Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870–1960What’s in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners’ physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range—often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village’s understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations. Methodologically innovative, Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process—the naming of Europeans—can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents—“the home burner,” “Leopard,” “Beat, beat,” “The hippopotamus-hide whip”—clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions. |
Contents
3 | |
An Overview | 21 |
Contexts to Naming | 32 |
3 Naming Colonialism Making History and Social Memories | 53 |
4 Early Naming Explorations Trade and Rubber Collection | 79 |
5 Naming and Belgian Colonial Rule | 92 |
Praise Names as Strategic Ambiguities | 119 |
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accusations agents anthroponyms Azande Basoko Belgian colonial Belgian Congo Brussels brutal Bula Matari Bwana cash crop cash crop cultivation Catholic missionaries Central Africa collective names collectors colo colonial administration colonial government colonial officials colonial rule Congo belge Congo Brussels Congo Free Congolese villagers connotations cotton cultural district domination Eastern Congo economic Équateur Etude everyday exploitation explorers expressed foodstuffs gave golese individual names interview Kasai Kasongo Katanga Kikongo Kisangani Kiswahili labor Lanoitte leaders Leopold II Likaka Lingala loanword Lomami River lonial Lubumbashi mandatory cash crop Maniema Matamba-tamba Mbole meanings of names messages Mingi Mondele names of colonial names of praise naming colonial naming pattern native courts nial officials Opala peasants perceptions of colonialism policies political polygyny praise names producers protest Province Orientale recruitment rivières glauques roads rubber collection Rural Society shows social Stanleyville stories symbol taxes Territoire tions trade Uele University Vansina village world violence women workers Zaire