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

11. Toward a New World

298 11 Toward a New World The first Luso-Africans, and later the first people from overseas, revealed to the Kuba a new world across the oceans in which most things seemed to be vastly different from what they were used to. When these exotic foreigners began to settle in their country, the curious local people keenly scrutinized everything they did and everything they used. All of it was completely novel and hence fascinating, just as any novelty is anywhere else in the world, especially among the young, perhaps because it seems to foretell the future. For some time, then, and just by the mere fact of living there, the incomers demonstrated the possibility of another way of living that they liked to call modern , a word that means, strictly speaking, “of the present time.” Yet in the new colonial context, the colonialists used the word modern to refer not to any novelty in general but only to the particular innovations they were introducing, and especially to their own way of living. In this last chapter we follow the process by which modernization took root and gradually developed in the region alongside the older Kete and Bushong way of life. Modernization, in its attempt to impart a raft of new attitudes, wants, aspirations, norms, and institutions in tune with the requirements of an industrial world, was a process that went well beyond conversion to Christianity or the adoption of Western knowledge. The acquisition of Western clothes or Western table manners was merely a superficial sign of adherence to a modern way of life, and even a new sense of religion or new abstract knowledge was not enough. To fully succeed in a modern way of life one also had to acquire a new sense of time, as measured by clock and calendar expressed in hours and schedules ; a new sense of money, as revenue needed to maintain the modern lifestyle; a new sense of work, as the source for monetary revenue as distinct from leisure; and, most difficult of all, a new sense of the limits of social obligation toward kith and kin. Indeed, even today most Congolese still struggle to balance the obligation to share with those they recognize as kin and the need to hold onto enough income to maintain the standard of living expected of them. Obviously, then, modernization was too tall an order to be accepted all at once. It was a process. Yet it was not a straightforward accumulation , occurring drop by drop, as it were, through the adoption of one modern thing after another until by the end of the process that way of living had become modern. In particular, one should not confuse the acquisition of new foreign goods with the development of a modern way of living, as so many of the early colonialists did. Thus the early adoption of sea salt and matches did not affect the daily way of life of Bushong or Kete in any significant way, nor did it ineluctably lead to a subsequent craving for Western costumes, cigarettes, bicycles, or the standard of living of a storekeeper. The process started with observing the behavior of the foreigners from overseas at Luebo along the Sankuru River and at various trading posts. Soon thereafter the Presbyterians pioneered active instruction into how to live the modern life. The Catholics followed them only some years later. But neither demonstration nor instruction met with immediate acceptance among the Kuba, for the obstacles were just too formidable . Moreover, the adoption of even the outward appearance in dress, food, or housing erased important expressions of Kuba identity and consequently provoked resistance. So, despite the fascination with things modern, acceptance of a modern way of living remained quite slow for a long time. But by the late 1940s, as the economic and social context had become more favorable, the new way of living began to spread faster. Suddenly, between 1950 and 1952, a breakthrough occurred at Nsheng when trendsetting young men among the elite at the capital embraced the modern way of life they had learned at boarding school, thereby legitimizing it. In the following sections we deal successively with the introduction of a modern lifestyle, resistance to it, and the final breakthrough of modernization. Toward a New World 299 Introduction of a Modern Lifestyle The missions were not only the demonstrators but also the first main teachers and disseminators of a modern...