Belgium and Northeastern Congo
Northeastern Congo is made up of rural communities with poor roads and even poorer cellular service. My research in Haut Uele province focuses on its modern humanitarian infrastructures—two-way radio networks that non-governmental organizations have built in an effort to connect communities—but it also concerns the longer history of infrastructure, remoteness, and connection in the region.
Africanist historians must often split research time in Africa with visits to the former imperial metropoles—a month in Senegal and a month in France, several weeks in Mozambique and several more in Portugal—and the experience can play bizarre tricks with your sense of space and time. Since Congo was once a colony of Belgium, I spent time in three different Belgian archives: the African Archives in Brussels, the Royal Central Africa Museum in Tervuren, and the KADOC Documentation Center for Religion and Culture in Leuven.
When visiting these archives, the violent and extractive history of Belgium’s presence in the Congo was impossible to ignore. The museum in Tervuren is housed within an ornate neoclassical palace, still decorated with racist statues despite recent multimillion-euro renovations, and was first established to showcase King Leopold II’s colonial ambitions at the 1897 International Exposition, including three “exhibits” of Congolese villagers. The archives sit in what was the Welcome Center for African Personnel (Centre d’accueil pour le personnel africain, CAPA) during the 1958 World’s Fair.
The CAPA Building holds the archival service of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. All photos by Scott Ross.
Among their files, I found an assortment of artifacts from government reports to colonial officer letters to missionary accounts, all of which I look at from the vantage point of my months of fieldwork in Haut Uele.
For example, when I traveled to the town of Niangara to conduct interviews, I found a town whose heyday had long passed, with the remains of large colonial and Mobutu-era buildings in disrepair, while the bridge over the River Uele had been recently renovated by Indonesian engineers in tandem with the MONUSCO peacekeeping force. Back in Brussels, I found a series of photographs from the initial construction and grand opening of that same bridge (I had been looking for the history of another bridge, in the town of Dungu, but my infrastructural interest chased everything). Niangara has gone through many changes in the intervening years, but the bridge and its link to foreign investment and interest endures.
The construction of the bridge over the Uele River in Niangara, 1950. From “Transports par route.” AA PD(1637).
The same bridge, recently rehabilitated by MONUSCO.
These colonial archives also complement my own local archival work. The humanitarian radios that I study were modeled on an existing radio network operated by the Roman Catholic Church in the region, where parishes would share information about expenses and inventories. When the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army began carrying out attacks in the area in 2008, operators used these church radios to track incidents, casualties, and rebel movements.
These books hearken back to the missionary notes found in the Leuven archive, where the collections include the daily reports and requests of various Catholic missions across the region. The missionary presence in Congo was one of the ways that the Belgian metropole found its hold in the rural hinterland, funding health centers and schools across the colony.
Radiophonie notebooks listing daily news, Dungu.
Annual accounts of the mission in Dungu, 1933. From “Jaarrekeningen van de missiepost Dungu (1930-1939)”, KADOC BE/942855/558.
As I arrive back in Haut Uele and look through my notes from the archives, I continue to find little connections. The small shuttered shop across the street from my house bears a Greek trader’s name, Coutsoukous, and the same name appeared in a 1960s business directory. I watch my interlocutors install antennas for their radio network, and I recall government reports about the expansion of its predecessor, the wireless telegram. As people navigate tensions with pastoralists who have come to the region, supposedly from Chad or Cameroon, I remember letters from missionaries and colonial officers about the efforts to monitor the porous border with Sudan. The people around me may talk of working to make the rural Congolese more connected to one another and the outside world via radio, but the historical reality is that the region sits at a crossroads that has been connected in other ways before—with varying consequences.
