Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960

10. Visions for a Different Future

271 10 Visions for a Different Future Reckoned by the calendar, the colonial period constituted only a small fraction of the whole duration of Kuba history. Yet these years were all important, for it was during this period that some Kuba pioneers began to leave their universe and step into a brave new modern world. No, they did not emigrate to a new world across the Atlantic; rather, the modern new world came to Congo and Kasai. In these concluding chapters of our study, we follow the track of how modernity invaded the country. This chapter deals with its foremost foreign agents—the missionaries—and focuses on mission stations and schools, their main tools to graft modernity onto Kuba society. They came to save souls, but in the process they found themselves transmitting Western technology, culture, education, and social institutions and practices in the hope of turning their converts into surrogate Belgians or Americans . The graft began to take, for by 1960 they were beginning to transform their flock, and especially their pupils, culturally from Kuba into Congolese. Organizing Missions and Their Stations The colonial administration justified its rule by claiming that its goal was to bring civilization to the benighted Africans. When they spoke of civilization, they referred to their own customs, religion, language, and other habits—that is, the gradual assimilation of Congolese to their own way of life. They strove to make the country’s inhabitants adopt literacy, Western dress, food, housing, etiquette, social customs, ethics, and Christianity so as to turn them into surrogate Belgians in all particulars. While aspiring to confer “civilization” on its subjects, the colonial administration still did not envision spending large amounts of money to achieve it. That task was best left to the private sector, especially the Christian missions, which were expected to transform Africans into “modern” people by a combination of religious conversion, education, and their own example of gracious living. Side by side with the missionaries , private corporations would usher the Congolese into the market economy by providing them with a handsome monetary income stemming from wage labor or from the returns of the compulsory cash crops the companies marketed for profit. From today’s vantage point it is evident that the missions succeeded to a large degree in converting the rural Congolese but that the corporations failed. The first rival missionary parties steamed up the Kasai River by paddleboat in 1891: the American Presbyterian Christian Mission (APCM) would settle at Luebo and the Catholic congregation commonly known as Scheut established themselves at Luluabourg. These 272 Visions for a Different Future Missions, central schools, and hospitals, 1891–1960 men (women followed soon after) had but a single mission: to redeem souls and to set up an organization to do so, their church. Each was convinced that they were God’s emissaries and that their task was to bring the “book” (Biblion) to the Congolese and be its “good messenger” (euangelos ), thereby redeeming them both from degrading paganism and from the pernicious falsehoods propagated by their competitors in order to save their souls for all eternity. In their minds they did God’s work and acted in God’s name. Today they would be called fundamentalists. Even in 1912 a British consul sketched the Catholic fathers of Scheut as follows : “Brusque in the extreme for they are mostly of the peasant class, they are nevertheless indefatigable workers, more especially in regard to their cause, to which they are espoused almost to a degree of fanaticism .”1 The Presbyterians, declared the consul, were sadly wanting in tact. He further added of the Catholics that “power with them is everything ” but that was just as true of the Presbyterians. For all the intensity of their faith, however, these missionaries were not charismatic, with the partial exception of William Sheppard. Apart from the very first year or so of their ministry, they did not wander around the country to proclaim the faith to all and sundry with the help of translators. Rather, they acted like traveling businessmen representing corporations. Both Presbyterians and Catholics began by erecting a set of buildings, called a station, and then by looking for ways to attract people. Both faiths discovered almost immediately that those who flocked to their station were mostly Luba migrant refugees seeking shelter from the ongoing wars in Kasai. At first Sheppard planned to reach the Kuba court to convert the king because...