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

2. The Colonial Relationship

35 2 The Colonial Relationship An absolutely essential foundation for the development of any colony was the creation of a special unequal relationship between people belonging to two different worlds: namely, all the foreigners from overseas, not just state personnel, with their own different and exotic culture, as masters and all the local African populations, with the variety of their cultures, as subjects. Without such a relationship the colonial state could not have endured. This relationship was backed by force, but ultimately it did not rest on force. In the eyes of the foreigners it was justified by the conviction of their absolute superiority, while their subjects mainly accepted it because of the foreigners’ wealth and their superior magic-like technology that included their lethal weaponry. The local populations accorded a special treatment to overseas foreigners and their agents from their very first appearance. Such a treatment was crucial even if it did not yet constitute a colonial relationship. This kind of behavior first appeared in Kasai as people witnessed the deference with which the Angolan caravans treated their Portuguese or German leaders, a behavior that was based in part on the centuries-old practice of colonialism in Angola. But caravans are temporary phenomena : when they arrived in the vicinity local people could either contact them—for instance, to trade—or ignore them. They were compelled to become more involved when foreigners came to stay, founded stations, and began to interact daily first with willing local people and later by gradually forcing everyone into this new relationship of absolute inequality between locals and foreigners. It was a relationship expressed daily in conventional signs of superiority or submission, such as standard gestures to give or to receive, to claim precedence, or to yield it, a relationship vocalized by a tortured colonial jargon in which true verbs were always in the imperative mood and all other verbs became nouns, a jargon that bristled with a special lexicon referring to the benefits of superior civilization and the savagery of inferior culture. It was a relationship in which all terms of address invariably referred or alluded to the utter inequality of the relationship, and its jargon dripped with the condescension of the master toward the subject. In addition and almost from the beginning the colonial relationship developed further on the basis of the preconceptions and the impressions each party built into its vision of the other during their initial encounters . However, this general vision then petrified almost immediately into a stereotype that was to last the whole colonial period, despite the accretions over time of further curlicues induced by later observations and by the very practice of colonial rule. In the Kuba instance the crucial initial encounter was not the one involving Silva Porto but the one involving Wolf because he was supposedly the experienced white pioneer whose opinions were gospel for all his colonial followers. The followers of these followers then adopted the views of their predecessors as a matter of fact. Thus, even well before 1900 the essential colonial stereotypes had been formed about both the Bushong and the Kete. They would remain valid during the whole colonial period, just as the quintessential image of the foreigner did in the Kuba imagination. The impression their kingdom made on the imagination of the colonialists turned out to be crucial because it also conditioned the whole Kuba experience of colonial rule. Hence, this chapter deals first with the impressions left on both parties by their initial encounter , follows this up with a sketch of the organization of the Kuba kingdom and its villages, and only then turns to the colonial relationship proper. Becoming Acquainted Ludwig Wolf’s unexpected irruption in the Kuba border settlements from an unusual direction created a stupendous surprise. In the first Bushong settlement where he arrived, the village of Ndong, the inhabitants completely lost their heads, as if they had seen something impossible , something out of a nightmare: 36 The Colonial Relationship They first stood stock still as if spell-bound and yet it seemed as if they dearly wished to flee. Some silently held their hand in front of their mouth as a sign of surprise and others were aimlessly running around with their spears. All the while a woman kept staring at me with an expression of the greatest surprise and kept pinching the folds of her stomach with such force that her face mirrored the...