‘ Travail et progrès ’: Obligatory ‘Educational’ Labour in the Belgian Congo,1933–60

‘Travail et Progrès’ (Labour and Progress) was the official motto of the Belgian Congo, inherited from the times in which the colony was the private domain of King Leopold II. These two words are revealing of the sense that the Belgian colonizers gave to their dominance over this vast territory. Their mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) consisted mainly of inculcating a European-inspired culture of work into the native populations in order to exploit the territory’s rich natural resources. ¹ This idea implied, in the minds of the colonizers, the ‘progress’ of the local communities and was identified in the Belgian colonial discourse with ‘education’. The purpose of this ‘education’ was to transform the local subsistence economies into exporting economies. ² To do so, the Belgians forcibly trained the native populations into agricultural and construction techniques, and then imposed annual workloads on them.

This article deals with these workloads, which represented the main form of legal forced labour which existed in the Belgian Congo after the First World War. They consisted of a series of compulsory tasks of a varied nature (agricultural, construction of roads and buildings, cleaning common areas, and so on) that, under the pretext of ‘educating’ the local populations, were imposed on the native subdivisions (circonscriptions indigènes) for a period of 60 days per year. From 1933 onwards, these workloads were officially called travaux d’ordre éducatif (TOE). We propose to analyse the history of these TOE, their evolution from their creation in 1933 until the end of colonial rule in 1960, with a particular focus on the province of Equateur.

This article revolves around the question of why these practices of obligatory labour were maintained after the Second World War. The Belgian case is in this respect different from the ones of the neighbouring French and British colonial empires, where all practices of legal forced labour were at least officially abolished after 1945. ³ Why then did Belgium, a democratic state with a strong liberal tradition, keep obligatory labour and why was this not even the subject of political embarrassment in the Belgian colonial empire? ⁴ We argue that the Belgian conception of colonialism – what Crawford Young called already in 1965 ‘the Belgian vision’ – characterized by its ‘paternalism’, ⁵ explains the continuity in these practices.

The Belgian system in Congo was particularly patronizing. The Belgian colonizers tended to consider the Congolese populations primitive and backward. As a result, their idea of ‘education’ was not based on literacy or on the acquisition of cultural knowledge. The Belgian colonizers did not pay much attention to the creation of schools or universities, which they left mainly in the hands of religious missions. For them, ‘education’ essentially meant technical qualification, that is, the acquisition of skills such as cultivating, farming or construction, necessary for the development of a local economy. In this sense, the Belgian rulers in Congo considered that the TOE represented an effective means to ‘educate’ the local communities and were reluctant to abolish them.

Although hidden under the pretext of ‘education’, the TOE represented a forced labour obligation imposed by the colonial state. As such, they were related to different forms of violence. As numerous authors have shown, violence was an essential pattern in the functioning of colonial states, who used it as a source not only of domination, but also of legitimacy of their power. ⁶ A British authority in Nigeria once justified the use of violence as ‘a way to create harmony’: ⁷ this idea seems also present in the conception of colonial rule in Congo. As authors like Julia Seibert or Sven van Melkebeke have recently shown, in the case of the Belgian Congo, violence usually determined the relations between the Congolese labourers and the colonial state. ⁸ The latter frequently restrained labour markets, endorsed hard working conditions (sometimes as employer, other times to uphold the interest of private enterprises) or was even complicit in the coerced recruitment of workers for private enterprises. In continuity with this, in the context of the TOE, the relations between the colonizers and the labourers also entailed violent practices by the local officials such as forced detention of the individuals refusing to fulfil them or the use of chicotte (leather whip). We review in this article some examples taken out of the consulted archive records which account for some of such practices.

As workloads were forcibly imposed, the TOE were a cause of unrest for the Congolese rural populations. The archival records show that they were met with resistance by some individuals or groups. We present in this article some examples of how this resistance was displayed (protests, desertion, refusal to work, and so on) and how the colonial administration reacted to it (through the use of fines or imprisonment). We argue that the TOE contributed to the urbanization of the Belgian Congo as many rural populations preferred to emigrate to urban areas in search of waged employment.

The historiography on the Belgian Congo has comprehensively studied the forms of illegal forced labour that were common during the early decades of the twentieth Century. Based on the archival records of the Belgian African Archive, the Belgian former diplomat Jules Marchal published in the late 1990s an extensive study in three volumes in which he described forced labour practices in the Belgian Congo until the Second World War. ⁹ Only a third of these volumes, revolving around Lord Leverhulme’s enterprises, has been published in English. ¹⁰ More recently, Julia Seibert has historically contextualized forced labour in the Belgian Congo with regard to the scientific literature on violence and labour in colonial empires, in an important book which we are looking forward to seeing translated into English. ¹¹ However, extensive studies still lack on the question of legal forced labour in the Belgian Congo, represented mainly by the TOE. A pioneering work is a study written by Faustin Mvuluya-Mulambu in 1974, which was not based on archival documentation and which is difficult to find today. ¹² The purpose of this article is to partly fill this gap with an analysis based on the records of the Belgian African Archive. ¹³

We use the province of Equateur as our main case study. ¹⁴ This is motivated by two reasons. On the one hand, Equateur represents a noteworthy example because of its agricultural importance as one of the main suppliers of cash crops exported from the colony. In 1955, the province was defined by the Congolese writer Antoine-Roger Bolamba as the ‘test bank’ of the Belgian colonizers’ socio-economic experiments. ¹⁵ On the other hand, the records of the office of the governor of Equateur are particularly abundant in the Belgian African Archive when compared with those from other regions. ¹⁶

This article provides, therefore, a historical account of how the organization of obligatory workloads evolved in Equateur from the Second World War to the end of colonial rule. It interprets the perspective of the colonizers and then seeks to understand how the imposition of this form of forced labour affected the native communities, especially those located in the less accessible rural areas, where the colonizers recognized the existence of a so-called ‘customary’ native law.

Forced labour was a common practice in the Belgian Congo and maintained throughout its whole existence. During the period of king Leopold’s direct rule (1885–1908), the economic organization of the territory was based on an infamous system of generalized forced labour as a means of personal income taxation, in which the native populations were extorted to extract natural latex from rubber trees (a particularly hard task). ¹⁷ After the transfer of the Congo to the Belgian state, the Colonial Charter, promulgated by the new rulers, initially banned all practices of forced labour with the exception of those pursuing ‘public utility’. ¹⁸ However, during the First World War, new practices of forced labour resurfaced with the aim of countering some of the major problems that arose in the war context (during which the metropole but not the colony remained under German occupation). These included, namely, the shortage of manpower required to cope with the demands for export products, the lack of money supply, and the deficit of tax revenues. From that moment on, forced labour became again an important element of the economic organization of the Belgian Congo and played a pivotal role in the economic transformation of the colony during the 1910s and the 1920s. ¹⁹

Forced labour in the Belgian Congo had actually an ‘illegal’ and a ‘legal’ variant. The former corresponded to the practice of enlisting men from the ‘native subdivisions’, who were forcibly relocated into workers’ camps and put at the service of private companies. ²⁰ Intensively used in the first decades of the colony, ²¹ these practices tended to disappear over time. The latter was expressed through obligatory labour, mainly in the cultivation of cash crops and local public works, which the colonial authorities had imposed on the native subdivisions since the days of direct rule by king Leopold II. From the 1930s until the end of colonial rule, the colonial authorities referred to this form of labour as travaux d’ordre éducatif or TOE, an acronym commonly used in the colonial documentation too. These TOE constituted the basis of economic organization of rural areas outside the control of private companies.

Obligatory labour in the Belgian Congo concerned mainly the so-called native subdivisions. These were subjected to a special law combining their ‘customary’ traditions with the colonial law applied to the whole territory of the Congo, the former obviously being defined as inferior to the latter. ²² It had a significant impact upon both the societies of these areas and the mentalities of the individuals concerned. ²³ A decree promulgated on 5 December 1933 established the legal framework of the native subdivisions (this decree reformulated a previous one of 1910 and another one of 1917 on mandatory cultivation). ²⁴ The Decree of 1933 established a series of workloads that the colonial authorities imposed on the native subdivisions, presented as ‘educational labour’: the TOE.

The idea of allegedly ‘educational’ labour is also revealing of the attitude that the Belgian government held with regard to the 1929 International Labour Organization (ILO) Forced Labour Convention. During the drafting process of this convention, the Belgian representatives in Geneva defended this kind of compulsory work, arguing that it responded to the need to teach the native populations the techniques that would render them economically autonomous, and should consequentially be excluded from the convention as they did not represent, according to the Belgian view, a form of forced labour. Once the convention passed without taking into account the claims of the Belgian delegation, the Belgian government aligned with those of Portugal and France and refused to launch the ratification procedure, ²⁵ which would subsequently remain blocked for years.

The TOE were imposable only on ‘able-bodied adult men’ (hommes adultes valides or HAV) residing in native subdivisions. According to a quota system introduced in the 1920s, the colonial authorities could appoint a maximum of 25 per cent of these able-bodied adult men per year to the TOE in each native subdivision. The Decree of 1933 established two main categories of imposable compulsory labour: a waged and an unwaged form. Article 45 of the Decree described the unwaged tasks. They consisted of the production of cash crops and a series of public works, namely the cleaning and maintenance of the subdivision area, the upkeep of the roads and waterfronts within it, and the construction of a cemetery, a prison and medical facilities. The native subdivision’s budget had to assume the costs of these works, managed by the Belgian local authorities. On the contrary, Article 46 described a series of tasks for which the appointed HAV could receive a monetary compensation, established according to each region’s respective index of salaries. These tasks were public works of particular interest for the Belgian local authorities: the construction of houses and other infrastructure necessary for the European agents, whether they were permanently residing within the subdivision or just visiting, and the construction and maintenance of the general roads which passed through the subdivision, provided that not enough voluntary workers could be found.

All the workloads foreseen by Article 46 had to be funded from the general budget of the colony. According to the decree, the men appointed to the TOE were not to be employed for these activities for more than 60 days per year. However, the local authorities had the right to extend the imposed days in case of an emergency provoked by a shortage in the food supply or by any sanitary disaster. Furthermore, the decree allowed for the possibility of reallocating these works to another person (substitution). Any appointed HAV could reassign his duty, with the exception of cash crops, to another man, even if this man had also been called for TOE in that same year. In case of such an eventuality, the first man was entirely responsible for the deeds of the second: if the latter was unable to accomplish his tasks or caused some damage, it was the former who had to respond to the justice while the latter was discharged of any responsibility.

The non-fulfilment or the non-attendance of the assigned TOE was of course penalized. The Decree of 1933 established a fine of 100 francs or a confinement of a maximum of seven days to those who did not comply with the request. ²⁶ The amount of the fine does not seem to have changed over time regardless of inflation: at least in the Tshuapa District of Equateur, 100 francs was still the sum that men who did not comply with TOE had to pay in the early 1950s and this might have been the case in the other districts. ²⁷

The Decree of 1933 came into effect on 26 September 1935 and would remain the legal basis for compulsory labour until independence in 1960. Compared with previous legislation, the Decree of 1933 introduced a new organization of obligatory labour by the colonial administration, planned to be more centralized and thus more systematic, and probably also more efficient. Up to that date, the district commissioners had the competence to impose public works and cash crops. The territorial administrators, under the supervision of the district commissioners, were in charge of their application. After the coming into effect of the Decree of 1933, the organization was centralized so that the governors could exercise control over the local civil servants who were in direct contact with the native subdivisions. This way, the higher-ranking authorities in Léopoldville could better control the officials at the native subdivisions, particularly the territorial administrators, who usually exercised a considerable power over the local populations. ²⁸

According to the system introduced in 1935, the Governor-General annually decided the general guidelines for the organization of the TOE in the whole colony. On those grounds, the governors of the provinces were charged with the concrete organization of the workloads in each subdivision under their jurisdiction. The provincial governors determined, by means of a by-law (arrêté), the exact number of able-bodied adult men to be called in each circumscription and the specific workloads assigned to them. The provincial governors established the TOE in theory according to the needs (‘public interest’) of each subdivision in terms of food supply, infrastructure and, more generally, the so-called ‘educational requirements’. To identify such needs, the governors relied on the advice of their district commissioners, who periodically sent them a series of proposals. The district commissioners were assisted by the local authorities, namely the territorial administrators and their teams, composed of agronomists and the agents of police and justice in direct contact with the native communities. In this system, all the echelons of the political hierarchy of the colony were involved in the administration of the TOE. ²⁹

Each summer, the district commissioners and territorial administrators forwarded to the provincial governor their proposals regarding the needs of manpower for public works and cash crops. The provincial governor used these proposals to draft the by-law on TOE, which was published in the following January or February. The by-law contained the list of workloads and the amount of HAV required for their fulfilment. As a subsequent step, the organization of the workloads in each native subdivision corresponded to its incumbent territorial administrators, who relied very much on their respective teams for the execution of the tasks. The key figures for this matter were the agronomists, nominally private agents hired by the colonial administration. The agronomists determined and demarcated the lands where cash crops were to be planted, and controlled the technical aspects of the production process such as seed supply, land rotation or the distribution of tools. The agronomists were also the African chiefs’ main contacts and negotiated with the ‘traditional rulers’ the individuals to be appointed for the workloads. In many cases, the agronomists also disposed of other means of control of the Congolese labourers such as individual records of the men in the subdivision. ³⁰ In addition to them, the territorial administrators relied as well on other civil servants in the organization of the TOE such as their own deputies. Finally, the local agents of police ³¹ were charged with the judicial aspects of the programme as they had to pursue, judge and sanction the individuals who refused to fulfil or neglected the imposed tasks.

The cash crops were the cornerstone of the TOE. In theory, the colonial authorities imposed them with an educational goal and with the intention of supplying the urban areas closest to the regions in question. The remainder could be sent to the export market. According to the decree, these products were to be sold ‘without pressures, and to the individual and exclusive benefit of the cultivators’. The colonial administration in the Congo found in this alleged ‘educational’ importance of the measures an ideological legitimacy for these compulsory crops. The TOE not only should contribute to the mission civilisatrice towards the Congolese populations, but should fulfil a ‘humanitarian’ aim as well: they should help the inhabitants of the native subdivisions to prevent famines in the eventuality of medical or natural upheavals. ³²

In practice, the imposition of cash crops, actually performed by the colonial administration since 1917, responded mainly to fiscal motives. As their name suggests, these crops introduced cash flows into the moneyless rural areas of the Belgian Congo. By allowing them to sell the product of these crops, the colonial authorities provided cultivators with currency. And since taxation in goods was illegal from 1910 onwards, the cultivators primarily used the income resulting from their sales to pay the poll taxes demanded by the colonial authorities from the inhabitants of the native subdivisions. For that reason, the compulsory cash crops largely contributed to the monetization of the economy in the colony and figured for decades as a fundamental element of poll taxation in the rural areas. ³³ However, they did not help to contain the phenomenon of massive migration to the urban areas leading thousands of young villagers to abandon the native subdivisions in search of better remunerated waged employment. ³⁴

The choice of some crops over others by the colonial authorities, theoretically made according to the needs on supply of the native subdivisions and their contiguous areas, often relied on the market interests of European settlers. The educational aim indeed justified a certain degree of experimentation, put to the service of the local markets. The archival records frequently mention that some district commissioners and territorial administrators used to agree with the local European entrepreneurs on which products should be cultivated in a given area. In the more industrialized regions of Southern Congo, for example, the TOE served to supply the mining and railway companies with food products such as maize or manioc. ³⁵ In the areas controlled by Lever Brothers, the TOE served to train the local inhabitants in the exploitation of palm trees for industrial uses. ³⁶ The colonial authorities also imposed other products such as coffee, bananas or rice – usually where the local European entrepreneurs held an interest in exporting these goods overseas. Even the infamous rubber reappeared from the early 1940s onwards as one of the main crops imposed in areas of the Equateur province as a response to its growing demand in the international markets. ³⁷ Since the colonial administration also fixed the minimum selling price, which usually happened to be the only price available, the system generated in many places a concealed small-scale monopoly, in which the territorial administrators agreed with the local entrepreneurs on the organization of the educational crops. ³⁸

The cotton concessions represented a special case. The ‘concessions’ were the territories granted by the colonial administration to private companies for the cultivation of one unique product. The most important concessions were those assigned to the production of palm oil and cotton. Whereas the companies holding a palm oil concession enjoyed full rights of possession concerning the land, ³⁹ such was not the case of the cotton concessions, where the concessionaires only had the exclusive right of purchasing the harvests of the peasant households located within the chartered zone. ⁴⁰ This meant that the TOE applied also to the populations of the cotton concessions, who were at the same time constrained to specialize in the production of cotton as a means of living. In these cases, the colonial authorities subordinated the mandatory crops to the requirements of the concession, not only in terms of cotton output, but also in terms of its needs in food supply. ⁴¹ This system was euphemistically called ‘collaboration’ in the documentation. ⁴² In Equateur, such was the situation in some territories of the Ubangi District, where several cotton concessions were located. ⁴³

The ‘educational’ workloads encountered serious resistance from the Congolese populations. Compulsory crops were already unpopular before the introduction of the Decree of 1933. They had already motivated a revolt of the Ndengese populations in the cotton concession between Equateur and Kasai in 1931. ⁴⁴ After 1935, the resistance to the TOE would continue to manifest itself in various ways. As main causes for this resistance, we can point to the behaviour of some administrators who overburdened the locals, appointing the possible maximum of able-bodied adult men during the legal maximum of imposable days, even when this was not necessary. This would become a cause of concern for the General Government in Léopoldville. ⁴⁵

Open refusal to work in the fields or even sabotage were common ways of everyday resistance to the TOE. They had the result of delaying the scheduled programme of the TOE. ⁴⁶ The colonial administration fought against these acts mainly with fines and short prison sentences. ⁴⁷ However, there were means of resistance other than open refusal. In some cases, the African inhabitants of the native subdivisions preferred to enrol as waged workers in private companies, which indeed exempted them from the TOE. ⁴⁸ In doing so, these individuals also abandoned the lands they had cultivated until that moment, and this process represented a problem for local subsistence production in some agricultural areas. ⁴⁹ In other cases, locals sought for protection in the religious missions and refused to do the TOE arguing that they had to attend the local school or that they had to work for the construction of a church. These claims frequently led to a conflict between clergymen and the local administrators. ⁵⁰ In certain cases, some Congolese even barricaded themselves in the churches to avoid the compulsory assignments. ⁵¹ In other places local administrators found traffickers who sold false contracts as company personnel (boys) that also allowed locals to free themselves from the TOE. ⁵²

The system perpetuated by the Decree of 1933 was, thus, the bedrock of Belgian rule in the Congo’s rural areas. It provided to the colonial administration a way to politically control the peasant masses. Under the ideological cover of education, the Belgian colonizers tried to transform the subsistence economy of the Congolese peasantry into a market economy. The series of transformations that the system experienced before and after the end of the Second World War explain why, unlike what happened in the neighbouring colonies, it was legally preserved until the end of colonization.

The Second World War brought to the Belgian Congo experiences similar to those lived during the Great War. From June 1940 to September 1944, the colony was cut off from its metropole under German occupation. As during the First World War, the Belgian Congo fought the Germans and their Italian allies on its own by means of the Force Publique, whose troops took part in the liberation of Ethiopia in 1941 and participated in the later campaigns of the Allies in Northern Africa.

After the defeat of the metropole, the Léopoldville government put the natural resources of the colony at the disposal of the Allies and signed with these a series of agreements in order to settle the terms of the Congolese material contribution to their war effort. A Tripartite Committee, British–Belgian–US, was set up in Léopoldville to oversee the policy coming out of such agreements. ⁵³ In this context, the Léopoldville government reinforced pressure towards the Congolese populations demanding a supplementary effort because of the war emergency, which resulted in new forms of legal forced labour. In order to contribute to the defeat of the Axis, the inhabitants of the Belgian Congo had to increase substantially the production of raw materials demanded by the Allies. ⁵⁴ For those reasons, a series of emergency laws were issued by the Léopoldville colonial authorities, which considerably multiplied the workloads imposed on the Congolese in terms of obligatory labour. The new assignments, added to the traditional ‘educational’ ones, would be commonly referred to by the colonial administration as ‘war effort’.

During the first months of the war, the Governor-General received special powers in matters of ‘requisitions’ for military or labour purposes. By these ‘requisitions’, the Congolese administration constrained individuals to be recruited into the Force Publique or to be employed by an industrial company. According to a decree of 7 December 1939, the Governor-General could requisition the populations of the colony in order to assure the functioning of the public service as well as the security and defence of the whole territory. When this decree finally came into force on 21 June 1940, right after the surrender of the metropole to the German invaders, it opened up an emergency legal framework, the ‘war effort’, which marked the life in the colony during the following years. Subsequently, the governors of the provinces also claimed a power of requisition. On 31 October 1941, the Governor of Elisabethville decreed the requisition of all the personnel of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) who could no longer break their employment contracts, allegedly because of its importance in the defence of the province. ⁵⁵ On 9 May 1942, a new law issued by the Governor-General in Léopoldville extended the principle of requisition to the white populations by establishing that all the unemployed white men in the colony should occupy a job from a list of vacancies made available by the entrepreneurs. Through these steps, a system of compulsory white labour was introduced for the first and only time in the Belgian Congo. ⁵⁶

In spite of these developments, the Léopoldville government delayed the establishment of a definite legal framework for a general system of requisitions until 1943. A law of 20 May 1943 issued by the Governor-General finally established this system: according to its rules any Congolese could be requisitioned to work for an industrial company during the duration of the war, providing that this company lacked sufficient manpower to assure the necessary production destined for exportation to the Allies. The governors kept in their hands the power of requisitioning. They decided upon the exact number of requisitioned workers and the companies where to relocate this manpower, as well as the wages that these workers should receive and the conditions of transfer to their new location. Wages could not in this case be inferior to the salary of the free workers belonging to the same professional category. Nonetheless, the governors’ decisions did not necessarily have to mention the duration of the requisition.

The territorial administrators, under the supervision of the district commissioners, received the charge of appointing the workers for requisition. The territorial administrators punished non-compliance with severe penalties: up to five years of imprisonment or fines of up to 5000 francs. Although this was not stated by the law, sometimes the resisters were also enrolled in the Force Publique as a means of punishment. ⁵⁷

The requisition could be prevented by acceptance of voluntary labour: those who volunteered to work in a company were excluded from those measures. Therefore, the number of volunteers reduced the number of requisitions in a territory. Additionally, the local nobility and the fathers of more than three children were legally exempted from requisition. ⁵⁸ Moreover, in many places the system of requisitions resulted in the forced displacement of thousands of persons, who were appointed to work at an industrial site located in a province other than theirs. However, such was not the case of Equateur, where the provincial law explicitly banned the dispatch of requisitioned workers out of the province. ⁵⁹

In addition to the war requisitions, the emergency context led to the multiplication of mandatory workloads in the native subdivisions. The colonial rulers then added new ‘war effort’ tasks to the TOE. These new tasks were exclusively agricultural and came in addition to the already existing compulsory cash crops. ⁶⁰ The colonial rulers obviously intended to intensify the production of cash crops in each territory in order to increase the exports of the colony. This time, it was no longer a matter of educating ‘the natives’ or testing new crops; it was a question of harvesting the largest possible quantities.

An ordinance legally established the war effort workloads on 10 March 1942. This ordinance indicated the targeted crops: rubber, palm oil, rice, manioc, maize, wheat, potatoes, copal, raffia and wood. These were the crops to be intensified with regard to the technical skills already acquired by the men of the subdivision, the needs of the industries located nearby, the available means of transportation and the seasons of the year. ⁶¹ The organization of these impositions should follow the same pattern as the TOE. Like the ‘educational’ cash crops, these tasks were not remunerated and the same able-bodied adult men should carry them out. According to the ordinance, each one of these men had to work for 60 days a year. Since the war effort workloads did not replace the TOE, this meant that the able-bodied male inhabitants of the native subdivisions could be appointed for up to 120 days of unpaid compulsory labour each year. ⁶²

As far as it concerned the TOE, the Léopoldville government set now the priority on the cash crops. In order to avoid public works taking much time of the educational labour, in places like the District of Ubangi qualified workers were hired at the expense of the budget of the native subdivisions so that they could carry out the work in place of the appointed able-bodied adult men. ⁶³ Indirectly, such measures contributed to boost the professionalization of the tasks in question. In Equateur, for instance, the Governor explicitly ordered his subordinate officials to reserve at least 40 days of the educational labour for agricultural tasks and this principle was subsequently followed in the TOE programmes during all the years of the war. ⁶⁴ As a result, a considerable part of the local populations had to forcibly dedicate more than three months per year to agriculture under the control of the Belgian administration.

The resistance to both requisitions and agricultural compulsory labour grew in parallel to the multiplication of the workloads. The three-monthly reports on requisitions coming from the Province of Equateur show that the industrial managers often complained about the poor performance of the requisitioned workers and about the high level of desertion among them. ⁶⁵ In the Province of Katanga, social unrest caused by the requisitions transformed itself into a movement of protest and led to several strikes between 1944 and 1945. ⁶⁶ The disaffection of the local populations with regard to the imposed agricultural tasks also grew bigger: not only did they have to work for the administration twice the time they had used to, but also the remunerated part of these labours declined in importance. ⁶⁷ The intensification of coerced agriculture appears to have accentuated the flows of migration of young men from the native subdivisions into the urban areas. ⁶⁸ It is difficult to give figures about the quantity of individuals who fled from the countryside into the cities to escape from coerced agriculture because of the lack of reliability that characterizes the census data obtained during the war, but it seems that it was a massive phenomenon. ⁶⁹ In Léopoldville, the non-European population rose consequentially from around 43,500 in 1940 to around 78,800 in 1945. ⁷⁰

Nevertheless, the emergency legislation on requisitions and war effort labour met the goals intended by the administration: the Belgian Congo’s exports were increased thanks to the intensification of the production and the colony supplied the materials needed by the Allies according to the levels that these demanded. Around 800,000 tonnes of copper were sold to the United Kingdom at the same price as the copper provided by the British colonies. The production of Congolese cadmium attained the record figure of 27 tonnes in 1942. The production of industrial diamonds, supplied by Forminière from Kasai, was equivalent to more than 40 million carats. The USA could develop their nuclear armament programme thanks to the imports of uranium from Shinkolobwe in the Province of Katanga. The USA also imported considerable amounts of zinc from Kipushi, also in Katanga, with which they manufactured other types of armament. ⁷¹ And the production of cotton went over 40 square metres annually. ⁷²

The end of the war in Belgium drove the Congolese export flows back to the metropole, especially from January 1945 onwards. However, the end of the war did not entail an immediate abrogation of the emergency laws, which were instead progressively removed. The Léopoldville government formally abolished all the requisitions and the war effort tasks on the last day of 1945. ⁷³ In order to prevent further social turmoil, the colonial authorities recommended the industries to hire the requisitioned workers as permanent employees. All the remaining requisitioned workers were to be gradually released before a deadline fixed at the end of August 1946. ⁷⁴

Reflecting what was happening in the metropole and in other colonial empires, the aftermath of the Second World War brought about in the Belgian Congo a new organization of the socio-economic life and, more particularly, of labour relations. ⁷⁵ The progress made in the labour law of the colony characterized most of the period starting in 1945, ⁷⁶ although the most important developments would only be achieved during the last years of colonial rule. In 1946, the first African labour councils were instituted. Multiple systems of contracts, insurances and indemnities for the Congolese workers were enhanced during the following years along with a set of specific laws regulating them. ⁷⁷ These more beneficial job conditions, followed by wage increases in many industries, attracted even more rural populations into the urban centres, giving a first taste of the urban proletariat that would subsequently overcrowd the Congolese cities. ⁷⁸

Nevertheless, obligatory labour continued to exist in the Belgian Congo despite the modernization of labour law. If in the French and British colonies existed the idea that the transformation of labour relations should imply the removal of the coercive practices to assure industrial and agricultural production, ⁷⁹ Belgian colonial officials and politicians tended to disregard such possibilities. For these, the Congolese populations, especially the rural communities, were not ready for ‘progress’ as they had not achieved yet a convenient level of technical education to be able to develop a local economy based on production and sales. ⁸⁰ Economic interest lay of course behind this idea as a more autonomous conception of labour would go to in detriment of the close political and economic control of the local communities by the colonial state. As a result, whilst the French and British accompanied the modernization of labour relations with more political representation of the African populations, ⁸¹ the Congolese remained unrepresented in the colonial institutions.

The concept of ‘education’ lay once again at the core of the Belgian colonial authorities’ approach. The Belgian colonial rulers continued to conceive education as they had done prior to 1940. They did not give much importance to literacy for the Congolese, which was a problem they delegated to the religious missions until 1954. ⁸² The Belgian administrators seemed more worried, instead, by the technical qualification of the Congolese to develop a local market and believed for that reason that the TOE still constituted a good means to uplift the ‘material’ condition and ‘moral level’ of the Congolese populations. ⁸³ Behind this conception we encounter the die-hard myth of the ‘lazy African’ that had sustained the ideology of the European colonizers. ⁸⁴ Therefore the Belgian rulers determined in 1946 that the colony was to return to the status quo prior to 1940 for the issue of obligatory labour, regardless of the fact that the ILO Forced Labour Convention had already finally come into force in the Belgian Colonies. ⁸⁵

During the first months of 1946, right after the abolition of the war effort legislation, there was indeed some confusion about the continuity of obligatory labour. The provincial governors were uncertain about which crops they could impose in that concrete year, and about the duration of the work periods (whether 60 or 120 days). The Governor-General, Pierre Ryckmans, tried to clarify this situation and confirmed to the provincial governors, in May 1946, that they should still impose the TOE, although they should at the same time endeavour to make them more appealing to the Congolese labourers. Ryckmans gave instructions to apply the TOE in a more gentle way so that the local populations showed less reluctance to accomplish them. Ryckmans proposed that the administrators offered an adequate wage for the public works and a fair sales price for the agricultural products. The administrators were also called upon to better supervise the chiefs so that these equitably distributed the tasks between the able-bodied adult men of their subdivision. ⁸⁶

In accordance with this approach, the Belgian government appointed a Commission on Native Labour in Brussels to establish the guidelines of labour in the Congo for the following years. In July 1946, this Commission concluded that the system of obligatory labour should be preserved in the Belgian Congo for the same educational purpose for which it had been created a decade earlier. The Commission of 1946 reaffirmed thus the unwillingness of the Belgian administration to ban forced labour in their colonies. However, the Commission highlighted that this system should not be regarded as permanent. Once the provincial administration considered that the populations fulfilling TOE had been finally ‘educated’, the system would become pointless and could be consequentially abolished. Willing to challenge the permanent nature of the system, the Commission called for a gradual reduction of the imposed tasks. On the one hand, the public works were to be progressively assigned to waged labourers. On the other, the mandatory cash crops should be rationalized with a focus on food supplies. ⁸⁷

Additionally, the Commission introduced two new taxes whose payment exempted the appointed able-bodied adult men from fulfilling the TOE: the redemption (rachat de la corvée) at a price fixed by the territorial administration, and the centimes additionnels, a personal tax commonly paid in the subdivisions which started to be used in some places to make up for the obligation of the TOE. ⁸⁸

We can observe some significant changes in the application of TOE during the first postwar years. In most provinces, all the TOE, including those under article 45 and those under article 46 of the Decree of 1933, were remunerated. In Katanga, where the economy was centred on the mining industries, the TOE seemed irrelevant after the war and were consequently completely suppressed. ⁸⁹ The redemption system following the guidelines of the Commission worked in all the provinces as an optional system depending on the earnings of the locals. It was the local chief who had to request the redemption and who, in many cases, even established which workloads could be redeemed from the annual programme and which could not. In some provinces, the income obtained from the redemptions was used to fund public works. ⁹⁰ However, we observe lesser changes in Equateur, where, apart some improvements in its administrative aspects, the system continued to function essentially as it had prior to 1940.

In Equateur, the provincial government improved the organization of the TOE. The documentation of the years after 1946 shows how the provincial government annually meticulously established the programme of TOE. The office of the provincial governor sent precise guidelines on the workloads, the quantities to produce and the number of HAV available in each subdivision, to the territorial administrators via the district commissioners so that they could organize the tasks locally. Quid pro quo, the territorial administrators used to set forth a series of plans for their practical application. On these grounds, the final programme of TOE was frequently accompanied by a set of studies concerning the needs of the different territories of the district, in which there was usually a chapter concerning the nutritional necessities of the local populations, along with other chapters on the enhancement of the cash crops. In the latter, the programme of TOE gave details on how to improve the methods of cultivation with regard to existing agricultural practices in each territory, or on the subject of introducing new seeds. ⁹¹

In addition, in many places the territorial administrators appointed the Congolese chiefs to a Council of Dignitaries under the presidency of a representative of the colonial administration, usually the Deputy Territorial Administrator, in order to discuss the annual programme of TOE. Some of the official notes of these reunions are conserved, especially a series concerning the territories of Befale, Bokote and Bongandanga in the Tshuapa District for the years 1952 and 1953. They show that during these meetings the local chiefs symbolically agreed on the annual programme of TOE and, at the request of the colonial administration, gave their opinion on the subdivisions’ needs of food resources, the adequacy of the proposed crops or the convenience of replacing the TOE by waged qualified labour. Significantly, the conclusions of most of the meetings held in 1951 and 1952 stated that the ‘natives’ had not ‘yet understood the interest of imposing these crops’ and that the mandatory nature of them should consequently remain in place ‘for at least four or five years’. ⁹²

In 1949, the provincial governor of Equateur removed the construction of roads from the TOE programme as an experiment. However, it was reintroduced in the 1952 programme, namely because many agents encountered much difficulty when trying to find free labourers for these tasks. ⁹³ In 1950, the provincial governor of Equateur launched a campaign to promote free cultivation among the inhabitants of the native subdivisions. ⁹⁴ This campaign was combined with another directed towards the European entrepreneurs to make them cooperate with the African producers by means of economic incentives and gratifications. In the words of the provincial governor, the aim was that the European entrepreneur and his Congolese suppliers constituted ‘in a healthy spirit of cooperation a united and organic enterprise’. ⁹⁵

Nonetheless, neither this approach nor these measures helped to stifle abuses and discontent. The documentation shows the continuities, still in this period, of violent practices in the application of the TOE throughout the province of Equateur. Some private firms continued to lobby the administration so that the annual programme of TOE was defined according to their own interests. ⁹⁶ In 1952, the provincial governor was still complaining about the fact that many territorial administrators exceeded the land limits agreed upon in the annual programme or imposed construction works in the areas where those had previously been banned. ⁹⁷

The local authorities often imposed fines and prison penalties in abusive manner, sometimes to the detriment of the majority of adult able-bodied men of one subdivision. In May 1952, for instance, in the correspondence between the Administrator of the Budjala Territory and an agronomist, the latter revealed that he used to imprison a considerable number of reluctant labourers as a means of persuasion towards the local population, convinced that this was the most efficient way to fight the unwillingness of some of the appointed labourers. ⁹⁸

Moreover, some territorial administrators and their agents still used violence when imposing the TOE. A legal instruction of 1956 revealed that certain agronomists in Equateur commonly used the whip when they applied the annual programme of TOE, which motivated a complaint from the Governor-General to the provincial governor. ⁹⁹

As a result, these practices certainly did not help to contain the rural exodus to the cities. For instance, in a document of the Native Labour Service (Service de la Main d’Œuvre Indigène) of the provincial government, the depopulation of the Monkoto Territory was deemed to be the consequence of the violence with which the territorial administrators imposed the annual TOE. ¹⁰⁰

Finally, another cause of unrest among the local populations of Equateur was that former soldiers or reservists of the Force Publique were also included within the TOE. In September 1953, the Governor-General addressed this problem and asked the provincial governor of Equateur to require from his administrators that they facilitated redemption or replacement for these men. ¹⁰¹

In 1953, the Governor-General, Léon Pétillon, ordered an examination of the possibility of finally abolishing the TOE. For that purpose, he appointed a commission in Léopoldville, composed by six high-ranking civil servants (directors and vice-directors) of the General Government. This Commission, convened on 2 March 1953, was unanimous in affirming the ‘need’ of abolishing compulsory labour, but considered that its total disappearance was not yet realistic. The administration, the Commission said, was to facilitate a gradual suppression such as through the use of the centimes additionnels, and to take over the costs of the public works charged to the budgets of the native subdivisions. The Commission also proposed the creation of a general fund to gather the reserves of the native subdivisions (Fonds des Circonscriptions Indigènes et Centres Extra-Coutumiers), which, subsidized by the colonial administration, should contribute to the replacement of the corvées by a system of credit and public investment. ¹⁰²

When this Commission’s project came to the office of the Governor-General, it was still modified to put the accent on the progressive reduction of the TOE as the main means to achieve their effective removal. ¹⁰³

In continuity with the measures taken since 1946, the Governor-General proposed to abolish the workloads of building infrastructure everywhere in the colony and, therefore, to limit the TOE to cash crops and the maintenance of sanitary systems. In April 1953, this project was communicated to the provincial governor of Equateur, who manifested his scepticism. He argued that the experience showed that the natives were reluctant to fulfil this kind of labour even when they were paid, especially in the less inhabited subdivisions. He proposed instead that the tasks should rather be assumed by the central administration at the cost of the budget of the colony. Even so, the provincial governor of Equateur engaged himself to reduce the number of maximum imposable days from 60 to 45, starting at the following annual programme. ¹⁰⁴

Léon Pétillon’s proposals of 1955 led to the publication of a new decree on 29 December of that same year modifying the system of TOE. As desired by Pétillon, the TOE were reduced to what the Belgian rulers considered to be the minimum possible. Compulsory labour was limited to agricultural workloads, meaning that all the other tasks mentioned by the articles 45 and 46 of the Decree of 1933 were no longer imposable. The maximum of days during which a Congolese able-bodied adult man could be employed within the TOE was accordingly reduced from 60 to 45 per year. ¹⁰⁵

Nonetheless, the new decree did not change the system in any substantial manner. In Equateur, for example, the public works had been playing a marginal role in the TOE annual programmes for some years already and the local authorities had by that time effectively replaced them by qualified labour. Moreover, the provincial governor had already introduced the maximum of 45 days of work prior to the promulgation of the new decree. Therefore, the organization of the TOE programmes followed the same pattern as it had during the previous years, with a particular attention paid to technical improvements and methods of crops rotation. ¹⁰⁶

The new law did not lead either to a change of mentality of the agents who applied the workloads. In 1956, a case taken by the General Prosecutor of Léopoldville on the use of the chicotte within the private companies revealed that this was no unfamiliar practice within the public administration. Two public servants of the province of Equateur were condemned for inflicting lash penalties on Congolese reluctant to cultivate cotton fields in the framework of the application of TOE. ¹⁰⁷

The Belgian enigma of why forced labour was not legally banned in Congo after 1945 is explained by the convergence of several factors that differ from the French and British colonial experiences.

First, the complete lack of political representation of the Congolese populations in the rule of the colony set up a context in which any criticism of the colonizers’ methods could be easily silenced and suffocated. On these grounds, the conception of education underpinned by colonial ideology, privileging technical skills over literacy and intellectual emancipation, served to perpetuate the idea that obligatory labour was kept ‘for the well-being’ of the indigenous populations. In 1946, the TOE were reaffirmed allegedly because they were deemed to play still an essential role in the mission civilisatrice that justified the colonization. They contributed to the ‘moral progress of the natives’ by introducing a morale of work and a rudimentary form of capitalism. The measures were ‘good’ because they promoted a culture of market and of basic economic planning in terms of food and currency stocks.

Nonetheless, behind these considerations stood the importance that the old system of obligatory labour still had in the control of rural areas of the colony by the Belgian colonial administration. The TOE were at the same time a source of indirect taxation, a system of low-cost agricultural exploitation and an effective means of political control over the local societies imagined as ‘tribal communities’. Therefore, the example of the Province of Equateur after the Second World War reflects quite well how the Belgian administration in Congo found a powerful argument of legitimacy in education in order to protect its system of legal forced labour from the new trends in international and colonial law elsewhere.

As in other African contexts, the postcolonial administrations of the Congo would also find in mandatory labour a useful system of political dominance. The Belgian scheme of TOE, extinguished after the independence in June 1960, was soon to be echoed by new similar practices. Although the Lumumba government proclaimed the compliance of the Republic of Congo with the ILO Forced Labour Conventions, ¹⁰⁸ Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime restored the obligatory workloads. In 1973, the so called ‘Salongo’ was institutionalized. ‘Salongo’ was a compulsory ‘civil service’ consisting in a series of agricultural and ‘development’ works that every Congolese citizen had to execute one afternoon per week, usually on Saturdays. The shadow of the TOE was consequentially reflected in this practice.