October 15 - 18, 2008 

Beyond the Port of Antwerp, the Savages and their Women: The Violence, Intimacy, and Sexuality of Colonial Power in the Belgian Congo

Jean Muteba Rahier

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Florida International University

Miami, Estados Unidos

This work focuses on inter-racial intimacy in the Belgian Congo (1908-1960) and during the short lived political entity that preceded it, the Congo Free State (CFS) (1884-1908), which mostly functioned as a private property of the Belgians’ king, Leopold II.  Most people who have some knowledge about the CFS have read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), which describes the abominable atrocities and violence committed by Leopold’s agents during what they called “the campaigns of pacification,” which supposedly took place against the Arabisés, or “African Arabs” who were capturing “African animists” for sale as slaves in the Middle East.  Hochschild and others revealed that these campaigns were actually often conducted directly against “African animists” who were resisting the exploitation by the CFS’s agents, who had for unique objective to incorporate the Congo within a “world economy” centered on the trade of mostly ivory and rubber.

In Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, Ann Laura Stoler (2002) uses mostly archival documents that have recorded exclusively the voices and perspectives of metropolitan society, the state, and white Dutch males, to show how important the regulation and relative control of intimate relations between colonizers and colonized was to imperial power.  With this research, my intention is to hopefully complicate Stoler’s theorizing of “intimacy” by listening carefully and examining both indigenous (and mostly female) individual perspectives and voices, which were only very marginally recorded in the colonial archives, and individual white male colonizers’ experiences that are, unlike the formers, all over the colonial archives.  My primary objective is to uncover the “microphysics of colonial power,” that is to say the micro-dimensions of the practice of colonial power in the interactions between colonizers and colonized.  This brings the discussion close to the notion of power and its microphysics as conceptualized by Michel Foucault, for whom power is in permanent circulation: it is not exclusively monopolized by a center, but is on the contrary diffused through an organization that appears as a network.  This suggests that both dominants and oppressed are involved in its circulation because it permeates all levels of society, as much in the spheres of family life and sexuality than in the public spheres of politics, economics, and the law.  As Foucault explained, power is not only repressive, it is also productive: it takes us over and produces, among other things, pleasures, particular kinds of emotions and relationships, forms of knowledge, and discourses.  This comes with a series of important questions: How have white Belgian colonial males on one hand, and Congolese colonized women on the other, managed to navigate the particular contexts of Leopoldian and later Belgian colonialism to establish what have sometimes been relatively durable relationships? What was the level of emotional interaction between them? Was something resembling western romantic “love” possible at all in this inter-cultural interface marked by unequal concentrations of power?  If western romantic love wasn’t possible, then what was there instead?  Etc.

I will suggest elements of answer to these questions with a close examination of the story of a CFS agent, Clément Brasseur, who was involved in the most brutal acts of repression against African animists at the same time that he maintained a close relationship with an African woman, his concubine, with whom he had a mulatto child, Léon, to whom he left most of his wealth when he died in the Katanga in 1897.  I have consulted—among other documents—Clément Brasseur’s private papers held in the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, in Tervuren, Belgium.  

About Jean Muteba Rahier

Jean Muteba Rahier was born in the Congo from a Congolese mother and a Belgian father.  He received his Ph.D. from the Université de Paris X, in Nanterre, France.  He came to FIU in August 1998 from Louisiana State University, where he taught for 6 years in the Department of Geography & Anthropology.  At FIU, he has been an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African-New World Studies (ANWS) and has served as ANWS Graduate Program Director, ANWS Acting Director, and Department of Sociology & Anthropology Graduate Program Director.  He has been appointed Director of ANWS in July 2008.

He is the author of La Décima: Poesía Oral Negra del Ecuador (Quito, Ecuador: Abya-Yala, 1987) and the editor of Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities (Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 1999).  He also edited with Percy Hintzen Problematizing Blackness: Self-Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States (Routledge, 2003). He has authored a series of articles and book chapters, and has published in the American Anthropologist, the Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Research in African Literatures, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Cadernos de Antropologia e Imagem, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Íconos, etc.  He is fluent in French, Spanish, and Portuguese and was, from January 2002 until the summer 2007, the Editor of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology: the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (within the American Anthropological Association).  He is completing revisions to a book manuscript on the Afro-Esmeraldian Festival of the Kings in Ecuador, which is forthcoming at the University of Illinois Press.  The same press is also considering for publication a volume he has co-edited with Percy Hintzen and Felipe Smith entitled Global Circuits of Blackness: Race, Space, Citizenship, and Modern Subjectivities.  His next big projects focus on the diversity of black subjectivities in South Florida, and on inter-racial intimacy in the Belgian Congo.  The latter pays careful attention to the intersections of race, power, and sexuality in the context of Belgian colonization of the Congo, and involves both interviews and archival work.

Return to list of abstracts

Return to conference homepage