Settler farming, agricultural colonisation and development in Katanga (Belgian Congo), 1910-1920

Abstract

From 1908 to 1920, the Belgian Ministry of Colonies organised the first stateled agricultural colonization efforts in Katanga, Belgian Congo. This article examines the complex interactions between public and private actors and how they shaped a colonial agricultural policy. Mission Leplae had a very difficult start and was terminated after ardent discussions in the Belgian Parliament, despite the support of the Agricultural Service. This migration initiative exposed the different views and even tensions between the opinions of technical experts such as agronomists and the ideas of the colonial hommes politiques and private actors, both in Belgium and in the Congo. In this article, the image of a homogeneous colonial state acquires nuance as we unravel and analyse the daily realities and initiatives of these first Belgian agricultural settlers in the broader framework of Belgian colonial politics. When the alliance between the State, the mining sector and agricultural settlers ceased to exist, because European agriculture was not developing fast enough and geopolitical interests had changed, the government stopped supporting the colonization project. After the First World War, the number of Belgian farmers in Katanga began to increase again, mainly thanks to support from the private sector. This article shows how state support was an important but not decisive factor in the survival strategies of a settler community.

Labor Recruitment and Coloniality in the Agricultural Sector: On Plantation Archives, Underclassing, and Postcolonial Masculinities in Switzerland

“…Coloniality of Labor. Cedric Robinson (1983) coined the term 'racial capitalism' to point out that capitaldriven exploitation has evolved from racial slavery and settler farming (Vekemans and Segers, 2020) and is therefore based on racialized violence and the west's coercive extraction of raw materials and labor from the colonized parts of the world (Frank, 1967;Wallerstein, 1979). Elaborating this point further, Kris Manjapara (2018) shows that the formal abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to a 'new system of slavery' (p. 375), thereby spreading the plantation com plex on a worldwide scale.…”