Lubumbashi, first impressions

My feelings about the Belgian colonialists grow ever more mixed.

On one hand, the Belgians sucked.  In terms of their colonies, they were basically meaner, dumber French.  There was the whole Congo Free State thing, where they managed to wipe out half the population of the Congo in 25 years or so.  Then fifty years of the Belgian Congo, which was better, but that's not saying much.  Twenty years after the Congo Free State had closed up shop, the Belgians killed seven thousand workers in four years on the Matadi-Kinshasa railway.  They didn't abolish the use of leather whips on Congolese workers until six months before independence.

It wasn't just the violence, though that's the biggest part of it.  The Belgians treated the locals with relentless contempt.  By the 1950s they'd allowed a small handful of Congolese to get high school degrees and to be considered "evolues" -- literally, "evolved ones" -- but Kinshasa was still a segregated town where Congolese had to get out of white districts after nightfall, and at independence there were less than twenty Congolese with university degrees in the entire country.

On the other hand, the Belgians did build some stuff.  I saw a little of this in Bujumbura, and more in Kinshasa.  But you can see it more clearly here in Lubumbashi, the former Elizabethville.

This town was gorgeous once.  You can still see it, just a little.  It's ten degrees south of the equator and nearly a mile up, so the climate is delightful -- warm mornings, hot afternoons, cool evenings.  The architecture fits it: lots of buildings with porches and balconies and shuttered windows and atriums.  It's a town of broad boulevards and sidewalks, a lovely railway station and post office.  It must have been a garden spot, back when.

And it's not just the town.  Eastern Zaire gets all of its electricity from four hydroelectric dams.  The Belgians built them all.  The railway?  Belgian.  The inter-city roads?  Belgian too.  As recently as the 1970s, it was perfectly possible to drive across the country from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa -- more than a thousand miles, by road.  It would take three or four days, and you might have to sleep rough once or twice, but people did it.  Today it's pretty much impossible; the road is very bad everywhere, and in some places has ceased to exist, and there may also be "security issues". 

The Belgians had a vision for the Congo.  They wanted to develop it -- build railroads and mines and plantations -- for themselves, with the natives kept firmly subordinate as a docile labor force.  They didn't see themselves as having a civilizing mission, like the French, nor were they distracted by Christian sentiments or strategic concerns like the British.  Their colonial vision was narrow, and pretty strictly commercial.

So it was even more doomed to fail than the French or British.  But while it lasted, the Belgians built a lot of stuff.  They did much of it with native labor that was unfree, or in the last generation before independence, semifree.  But still: roads and mines and rail lines, and this beautiful town with the nice wide boulevards and the lovely buildings.

Elizabethville was built to be the capital of a mining province, but it was strategically placed so that only one large mine is nearby.  Miners, who were of course natives, would not be in the nice balconied houses on the boulevards; they would live in planned villages out at the mines.  Elizabethville was intended to be an administrative and commercial town, controlling the flow of wealth outwards to the world.

Lubumbashi today is... well, "run down" doesn't really do it justice.  "Post-apocalyptic" is probably too extreme.  But there's a lot of deferred maintenance.

The town has had ups and downs. There were a couple of good years earlier this decade, when commodities prices surged and it briefly became worthwhile to invest in the Congo again.  Then the economic crisis hit.  You wouldn't think someplace deep in the interior of Africa would be hit hard, but that's in fact the case -- the crisis caused metals prices to crash, and metals are almost all Lubumbashi has.  Most economic activity right now is from "artisanal" mining -- a nice way of describing one or two guys going through mine tailings and filling bags with promising bits of gravel -- and as a commercial center for the surrounding region: villagers come here to sell vegetables and chickens and fish, and come back with sandals and jerrycans.  There are a lot of boarded-up buildings.

Our hotel is a large three story building that occupies half a city block.  It has breezeways and balconies, and a large atrium that's full of flowers.  The big main staircase is polished granite, which seems oddly appropriate.  The walls are covered with art made of hammered copper.  It's a handsome building.  Our team seems to be the only guests.

Okay, I'm still putting these pieces together in my head.  More in a day or two.

Comments

[The New York City Math Teacher]

In my teens, I found Victor Lasky's _The Ugly Russian_ in my grandfather's bookcases, where I heard of Patrice Lumumba, Moise Tshombe, and Joseph Mobutu for the first time. For Lasky, of course, Tshombe was a mix of Harry Reardon, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington. Any sign of the existence of Tshombe left in Lubumbashi/Elisabethville?

[Doug M.]

Little. Tshombe is remembered by the locals, but the central government obviously wasn't a fan of the great secessionist. Apparently there's a modest square named after him, and that's it.

There are a lot of Moishes here, but I think it's just a common name.

Doug M.

[Tony Zbaraschuk]

"Deferred maintenance" is a frightening phrase.

[Scott]

Um, are you using the phrases "docile labor force" and 'unfree' as euphemisms for 'slaves?' If so, why are you so impressed with extravagant physical constructs made from slave labor?

Just asking...

[Doug M.]

What euphemisms? They weren't slaves -- nobody owned them, they couldn't be sold. But they couldn't leave at will, either.

By the mid-colonial period, it was a mix of corvee (labor as substitute for taxes and fines, mostly for small local projects) and "contract" labor. The latter involved, of course, grossly unfair contracts. The native workers were paid a pittance and forced to work long hours, often in appalling conditions. Contract labor in the Belgian Congo involved liberal use of the "cocotte", a lash made from hippopotamus hide, and men with guns as the final backup.

That said, at the end of the contract, the workers could go home. Of course, contracts often lasted for years, and the Belgians tried to set things up so that a steady stream of workers were forced by economic circumstances into signing.

So, "unfree" is not a euphemism, but shorthand.

Why am I so impressed: apparently I failed to communicate my very strongly ambiguous feelings here. My bad.

Doug M.

[andre]

Having lived in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi)in the Congo and in Ndola as well as Kitwe in Northern Rhodesia from 1950 to 1968, I can tell you this: I hear that to this day, the "workers" there are nostalgic for the good old days before independence when they got paid on time for their work and earned enough to live on without having to worry about inflation that makes their currency worthless soon after it's issued. Sure they have been freed, but what good is that to anyone except the head of state and a handful of his cronies? The fact is that independence came too early in most African countries. Too early in the sense of their not having enough people with a sufficient education and sense of justice for carrying out civil servant responsibilities. What they have instead is corrupt officials that exploit the population and keep it in the worse misery imaginable. Moreover the military consists of illiterate, unprincipled youngsters that are rarely paid their salary by the government. As a result, the military consider it normal to rob and loot civilians even in peace time.