Church, State and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890–1962

Reuben A. Loffman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030173807
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book examines the relationship between Catholic missionaries and the colonial administration in southeastern Belgian Congo. It challenges the perception that the Church and the state worked seamlessly together. Instead, using the territory of Kongolo as a case study, the book reconfigures their relationship as one of competitive co-dependency. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, the book argues that both institutions retained distinct agendas that, while coinciding during certain periods, clashed on many occasions. The study begins by outlining the pre-colonial history of southeastern Congo. The second chapter examines how the Church began its encounters with the peoples in Kongolo and the Tanganyika province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Subsequent chapters highlight how missionaries exerted significant influence over the colonial construction of chieftainship and the politics of Congolese decolonization. The book ends in 1962, with the massacre ofa number of Holy Ghost Fathers in an event that signaled the beginning of a more Africanized Church in Kongolo.
'The author gratefully acknowledges support from the Economic and Social Research Council in the completion of this project.'

© The Author(s) 2019

R. A. LoffmanChurch, State and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890–1962Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17380-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Church and State in Southeastern Congo

Reuben A. Loffman¹

(1)

School of History, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

Reuben A. Loffman

Email: [email protected]

The original version of the book was revised: Belated corrections have been incorporated. The correction to the book is available at https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​978-3-030-17380-7_​9

End Abstract

Scholars have traditionally assumed that the Catholic Church had an exceptionally close and collaborative relationship with the colonial administration of the Belgian Congo. Crawford Young, writing in his influential book Politics in Congo, argued that, along with business enterprises, the Church formed part of a ‘seamless web’ in tandem with colonial officialdom.¹ Wamu Oyatambwe reached a similar conclusion in his book Eglise Catholique et Pouvoir Politique au Congo-Zaire in that he argued that the Latin phrase do ut des (‘I give so that you will give’) essentially captured the essence of the Church–state relationship in the Congo.² These authors are representative of the wider literature on the Church–state relationship in the Belgian Congo in that they see an unusually collaborative relationship between the state and missionaries. Scholars working in other imperial contexts have not emphasized such a close relationship between Church and state. Hugo Hinfelaar, writing on Catholic missionary activity in Zambia, was careful to elucidate the significant struggles between the interests of the state and those of the Church.³ And Andrew Porter did not even suggest that the Anglican Church, part and parcel of the British state, had such a hand-in-glove relationship with British imperialism.⁴

This study challenges the idea that the Church had an exceptionally close relationship with the colonial state in the context of the Belgian Congo. To do so, it examines the history of southeastern Congo. Specifically, this book looks at the Church–state relationship in the Congolese territory of Kongolo, in what is now the Tanganyika province, which has largely been ignored by authors hitherto. Kongolo was of vital importance to the Catholic Church in southeastern Congo and to two mission orders in particular: the Spiritans and the White Fathers. It played host to a vital Spiritan out-station in the north of the territory, for example, which became so famous for its educational facilities that Africans walked from many, many miles away to attend classes there. Kongolo town centre also hosted a major seminary meaning that Catholics not only from the Tanganyika province but across the Belgian Congo as a whole deemed it to be an extremely important site. Kongolo was important not just as a Catholic centre in and of itself but also as a bulwark against the Protestant expansion that had occurred during the early phase of Leopoldian rule. American Presbyterians, for example, had been working tirelessly in Kasai since the 1891 and so Catholic missionaries wanted a strong Catholic presence to counter what one Catholic missionary referred to as the incoming Protestant ‘invasion.’⁵ While Kongolo was not the only place that developed a significant mission infrastructure, few other territories in rural southeastern Congo boasted the same intense Catholic mission presence.

Not only did Kongolo develop an impressive mission infrastructure, but the history of Tanganyika (see Fig. 1.1) as a whole is pertinent for a number of reasons. First, the leader of the White Fathers, Cardinal Lavigerie, wanted to establish a Christian kingdom in Central Africa and he believed that what is now the Tanganyika province could be that polity. Lavigerie’s desire for a theocratic polity to emerge in southeastern Congo, coupled with the state’s initial neglect of it, meant that there was a substantive Church presence in the region. The Church in Tanganyika therefore developed relatively independently from the colonial state and so it is a good litmus for what missionaries did when they had more leeway to disagree with the Belgian administration. Secondly, that Tanganyika was a centre for the Spiritans as well as the White Fathers means that this is one of the first studies of a Spiritan mission encounter in the Belgian Congo. Unlike the White Fathers, the Spiritans were initially prohibited from working in the Congo by the Belgian king, Léopold II, because he believed that they could be a fifth column for French imperial interests given they were a French order. The Spiritans, therefore, perhaps exemplify this book’s thesis that a close, collaborative relationship between the Church and the state was not the inevitable product of Belgian colonialism. Rather than enjoying a consistently cordial and co-dependent relationship with the state, there were a number of occasions in which missionaries clashed with colonial officials working in Kongolo. So, while surveying the times when the Church did facilitate the colonial state’s work, and vice versa, this study focuses more on the episodes in which the two institutions clashed. Instead of allies working seamlessly with each other, this study suggests the Church and state were in fact competitive collaborators. That is to say that while they did collaborate on a number of occasions they retained demonstrably different agendas and these often clashed with each other.

Fig. 1.1

The Tanganyika Province and its neighbours in the African and international context, present borders

Some authors have already drawn attention to Church-state conflicts in the context of the Belgian Congo. Marvin Markowitz is the most notable of such scholars. He examined the Church’s relationship with the colonial state in a lucid, sustained and detailed way. But, in his book Cross and Sword, he tended to approach the Church–state relationship in the Belgian Congo very much from a ‘top down’ as opposed to a ‘bottom-up’ perspective.⁶ In a similar vein, Jean-Pacifique Balaamo Mokelwa, in a book about the influence of the Church on the formation of Congolese law, focused on the state–Church relationship from a metropolitan vantage point.⁷ In his comprehensive and masterful account of the White Fathers’ operations in the Belgian Congo, as well as those of other Catholic missionaries, Marchal/Delathuy took a similar approach.⁸ He pointed to a number of clashes between the state and the White Fathers in a local context, for example over their use of their own currency: the pesa.⁹ In a similar vein, Bruce Fetter, in his book The Creation of Elisabethville, notes that ‘In Elisabethville… [the] colonial trinity was not solidified into its final form until the 1930s.’¹⁰ Yet this book differs from Fetter’s and Marchal/Delathuy’s, as well as Mokelwa and Young’s, in two key respects. First, as already noted, it focuses on the local, territorial scene more than the above-mentioned authors who adopted a largely metropolitan perspective. And, secondly, it brings African intermediaries, such as chiefs and nobles, much more meaningfully into its analysis of the Church–state relationship.

To bring Africans into the story of Church–state relations in the Belgian Congo, this book examines the Church–state relationship largely through the individual mission stations themselves as well as through the prism of chieftainship. Chieftainship, or the rule of a geographically defined territory by a single chief, was the lowest level of colonial administration. Such polities constituted territories, such as Kongolo, that in turn constituted provinces, such as Katanga. Catholic missionaries tended to have significant influence on the colonial construction of chieftainship and sometimes even more than that of the colonial administration. The Belgian versions of chieftainship were generally weak in Kongolo due to its initial neglect by the colonial state, local revolts against chiefs, and depopulation from disease and colonial recruitment. So, missionaries exerted a great deal of influence over colonial government there. It used its greater staff, defined as its affiliated missionaries and African converts, as well as its built infrastructure, to shape societies in the territory and often in ways that contradicted state policy. For example, Chapter 4 discusses, in part, how one missionary believed that he could impose his own version of canon law even outside his out-stations and in a manner that directly contradicted state policy. Similarly, Chapter 5 deals with a witch-finding movement in which the White Fathers successfully petitioned the state to put two of its most trusted African intermediaries on trial. The Church, then, exercised a great deal of control over the politics of the Katangese hinterland.

Although it could and often did help to shape local societies in the Belgian Congo, this book stops short of suggesting that the Church’s influence was hegemonic. European Catholic missionaries may have developed strict codes of conduct for those who came to and stayed in their out-stations, which they enforced obsessively at times, but Victor Roelens, who led the White Fathers in Tanganyika, and his followers in Kongolo, such as Joseph Van den Tillaert and Louis Verstraete, frequently could not control nor even fully convert many of the peoples living in villages outside of these out-stations. If conversion, or the process of changing someone’s spirituality from one theology to another, is defined along Catholic lines...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Church and State in Southeastern Congo
• 2. Pre-colonial Politics in Kongolo to 1890
• 3. The Halting Development of Catholic Power in Kongolo, 1891–1917
• 4. The Failure of ‘Great’ Chieftainships and the Consolidation of Catholic Authority, 1918–1932
• 5. Missionaries and the Formation of Colonial Chieftainship, 1933–1939
• 6. A Marriage of Convenience: Church and State in the Late Colonial Period, 1940–1956
• 7. Religion, Class and the Katangese Secession, 1957–1962
• 8. Conclusion
• Correction to: Church, State and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890–1962
• Back Matter