A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo

1. Invitation to a Beheading

15 1 · InvitationtoaBeheading The colonizer constructs himself as he constructs the colony. The relationship is intimate, an open secret that cannot be part of official knowledge. —Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason In the mid-1970s, people living in the large village of Lubanda in what is now theDemocraticRepublicoftheCongo(DRC),readilyrecalledthenameand a few of the exploits of Bwana Boma, despite his having lived there for a mere two years nearly a century before. Bwana Boma is the local sobriquet for Émile Pierre Joseph Storms (1846–1918), Belgian leader of the fourth caravan of the International African Association from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika that arrived deep in the heart of Africa in late September 1882 (fig. 1.1). The name Bwana Boma means “Mister Fortress,” and it was chosen during Storms’s days at Lubanda because of the formidable stronghold Storms constructed there in 1883.1 Storms was an assertive young man who sought to leave his mark on European conquest of the Congo. With acuity and irony, a Belgian journalist noticed Storms’s unmitigated ambition and heralded him as “Émile the First, Emperor of Tanganyika.”2 Of Bwana Boma’s many adventures, the one that proved pivotal to his proto-colonialprojectwasapunitiveexpeditionhemounted(butdidnothimself lead) in early December 1884. The goal was to sack the mountain fastness 16 · The “Emperor” Strikes Back of Lusinga, a most “sanguinary potentate,” in the estimation of Joseph Thomson , the Scottish explorer who visited the chief in 1879.3 Lusinga commanded men engaged in ruthless pillaging and slave raiding in a wide area north of Lubanda, and such activities seemed justification enough for Storms’s attack. Yet as we shall see, he had more deep-seated reasons as well. Setting the Scene The mid to late 1800s were turbulent years in what is now known as southeasternmost DRC. Beginning around 1830, Swahili adventurers from coastal east Africa circumambulated or crossed Lake Tanganyika to hunt elephants and take slaves in the Marungu Massif and adjacent lands. The term “Swahili” and the related designation wangwana referred to “free-born” coastal men, as such socialreferenceswereunderstoodasfarinlandasLakeTanganyika.Thesewere expansive as well as prestigious identities, and non-coastal people could “reinventthemselvesaswaungwanabyappropriatingcoastalculture ,[and]bydressing and living a waungwana lifestyle” that included rich displays of consumer items and related material culture.4 Storms noted that persons who presented themselves as “free-born” might remain enslaved in Zanzibar but possess significant autonomy in the interior. As one scholar has reflected, “The slave who hadsimplyspenttimeinZanzibar,evenforashortwhile,wascalledanNgwana ‘free man’ thereafter; . . . every askari, by the sole act of having taken part in a military escort, became an Ngwana; . . . [and] far from Zanzibar, the Arab, the free Swahili person, the slave of the coast, all were labeled wangwana.” Such a fluid sense of what constituted “free-born” challenges what being “enslaved” must have meant in the same circumstances, as understood across different languagesandsocialpracticesaswellasthroughindividualcases.Indeed,StephenRockelarguesthatwangwana “wereatthecuttingedgeofAfricanengagement with international capitalism, that they were the prime movers in the economic, social and cultural network building of the period, and that they expressed an alternative East African modernity.”5 Swahili and wangwana were soon seconded by or competing with mercenary brigands known as rugaruga, who hailed from what is now north-central Tanzania. In the words of historian Aylward Shorter, rugaruga were “wild youngmen,aheterogeneouscollectionofwarcaptives,desertersfromcaravans, runaway slaves and others. They were without roots or family ties, and they owednoallegianceotherthantotheirchieforleader.”6 Rugarugaoftenactedas Invitation to a Beheading · 17 highwaymen,harryingstragglingcaravans.AsStormsnoted,“Whenacaravan crossestheland,itisconsideredagreatgodsend[aubaine],afavorablewindthat has brought resources and circumstances that chiefs exploit as much as possible .”Nowonderthatafewyearslater,aEuropeanstalwartfoundrugarugatobe “real vultures” preying upon the weak and robbing the dead.7 Storms’s phrase “a favorable wind” may have been a common expression in French, but it resonatedwithhowlocalpeoplewouldhaveunderstoodsuch “goodfortune”:apepo, or spirit—literally a “wind”—would be the agent leading the caravan into rugarugaclutches .TabwawouldcomprehendtheEuropeanmetaphorofrugaruga as “vultures” in their own way as well, for like these remarkable birds, the brigands benefited from an extraordinary ability to locate caravan “carrion” over great distances. Indeed, vultures are deemed to possess a supernaturally extended ken that Tabwa call malosi as an attribute shared with hyenas and a few other predators and scavengers. Ivory and slaves that rugaruga obtained to the west of Lake Tanganyika by commerce, force, and wile were sold to Swahili or Omani (collectively called “Arab”) traders based at Ujiji as of the 1840s, and at several less significant entrep ôts along the eastern shores and to the south of Lake...