Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T03:04:06.343Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Mise en valeur: economic exploitation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2010

Maryinez Lyons
Affiliation:
University of London
Get access

Summary

Belgian colonials produced much rhetoric on the subject of their ‘civilising mission’ in Africa and they often rationalised, even justified, their presence in the Congo by referring to their duty to instill and nurture in Africans the European, bourgeois values of education, hard work, moral duty, selflessness, courage and patriotism. These values were not only to be taught in the abstract in schools but were to be acquired by Africans in the process of practical works. Congolese would become civilised by labouring for Europeans. But it was often to prove difficult to obtain African labour, the supply of which remained a major issue during the entire colonial experience. This was an enormous problem as the mise en valeur, or economic exploitation, of the Congo in the early decades of its existence depended almost entirely upon obtaining sufficient numbers of African labourers. The earliest instructions to state agents had stressed the significance of labour as the pivot of the Belgian ‘civilising mission’.

As we have seen, the conquest of the northern Belgian Congo was protracted and costly for African societies, but military conquest was only the beginning of many decades of real stress for many people. Administrative policies strained societies in ways which for some populations culminated in famine, disease and death. State demands for labour and tax were particularly onerous and began almost immediately upon establishment of each state post. The relationship between labour recruitment and deployment and the overall upheaval experienced by northern Congolese, especially before 1920, is crucial to an understanding of outbreaks of sleeping sickness.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Colonial Disease
A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–1940
, pp. 25 - 36
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×