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

7. A Kingdom Preserved

178 7 A Kingdom Preserved The rulers of colonial Africa have been famously divided over how best to govern their dependencies. What was better, direct rule or indirect rule? Was direct rule better in which the colonial overlord created territorial units and imposed any person of their choice to head them, or was indirect rule better in which the overlord recognized the preexisting territorial groups and strove to rule through the legitimate leaders they found, provided that they could obtain the cooperation of these leaders? Most French and Portuguese colonies adopted the first approach, while most British colonies adopted the second one. In theory the rulers of Belgian Congo preferred indirect rule, but in practice they found nearly all the larger kingdoms in Congo in ruins, or they destroyed them during their conquest, so that they actually recognized only chiefs over small chiefdoms whom they named and deposed at will. Hence their indirect rule often came very close to direct rule. By its very size, however, the Kuba kingdom was one of the rare exceptions to this situation. The colonial experience of the Kuba during Belgian times was mostly shaped by two major laws: the decree of May 2, 1910, about chiefdoms (that is, governance) and the decree of February 1917 about compulsory labor. This chapter is devoted to the effects of the first decree since the preservation of the kingdom and its governance by indirect rule derived from it and thus created a striking anomaly in the administrative practices of the Belgian Congo. This was the only precolonial kingdom to survive nearly intact, the only territory of its kind and its size encapsulated in the colony’s administrative grid like a fly in amber, large enough to be effectively governed by indirect rule and yet small enough to fit in the colony’s standard territorial grid as a “territory .” After relating how this case of indirect rule took shape, we follow the political history of the kingdom until independence wherever we can from the perspective of Kuba experience. In this chapter that means, first, what the kings and their councils did or what happened to them, but also the influence of the village constituencies as represented by their titleholders at court. The Imposition of Indirect Rule In chapter 4 we saw that it was only after the takeover of Congo by Belgium that the foundations of a genuine colonial administration based on the rule of law were laid down in Upper Congo, that is, in the whole of the colony upstream of Kinshasa. The 1910 decree on the chiefdom was the lowest but most fundamental element of a territorial system that was completed two years later. By then Congo was organized in districts, which included a number of territories (territoires), themselves composed wherever possible of chiefdoms and otherwise of an unstable aggregate of even smaller units such as villages or clans, called sectors. Yet even though districts existed in Leopold’s Upper Congo, the state had actually abdicated its powers on the ground to the Compagnie du Kasai over a very large portion of that district, including the Kuba kingdom. In contrast to this situation, however, as soon as the Belgian decree on chiefdoms became law in 1910, it was realized on the ground among the Kuba. In that same year no less a personage than Vice Governor General Eugène Henry visited the region and personally fixed the boundaries of “the Kuba chiefdom.” Although he amputated several peripheral portions of the realm, including one in the south toward Luebo, most of the kingdom stayed intact. Somewhat later in 1912, when the new district structure was decreed in Congo and the districts were divided into territories, a new smaller district of Kasai was created and territories were set up within it. But the Kuba “chiefdom” was so large that it became the territory of Mushenge all by itself, and when its boundary with the adjoining territory of Luebo was traced anew, the kingdom recovered all the land it had lost two years earlier in that direction , except for the town of Luebo itself. A Kingdom Preserved 179 To complete the new organization of the Belgian Congo and supposedly to decentralize the administration, the country should have been divided into provinces beginning in 1914, but by that date only three provinces had been set up. This measure was actually taken so as to provide for more oversight over...