Citation
Archives of Military Courts in Colonial
Congo: New Sources for the History of
Violence and Agency in Central Africa
Benoît Henriet1,* , Amandine Lauro2 , and
Renaud Juste1,2
1
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium
Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
*Corresponding author. E-mail: benoit.henriet@vub.be
2
Abstract: This article offers an overview of the recently rediscovered archives of the
Conseils de Guerre—the military court—of colonial Congo (1885–1960). As a longconsidered lost collection of court records encompassing seventy years of testimonies
of colonial military crimes, these archives offer unparalleled insights on the complex
relation between law, impunity, and armed violence in colonial Central Africa. The
article first sheds light on the history of those records and on their ongoing digitization in the context of debates about the contested heritage of Belgian “displaced”
colonial public archives. It then sketches out several promising avenues for academic
research and public history projects that they could help document, notably on the
controversial history of violence in the Belgian empire and on the multifaceted nature
of African agency under colonial rule.
Résumé: Cet article présente une vue d’ensemble des archives récemment redécouvertes des Conseils de guerre, le tribunal militaire du Congo colonial (1885–1960).
Longtemps considérées comme perdues, ces archives, qui regroupent soixante-dix
ans de témoignages sur les crimes militaires coloniaux, offrent un aperçu inégalé de la
relation complexe entre droit, impunité et violence armée dans l’Afrique centrale
coloniale. L’article fait d’abord la lumière sur l’histoire de ces archives et sur leur
numérisation en cours dans le contexte des débats sur le patrimoine contesté des
archives publiques coloniales belges « déplacées ». Il esquisse ensuite plusieurs pistes
prometteuses pour la recherche académique et les projets d’histoire publique
History in Africa, Volume 0 (2023), pp. 1–16
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the
African Studies Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction,
provided the original article is properly cited.
doi:10.1017/hia.2023.9
1
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
2 History in Africa
qu’elles pourraient contribuer à documenter, notamment sur l’histoire controversée
de la violence en Afrique centrale belge.
Keywords: Belgian Congo, Congo Free State, colonial violence, military history,
judicial records
Introduction
The history and collective memories of colonial Congo are rife with violence,
ranging from the infamous Congo Free State (1885–1908)—the private
colony of king Leopold II—to the brutal suppression of the January 1959
riots, which paved the way to the country’s independence in 1960.1 Multifaceted violence was integral to the technologies of rule deployed by colonial
power holders, whether in the form of military repression, bodily punishments, death penalty, imprisonment or relegation of “dangerous elements”
far from their place of origin.2 The Force Publique, Congo’s colonial army, was
instrumental in this regard. Acting both as a military and a police corps, it
enforced the colony’s racist power structure and acted against those perceived as threats to the public order. However, far from only embodying the
repressive arm of the colonial administration, the Force Publique was also a
breeding ground for further challenges to European rule. The concentration
of armed and trained soldiers near strategic enclaves and infrastructures
potentially posed an acute danger to the colonial state. The recently
unearthed archives of the Force Publique courts-martial constitute a unique
opportunity to shed a new light on these tensions. The Conseils de Guerre
(military courts) were responsible for the trial of Congolese soldiers and
Belgian officers for the violation of both military and civilian law. As a longconsidered lost collection of court records encompassing seventy years of
testimonies of colonial military crimes, these archives offer unparalleled
insights on the complex relation between law, impunity, and armed violence
in colonial Central Africa.
The recent “rediscovery” of more than 5,500 trial records—ranging from
the early days of the Congo Free State to the last months of colonial rule—has
led to their preservation and cataloguing at the State Archives of Belgium,
1
Pedro Monaville, “A Distinctive Ugliness: Colonial Memory in Belgium,” in
Rothermund, Dietmar (ed.), Memories of Post-Imperial Nations: The Aftermaths of Decolonization, 1945–2013 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 58–75. See also
Matthew Stanard, “Violence and Empire: The Curious Case of Belgium and the
Congo,” in Aldrich, Robert and McKenzie, Kirsten (eds.), The Routledge History of
Western Empires (London: Routledge, 2013), 454–467.
2
Amandine Lauro and Benoît Henriet, “Répression: le Congo après Léopold II,
une colonie moins violente?,” in Goddeeris, Idesbald et al. (eds.), Le Congo colonial: une
histoire en questions (Waterloo: Renaissance du Livre, 2020), 225–239.
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo 3
where they are now at the disposal of researchers. Furthermore, a significant
part of these archives has been digitized and is available online since
December 2022.3 This initiative ensures their wide circulation and eases their
mobilization by students and scholars with a limited access to physical records
held in Europe. It also promises to open new avenues for academic research
and public history projects on the controversial history of violence in the
Belgian empire and on the multifaceted nature of indigenous agency within a
key institution of imperial power in Central Africa.
In the first part of this report, we document the history of the production
of the Conseils de Guerre’s archives and of its recent valorization in the
context of debates about the contested heritage of Belgian “displaced”
colonial public archives. In the second part, we offer some preliminary
reflections on the historiographic value of these records, illustrated by
specific court cases, on three main levels. We first highlight the new perspective on military life and norms offered by courts-martial records. In spite of its
crucial role in colonial power dynamics in the Congo, the Force Publique
remains little studied. With a few exceptions, most of its historiography is
dated and espouses a top-down perspective.4 The daily experience of
3
More information on the content, accessibility and privacy protection of this
set of records can be found in the published catalogue of the State Archives of
Belgium: Tommy De Ganck and Ornella Rovetta, Inventaire des archives du Ministère
des Colonies et successeurs en droit. Administration d’Afrique. Conseil de guerre de Léopoldville, 1891–1956 (Brussels: State Archives of Belgium II–43, 2022), available online
https://search.arch.be/en/zoeken-naar-archieven/zoekresultaat/ead/index/ead
id/BE-A0545_722869_807023_DUT. (Additional catalogues for the courts of
Basankusu, Basoko, Boma, Coquilhatville, Kwango, Libenge, Luebo, Monveda,
Nouvelle-Anvers, Stanleyville and mobile “en campagne” courts will be available in
2023–2024.) Records may be accessed on the institutional web platform of the
State Archives of Belgium: https://search.arch.be/en/zoeken-naar-archieven/
zoekresultaat/ead/rabscans/eadid/BE-A0545_722869_807023_FRE. A paper
and digital copy is also available for consultation at the National Institute of
Archives of DRC in Kinshasa.
4
See among others Bryant Shaw, “Force Publique, Force Unique: The Military in
the Belgian Congo 1914–1939,” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin,
1985); Louis-François Vanderstraeten, De la Force Publique à l’Armée Nationale Congolaise
: histoire d’une mutinerie, juillet 1960 (Brussels: ARSOM, 1993); E. Jacobs et al. (eds.),
Défense et Maintien de l’Ordre en Afrique Centrale à l’époque contemporaine de la colonisation
belge (1908–1962) (Brussels: MRAHM, 1994). More recent works only address specific
aspects of military life, such as the troops’ performance in the World Wars, against
popular revolts, or as a police force: see for instance Isidore Ndaywel and Pamphile
Mabiala, Le Congo Belge dans la Première Guerre mondiale (1914–1918) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015); Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order. Police, Workers and Protest in
Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 301–
324; and Amandine Lauro, “Suspect Cities and the (Re)-making of Colonial Order.
Urbanization, Security Anxieties and Police Reforms in Postwar Congo (1945–1960),”
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
4 History in Africa
belonging to the army, having to uphold its code of honor, and being both
the target and the enforcer of racial hierarchies have hardly been documented so far. We then explore how these records constitute a unique opportunity to delve deeper into the history of colonial violence and repression in
Central Africa. Many trials show that violence exercised both by and on
soldiers (starting with their recruitment, in many cases forced) existed in a
continuum of coercion that questions the multidimensional deployment of
colonial violence. We finally explore how courts-martial records can add
depth and nuance to our understanding of African agency under colonial
regimes. Interrogatories of witnesses, victims, and accused constitute an
exceptional repository of fragments of Congolese voices, which can be
critically and prudently mobilized to investigate their experiences of and
participation to colonialism. The solid body of works that has been dealing,
since the 1990s, with court records as sources to study social change in Africa
has shown that these sources never offer unmediated insights into the acts
under investigation.5 Questions of translation and transcription, while not
exclusive to the colonial context, had special bearing in an environment
where (French) literacy was a strategic tool of domination. Furthermore,
translation was not only a matter of language: courtroom encounters were
also shaped by the transposition of testimonies into the normative framework
of judicial and military colonial conventions. The trials held by military courts
in the Congo nevertheless offer key insights into the ways in which colonized
people were (un)able to publicly speak about their experiences of violence
and subjection.
The Force Publique on Trial: Records and History
The archives of the military courts of colonial Congo are part of a larger
archival legacy of public colonial archives produced in Africa and
“evacuated” to Belgium on the eve of independence, whose history has only
recently been excavated.6 Soon after their displacement, these records were
placed by the Belgian Foreign Office (which succeeded to the Ministry of
Colonies as the “owner” of these archives) in the storage facilities of the State
in Rousseaux, Xavier and Campion, Jonas (eds.), Policing New Risks in Modern European
History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 57–85. See also Pamphile Mabiala, Les soldats de
Bula Matari (1885–1960) (Kinshasa: Editions Culturelles Africaines, 2019).
5
Carol Dickerman et al., “Court Records in Africana Research,” History in Africa
17 (1990), 305–318; Richard Waller, “Legal history and historiography in colonial
Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Oxford Encyclopaedia of African History (online), 2018.
6
Luis Angel Bernardo y Garcia, “Les ‘Archives Africaines.’ Généalogie d’un
nébuleux patrimoine colonial en partage,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 98–4
(2020), 1119–1174 ; Bérengère Piret, “Reviving the Remains of Colonization. The
Belgian Colonial Archives in Brussels,” History in Africa 42 (2015), 419–431.
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo 5
Archives. In line with the “culture of neglect”7 and of dissimulation that
presided over the management of colonial archives in Belgium in the
decades after decolonization, these records were not systematically catalogued, nor opened for consultation. In the 1960s, an archivist with a curiosity
for military history carried out a preliminary indexation of colonial courtsmartial files, but this work was never publicized and soon put to rest in a
closet. In the late 1990s, when the Foreign Office transferred its archives back
to its own cellars in hardly professional conditions, they fell further into
oblivion. It was not until the late 2010s that a dedicated employee “rediscovered” the existence of the collection, and shared it with a few young
historians on the lookout for new material on gender and the military.
This series of archives was nonetheless far from being of marginal
importance, both in terms of historical insights and of material volume.
More than ca. 5,500 files of trials held between 1889 and 1956 have been
preserved. This of course represents only a portion of the total activity of
colonial military courts. The remaining records cover 18 of the 90 courtsmartial’s seats that existed during the colonial period, and approximately a
quarter of the volume of their total activity. Yet the series constitutes a highly
valuable set of historical records: its coverage of the longue durée of the
colonial period, of times of “peace” and of times of war, of everyday policing
as well as of battlefront activities, offers a unique vantage point onto the
deployment and experiences of colonial order. The richness of these
records also comes from the multiple types of documents that trial files
can include. While they differ greatly in size (ranging from 15 pages to
200 pages per file, depending on the importance of the offense and of the
comprehensiveness of the registration procedure), records can consist of
documents related to police investigations, minutes of preliminary hearings, extracts of career individual records, medico-legal expertise, court
hearings, judgments, and papers related to the (penal) follow-up of the
procedure. As such, they do not only allow to document military violence
and colonial justice, but are also relevant for social history investigations as
the cases detail the facts, environment, and relationships with civilians
underlying the accusations.8
Part of the interest of these archives also comes from the multiplicity of
offenses under trial (from insubordination, desertion, or participation to
illegal religious movements, substance abuse, petty theft, or sexual violence,
for instance) and from the range of competences of courts-martial. One of
7
Vincent Hiribarren, “Hiding the Colonial Past? A Comparison of European
Archival Policies,” in Lowry, James (ed.), Displaced Archives (New York: Routledge,
2017), 83.
8
For a similar observation in another imperial context, see the ERC research
project "Law without Mercy: Japanese Courts-Martial and Military Courts During the
Asia-Pacific War, 1937–45,” https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/oas/japanologie/
forschung/erc_lwm/index.html, (accessed 10 November 2022).
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
6 History in Africa
the peculiarities of the Belgian colonial judicial system was indeed that it gave
military courts jurisdiction to prosecute civilian populations in territories
placed under “special military regime” by colonial authorities in case of
political or social unrest. In this regime, civilian courts were replaced by
military ones, appeal procedures were restricted, and sanctions were hardened. The non-compartmentalization of civilian and military jurisdictions
extended further. Until the interwar period, judges of military courts were
often the same (civilian) magistrates who were working for the local civilian
courts. Given the absence of separation between the executive and the
judicial in the Congo, this meant that judges (and/or prosecutors) could
be local administrators or district commissioners (i.e., public servants, and
not professional magistrates). While this testifies to the well-known porosity
between the military and the civilian and between “wartime” and “peacetime”
regimes of law and order in colonial contexts,9 it also implies that the
activities of courts-martial went well beyond the scope of the military and
that their functioning was interwoven with the political and social control
program of the colonial state.
This set of records is now inventoried and open for consultation at the
State Archives of Belgium, but questions about its accessibility for the global
academic community—and in particular for scholars from Central Africa—
remain open. The recent digitization of a part of this collection is an
imperfect answer to this issue. While digitization does not resolve issues
related to the ownership and legacy (both material and epistemic) of colonial
“displaced” archives, and while the digital divide between Europe and Africa
limits the effectivity of any ambition of virtual restitution,10 it nevertheless
offers new scientific and societal opportunities. The digitization of courtsmartial’s archives has for now focused on a “pilot” set of records, available on
the website of the Belgian State Archives (since January 2023): the archives of
the military court of the province of Leopoldville (present-day Kinshasa),
amounting to 1,183 trials and representing the largest part (approximately
one fifth) of the collection. While this geographical choice implies biases
(in connection with the specificities of military deployment in Lower Congo
and to the level of urban development in the region), it has the advantage of
respecting the classification logic of the archives (organized along jurisdictions) and therefore of avoiding the creation of a parallel, artificial, sample of
documents preventing the user to grasp the coherence of the archive. The
collection of Leopoldville also covers almost the entire colonial period (with
trials ranging from 1891 to 1956), including the Congo Free State era and the
9
Emmanuel Blanchard and Joël Glasman, “Le maintien de l’ordre dans l’Empire français : une historiographie émergente,” in Bat, Jean-Pierre and Nicolas
Courtin (eds.), Maintenir l’ordre colonial. Afrique, Madagascar, XIXe–XXe siècles
(Rennes: PUR, 2012), 11–41.
10
Fabienne Chamelot et al., “Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in
Africa,” History in Africa 47 (2020), 101–118.
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo 7
two World Wars. This pilot set of archives therefore opens a wide range of
research possibilities.11
Opening New Historiographic Perspectives
The Conseils de Guerre provide a valuable starting point to expand and
deepen the study of several key historiographic themes in colonial Central
Africa.
A New Lens into “Ordinary” Military Life within (and beyond) the Congo
First, their very nature offers a new perspective on military life, culture, and
norms. By comparison with other African territories, the history of colonial
armed forces in the Belgian empire remains poorly studied. This is a
crucial gap given the specific history of armed violence in Belgian colonies
and its postcolonial legacies. As in any other armed forces, the Force
Publique’s barracks were the stages on which everyday dramas unfolded.
They ranged from insubordination and personal animosities to more
explicitly “colonial” issues, such as experiences of segregation and the
routinization of racialized violence. Recent works on other fields have
shown that the mundane side of colonial soldiers’ lives reveals the broader
power dynamics in which they were enmeshed.12 Conseils de Guerre’s
court cases supply precious information on the multiple cracks appearing
in the seemingly well-oiled army machinery. These archives offer for
instance fascinating insights into the role played by gender relations in
the everyday operations of the Force Publique. Women were a ubiquitous
presence in the camps,13 which entailed complex intimate and disciplining issues. Among many examples, a case of 1927 brings to light the
condemnation of a Congolese corporal tried for multiple offenses, including burning down his company’s armory as an apparent retaliation against
the expulsion of his female companion from the camp. This expulsion was
itself decided as a measure of punishment of the corporal’s previous
11
In the forthcoming years (2023–2027), pending adequate funding, the rest of
the collection should be entirely digitized and shared with the National Institute of
Archives of DRC in Kinshasa. In compliance with European legislations and with the
ethical committees of the three scientific institutions involved in the project, court
records posterior to 1945 are not yet available digitally.
12
See for instance Marie Muschalek, Violence as Usual. Policing and the Colonial
State in German Southwest Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).
13
Shaw, “Force Publique, Force Unique,” 268–332. See also Michelle Moyd,
Violent Intermediaries. African Soldiers, Conquest and Everyday Colonialism in German East
Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 156–160; Sarah Zimmerman, Militarizing
Marriage. West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2020), 44–49.
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
8 History in Africa
unruly conduct. This chain of events lays bare the dialectic articulations of
the paternalist interventionism of colonial military rulers (here in matrimonial arrangements) with complex dynamics of loyalty and resentment
among soldiers. The formulation of the defense presented by the accused
soldier (“I had therefore no one to cook for me [anymore]”14) is also a
good reminder of the crucial duties accomplished by women in military
camps such as maintaining the barracks, tending to food crops, and
preparing soldiers’ meals.
Moreover, the interest of these records for a renewed military history in
Africa is not circumscribed to the former Belgian empire. While martial
justice has been the object of a dynamic field of research globally, very little
is known about its history on the African continent.15 The scholarly avenues
offered by these records are therefore unprecedented, all the more so as
some files concern historical episodes related to territories beyond the
borders of Central Africa. The most obvious example of this is the deployment of military courts on Eastern/Northern African and Middle-Eastern
battlefields during World War I and II, as the Force Publique fought on
several theaters of operations, from Tanzania and Eritrea to Egypt and
Palestine. But other cases involving non-nationals or border regions are also
interesting in this respect. Take for instance the trial of a Swedish lieutenant
—accused of being unable to maintain discipline among his subordinate
soldiers and of letting them loot neighboring villages—held at the very
beginning of the twentieth century on the disputed Rusizi-Kivu border
between the Congo Free State and German Eastern Africa. This case illustrates, for instance, how the impunity of military violence and the exercise of
martial justice could be arenas of confrontations within wider (international)
political conflicts.16
Defining (Il)legitimate Violence
The Conseils de Guerre’s archives can also facilitate future research on
colonial violence. The Congo has a paradoxical historiography in this regard.
The “Congo Atrocities” of the early colonial period have generated intense
discussions, notably on how exceptional this violence had been by comparison with other colonial contexts. At the other end of the colonial timescale,
the violence of the crisis of decolonization has also attracted a lot of scholarly
attention. The structural violence of colonial rule on the longue durée and
14
State Archives of Belgium Repository II Joseph Cuvelier, Brussels (SAB2),
African Archives (AA), CG Kwango 110, Minutes of the enquiry, 30 sept. 1927.
15
See however Claire Eldridge, “Conflict and Community in the Trenches:
Military Justice Archives and Interactions between Soldiers in France’s Armée d’Afrique, 1914–18,” History Workshop Journal 93–1 (2022), 23–46.
16
SAB2, AA, CG Leopoldville 70, Judgment 14 May 1901.
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo 9
how it translated on an everyday basis, however, has been far less explored.17
This paradox is not exclusive to the Belgian Congo. Historians of violence in
colonial Africa have paid far more attention to large-scale, “spectacular”
moments of violence (e.g., warfare, rebellions, counterinsurgencies) than
to everyday colonial violence, to the detriment of “the mundane but more
insidious violence of the fist, the cane, or the noose.”18 The trial records of
military courts offer precisely excellent sources to think beyond traditional
distinctions between “exceptional” and “everyday” violence, and to delve into
the continuum between the violence of colonial conquest and “ordinary” law
and order enforcement. In the wake of recent ground-breaking works on the
violence of imperial intermediaries,19 these records allow to consider African
soldiers as simultaneously perpetrators and targets of colonial repression.
They provide complex examples of how colonial military forces operated
“through collaboration and exclusion/difference, within multiple and
changing hierarchies” rather than on a strict dichotomy of “the police
vs. the policed,”20 on two main different levels. These records not only
provide insight into countless episodes of violence and into their mechanisms
of escalation; they also offer a lens to examine how (military) judicial practices have been instrumental in conceptualizing the boundary between
legitimate and illegitimate violence and how they have served as a field of
debate about the (tenuous) limits of impunity in colonial contexts.
Numerous trials reveal for instance the ambivalence of colonial rulers
toward the violence of their intermediaries against civilians and the challenges raised by the definition of (judicial) thresholds of acceptance in this
regard. As a force of repression, African soldiers and policemen were indispensable for the maintenance of order. At the same time, the very existence
of contingents of armed indigenous men, and the use of force that was at the
17
See the historiographic overview in Aldwin Roes, “Towards a History of Mass
Violence in the Etat Indépendant du Congo, 1885–1908,” South African Historical
Journal 62–4 (2010), 634–670 and see also Stanard, “Violence and Empire.” More
recently, see Nancy R. Hunt, A Nervous State. Violence, Remedies and Reverie in Colonial
Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Lancelot Arzel, “Des ‘conquistadors’
en Afrique centrale : espaces naturels, chasses et guerres coloniales dans l’Etat
indépendant du Congo (années 1880–années 1900)” (unpublished PhD thesis,
SciencesPo Paris, 2018); and Benoît Henriet, Colonial Impotence. Virtue and Violence in
a Congolese Concession (1911–1940) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021).
18
Matthew Carotenuto and Brett Shadle, “Toward a History of Violence in
Colonial Kenya” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45–1 (2012), 3. See
also Florence Bernault, “Control and Excess: Histories of Violence in Africa,” Africa
85–3 (2015), 385–394.
19
Moyd, Violent Intermediaries; Muschalek, Violence as Usual.
20
Emmanuel Blanchard et al., “Tensions of Colonial Policing,” in Blanchard,
Emmanuel et al. (eds.), Policing Colonial Empires. Cases and Connections, 19th and 20th
Centuries (Brussels-Bern: Pieter Lang, 2017), 17.
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10 History in Africa
heart of their mission, remained a locus of anxieties for colonial authorities.
These tensions can be found in many investigations and judgements, notably
in recurring debates about the issue of the respective responsibilities of
Congolese soldiers sent to unsupervised missions and of their European
commanders. Among many examples, the trial of an African soldier accused
of exactions against civilians after he was put in sole charge of a post in Lower
Congo for six entire weeks by the (absent) local administrator, in 1917 and in
a tense regional political context, illustrates this well: while the judgment
makes clear that the soldier had used excessive violence, it also considered as
a mitigating circumstance the fact that the soldier had been “left alone at the
post of Niadi” and therefore that he “believed he was to replace the [European] head of the post in the full extent of his powers, whose limit he
could not know.”21
These tensions did not only concern African rank and file soldiers. Force
Publique’s courts-martial records hold the judiciary proceedings of more
than 200 European officers. They show that Europeans did not benefit from a
blanket impunity, even under the infamous Congo Free State regime. The
specific (political) climate in which a court case unfurled could heavily weigh
in the proceedings and ultimate judgment, and thus needs to be taken into
account when mobilizing those records. This is striking in the trial of a young
Belgian non-commissioned officer, Arnold Ameye, in late 1904. Ameye was
accused of arbitrary arrest, arbitrary detention, and torture resulting in the
death of two Congolese villagers from the Equateur region named Etefu and
Emina; a few months before, when Ameye commanded the outpost of
Mondjoku, he had them arrested and tied down to palm trees for several
days, without receiving food nor drink.22 This trial takes us into the heart of
the terror regime of King Leopold II. It also exposes the factors that were
decisive in determining the limits of impunity. Anxieties about anticolonial
disorders arising from interracial abuses by colonial agents, as well as concerns for potential scandals and issues of (international) reputation and
prestige, proved a driving force in the judicial repression of white violence.
This was particularly the case at the turn of the twentieth century, when the
global humanitarian campaign against the atrocities perpetrated in the
Congo Free State gained intensity.23 This context weighed on Ameye’s trial.
The court case was held in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the
Casement Report about abuses in the Congo, at a time when international
denunciations of Leopold II’s regime were reaching their highest point. The
prosecutor of the trial was the magistrate who had been charged by the
21
SAB2, AA, CG Kwango 65, Judgment 26 Feb. 1917.
SAB2, AA, CGA Boma 157, Judgment 21 Dec. 1904.
23
Amandine Lauro, “Violence, Anxieties, and the Making of Interracial Dangers: Colonial Surveillance and Interracial Sexuality in the Belgian Congo,” in Herzog, Dagmar and Schields, Chelsea (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and
Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2021), 329–332.
22
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo 11
Congo Free State to investigate the crimes reported by Casement.24 Not
surprisingly, the terms of the judgment were unusually straightforward; they
condemned the crimes of Ameye as “not only illegal, but also arbitrary” and as
“inspired by deceit, by malice, by the desire to repress minor faults by cruelty,
and not [inspired] by the desire to serve as an auxiliary to Justice.”25 The
strategies of the defense also reflected this context. Ameye and his supporters
blamed the influence of an old Congolese soldier whom 21-year-old Ameye
trusted. Presented as “as brutal as he was devious,” this right-hand intermediary had served the infamous Léon Fiévez, a Belgian official whose violent
methods of enforcement and repression had attracted international media
coverage and made him one of the embodiments of ”Red Rubber" atrocities.
But while the exoneration of Ameye tapped into familiar racist tropes of white
innocence and African malice, its description of an “overly credulous” and
weak commander shows how little self-evident colonial authority was and how
isolation and anxieties played a role in how Europeans performed the act of
command in the field.26
Testimonies of/as Agency
This trial also provides a good illustration of the involvement and agency of
indigenous plaintiffs in early colonial justice. Ameye’s case was incepted by
the complaint of Etefu’s widower to a higher-ranking officer, and the testimonies of Congolese witnesses proved key in the defendant’s sentencing to
ten year’s imprisonment. Although the Congolese who attempted to testify of
brutal treatments under Leopoldian rule faced an uphill battle,27 they could
still sometimes choose to use the channels of colonial courts to seek justice.
This is just one of the many windows provided by Conseils de Guerre’s records
onto the agency of colonized people. Here again, the complex position of
armed forces in the colonial order—as both actors of repression and potential threats to the very rule they were supposed to safeguard—is interesting to
explore in terms of how it translated in specific modes and expressions of
agency. In military camps and barracks, more tightly controlled than other
24
Rosario Giordano, “‘En attendant le nouveau Bula Matari’: Gennaro Bosco et
Roger Casement dans l’Abir (État Indépendant du Congo 1902–1904),” in Comberiati, Daniele et al. (eds.), Des Italiens au Congo aux Italiens du Congo. Aspects d’une
glocalité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2020), 43–54.
25
SAB2, AA, JUST 42A, Letter from State Prosecutor to Governor General,
17 May 1904.
26
See for instance Eva Bisschof, “Tropenkoller: Male Self-Control and the Loss
of Colonial Rule,” in Reinkowski, Maurus and Thum, Gregor (eds.), Helpless Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear and Radicalization (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2013), 117–137; Henriet, Colonial Impotence, 53–59.
27
Robert Burroughs, African Testimony in the Movement for Congo Reform. The
Burden of Proof (New York: Routledge, 2019), 151–152.
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
12 History in Africa
colonial spaces, Congolese soldiers frequently probed or overstepped the
boundaries of legality, revealing how compliance with the colonial order of
things was far from universal. There were of course the familiar cases of
rebellion, insubordination or desertion, but the snippets of life in barracks
and military operations offered by the transcripts of testimonies and interrogatories of Congolese soldiers also reveal how the colony’s military has
been traversed by forbidden solidarities, and how soldiers mobilized their
agency and capacity for violence sometimes to their own ends.
Courts-martial’s records hold striking examples of openly critical discourses held in court by Congolese defendants. In May 1956, for instance,
Arthur K., a sergeant of the Force Publique, was tried for belonging to the
outlawed Kitawala religious movement. He used his trial as a platform to
indict the inherent racism of the colonial order in striking terms:
We can’t believe what the Whites tell us, for they are liars who always try to
deceive us. Whites and Blacks don’t go along. If a Black man commits a fault,
he will be severely punished, while a White man who would do the same
won’t get a thing […] and this is only because the colour of our skin is like
this (the defendant shows the back of his hand). Yet the only difference
between us is a skin colour, and nothing else.28
Courts-martial’s archives also allow to analyze the testimonies of the many
civilian victims, witnesses or even accused (in the case of trials led under the
“special military regime”) who were heard in front of the Conseils de Guerre,
documenting experiences or even informal sectors, which otherwise escaped
the gaze of colonial administrators.
Conclusion
One should nevertheless be wary of the many distortions these “fragments” of
indigenous voices underwent before being consigned. They were both translated and transcribed, which offered to clerks and interpreters significant
leeway as to how they conveyed and recorded the words of the Congolese
appearing in court. Furthermore, there are little information available
regarding the conditions in which most of these hearings took place, and
to what extent confessions were obtained under duress. For instance, it has
been proved that many accused were flogged during the judicial repression
of the 1931 Tupelepele revolt.29 Reading these court cases against the grain, on
the lookout for traces of subaltern experiences, requires their cross28
SAB2, AA, CG Stanleyville 516, Transcript interrogatory Arthur K., 18 Apr.
1956.
29
Belgian Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs, African Archives, AE3268,
Enquiry on the Kwango revolt, 29 November 1931.
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Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo 13
examination with complementary sources, which might include oral
enquiries and direct memories of colonization recorded in the last decades
of the twentieth century.30
Finally, using these archives necessitates a critical assessment of the
inherently distorted insights they provide into the past. First, the judicial
system was a crucial tool for safeguarding and upholding the colonial social
order. The Conseils de Guerre provide fascinating examples of segregation
and marginalization in the making—for instance in the distribution of the
burden of proof along racial and “ethnic” lines—but imperfectly reflect
Congolese experiences of the everyday in the barracks and the troops.
Second, judicial archives follow their own discursive and formal conventions.
Categorizing an event as a “misdeed” means making it fit into a specific legal
framework—such as qualifying a soldier’s provocative answer to his officer as
“insubordination.” These “rough translations,” shaped by the rigidity of the
law, could entail silencing or downplaying testimonies and evidences that
fitted awkwardly in the narrative envisioned by the prosecutor.31
In spite of these lacunae and silences, whether inherent to the written
legacies of empires or specific to these records, the Conseils de Guerre can
contribute to a fine-grained analysis of colonial power dynamics, both within
and outside of the military. The vast range of recorded crimes and misdeeds
and their judicial handling, provide fascinating insights into the everyday
deployment of colonial rule. These courts handled cases ranging from the
mundane—petty theft, cannabis consumption, traffic accidents- to the gruesome—rape and murder. Each affair, whether big or small, constituted in its
own right a challenge to the self-proclaimed ideal of Belgian Congo as a
“model-colony” populated by compliant African subjects. These archives
contain precious fragments of life and voices, as well as fascinating information on how justice was performed, and (military) order upheld.
Benoît Henriet is Associate Professor of History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
(VUB).
Amandine Lauro is Research Associate of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research
(FNRS) at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
30
See for instance: Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, Recalling the Belgian Congo. Conversations and Introspections (New York: Berghahn, 2000); Robert Eugene Smith, “Les
Kwilois parlent de l’époque coloniale,” Annales Aequatoria 26 (2005), 165–217; Jan
Vansina, Being Colonized. The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960 (Madison:
Wisconsin University Press, 2010.
31
On the uneasy judicial qualification of misdeeds in colonial settings, see Anjali
Arondekar, For the Record. On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2009), 67–97; Victor Roman Mendoza, Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 63–95.
https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
14 History in Africa
Renaud Juste was a scientific collaborator at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and
at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
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