In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism by J. P. Daughton (review)

This is a book about colonial violence. J. P. Daughton tells the story of the Congo-Océan Railway, the construction of which cost between 20,000 to 60,000 lives and left thousands more laborers undernourished, sick, and traumatized. The 500 km railway, connecting Brazzaville with the Atlantic port Pointe-Noire (both in present-day Republic of the Congo), first envisioned in the 1880s, was built between 1921 and 1934. Although officially relying on volunteers, the construction sites became known as exceptionally violent workplaces both in French Equatorial Africa and the imperial center, France. How is it possible then, Daughton asks, that despite the knowledge of horrendous working conditions, the project was carried out over thirteen years—and after the completion of the railway, the suffering and deaths of African laborers were completely forgotten about in France? Daughton sets out to bring justice to this neglected human suffering on the Congo-Océan Railway and embeds his story of the railway in a larger history of French colonial violence in equatorial Africa.

This is therefore not your classic railway history focusing on heroic surveying and brilliant engineering, or reporting locomotive classes, engine miles run, and amounts of goods transported (although interested readers can find some of that information in Chapter 11). Daughton unerringly addresses a painful gap in most colonial railway accounts: the suffering of the (mostly) African laborers that moved incredible amounts of earth, cleared bushes, dug tunnels, and laid the tracks. Tragically, those laborers left very few traces for historians to reconstruct their lives and work. Daughton has an exceptional body of sources at hand—created by the Société de Construction des Batignolles and the French administration—which he masterfully uses not only to demonstrate the pain inflicted on laborers, but also to reinstate their agency. Given the general lack of sources on African workers on such construction sites, In the Forest of No Joy is a must read for anyone interested in colonial infrastructure projects. Daughton emphasizes the forceful recruitment of "volunteers," their arduous journeys to the construction sites, and the working conditions there. A key chapter investigates the particularly difficult conditions in the eponymous "forest without joy," the Mayombe (Chapter 5). Daughton does not shy away from recounting anecdotes of shocking atrocities and contrasts them in later chapters with the local colonial administration's attempts—personified by Governor-General Raphaël Antonetti—to justify, downplay, and deny the violence committed on the construction sites. Antonetti, as Daughton argues, was driven by a strong belief in bureaucratic measures to bring "humanity" and progress into the colony. In his "circular logic," Antonetti upheld that the violence committed on the Congo-Océan Railway would eventually lead to a reduction of violence in the colony. Antonetti's belief in bureaucracy was shared in imperial Paris, and his strategy of deflecting criticism to "individual rogues," coupled with his superior institutional knowledge and vigor, successfully secured support for the railway throughout its construction period.

In his final chapter, Daughton seeks to explain the particular brutality and high death rates on the Congo-Océan Railway. He contends that overwhelming racism on different levels met with the devastating hubris of the French colonial administration, which commenced railway construction without even having surveyed the territory properly. Ultimately, the high death rates were a sign of the French inability to keep its workforce alive, and hence a sign of imperial weakness. The results of this failure were then justified as either negligible or unavoidable in a project of such magnitude. However, if violence inflicted by humans on humans is the main concern of this book, one wonders why the author is not drawing more from the existing literature about human cruelty. The lack of engagement with other literature is perhaps more broadly the only shortcoming of this book for academic readers, as there...