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3 0 Introduction The old man stood there in his compound on top of the hill, silent now, lost in dreams and gazing over the landscape. He had just retold us how the colonial soldiers came to capture the town and his freedom . He stood there for a long while, recalling perhaps all that happened to him and those he had known since then until this day in the waning years of the era these men had ushered in. If so, his vision of colonial history had certainly very little in common with the standard accounts one finds in textbooks about the period. Most of the latter begin with the creation of colonies by European powers through treaties with the other powers accompanied by occupation on the ground. These accounts then continue by writing about the initiatives the colonizing powers took and the structures they implanted in order to exploit these territories and to “civilize them”—that is, in so far as possible, turn them into approximations of modern metropolitan societies. Or they tell the same tale refracted through the prisms of multiple abstract concepts. Such a top-down focus may well be admirably suited to explain the links between colonies and their metropolises and to detail the large place taken by the plans and activities of colonial intruders in the fields of economics, administration, justice, education, religion , and health, but these accounts have no room for histories retold by people such as the old man in his compound on the hill. For in such textbooks the colonized Africans were merely the potter’s clay out of which splendid colonies were made. For all their merits, such historical surveys provide then obviously only fragments of a much richer history. They are crippled for lack of the perspectives of those like the old man on the hill who lived through it all and went on into independence after that. For African subjects were just as much agents in this story as were their masters. Did they not have their own achievements, aspirations, joys, and suffering? Were they not shaped in part by their shared experience of colonialism? Were they not the mass of the people in the colonies at the time and the ancestors of today’s citizens, whose countries inherited what they wrought? Yet, I do not know of any introductions to colonial history that emphasize the African experiences and place them at the heart of the tale, where they obviously belong. That is the reason why I wrote this work. This book introduces its readers to the colonial period from the side of the colonized, as far as feasible, by keeping its focus on their concrete experiences, by underlining their active rather than their passive agency where appropriate in the overall narrative, and by letting them tell their own story as much as possible—and that does include some reminiscences of that old man on the hill. Such an endeavor cannot fully succeed , mainly because “the colonized” is a collective noun that includes myriad points of views, experiences, voices, and agents, yet it is one that to my mind presents a history that is more concrete, more realistic, richer, and more meaningful than any top-down alternative. Given this goal, it becomes immediately evident that one cannot encompass all of tropical Africa in such a book, nor even all the peoples of a single colony without losing the immediacy of those voices into overgeneralization . In consequence this essay focuses only on one country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, also known as Congo-Kinshasa, and only on one group in that country, a group I call Middle Kuba. As it happens this country occupies the heart of Central Africa, and the group we study live at its center. By itself, however, that does not mean that either the colony or the Middle Kuba are representative for all of tropical Africa—and yet to a certain degree they are. As a colony Congo is exceptional in that it was the only one that had been founded as the domain of a single despotic ruler, that it later became the only Belgian colony in the world, and that its colonial rule ended in the most spectacular chaos. Yet that exceptionalism is often exaggerated: nearly all of its patterns of governance, economic exploitation, conversion to Christianity , and social modernization have on the whole been quite similar to those of other colonies. The choice of the inhabitants of the central core of the Kuba...

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