CONGO QUESTION · Internationalism and the Congo Question (1875-1914)

Internationalism and the Congo Question (1875-1914)

Objectives Between 1875 and 1914, the'Congo Question'led to a unique international concentration of religious and secular mobilisations around humanitarian issues. While liberal internationalism provided the initial justification for the Congo State of Leopold II, the region soon attracted Protestant and Catholic missionary movements. Until well into the 1890s, however, not Christianity but Islam was the most expansive religion in the Congo basin, spread by Arab-Swahili traders. After the turn of the century, leading lights of the Second International placed high hopes on the Congo as a showcase of "socialist colonialism". These different varieties of internationalism were the motor force behind successive campaigns and counter-campaigns around the leitmotif of'old'(Arab-Swahili) and'new'(colonial) slaveries, first in support of the Congo State and from the mid-1890s against it. The objective of the project was to elucidate how their interaction shaped a global civil society, and what role Africans played in this process through their growing involvement with the religious'Internationals'in particular. By combining the reassessment of the role of transnational movements in international history with new insights into the cross-currents of influence connecting colonies and metropoles and with the reconsideration of the vitality of religion in the modern age, the project set out to make a timely contribution to global history. Work carried out To this effect, a resolutely multi-archival and multi-disciplinary research strategy was followed. It had the double aim of grounding the project in extensive original sourcework, and of contextualising the findings more broadly through an array of training activities. Research was carried out in two dozen archives and libraries in seven countries. New or previously unused material was uncovered, notably in Rhodes House (Oxford), the London School of Economics (London), the Vatican archives (Rome), the Royal archives and the Congo archives (Brussels), as in the papers of Protestant and Catholic missionaries held in the UK, Italy, Belgium and France. A fieldtrip of three weeks to the Democratic Republic of Congo served to explore not only written, but also monumental and oral sources. Throughout, training activities in Oxford created a framework for'reading'research findings. The researcher learned elementary Swahili. He regularly attended seminars in relevant fields such as African Studies, Global and Imperial History, Religious History and Modern European History. The African Studies and African Politics seminars, in particular, proved fruitful venues for deepening the interdisciplinary dimension of his work and for better understanding its relevance to the present. The researcher presented his work in two Oxford seminars (with a third,'ex-post'presentation scheduled for the autumn). He refined his teaching skills on both MA and BA levels, through a semester-long independently taught discussion class and through 4 one-hour lectures. If the seminar presentations gave him the opportunity to discuss the progress of his research with a specialised audience, the course work allowed him to'translate'his findings for a broader audience of students, and integrate them in the curriculum of modern history. During the course of the fellowship, the researcher also invested considerable time in about a dozen applications for academic posts. These efforts were eventually rewarded with the appointment to a university lectureship at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) starting this year. Results Research results were publicised through the publication of 3 edited volumes and 12 articles, through the organisation of an international scientific conference open to the public, and through 8 presentations at international scientific conferences (a further four conferences were attended). Furthermore, the researcher participated in public debate about Belgium's colonial past on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence, through a book launch followed by a press conference and through a joint event with bestselling authors Adam Hochschild and David van Reybrouck. He is currently finalising a monograph on the Congo Question. Conclusions The project has reconsidered the Congo Question as a vital episode in the history of civil society in three ways: 1° by bearing out that rival transnational movements trading in moral capital were the principal protagonists of debate, and that this is therefore a global story; 2° by highlighting the role of religion as the key mobilising factor in these movements; and 3° by demonstrating that religion did not only mobilise Europeans and Americans, but also Africans. 1. While the early 20th-century Congo Reform Movement against atrocities perpetrated by the Congo State is well-known, other humanitarian campaigns had until now been reduced to political manipulations, like the foundation of the Congo State, or relatively neglected, like the campaign against the Arab-Swahili slave trade around 1890 or the debate on colonial reform at the time of the Congo's annexation by Belgium in 1908. Seeing the Congo Reform Movement as part of a chain reaction has not only allowed for a more comprehensive understanding of civil society networks and their global expansion, but also for a better insight into the Congo Reform Movement itself as a pioneer of 20th-century humanitarianism, relying on new media techniques (such as photography,'breaking news'or forms of'live coverage'avant la lettre) and integrating expert knowledge with the mobilisation of empathy. 2. The Congo campaigns testify to the success of religions in reinventing themselves as voluntary forces operating on a global scale, by capitalising on the communications revolution and on their nature as often unique channels for mediating a non-European input. Christian missionary lobbies and the Anti-Slavery Society (dominated by Quakers) provided the backbone for campaigns against the slave-trade and against colonial atrocities. The liberal and socialist Internationals were galvanised by the perceived threat of "clericalism". Islamic leaders, including Africans, consciously and at times successfully courted these secular Internationals. 3. Africans entered the global public sphere above all because missionaries mobilised mass support by projecting the voices of their Congolese converts into the debate. They carefully staged this process, but it partly escaped their control. Protest acted as a catalyst for the rise of a self-conscious class of native catechists, who started to define African Christianity as a new cultural formation. This, more than anything else, made the fall of the Congo State inevitable, and provoked a fundamental debate on colonial reform against the backdrop of Belgian annexation, even if the terms of that debate were not of Africans'making. In sum, the interplay of Internationals in the Congo Question helped to define a moral economy for imperialism, however asymmetrical. The Congo campaigns, while ultimately justifying a more'humane'colonial order, thus also laid the foundation of global civil society, a notion too often considered in exclusively secular and Western terms. Social relevance The project has contributed to a growing corpus of research on the early history of humanitarianism and civil society. The researcher hopes that a better understanding of the global origins of these phenomena may lead to a better informed and more mature debate about the place of immigrants in European society. He hopes that the reconsideration of religion's influence may remedy the persistent religion-blindness of many international governmental institutions, which leads to major policy errors in Africa and elsewhere. He hopes, finally, that awareness of the key role played by Congolese themselves in the Congo campaigns may encourage those Congolese who fight, against all odds, to recreate a civil society in Congo today.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union