Zaire The Apparatus of Control
Traditional tombs in Bas-Zaïre Region
Courtesy Zaire National Tourism Office
State, church, and business formed the trinity of
powers upon
which the royal hegemony rested during most of the
colonial era. By
virtue of their special relationship with the state,
formalized by
the 1906 Concordat between the Vatican and Belgium,
Catholic
missions were the privileged instrument of primary and
vocational
education for the colony's people; the operating costs of
their
educational and missionary activities were almost entirely
covered
by state subsidies. According to some estimates, the
mission
establishment had virtually as many personnel as the state
and
three times as many outposts. The business corporations,
involved
in plantations and mining, were given virtually a free
hand to
recruit African labor, to organize food production for the
labor
camps, and to provide social services for African workers
and their
families. Both missionary and business interests were
given direct
access to the state through the appointment of
representatives to
advisory organs, such as the Government Council in
Léopoldville and
the Colonial Council in Brussels. The result was a close
and, most
of the time, mutually supportive relationship between the
state on
the one hand and the church and business interests on the
other.
The colonial state was, of course, the pivotal element
in this
coalition of interests, because of its unchallenged
monopoly of
force and highly visible administrative presence. From the
time of
its creation in 1888 until its dissolution in the wake of
the 1960
mutiny, the Force Publique provided the colonial state
with a
formidable instrument of coercion, whose reputation for
brutality
was well established. The everyday tasks of administration
were
mostly performed by a corps of colonial civil servants
whose
density on the ground was without equivalent elsewhere on
the
continent. By independence there were some 10,000 European
civil
servants and officers serving in the Belgian Congo. From
the
territorial administrators to the district commissioners
and
provincial governors, the network of colonial
functionaries reached
out from remote areas of the colony to its administrative
nerve
center in Léopoldville, where the governor general held
court.
Except for the 1957 local government reform, the grid of
administrative control fashioned by Belgium remained
virtually
unchanged throughout the colonial era.
Adding to the weight of the European hegemony, a system
of
native tribunals and local councils was introduced in the
1920s to
enlist local chiefs in administration of the colony. Few
of the
chiefs, however, claimed as much as a glimmer of
legitimacy, as
most of them acted as the agents of the colonial state.
The
machinery of African participation in local government was
a far
cry from the native authority systems established in
British
colonies, for example. Ultimate control over local affairs
always
rested with European administrators.
Equally restrictive of African participation was the
system of
administration prevailing in urban sectors, the so-called
centres extra-coutumiers. Under the arrangement
introduced
in 1931, urban areas were administered by a special sector
chief
(chef de centre) assisted by a separate sector
council
(conseil de centre) appointed by the local district
commissioner; urban centers were in turn divided into zone
councils
(conseils de zone), headed by appointed
authorities, called
zone chiefs (chefs de zone). As the system proved
increasingly ineffective, however, the tendency,
especially after
World War II, was to resort to a more direct form of
administration, in which European territorial agents ran
the
affairs of the so-called native townships (cités
indigènes)
as they deemed fit.
Not until the postwar years was this complex system of
interlocking structures among the colonial state, the
church, and
big business much called into question. The decisive
factor then
was the intrusion of metropolitan politics into the
colonial arena,
following the election in 1954 of a Socialist-Liberal
cabinet in
Brussels whose anticlerical program had a profound effect
on
colonial policies.
Data as of December 1993
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