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

Conclusion: The Experience of Being Colonized

325 0 Conclusion The Experience of Being Colonized This narrative about the history of colonial experiences among the Bushong and Kete is now over. And so it is time to look back at the whole sweep of this book and to ask ourselves a few questions that flow from the choice to write about “being colonized” and about the value of “the experience of the Bushong and Kete” as an introduction to the history of the period in the whole of Congo. The very first question a reader raised was whether being colonized accounts for all the changes the Bushong and Kete faced between 1880 and 1960. Would some of those changes have happened anyway, even if they had not been colonized? This sort of question is called counterfactual because it deals with a situation that did not happen. The short reply is that precisely because it did not happen, any answer except for “we don’t know” has to be mere fiction limited only by the imagination of the speaker. Yet when their underlying reasoning is comparative, counterfactual questions can sometimes be useful to disentangle various factors that led to a given outcome. Thus one might posit: if Kasai had become part of Angola, then the Kuba would have learned Portuguese, Luanda would have been their capital and then . . . because that is what happened to people in Angola. “If the Kuba had never been integrated into any colony,” however, is an extremely unlikely presupposition given the known history of Africa. But it is one that might be invoked to justify a comparison with, say, Bhutan or Thailand to conclude that the Kuba still would have been affected by the global market economy. Well and good, but the real evidence is that all change for whatever reason among the Kuba between 1899 and 1960 was so affected by the colonial situation that it is spurious to try to figure out how it could have been different otherwise. Colonialism was an essential attribute for every other process occurring at the time, something that colored everything else. And yes, being colonized was the essence of Kuba history during that period. Does that mean, the same reader asked, that by 1960 Kuba people no longer defined themselves as “people of the king,” as they did in 1880, but as “colonized Congolese”? Yes and no. By 1960 they defined themselves toward other Congolese as “Bakuba,” a label imposed by others that became part of the colonial gallery of ethnic identities, almost from its inception. When asked by anyone outside of Congo they would call themselves Congolese and feel themselves to be that. Only in local situations did they still distinguish between Kete or Bushong. So, yes, colonialism influenced their identities. The next question raised by the title of this book is one of agency. “Being colonized” sounds passive, and “experience” is ambiguous. To what extent did ordinary Bushong or Kete affect their own destinies? The answer is quite complex. The reader will first notice that the leading actors are not always the same. They vary from chapter to chapter and even within chapters: sometimes they are the colonizers, sometimes not. Because this is a history from below, we are emphasizing agency from below, that is, from somewhere among the colonized, not from the colonialist top down. Agents vary from individuals and villagers to kings and the Kuba establishment, and so do the points of view we follow. Most of the time, though, the dominant agents are the kings and the Kuba councils of titleholders at the capital, so that their views dominate in the narrative as well as in the sources. Before dismissing this as yet another elite point of view, although admittedly one below the top level, the reader should keep in mind that the opinions of the councils usually reflected those of their constituents, that is, most Bushong villages, and thus they are closer to the grass roots than is apparent at first. As to the king, the main reason why he still enjoyed genuine authority at the end of the period flows from the conviction that he used his agency above all to further the interests of his villagers. So the question of agency is quite complex, and one can sympathize with another reader who concluded that this book views the history of 326 Conclusion colonial rural Congo neither from the top down nor from the bottom up but...