Bringing the Workers Back in: Worker Protest and Popular Intervention in Katanga,

1931-1941
Author(s): John Higginson
Source: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines ,
1988, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1988), pp. 199-223
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African
Studies
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Bringing the Workers Back In: Worker Protest and
Popular Intervention in Katanga, 193 1-1941

John Higginson

Resume

La place du monde rural et des migrations du travail dans la formation de

conscience des travailleurs africains a etd depuis plus d'une generation l'un
des thames dominants de l'historiographie de l'Afrique australe. Plusier
monographies de valeur ont ete consacrees h ce sujet. Et pourtant, contrair
ment a' leurs homologues qui etudient ce problkme dans d'autres regions d
monde, les historiens du travail en Afrique astrale arrivent difficilement
expliquer le lien entre la conscience ouvriere et les diffdrentes strategies d
lutte ouvriere. Cet article analyse cette derniere question a' travers l'exemp
de la lutte des travailleurs des mines du Katanga entre 1931 et 1941. L'auteu
conclut que l'expirience analysde ddmontre l'impossibilite de comprendre
place du travail migrant et du monde rural dans la conscience des travailleu
miniers sans tenir compte de la contrainte que la domination coloniale imp
sait a' la production industrielle.

Introduction
For more than a generation the social consciousness of African workers has
been a central theme in the historiography of southern Africa (van der Horst
1954; Jones 1953). Richly detailed monographs have reiterated its impor-
tance (Legassick I977; Rennie 1978; van Onselen 1976 and 1978;
Jewsiewicki 1976; Wolpe 1972; Kabuya-Namulemba i974; Jeeves 1985;
Gordon 1977; Alverson 1977; Fetter 1976). However, labor historians of
southern Africa - not unlike their counterparts who study working people
in other parts of the world - have often been hard put to explain the relation-
ship between workers' consciousness and a given strategy of protest. This
article examines this problem through the prism of experience provided by
the African mineworkers of the Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga in Katanga
Province, Belgian Congo (presently Shaba Province, Zaire) from i93I to
1941.1
African workers' strategies of protest are the more readily reconstructed
the more closely their practical context is analyzed. Although we have
learned much more about the plight and aspirations of African workers over
the past twenty years, African labor history still suffers from a divided focus:
Africans are seen as workers but not as colonial subjects or as colonial

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200 CJAS / RCEA XXII:2 1988

subjects but not as workers. This study will demonstrate how detailed
research on specific work sites and colonies can reveal hidden realities that
reside just beneath well-known episodes of protest.
There is a further point to be made about what I call the "volcanic vocab-
ulary" of the human and social sciences and its specific manifestations in
African labor history (Aya 1984, 318-319). Recent scholarship has exposed
the pitfalls of treating African workers as "villagers" and "tribesmen"
dressed up in proletarian drag; other unduly used terms require a similar cri-
tique. "Stablization," "deserter," "disturbance" and other such terms are
widely used as if they are politically innocent and as if they have a determi-
nate meaning apart from the specific historical content research and analy-
sis can give them.
Even the term "worker" must receive a conceptual critique and specific
historical content if fundamental questions about the growth of workers'
consciousness are to be answered. Neither can be accomplished without
bringing to bear an understanding of the economic rationality of the owners
and the context of its exercise. Otherwise, the question becomes, inevitably,
consciousness of what?

The Roots of Worker Protest in Katanga

The efforts of the Union Miniere to effect economies of scale, to depress
African wages by exacerbating ethnic tensions, and to foist a complex map
of class and racial segregation on the urban population partially explain why
African workers occasionally protested their conditions during periods of
economic conjuncture or depression; but they cannot explain why a particu-
lar form of protest appeared to suit the popular consciousness better than
another - why a strike in one instance and riot or millennial expectation in
others. Nor do they tell us how the workers' aspirations were reflected in
the selection of their leaders, or how such leadership weighed a potential
course of action. The answers to such questions are far from straightforward
(Moore 1978, 470-474).
In posing them, I assume that the decision to oppose oppression or a
given form of economic exploitation and a given group's sense of moral val-
ues are neither mutually exclusive nor autonomous regions of collective or
individual will. People often make such decisions in the shadow of long-
standing grievances - which may in fact be much longer than one lifetime
(Moore 1978, 20-23; Scott 1985). For example, consider the observations of
A. J. Beia, an African clerk and former factory operative at the Union
Miniere in November 1934:

Monsieur le Directeur: Many whites are astonished to hear our demands for
better housing and better treatment. They feel that we are asking for too much
- in short, that we desire to live as they do....

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2oI Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, 1931-1941

Permit me to draw attention to the fact that a small dwelling might have served
our needs in the past since we spent most of our time in the open air or in the
shade of a large tree or lean-to. But now, with new ways of doing things intro-
duced into our country, we can no longer live as we did in the past. We are
obliged to live in houses in which we can entertain our relatives, friends and
other visitors (1934, 3).

Nor do grievances translate automatically into particular forms of protest.

Whether people take to foot-dragging, feigned stupidity, or sabotage, or
resort to more organized kinds of resistance such as millenial preaching,
strikes, boycotts, and the like, depends upon the relations of power in a
given society and how decisively an elite or ruling group can repress dissent.
The lower classes do not make suicidal choices; for most people recognize
that death is in fact the final choice in the world of living. So they choose life
- which can sometimes be worth dying for.
How a given society reproduces itself from generation to generation -
particularly when it is in the midst of wrenching economic and social
change - also determines how people choose to respond to perceived injus-
tices. Such a process is more than a numbers game, since the lower classes
are often as much imprisoned by custom and tradition as other classes in
society. Yet they rarely have anything to do with shaping the institutions
that give social conventions legitimacy. Inasmuch as they do not, they are
faced with a series of ready-made solutions that do not always coincide with
their aspirations and which occasionally play into the hands of their rulers.
When this happens, they must decide to fight as a potential group - or face
possible extinction as a series of individuals.
From 1931 to 1941, the Union Miniere, the principal employer of African
labor in the Belgian Congo, drastically overhauled and expanded its opera-
tions. By the middle of the Second World War it had become the world's
chief supplier of cobalt and uranium, and one of the ten largest suppliers of
copper and tin (Dummett 1985, 402-403). The mining company multiplied
its general output sixfold, with a mere twofold increase in its workforce and
a minimum of technical innovation. Like other industrial firms in southern
Africa during the Depression, the company sought to drastically reduce the
cost of maintaining and reproducing subsequent generations of African
workers (Higginson 1988). Its administration believed that it could do this
without undermining the company's legitimacy in the eyes of the workers.
The larger context of the mineworkers' experience, therefore, had its roots
in this decisive turn in southern Africa's industrial revolution - a revolution
that has been somewhat derailed in recent times (Dummett 1985).
Katanga's mining proletariat emerged under colonial rule and monopolis-
tic economic organization. While the European working-class matured dur-
ing the social democratic upsurge of the last quarter of the nineteenth

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202 CJAS / RCEA XXII:2 1988

century, there was no comparable ideological dawning at the Union

Miniere. Racism had much to do with this, specifying as it did the condi-
tions under which democratic ideals need not apply. The production process
was labor-intensive and limited to the extraction and refining of various
metal ores. Few of its benefits found their way back to the workers or the
rest of the African population, who saw their living standards rise and fall
without any relation to effort or even to locally visible causes. The ameliora-
tion of the workers' condition was often gratuitous or the product of their
own efforts (Dellicour 1938, 70-8I; Fetter 1976).2
Faced with an increasingly restive and demanding component of African
workers from Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland during the i92os, the
Union Miniere determined to lessen its dependence on these workers. By
1926 more than half of the mining company's twelve thousand workers
were from the latter two British colonies. One thousand or so of the most
experienced African workers at the mining company's Lubumbashi foundry
were British colonial subjects. The company's labor problems were further
accentuated by the expanding mining industry of adjacent Northern Rho-
desia and the consequent competition for labor in that colony's northeastern
region (Davis 1968, 54; Parpart 1983, 32).
It attempted to solve these problems by recruiting workers from the Luba
peasant communities of northern Katanga and southern Kasai. In 1927, after
the completion of Katanga's provincial rail lines, a major portion of this
region's population was compelled to move closer to the industrial towns.
By the end of the decade, the once semi-deserted pedicle of Katanga had been
transformed into one of the largest industrial African populations outside of
South Africa (Romaniuk 1967; Mottoulle 1952; Fabian I978).3
As African workers began to demand better living and working condi-
tions and higher wages, the mining company resorted more often to piece
rates, motion time study, and other aspects of scientific management to
constrain their demands.4 Even so, its corporate strategy continued to be
shaped more by coercion than material and moral incentives. Corporal pun-
ishment was deemed a practical solution to the African workers' restive-
ness, even though illegal after 1922; labor legislation talked of "masters and
servants" rather than employers and workers. Trade unions were illegal.
Even worker's lodges and friendly societies incurred the hostility of the min-
ing company and the state. Work routines were therefore the result of skir-
mishes between rulers and ruled as well as capitalists and workers. This fact
reflected the hegemonic but uneven influence of the Union Miniere over the
colonial state (Kabuya-Namulemba i974; Tshibangu 1974).
The accelerated pace of industrialization exceeded the administrative
capacity of Katanga's provincial government. Despite its repressive nature,
the state was ill-equipped and inept. Since funds for an infrastructure for
industry were almost non-existent, the urban educational system was run

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203 Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, i931-194I

by Benedictine monks. Civil courts and magistrates were undermined by

the growing power of the provincial secret police and the military tribunals.
And by 1933, for budgetary reasons, the provincial government began a
phased withdrawal from large portions of the countryside under the guise of
administrative reorganization (Bustin 1975, 136; Vellut 1977).5 The state's
ineptness was particularly evident when it came to the monitoring and pol-
icing of workers from the British colonies. As early as 1913 African workers
from Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, especially those at the Star of the
Congo mine and the Lubumbashi foundry, made frequent use of the two res-
ident British inspectors to protest their conditions - so much so that a num-
ber of inspectors appeared to be veritable workers' tribunes.6 By the i92os
Katanga's own State Inspectorate of Labor was fielding many of the duties of
the British residents. It too found itself swamped by a sea of complaints from
foreign and indigenous African workers. Even though its corp of inspectors
were considered civil magistrates of a sort, they had less power than the Brit-
ish residents to make the industrial companies obey the law (Perrings 1979,
238-239; Parpart 1983, 96-113; van Onselen 1976, I7-33; Fetter 1977, I60-
164; Burawoy 1976, 1056; Heisler 1971).7 Katanga's industrial revolution
involved the creation of an industrial working class without the creation of
an industrial society.
At the outset of the Depression, the Union Miniere and the provincial
government believed that African workers both foreign and Congolese, who
were not indigenous to Katanga, could be laid off and repatriated without
difficulty. From May to December 1931 labor unrest at the Prince L6opold
underground mine and the larger southern work sites proved that this was
not so.8 The workers were most immediately concerned about deteriorating
living conditions and the scale of the layoffs. The mining company was
most concerned about maintaining its production schedule, and the work-
ers' planning apparently took this into account. Management was forced to
put many of the incarcerated workers back to work, even as the police were
suppressing the last instances of protest.9
At the end of September, many workers and African residents of Elisa-
bethville, the provincial capital and the administrative center of the mining
company, turned to what proved to be a more effective form of protest - a
boycott of all the European commercial establishments in the town. The
scale of repression - which, according to some workers, appeared to endan-
ger their women and children - compelled them to seek a broader base of sol-
idarity.'0 Consequently, much of the leadership of the worker's lodges and
ethnic associations - the bashikutu or "Belges" as the Europeans chose to
call them - was drawn into the protest. A wide cross section of leaders and
members of the town's various adventist and millenarian sects such as Afri-
can Watchtower also joined the boycott."
By November the boycott threatened to shut down Elisabethville and

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204 CJAS / RCEA XXII:2 1988

gave the government cause to make use of the newly-formed provincial

secret police. Government officials in L6opoldville, the Congo's capital,
were particularly alarmed at the participation of Watchtower adherents in
the boycott. As a result, Auguste Tilkens, the Governor General, assented to
the establishment of a secret committee devoted to gathering intelligence
about African millennial sects and the means to suppress them (Fetter 1977,
136-139). The local constabulary - along with the newly formed secret pol-
ice, who apparently reported directly to Tilken's secret committee - were
certainly worried by the role that Watchtower adepts appeared to be assum-
ing in the protest, but they were more concerned about the long range threat
posed by the possible coalesence of Watchtower and lodge leaders. Fearing
that a closer relationship between these two kinds of leadership would unite
town and countryside in protest against the government, the various
branches of the police engaged in a series of preemptive mass arrests
throughout December.12
While not unhappy about this turn of events, the mining company felt it
should have more control over the new police apparatus, particularly once
the secret police appeared to be subjecting the African quarter of Elisabeth-
ville and the workers' camps to series of progroms. As the secret police
became more extreme, the company's view of the situation became less
benign. By the end of the year, it demanded that the joint government-
mining company commission, which had been established during the first
peak of worker protest in October, become a permanent appendage of the
provincial government.'3
The workers' lodges were not completely destroyed by the repression.
Nor were the attempts to supplant them with tribunaux indigenes or
"native councils" entirely successful. In late 1931 Auguste Verbeken, a key
provincial administrator, warned the commission not to mistake the sup-
pression of the 193 I protest as a sign of the workers' contentment:

The councils should not become stepping stones for "unevolved" natives and
chiefs. For if they do, the recent disturbances will be repeated, but on a larger
scale. Rather the councils should be framed by order and discipline.14

Some of the more observant company officials and colonial administrators

suspected that some of the leaders of the lodges had simply worked their
way into positions of leadership in the councils.
Who were the leaders of the I93I protests? Were they in fact harbingers
of rural protest as well as insubordinate voices at the workplace, as the
secret police claimed? To be sure, some of them might have been, although
this can not be determined from the arrest records of any branch of the pol-
ice. Some of them did have connections to millennial African religious
sects, although the evidence for such connections is, at this juncture,

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205 Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, i931-1941

fleeting and circumstantial. Moreover, whether such connections suggested

an insurrectionary nature for the protest cannot be easily posited; yet they
do suggest that the extreme measures taken by the police were enough to
push the workers into secretive and underground forms of organization in
order to save their lives.15
After almost a generation of working for the Union Miniere, many of the
workers - particularly those in the mining company's factories, machine
shops, and the Prince Leopold underground mine - recognized that they
could not live in even the most idyllic version of the world of their ances-
tors, and that what they really wanted was a world not unlike the one in
which they lived but shorn of the most painful features of economic exploi-
tation and colonial rule. In short, they wanted some measure of control over
their labor and leaders who could convey their grievances and expectations
to their employers as well as to their God and the ancestors. As the mining
company expanded and reorganized during the 1930s, these workers, along
with those on the newer work sites, would be further convinced of the right-
ness of their world view and of the kind of leadership they required.

Industrial Expansion: Profits versus Living Standards

Despite the unanticipated violence, the mining company chose not to
scuttle all aspects of its new policy, particularly since the lay-offs on the
southern work sites were effected with only a slight drop in production. Yet
the company's goals were substantially changed by the Depression and the
protests. Instead of untrammeled economic growth, the mining company
now sought to maintain a uniform ratio of approximately ten to one
between its net profits and its wage bill (see Table I). Given the impact of
the Depression, all factions within the company and the provincial adminis-
tration agreed that the maintenance of order had to be based on a lower uni-
form living standard for African workers.
Management would have argued that its total expenditure on African
labor offset the huge gap between wages and profits. But if one examines
closely the categories that made up "total cots," it is clear that many were
irrelevant in the context of the 193os. For example, between 1931 and 1935,
the number of mineworkers with immediate dependents fell by at least ten
percent at all the major work sites; the number of children fell by more than
forty percent; and there were no recruitment costs to speak of for 1932 and
1933 and virtually none for 1934 and 1935. Between 1932 and 1935, more-
over, "total costs" remained fixed at a little more than two million Ameri-
can dollars, even though the workforce doubled within the same time
period. The relatively high cost of white labor, the company's pressing need
to increase the market value of its finished product, and falling copper prices
were the other factors that formed the background of the company's concern

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 TABLE I

UMHK: Net Profit, Output and Wag

Copper (cu) and Wages and Number of Num

Cobalt (co) Output Total Costs' of African Europ
Year Net Profit (metric tons) African Labour Workers2 Wa

1929 12 351 495 140 000+ (cu) 1 101 600 (w) 17 000 1
800+ (co) 6 552 000 (c)
1930 12 096 778 142 000+ (cu) 1 036 800 (w) 16 000 2
810+ (co) 6 318 000 (c)
1931 3 638 138 120 000 + (cu) 777 600 (w) 12 000 2
300+ (co) 4 665 600 (c)
1932 ? 55 000+ (cu) 324 000 (w) 5 000 1 9
200+ (co) 2 376 000 (c)
1933 ? 65 000+ (cu) 388 800 (w) 6 000 1 58
350+ (co) 2 116 800 (c)
1934 114 000+ (cu) 583 200 (w) 9 000 1 46
200+ (co) 2 138 400 (c)
1935 5 732 688 110 000+ (cu) 648 000 (w) 10 000 1
180+ (co) 2 376 000 (c)

SOURCE: TC / UM 64, "Union Miniere: rapports annuels," avril 1932-

1954, 36 (graphs and copper and cobalt production); Fetter, 1973, P. 13; G
250-252.

i. Most of the categories of "costs" do not apply throughou

treated with some caution.
2. These figures do not include workers at the tin mines or privately contr

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207 Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, 1931-1941

with cost effective measures. Consequently, by various means, the mining

company placed a rather large fetter on the wages of most African workers
(Perrings 1979, 258; see Table 1).16
But suddenly there existed a large and rapidly growing component of
skilled and semi-skilled African workers in the metallurgical and machine
tool trades, who worked with little or no European supervision (Gouverneur
197I, 54-80).17 On the other hand, white workers were insufficiently strong
or shrewd to secure for themselves a job reservation act similar to the one
pertaining to white workers in South Africa (Richardson and Van Helten
1984; Johnstone 1976; Higginson 1983). As a result, white workers became
increasingly redundant. Meanwhile, the Union Miniere began to realize sav-
ings on its wage bill. But the company failed to transform the political con-
text of expanded production. The increasing numbers of skilled African
workers underscored a greater number of flashpoints during the course of
expansion. Table i shows the extent to which the company cut back on the
worker's living standards while failing to comprehend the shift in the ter-
rain of the class struggle at the point of production.
From 1936 to 1944, the number of people migrating to Katanga's second
and third largest industrial towns - Jadotville and Kolwezi - doubled, going
from 34 267 to 72 862 (Bustin 1975, 136). Expansion brought areas that were
formerly on the periphery of the industrial world into the very center of its
operations. A significant portion of the Union Miniere's workforce, for
example, began to be drawn from the smaller towns. Temporary casual labor
- the "floating population" of the colonial censuses - was always at hand.
As Table 2 demonstrates, by 1940, over twelve percent of the mining
company's African workforce with more than ten year's seniority had been
recruited from the industrial towns. A burgeoning and occasionally restive
urban population provided the setting in which the mineworkers could test
their strength. Moreover, after 1936, the native councils, the company's and
the state's most public means of surveillance and repression, very nearly
disappeared on the work sites beyond Elisabethville. The demographic char-
acteristics of the industrial working class were in turn transformed; a trans-
formation of its aspirations and methods of organization followed closely
behind. Industrial expansion widened the arena of worker protest.'8
As a result of increased output and productivity, virtually all of the min-
ing company's work sites experienced new, more protracted protest. This
new wave of protest was, in part, a reaction to the mining industry's recon-
struction and subsequent wartime increases in output. There was a sharp
fluctuation in the wages and living standards of the majority of Katanga's
industrial workers. The cosmetic wage increase of June 1938, the relegation
of several hundred factory operatives and skilled workers from Panda and
Kipushi to rural penal colonies for Watchtower activities, and the closure of

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 TABLE 2

Origin of African Workers at Union Minie

with More than io Years of Seniorit

Years of Se
Category 30+ 25-29 20-24 15-19

Workers from viable agrarian reg

(Kasenga, Sampwe, Kamina, 5 41 273
Kabongo, Malonga, Sandoa, etc.)
Workers from rural areas which had 3 1
ceased to be productive from a mar-
ketplace vantage point (Katako-
Kombe, Luebo, Mweka, Tshikapa,
Lodja, Sakania, etc.)
Workers from older industrial towns 0 1
(Elisabethville, Jadotville, Bukama)
Workers from the industrial boom 1 1
towns of the 1930s (Kolwezi,
Manono, Mwanza, etc.)
Other colonies (including Ruanda- 11 35
Urundi)

NOTE: Workers from other provinces of the Belgian Congo are not accounted for in the table. Their total numb
question was about 70.

SOURCE: Archives G6camines A9, SM / MOI, "Instruction de R6f6rence No. 8"; Conseil de Province du Katanga
l'instruction No. 77 / MOI," 126.

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209 Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, 1931-1941

the troublesome Kengere work site did little to mitigate the negative effects
of the fluctuation.19 Workers at the reopened tin mines, railway camps, the
uranium mine at Shinkolobowe, and the copper and cobalt mine at Kolwezi
in the far west - in short, all those workers who were directly affected by the
new current of industrial expansion - were the first to react to it.20
Skilled and semi-skilled African workers outside the metallurgical and
machine tool trades were also negatively affected by industrial expansion.
By 1938 many of them had been pushed down into the ranks of the unskilled
workers or out of the mining industry altogether. As early as 1935, for
example, the mining company's central administration concluded that the
criteria for determining whether a given African worker should retain the
designation MOI / S (main-d'oeuvre indigene specialisee) or "skilled
worker" were in need of drastic overhauling.21 Initially, the administration's
review focused on skilled workers at Jadotville's factories and at the Lubum-
bashi foundry in Elisabethville, but its conclusions came to be levelled more
at skilled workers in the building and construction trades on the central and
western work sites.22 As the mining company expanded, these workers
often emerged as leaders and articulators of worker protest. They were also
bent on determining both the physical and moral limits of industrial
growth.
Consider the situation of Kaumba Kalubatini, a carpenter who had been
transferred from Jadotville to the Kikole tin mine in early 1935. Kaumba
assumed that he would resume his duties as a carpenter once he reached
Kikole. Instead, he was assigned to excavation work in the underground gal-
leries. After he pointedly refused to work in the underground galleries, Jean
Schroeven, the work site manager, had Kaumba arrested and sent his person-
nel file to Elisabethville for further instructions:

We are sending you the dossier of worker number 47 / 5236, Kaumba Kaluba-
tini. This worker has been engaged at Jadotville and transferred to Shienzi
(Kikole). He maintains that he is a carpenter. Since the central office has
reduced the number of carpenters, this worker has been sent to the work sites,
where he has refused to work under the pretext that he is a carpenter, and that
he has always been employed as such. He ignores the fact that this specialty is
not mentioned in his contract. I have deposited a complaint about his refusal to
work with the territorial administrator of Luena.23

The territorial administrator upheld Kaumba's claim over Schroeven's livid

protest. He maintained that since Kaumba had indeed been employed as a
carpenter, Schroeven had no grounds to punish him for refusing to work as a
mere laborer.
Kaumba was eventually fired, but his example caused Schroeven and his
subordinates a good deal of consternation. The following year, in 1936,

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210 CJAS / RCEA XXII:2 1988

when it was rumored that the number of African carpenters at Kikole would
be reduced, Schroeven drew up an unsolicited report on the state of skilled
African workers at Kikole and sent it to the central office at Elisabethville.
He closed his report with these remarks: "From what we have heard, the
central office intends to reduce the number of carpenters here by a dozen.
We would like to know if there is another work site where they can be
employed, so that we can send them there beforehand.",24 In its answer to
Schroeven's inquiry, the central office maintained that he had had over two
years to "come up with a solution" to Kikole's labor problems and that in
that time he had failed "miserably."25 The bureaucratic ineptness and cru-
elty that these workers experienced was partially mitigated by the relative
ease with which they could escape it. Very often such workers came and
went as they pleased while working for months at a time under assumed
names or with forged identity and work papers. For example, Lukingama
Kabila and Kasongo Pisa, both masons attached to the construction gang at
Busanga, left their posts at the latter mine and hired on at Kikole in April
1938. Visas and work papers had been forged for the two men by an African
clerk named Manda Enea. When they were finally discovered, the response
of the mining administration to the incident was exceedingly arbitrary.
Although accused of the same infraction, Kasongo was sent back to Busanga
after being "severely reprimanded" while Lukingama was sent to prison.26

The Mines and the Hinterland

Because of the proximity of many of Katanga's smaller industrial towns to
the rural areas, large segments of the poorer strata of the peasantry were
automatically caught up in the new current of worker protest. Throughout
the 1930s and 1940s - by dint of state policy and market forces - a direct
relationship between the annual cash income of the peasant farmer and the
,average annual wage of the unskilled worker was evolving in Katanga (Pee-
mans 1975, 191).27 The wartime demands of the colonial government sped
up the process by imposing levels of productivity on the peasantry that sim-
ply could not be met under the circumstances.
Although no large group of white settler farmers challenged the African
peasantry, a large portion of the poorer peasants of central and western
Katanga were in fact dispossessed. Instead wealthier peasants, chiefly aristo-
crats, and territorial administrators determined to seize "vacant" land (Bus-
tin 1975, 125-127). As early as April 1931, their initiatives led to the out-
break of a millenarian revolt that involved the killing of black livestock and
the construction of ritual granaries or sombo. While the revolt was put
down between December 193 I and January 1932, by a combination of gov-
ernment forces and those of the reigning Lunda paramount chieftain
Kaumba, its ideological force remained strong among the poorer peasantry

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21I Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, 1931-1941

for almost a generation (Bustin 1975, 120). In concert with the government,
the big men of the villages launched a coordinated offensive against the
poorer peasantry with the passage of the 1933 Land Act and the introduction
of cash crops such as cotton, rice and sesame.28 By 1938 thousands of subsis-
tence peasants had been removed from the so-called vacant land. Greedy
Lunda aristocrats and well-to-do Luba and Chokwe peasants, on whom the
government had conferred chiefly titles, gobbled up this land and talked
openly of living off the sweat of the basendji or subsistence peasants. Forced
labor increased by forty percent (Bustin 1975, 158-81).29 Starvation increased
as taxes and cash crops forced those peasants who were trapped on the land
to plant food crops in between rows of cotton (Leplae i933).30 Large seg-
ments of Katanga's peasantry became an army of rural laborers in all but
name (Toussaint 1952; Jewsiewicki I977; Velut 1977, 308-309).31
In effect, the Land Act and the transformation of land tenure that flowed
from it amounted to an instance of government initiated land enclosure.
The ethnic and tribal "integrity" of the expropriated land was vital to rural
strong men, since few of them had individual proprietary rights to the land.
Preserving the "Lundaness" or "Chokweness" of a given parcel became a
means to keep potential laborers in one place without the aid of pass laws or
their functional equivalent.32 However, manpower in the rural areas fell by
at least twenty percent toward the end of the 1930s - to the point that the
fund of peasants upon whom the cultivation of cash crops could be foisted
contracted sharply.33 Government reports told of shoots of rice rotting on
inundated land and abandoned fields with the soil already broken for plant-
ing (Rapport de la commission 1952; Jewsiewicki 1976, 83-96).
The impoverishment of the villagers was a direct consequence of the
Land Act. By the end of the 1930s, the annual income of Katanga's peasantry
fell further behind that of the province's industrial workforce. Instead of the
self-sufficient peasant farmer being the measure of the urban worker's stan-
dard of living, just the opposite now obtained (Dupriez 1973, 61-66). In both
the towns and the countryside people now resorted to cultivation more out
of sheer economic necessity and the desire to survive than out of desire to
become self-sufficient.
The Second World War exacerbated the manpower needs of both prosper-
ous peasant farmers, and the Union Mini"re and brought them into competi-
tion with each other. Consequently, poorer peasants and their kin, who had
been forced to hire on with the mining company, acquired some room to
maneuver and to make their expectations known. Under these circum-
stances, popular opposition to the big men of the villages, who were backed
up by the provincial administration and the big cotton refineries, and popu-
lar opposition to the mining company ceased to be mutually exclusive.34
As land enclosure forced thousands of younger male peasants in the

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212 CJAS / RCEA XXII:2 1988

direction of the Union Miniere work sites and its unused land holdings, pro-
test on the work sites themselves began to assume new forms. These new
forms included short-term departmental strikes at Jadotville's and
Elisabethville's factories or the actual absconding of a portion the workforce
from a given work site until management consented to hear their demands.
Absconding workers would often attempt to get local government officials
to intervene on their behalf. Predictably, while waiting out the results of
these efforts, many such workers returned to their home villages. They
discovered that enclosure and compulsory cotton cultivation had driven off
many of their relatives and turned subsistence plots into literal factories in
the field, where the roots of cotton plants which had been planted in May
strangled those of food crops which were planted in December.35 Emile
Toussaint, the Assistant Director of Native Personnel at the Union Miniere,
bore witness to popular discontent in a letter written to the territorial
administrator at Malonga:
Worker number 4592, Ngoi Kimbalanga, worker number 4746, Kawamba
Kalulu, and worker number 4747, Tshantaba Moke, have been found in the vil-
lage of the medallion chief Mafunga. Mafunga has refused to hand these men
over because, according to him, they are tending their families' cotton fields. I
depend upon you to impress upon the latter chief that he is in fact harboring
men who have broken the law.36

The lessons of the mining site and the factory seemed readily applicable to
the countryside. Chiefs and big men were humbled. Poor peasants and their
worker kin reoccupied ancestral land and intervened in local disputes, call-
ing on custom and tradition to defend their actions where the law would
not. And the colonial administration, in the persons of the territorial agents
and European cotton speculators, was made to flee - at least temporarily.
At Kengere, for example, shortly after the June 1938 flight of forty-four
workers, a list of demands and conditions under which the workers would
return to work was presented to the territorial administrator of Musonoi.
Upon receiving the report of the territorial administrator, the camp manager
at Kengere sent a disposition of the incident to the Elisabethville office
along with a partial list showing the length of service, village, chieftaincy,
marital status, and job classification of each of the fleeing workers. The first
part of the camp manager's cover letter read thus:
We have initiated a secret inquiry, as you have asked, and besides the motives
that you are already aware of, it so happens that a number of these workers had
contracted with us in order not to be pressed on to the cotton plantations, and
that they are now in their villages attempting to organize the population to for-
cibly occupy the plantations that the latter are forced to work on. (This has

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213 Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, 1931-1941

been confirmed by the Territorial Administrator at Musonoi.) Also, we have

sought to discover just how much influence their spokesman, who was
transferred from Jadotville, has over them. His name is Malambi Tshokonie,
category R / L.37

In addition to the apparent leader of the absconded workers - who, from his
designation, had worked at the Lubumbashi foundry for at least three years
before he was transferred to Jadotville's factory complex - seven more of the
protesters had spent extended periods of time at one of the older southern
work sites, were probably skilled in a non-metallurgical trade, and had been
sent to Kengere because of their involvement in work actions at either
Kipushi or one of the other mines between 193 I and 1937. Moreover, at least
half of the fleeing workers had spent a portion of their length of service in
one of the factories at Jadotville (see Table 3).38 In short, they were far from
the least successful members of the workforce. Becoming rural rebels, there-
fore, was a card that the workers sought to play only after their other options
had been exhausted or were unsuccessful.
So great was the influence of incipient proletarian unrest on the rural
population of the Lualaba district in particular during the Second World War
that the provincial government created a censor and hired a translator, one
Djapao Arthur, to routinely seize and read the correspondence sent by work-
ers and other African townspeople to their rural kin. Ostensibly, the censor
was to check for evidence of mulatto Axis agents sifting into the district
from Angola.39 But by the end of 1940, the censor's efforts were directed
almost exclusively at the local population. Letters were randomly selected,
so the censor had no previous knowledge of their contents. This, of course,
made suspect correspondence appear all the more ominous; for local
officials wondered about how many incriminating letters might have gotten
past the censor given the rather inefficient method of selection.
Only a few of the letters seized yielded anything remotely seditious. On
23 November 1940, however, the censor seized a letter from Mutuka Burton
Fabian, a telephone and telegraph clerk at the Union Miniere's Kolwezi site,
which - in the mind of the censor - bristled with disloyal utterances.
Mutuka addressed the letter to his kinsman Florentin Chemise in the vil-
lage of Saluiji in Malonga territory, even though he had written it for the
benefit of several of his younger relatives. It caught the censor's eye because
Mutuka forged the cancellation date of the postage. The letter's contents
appear to justify the worst fears of the provincial commissioner and secret
police:
Many of the workers here say they will go to Kenya to be soldiers and to make
war with our brothers there. [This was roughly a month and a half before the

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214 CJAS/RCEA XXII:2 1988

TABLE 3

Sample of Absconding Workers, Kengere (1938)

Marital Job Home

Name Status Category' Village
1 Sapato Tshiniama married P / E Kawilila
2 Kibangula Fidere single P / C2 Kamungu
3 Swana Kipola single P / C2 Poyo
4 Njapi Tshipota married P / E Tshipoto
5 Mukosaie Kilazi married P / E Shandjonga
6 Likasi Tshiniama single P / E Tshamunoyi
7 Kamalata Kabwata single P / C2 Tshikuya
8 Tshaila Louis married P / C2 Makonko

9 Sapi Tshinyama single P / C2 Tshikuya

10 Guvulu Matepo married (twice) P / C2 Kaniama
11 Likasi Kabusa married P / C2 Lukama

12 Kanguluma Nawamba single P / C2 Sakafumbi

13 Kazanga Tshiniama married P / E Maninga
14 Mungwala Andre single P / E Chamukoka
15 Makando Kafwila married P / E Muyamba
16 Mutumba Jendeka married P / E Muyamba
17 Salubeni Kapenda single P / C2 Kabila
18 Moke Kanza single P / C2 Muteba
19 Kombolokoni single P / C2 Muteba
20 Muchanga Lambwe married P / C2 Katoka
21 Kayembe Kambozi single P / C2 Kiyanda
22 Matshoie Samposa single P / C2 Mutangala

i. P / E = shovelman, first engagement or contract (note that s

workers had previously worked at one of the southern work sites
time); P / C2 = shovelman or unskilled worker who was workin
second three-year contract.

SOURCES: Archives Gecamines, D6, no. 429, Kikole, Confidentie

pour Monsieur le Docteur Motoulle"; Archives Gecamines, D6, M
488 Kolwezi - E'ville, 23-6-38, "Desertions (Cremion),"; Archive
Gecamines, D6, no. 123 / 488 / Annexe, 9-6-38, "D6ertions (Ken

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215 Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, 1931-1941

Table 3 continued

Length of
Home Employment Date
Chieftaincy District at UMHK2 Absconded

Niakotolo Angola IR 1-6-38

Guba Lualaba E 1-6-38
Musokatanda Lualaba IND 1-6-38
Kakoma Rhodesia IND 1-6-38

Kawiza Angola E 1-6-38

Kakenge Angola E 1-6-38
Kazembe Lualaba IR 6-6-38
Kazembe Lualaba IR 6-6-38
Kazembe Lualaba IR 13-6-38
Kazembe Lualaba IND 13-6-38
Kazembe Lualaba IR 13-6-38
Mwene Lualaba IND 13-6-38
Tshakufola Rhodesia IND 13-6-38
Kanongera Lualaba IND 13-6-38
Kakoma Rhodesia IR 13-6-38
Kakoma Rhodesia IR 15-6-38
Kindola Lualaba E 15-6-38

Kasongo Lualaba IND 15-6-38

Kasongo Lualaba IND 15-6-38
Musokatanda Lualaba IND 15-6-38
Kasongo Lualaba IND 20-6-38
Sakayongo Lualaba IND 20-6-38

2. E = engaged for a three-year contract. IND =

undetermined length of employment. IR = former
Groupe Sud (southern work sites) worker, which, in
context, would mean at least six workers.

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216 CJAS/RCEA XXII:2 1988

Vice Governor-General and head of the colonial army Paul Ermens visited
Kenya's governor to discuss the integration of some Congolese units into the
King's African Rifles.] In many towns, in Jadotville and E'ville, men have
already been drafted, particularly clerks, hospital boys, cooks and students. All
the unemployed have been conscripted. Here at Kolwezi all the unemployed
will be drafted.

Listen Florentin, Romain, and Jugi, if you are going to flee, flee now and go far
away. Go far into the bush, where no one can find you. If someone does find
you, give him a sound beating because he has come to take you to the war, and
the war might kill you. For that reason alone you should try to prevent such a
situation.

Listen well now, the soldiers who used to steal our chickens are now going to
die. They have not called me up yet, but when they do I will go. Once there [in
Kenya presumably], however, I will flee with the others. Many of us here at
Kolwezi will be compelled to go, but you down there, flee as soon as you can;
for everybody who reaches the front is going to die. Those young men who hide
themselves quickly and well will not die so soon, but of those who are con-
scripted, both black and white, many will die. This information will not be
disseminated everywhere because of the palavers. You get what I mean?40

There was indeed disloyalty here and disaffection from the policies of the
colonial masters. There was also an undertone of revindication: old scores
would soon be settled; gains were to be made if one was aware of the war's
significance; the most important thing was staying alive so that one might
fight in more meaningful battles of the future.

Conclusion: Toward the General Strike

The spilling over of worker protest into Katanga's central and western
countryside was not accidental. Rather it was the coming together of two
streams of popular discontent, which originated in a common source of
colonial misrule but ran through different courses of human experience.
Poor peasants had been savaged and exploited in situ, and they had seen
their ancestral lands turned to alien purposes as the demands of a larger mar
ket for cotton and other cash crops constrained their ability to grow food. At
the same time, dissident skilled workers were relegated to work sites near
enough to the rural areas to give them access to a world out of which many
of their workmates had come a generation before. The ensuing protests were
not so much the work of outside agitators as they were of former locals who
had been fatefully changed by their experiences in the outside world.41 In
November 1941 a spokesman for striking African mineworkers at the
Kikole tin mine revealed indirectly just how profound those experiences had
been:

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217 Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, 1931-1941

The whites have been defeated in Europe by blacks from Kenya and America.
Why can't we defeat them here as well? ... We have the right to eat eggs and
own automobiles just like the whites. Let us break into the store and divide up
the stock. It belongs to us anyway since the Union Miniere has bought these
goods with our labor. We will cut down the trees and bridges and thereby keep
the boss from sending us to Kayumbo. Let them send us to Kenya instead, so
that we may kill whites.42

Thus, the prophylactic between Katanga's countryside and the industrial

work sites was punctured at several crucial points.43 The initial impetus for
the African mineworkers' general strike came from the outlying mines. By
the time of the general strike's actual occurence on 3 December 1941, a test
of strength between the mining company and the provincial government on
one side and the mineworkers and large segments of the peasantry on the
other was well under way - from the more removed tin, cobalt, and uranium
mines to the factories of Elisabethville and Jadotville.44
For all intents and purposes the mineworkers' general strike had been in
the offing since at least November 1941. Workers at Kikole, the Geomines
tin mines at Manono, and at Kipushi had gone on strike in the latter
month.45 The German occupation of Belgium after May 1940 also helped to
snap the cord of deference between African workers and European employ-
ers and rulers, for it destroyed the notion of Belgian invulnerability. The
rumor of an American seizure of the mines further eroded the legitimacy of

Belgian rule (Shepperson 1970, 145).46 During the 1941 strike at Kikole, for
example, mineworkers talked of commandeering jeeps and joining forces
with "Africans" from America and Kenya. "Discipline," as Auguste Ver-
beken had envisioned it in 1931, was disappearing rapidly on all of the work
sites north of the partially abandoned Star of the Congo mine. Nevertheless,
output and individual productivity actually increased from the end of the
1930s through the Second World War.47
Was there a core of contented workers upon whose backs the burden of
increased output was hoisted? Or were the "disciplined" African worker and
the truculent rebel merely two of several faces of the developing mining pro-
letariat during the era of general business recovery? The preponderance of
evidence points in the latter direction.
At the end of the 1930s, the African workers of the Union Miniere were
able to draw on a rich storehouse of accumulated information about the atti-
tudes of their employer in different phases of the business cycle. This was
largely a result of some success at getting what and where they wanted
within the world of the mining company. As daring as the action of the two
workers who used forged papers to hire on a Kikole must have seemed to the
company administration, for example, it was motivated nonetheless by a

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218 CJAS / RCEA XXII:2 1988

belief that working conditions were better at Kikole than at Busanga. Until
the advent of the war, most African worker protest was geared toward creat-
ing an effective defense against sudden shifts in the company's labor poli-
cies.

By the onset of the war, however, the outlook of many of the workers
changed markedly. Although they believed that the mining company could
accommodate their expectations given the dramatic increases in production
and profits, these workers felt their interests to be largely incompatiable
with those of the company. The material benefits did not come to them; and
the company's policies appeared to be creating permanent insecurity. While
they did not possess a revolutionary consciousness, the workers saw that
the war and the German occupation of Belgium had destroyed the illusions
and social conventions - in short, the culture of deference - associated with
the old order. Also, they discovered agrarian allies who seconded them in
this view. War and military defeat had provoked a confrontation between
workers and owners in Katanga. This confrontation carried with it the dual
crisis of capital accumulation and the social reproduction of the next genera-
tion of workers.
The general strike, therefore, was not a "disturbance," as contemporaries
said. It could not be said that social peace had been effectively established in
Katanga after the cosmetic wage increases of 1938, particularly in the
smaller industrial towns. Nor had the strike "erupted," for it was fairly obvi-
ous that the African workers had only bowed to the combined superior force
of the company and the state in 1931 and, to a lesser extent, in i938 in order
to prevent more bloodshed - not because they had come to accept either's
sense of justice.
The scale of the workplace and its proximity to the company's and pro-
vincial government's administrative center greatly influenced how readily
workers sought to intervene in redressing what they deemed intolerable or
unjust living and working conditions. At work sites where the appearance of
large concentrations of skilled African workers modified the existing chain
of authority, workers quickly learned how to test the validity of the
company's demands against their own expectations. Busanga, Kengere,
Kikole, and Kolwezi were such work sites. It was on these work sites -
peripheral in location but crucial in terms of the company's wartime pro-
duction quotas - that workers made the sharpest break with existing author-
ity.
As Charles Perrings (I979) has reminded us, labor militancy of this kind
often springs directly out of the production process. Yet it does not always
redound in political expressions of burgeoning class conciousness, much
less popular political intervention. Among an aggrieved population, those
most inclined to protest are those who not only have grievances but some

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219 Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, i931-1941

resources and wherewithal to keep such grievances alive long enough for the
authorities either to make reforms and concessions or go to great lengths to
suppress dissent. The African mineworkers of the more remote work sites,
particularly the more skilled and experienced ones, within and without the
machine tool trades, constituted such a population. These workers appeared
to be reasonably sure that they could prevail against the combined strength
of the company and the state - at least more sure than they had been in
1931.

The significance of the African workers' general strike, therefore, was no

its success or failure, but that it reestablished the boundaries of what was
possible in the relations between the workers and the company in a manner
which favored the workers. The company's attempt to blur the distinction
between its desire for profits and the needs of society was fully exposed. A
the ground rules of industrial production shifted, those workers who wer
skilled and conversant with but unencumbered by custom and traditio
played a pivotal role in transforming the various groups of African mine-
workers into a mining proletariat.

Notes

i. Portions of this paper were derived from a paper I delivered at a conference at the
University of Manchester on "Culture and Consciousness in Southern Africa." I wish
to thank Joye Bowman, Colin Bundy, Barbara and Karen Fields, Jeff Guy, Bogumi
Jewsiewicki, Otto Olsen, Carl Parrini, Terence Ranger, and Jan Vansina for their
insightful comments. The research for the article and the paper was funded by th
Ford and Haynes Foundations.
2. Archives africaines / Bruxelles (henceforth AA), MOI no. 4 (3553) Bourse du Tra-
vail, "Correspondances de Malfeyt," 29 septembre 1913, Bruxelles; AA, MOI no. 59
(3558), "examen psycho-physiologique, " 17 fevrier 1922.
3. National Archives of the United States / Washington (henceforth NAUS), 85 5A.
oo / 7-2345, no. 147, American Consulate General, Leopoldville, Belgian Congo,
Confidential, "Policy of the Belgian Congo Government Towards the Indigenous Pop-
ulation (Deposition of James Morrison of the American Presbyterian Congo Mis-
sion)," i.
4. AA, "examen psycho-physiologique."
5. Archives Gecamines / Lubumbashi (henceforth AG) C8, SM / MOI 1931, "Dos-
sier de la necessit6 d'6tablir aupris des centres industriels une administration directe
et competente" (21 aout 1931: Pusmans); Martin De Ryck Papers: Congo Collection /
Michigan State University (henceforth MRPCC), Secte "Kitawala" (Renseignments
g6n6raux) Dossier de Police au Katanga, Territoire du Kongolo, "Extrait du Dossier
Administratif du nomm6 Kianza Djoni."
6. AA, MOI no. 46 (3551), no. 955e 7 avril 1914, "Correspondence de l'Office du
Vice-Gouvernement General du Katanga."
7. Paradoxically, after 1927 the new array of sanctions and penalties envisioned by
the mining company exceeded the stiff penalties of the decree of 16 March 1922,
which called for the withholding of the third of an African worker's salary for

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220 CJAS / RCEA XXII:2 1988

infractions of discipline and two months imprisonment and a 50 franc fine for the
breaking of a contract. Once the labor shortages of late 1928 began to set in, however,
such penalties became somewhat difficult to effect: see AA, "(Sohier)"; AG, C8 and
DI3, 12 decembre 1928, "Discipline des Travailleurs Noirs."
8. AG, C8, SM / MOI i931, "Kipushi: Notes pour Monsieur le Docteur Mot-
toulle"; AG, C8, MOI, no. 262, Mine Prince Leopold 21 Aout 1931, "A Monsieur le
Commissaire de Police (Kipushi)."
9. AG, "le Comissaire de Police (Kipushi)."
io. In an interview with a former employee of the Union Miniere, Mzee Kitanika
Musuka, the grandfather of Mr. Muyombo Tarsis, I produced a photocopied list of the
"leaders" of the 1931 work action at Kipushi. Mzee Kitanika could only identify two
of the names that I read to him. However, he went on to name a number of men who,
in his estimate, were leaders of the workers. Their names did not even appear on the
list compiled by the police commissioner at the mine. Clearly, a number of those men
who came forth as "leaders" did so in order to limit the scale of repression: interview
with Mzee Kitanika Musuka at Postola, Shaba, Province Zaire, 4 July 1974; see AG,
"le Commissaire de Police (Kipushi)"; AG, C8, Reunion SM / MOI, "Proces Verbal de
la Seance Tenue le 20 octobre 1931 par la Commission Gouvernement-UM."
ii. AG, MOI 9-3-32, "Situation des effectifs au premier mars 1932"; MRPCC,
"Kianza Djoni."
12. MRPCC, "Kianza Djoni."
13. AG, "la Commission Gouvernement-UM."
14. AG, "Une Administration Directe et Competente (Pusmans)."
15. AG, C8, MOI no. 121, 20 aout 1928, Camp L'ishi, "Organisation: Les Belges;"
MRPCC, "Kianza Djoni."
16. AG, "la Commission Gouvernement-UM"; Rapport sur l'Administration du
Congo Belge, 1932, "situation economique," 234.
17. Tanganyika Concessions / Union Miniere: London (henceforth TC / UM) 98,
Usines de Lubumbashi: rapport mensuel, "Fourniture d'energie aux sieges de Ruashi
et Prince L6opold, fevrier 1929; AG, A9 no. 508 / D-4o, Lubumbashi, juin 1935,
"Bareme de salaires."
18. AG, D6, no. 609 / E'ville / 15 juillet 1936 (Mottoulle), "Pecheries du chef
Kibanda (Lubende)"; AG, D8, no. 461 / d-6, 25-5-36, E'ville, "Pointage: 6tablissement
des feuilles de paie."
19. AG, B22 Division A: Service d'inspection et de contr6le, 27-9-39, "Salaires."
20. AG, B22, no. 1167 / d6, 8-9-37, "Transfert des travailleurs de Shinkolobwe
Panda."
21. AG, B22, Division A, no. 136, Jadotville, 9 novembre 1935, "Salaires de MOI /
S."

22. AG, BI2, dossier no. 72, UMHK / D6partement MOI-Elisabethville, Busanga, le
19 mars 1936, (Confidentielle) "Proteste de surmenage."
23. AG, D6, no. i, i dossier MOI, Camp de Kikole, 7-5-36, "Correspondence
(Schroeven)."
24. AG, "(Schroeven)."
25. AG, "(Schroeven)."
26. AG, D6, no. 2.549c, Kikole, 8-6-38, "Travailleur no. K659 et Travailleur no.
K658.
27. Conseil de Province: Katanga, 1946-47, 235-245.
28. The Land Act was known as the paysannat indigene: see Bulletin agricole du
Congo belge, 1932-1937; AG, B6, SM / MOI, "Statistiques (1928-1932)."

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221 Higginson: Bringing the Workers Back In: Katanga, 1931-1941

29. Conseil de la Province: Katanga, 1945, Congo Belge, Province d'Elisabethville,

Agriculture et Colonisation, Annexe V, Reunion du 14 mai 1945, "Amelioration de la
sant6 de l'indigene par l'application d'une politique d'hygiene des villages, du loge-
ment, de l'alimentation"; Conseil de la Province: Katanga, 1946, Province
D'Elisabethville, I4 juillet 1946, "Reorganisation territoriale de la Province."
30. Rapport sur l'Administration du Congo Belge, 1925-44.
31. See AA, MOI no. 134 (3598), no. 1317 E'ville, le 26 novembre 1925, "note de
Monsieur Le Procureur General (Sohier).
32. Anon, "Coup d'oeil sur quelques affaires coloniales," L'Essor du Congo, ven-
dredi 9 octobre 1937, numero 3425, I.
33. Anon, "Le conflit coton-mines," L'Essor du Congo, samedi, 6 novembre 1937,
numero 3445, 2.
34. AG, D6, no. 555 MOI E'ville, 13-7-38, "Transfert des travailleurs de Keng
D6, no. 92, E'ville 1-1-36, "Retenues compensatoires - sommes dues par
deserteurs."
35. The harvesting of cotton began at the peak of the rainy season in December.
This was also the time that the peasantry normally planted maize and cassava. The
territorial administrators and the cotton refineries also exhorted the peasantry to
make baskets and drying nets for cotton. By mid-December the refineries posted the
purchase price for cotton and announced the date large-scale purchasing. The harvest-
ing of cotton continued from December to March (Leplae 1933, 352).
36. AG, BI2, no. 1883 / AE, MOI, 8-12-37, "Deserteurs de Busanga."
37. AG, D6, no. 123 / 488 / Annexe, 9-6-38, "Desertions Kengere."
38. AG, "Desertions (Kengere)."
39. Jean-Luc Vellut Collection: University of Wisconsin at Madison (henceforth:
JLVC), Territoire de Malonga / Censure / Dilolo, le 25 novembre 1940, "A Monsieur le
Procureur du Roi a Elisabethville."
40. JLVC, "A Monsieur le Procureur du Roi."
41. Conseil de la Province: Katanga, 1946, I1 octobre 1946, "Etat d'espirit des pop-
ulations indigenes"; Conseil de la Province: Katanga, 1952, "L'exode rural dans les
pays tropicaux"; MRPCC, Province D'Elisabethville, District du Tanganika,
Territoire de Kongolo, le 29 mai 1943, "Rapport sur les activites de la secte kitawala a
Kongolo (Beer de Laer)."
42. AG, B2I MOI / D 231, 15-II-41, "Graves (chef de camp Moppe)."
43. JLVC, Congo Belge, Province D'Elisabethville, District Du Lualaba, Territoire
de Jadotville, No / 4111 S.P., Jadotville le 25 septembre 1941, "Surveillance ligne de
force: UMHK a Luishia."
44. For the official account of the general strike see: AG, Al Administration
Generale (Rolus), 2-42, "Rapport sur la greve des travailleurs du l'Union Miniere"; AG
AS, UMHK / Departement MOI, 6 mars 1946, "Rapport sur la grave des travailleurs de
l'Union Miniere"; Anon, "La grave de Lubumbashi," L'Essor du Congo, 13, no. 419,
dimanche, Io decembre 1941, I; Ren6 Lemarchand Collection / Hoover Institution:
Palo Alto (henceforth LCHI) Emile Toussaint, untitled (handwritten notes) 2 janvier
1945.
45. See MRPCC, "Secte kitawala A Kongolo"; AG, "Greves (Moppe)"; AG, B17,
MOI / D42, II-II11-41, "Greve (Kipushi)."
46. TC / UM 113, "Sengier to Herbert Feis," ii October 1941; AG "Graves
(Moppe)."
47. AG, BI2, memo b6, 28-11-39, "Pointage: Busanga;" TC / UM 113, 19
November I941, "Edgar Sengier to G. C. Hutchinson" (correspondence).

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222 CJAS / RCEA XXII:2 1988

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