colonial context like the Congo, where what is used—the concrete items of a lexicon, of a lived vocabulary and speech of remains and debris—is not necessarily imposed or workerproduced.∑∞ Indeed, as much as I use the notion of a lexicon to focus attention on the social life of objects and their complex cultural entanglements as differentially signifying symbols and commodities in colonial and postcolonial histories, I also retain a sense of a colonial lexicon as a vocabulary list open to abstract, bodily, and spiritual phenomena. This lexicon necessarily consisted of words in multiple codes—in Lokele, Swahili, Lingala, French, and English— which were alive as speech in a context of language and colonial power, a context of complex hierarchies and di√erential translations. Furthermore, I have not forgotten that a lexicon may signify simply a compendium, condensation, or sketch, as all attempts at writing history certainly are. The lexicon of argument, borrowing, and mixture in the Yakusu region included (and includes) everyday colonial things—such as knives, soap, bicycles, and yaws—as well as elements from an abiding local moral imagination— such as crocodiles, placentas, food, and fala. The instant, ‘‘parachuted’’ hierarchies of colonial life assured that access to newer, imported elements was uneven. Such asymmetry was integral to the challenging and refashioning of moralities and imaginations that ensued. Tracing these processes of ‘‘colonial mutation,’’∑≤ in part a history of social conflict and negotiation over the meaning and use of these objects, brings to the fore the central action of those subjects who had privileged access to colonial words and things.∑≥ These authoring subjects, the emerging évolués or hybrid middle figures—the teachers, nursing men, and midwives of this study—helped beget a new creolized lexicon in the interwar period in keeping with the concrete, contradictory modernity they imagined as theirs. The word hybrid is used advisedly and in a heterodox manner. Rather than attempting to empty biological meaning out of the term, as some postcolonial theorists in ‘‘nonessentialist’’ desire would have it, the intent here is to garner the natalist connotations of hybrid∑∂ so as to clarify the metaphorical implications of colonizing projects broadly concerned with parturition and a middle category. The emerging ‘‘middles’’∑∑ of Yakusuland, the social category I alternately label as hybrid, were leading translators. As hierarchically distinct readers and writers of colonial syncretisms, they were central midwives of colonial mutations. Yet they could never control the circulation and remaking of the terms, neither the concrete objects nor the moral metaphors of an emerging,

Introduction

13

moving lexicon at play, a local historical process that might be called, following Johannes Fabian, the poetics of colonial lexical borrowing.∑∏ Thus, as much as there were new hybrid big men (and a few, less big, big women) who authored and transcoded, they were not the only subjects living and performing in translation. Translation was a necessary condition of colonial life, a social practice of one and all.∑π ‘‘Moi, je suis né à la maternité. Mais, toi, tu suis né à la case.’’ I had only arrived in Zaire a few days before and was still in the capital city of Kinshasa when a prominent Zairian newspaper editor shared this verbal jest with me: ‘‘Me, I was born in a maternity ward. But, you, you were born in a hut.’’ ‘‘All right, then, Mademoiselle Historian,’’ this postcolonial évolué seemed to challenge at a United States Information Agency–sponsored dinner welcoming me, their Fulbright scholar, to the country. ‘‘You have come here to understand who welcomed and who evaded maternity births in the colonial period. Well, then, please tell me why it is, among my friends—Zaire’s intellectuals, including historians not unlike you—that we tease each other in these terms?’’ This verbal taunt is part of a yet-to-be-studied repertoire of rejoinders and jests that belong to the popular verbal culture of the postcolonial Congo’s intelligentsia. It suggests a jockeying for prestige through no less conspicuous a Belgian African colonial sign than a maternity ward, a symbol of the reproductive benefits of urban life and hygienic civilities, as these men toy with the meaning, the distinction, of being born in a hospital, rather than in a village onto a banana leaf. Such jockeying has a history. Consider the words of an évolué in 1950, printed in a widely circulated Congolese journal of the time: ‘‘We must no longer tolerate the attitude of certain of our compatriots who prefer to give birth on the ground while our cities are endowed with maternity wards equipped with all modern scientific equipment.’’∑∫ Maternity wards joined bicycles and sewing machines as markers of social class, as the signs of rising, middle status in Belgian colonial Africa. This postcolonial quip suggests the continuing salience of maternity ward as metaphor late into Mobutu’s regime, even as it poses questions about how to filter history through a knowledge of social practice and memory gained during a research period in postcolonial Zaire, in Mobutu’s land. Soon after this dinner, I left Kinshasa’s o≈ces for my field sites on the Upper Congo River, finding an odd mixture of remnants from Baptist mission domesticity, Zairian ‘‘authenticity,’’ and colonial hygiene installations. (Mobutu decreed ‘‘authenticity’’ as an integral part of state party policy and national identity in 1973. Authenticité dictated that men should no longer wear Western suits and ties, women should no longer wear miniskirts and trousers, and all Euro-

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A Colonial Lexicon

Area of field research along the Congo River.

pean or Christian names should be replaced by ‘‘authentic,’’ Congolese ones.) At first I lived at Yakusu, in a brick house of former English midwife missionaries. Eventually, I settled for five months in a small, remote riverain village where popular midwifery was still active. During my first weeks in the Upper Congo, I made a tour with two Zairian male nurses, a Scottish missionary nurse-midwife, and the Land Rover driver. All worked at the Yakusu hospital. We visited rural health dispensaries established by this Baptist mission in the 1920s. They were still operating as church-a≈liated rural health centers, though they had been recently incorporated into a primary health care scheme known as Santé Rurale or Projet des Soins de Santé Primaires en Milieu Rural (sanru), which was centered in Kinshasa. We journeyed for about ten days, through the forest by Land Rover and along the river by canoe, visiting over half a dozen such health centers and staying in the homes of Zairian Baptist pastors. I took in hand-embroidered doilies on chairs and old, military-uniformed, pre‘‘authenticity’’ Mobutu photographs hung on walls. An ecstatic line of ululating women greeted the Land Rover of nurses along the road as we approached one Topoke (Eso) village. At most stops, greetings were more muted, sometimes uninterested. In most locations, church women

Introduction

15

fed us fine meals of turtle or monkey or antelope. I discovered that these hygiene tours were also a postal delivery service. Suddenly, the driver would stop in a village and hand over letters, or we would be stopped on the road to collect more. There was a large pile of mail by the time we returned to Yakusu. The driver and nurses bought forest products as we traveled, staple crops found more cheaply away from the city and forest meats, foods so di≈cult to obtain back at Yakusu that they were delicacies there. Meanwhile, serious, dedicated work went on as these Yakusu nurses met with local nurses and church health committees, inspected account books, sold drugs, and held clinic sessions for referral cases. Often the meetings were after dark by lantern light. Discussion could be heated, with loud voices interjected by laughter. Real issues were being decided: the salary of a health center nurse, the cost of drugs, whether a dispensary could purchase one or two thermometers when there were only four available for eight dispensaries. People were working out appropriate relations among the village church, dispensary, and nurse, and the Yakusu-centered sanru zone in an era of self-financing produced by structural adjustment– inspired public health schemes emanating from Kinshasa, Washington, D.C., and Geneva. The witty nurse who specialized in eye cases o√ered a running commentary as we traveled. A young Lokele man born on the Lomami River, he had come to the Yakusu mission for all his schooling. He had never left. His specialization meant that he had a ready, waiting clientele in the villages through which we passed. ‘‘Things are not stolen in Zaire,’’ he announced one day, ‘‘they are displaced.’’ Another day, he asked if I knew that bicycles in Zaire usually have no brakes, and explained that the people riding them are not afraid. One day, we drove from Bandu, passing ex-Elisabetha first, an old Lever Company site of urban, ‘‘extra-customary’’ tawdriness where there were contemporary popular paintings, an old Mobutu o≈cial pose, and Zairian agricultural promotions hung up as knickknacks on the wall. We left this less composed, more nationalist, entrepreneurial ‘‘authenticity’’ for Lingungu. It was about a sixty-kilometer ride through thick Topoke forest. There were few villages and a long stretch of horrific road. We slid dangerously in and out of holes and mud, and over an old wooden bridge across a large flowing stream. Then we had to walk across the bridge, positioning the few remaining loose wooden slats to fit the width of the Land Rover’s tires. A twenty-minute downpour coincided with some perilous, frantic accelerating through mud and water. Further on it was dry again. There were few people on foot as we drove along, although occasionally there were cyclists or women with heavy loads hanging on their backs from their strapped, bent heads. A well-dressed man came along, all in black. He wore a muted Mobutu suit or abacost ∑Ω and leather shoes, and

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A Colonial Lexicon

A typical bicycle advertisement of the 1950s in cartoon form from Philips Congo. From Nos Images, Sw. ed., 1955. (Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels, Belgium.)

had a black briefcase in hand. He, too, had reason to traverse the forest. No one in the Land Rover seemed to see any incongruity in his walking along this broken road in Mobutu’s land. How to understand what in my eyes seemed an oddity, I wondered, the out-of-sorts manufactured ‘‘authenticity,’’ the abacostsuited, briefcased ‘‘big man’’ with no wheels on these spent roads, but obviously with somewhere to go? I did not know at the time to ask why this postcolonial ‘‘big man’’ was not riding a bicycle. Except for the few occasions when I boarded a missionary or planter’s Land Rover, such was my own means of transport in Upper Zaire. I also walked plenty and moved by canoe, and when I was ready to move away from mission life, I put my bicycle in a canoe and headed about fifteen miles downriver to a remote village, inaccessible by car. Bicycles became a theme of my stay in the

Introduction

17

village as they were in the semiotics of colonial life.∏≠ Old men would tell me how they used to own bicycles. There were even two or three per household, they would say. The subject of bicycles evoked nostalgia and regret for the good times of late colonialism, when imported objects had been abundant and many village men had been wage laborers, especially for a rubber plantation company called Belgika. The want of bicycles was the best way to illustrate to a white lady researcher, never mind local youth who could not remember the days of many bicycles,∏∞ the deprivation and hunger of today. Although Yainyongo-Romée, the village where I was settled, was sited on a river, most of the people lived by what they produced from the forest. Most identified themselves as ‘‘BaMbole,’’ the Mbole people.∏≤ The prefix ba- signifies a plural personal pronoun; I retain it to preserve the flavor of local speech forms and code mixing, as in ‘‘ba-missionaires’’ (‘‘the missionaries’’) or ‘‘Ba-Stanley’’ (Belgian colonials). The village residents are farmers and trappers who also mud-fished in low-lying streams, harvested palm trees for oil, and gathered caterpillars, mushrooms, herbs, forest vines, and medicines. A few households had many oil palms. A few self-identified as Lokele and relied more on fishing as a livelihood. Whether oil palms or a canoe and nets were their capital,

Local place-names mentioned in text.

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A Colonial Lexicon

these two kinds of households tended to be better o√ than the rest; they had something substantial to sell. There are fruit trees in the area, many likely planted by the Zanzibari-associated traders who had once lived there. Occasionally, women would have enough tangerines or avocados to fill a few baskets and find a space in a canoe heading upriver to the Kisangani market, a good day’s distance away. Filling a canoe full of forest rope (used for house construction) or cassava was another activity, not likely to be achieved more than twice a year. Only two items considered essential required cash: soap and salt. Most people most of the time were subsisting by farming, trapping, gathering, and pressing palm oil, infrequently buying a little fish. My second day living in Yainyongo-Romée, I noted the presence of a bicycle: ‘‘The nurse from a sanru post just passed with his Red Cross helper, his scale, and kilo∏≥ record book strapped to the back of his bicycle. They had been to a nearby village today for their monthly kilo there.’’ Since arriving in the Yakusu district, I had been located in what United States Agency for International Development (usaid) o≈cers in Kinshasa called a sanru primary health care zone. sanru was a usaid-sponsored Primary Rural Health Care Project created in 1981 in conjunction with