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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'Elusive natives': escaping colonial control in the Leverville oil palm concession, Belgian Congo, 1923-1941
Author:Henriet, Benôit
Year:2015
Periodical:Canadian Journal of African Studies (ISSN 0008-3968)
Volume:49
Issue:2
Pages:339-361
Language:English
Geographic term:Congo (Democratic Republic of)
Subjects:workers
palm oil
plantations
labour history
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00083968.2015.1057855
Abstract:Throughout the inter-war period, in the Belgian Congo's largest oil palm concession, thousands of colonised workers and their families managed to escape administrative surveillance and authority through schemes of dissimulation and elusiveness. The shared nature of sovereignty imposed on this territory, distributed between private and public agents, along with a sparse territorial occupation, left extended areas unsupervised by Western actors and indirect rulers. In these remote places, palm-fruit cutters, with the blessing of their employers, could settle without having to answer to authority. After exposing the specific policies enforced in the concession, this paper highlights how natives were able to maximise their autonomy regarding both the production imperatives imposed upon them and their obligations to the public authorities. The last part details the administration's consecutive failures in its endeavours to tackle workers' elusiveness. The conclusion challenges the notion of 'resistance' as an appropriate concept to recover the fruit cutters' adaptation to the imperatives of colonial rule and large-scale manual labour within the rainforest. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]
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