Preliminary Programme

It is now a kind of historians’ wisdom that colonial planners and administrators in French West Africa abandoned the idea of “assimilation” in the early 1950s, if not immediately after the Second World War and in spite of their “French Union” rhetoric. The classic studies by Frederick Cooper (while remaining debatable on a number of points) have demonstrated that ideas of “assimilation” were indeed very expensive as soon as it came to workers’ social rights and payment scales – so that politicians considering reform in colonial issues would have been all too happy to find solutions that eliminated the assimilation of rights for African officials of the public sector, or those working in the small industrial sector. However, little is known on how material improvement and social ascension in the Senegalese Quatre Communes and other urban centres played themselves out in the 1950s, and who yet identified with “French culture” at the time.
This paper will analyse where the assimilation paradigm was yet mobilised by African individuals in an urban context in a period characterised by nationalist engagement and protest for social emancipation, while shedding light on observations made by French security services and administrators to describe social change. (Show less)

Catholic missionaries have been largely overlooked in scholarly debates on how European identity was shaped during imperial ‘encounters’ with Others. We could easily insert these missionaries into this debate, by outlining how their ideas of Europeanness mirrored their ideas of African identity. However, such a straightforward link between religion and (racial) identity cannot be forged due to missionaries’ commitment to (religious) conversion and social transformation. This paper investigates such complex identity politics through the case of Belgian Catholic missionaries in colonial Congo (1885-1960).

Firstly, I examine how Catholic Belgian missionaries’ conceptions of race shifted from assimilationism to (extreme) acculturation between the beginning and the end of colonial rule. As missionaries debated whether racial differences should, respectively, be obliterated or (selectively or racially) embraced, they also reconsidered their own role in intercultural relationships: should the missionary defend universal Christianity against divisions or was he a moral arbiter, distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ customs or someone who guided the Congolese in their discovery of their inherent Christian identity? Secondly, I examine Europeanness as a category through which missionaries shaped their relationships with state actors and commercial companies as well as a notion through which they confirmed the political, ‘world-making’ role of the Catholic Church and its place in a modernizing and secularizing world.

This paper not only deconstructs missionaries’ identity politics but also contextualises their ideas about identity by analysing them in light of their concrete relationships with various colonial actors (including state officials, settlers, and Congolese catechists and priests) as well as their (embodied) knowledge practices. Missionaries namely appropriated certain (scientific, juridical) types of knowledge, for example, to acquit a missionary from infanticide and delegitimize anti-clericals, while effectively side-lined oral, Congolese testimonies. Moreover, they not only used their body to shore up European superiority, but also used this corporeal interface between the African environment and their soul to navigate dislocation and (personal) transformation, as well as European relationships. In the ‘culture war’ between assimilationists and extreme adaptationists, the notion of (mis)translation of African (oral) knowledge, Catholic principles, etc.) played a central role.

In short, this paper reveals Europeanness as a construction through which missionaries negotiated the fluid boundary between Europeans and Africans on the on the hand and politics, religion, and economy on the other, through shrewd, selective epistemological politics. Precisely because Catholic Fathers are not the most obvious ‘(pro)creators’ of European identity, their identity politics give fresh insight into the various ways in which Europeanness was instrumentalized to deal with an ever diversifying and modernizing colonial world. (Show less)

In 1938, Sir Granville St John Orde Browne declined a request from the Colonial Office in London to look into the working conditions of white workers in Northern Rhodesia. Orde Browne claimed it was more within his expertise to write on black labourers and refused to engage with the question of white labour. This paper centres the case of Orde Browne to consider the question of how Europeans in African countries in the first half of the 20th century, used their careers and their whiteness as a vehicle for social mobility. Through an analysis of Orde Browne’s personal papers and colonial records, this paper asks how Orde Browne, the first labour advisor to the Secretary of State of the Colonial Office, went from an officer in the War Office to the so-called expert on Colonial Labour within the scope of his career – 1883 to 1947. This paper argues that whiteness, masculinity, and imperial careering could be used to crawl closer to a colonial elite through a proclamation of expertise over black working bodies and a stated distance from white working bodies. By connecting the historiography on imperial constructions of race, gender, class and sex with work on imperial networks this paper highlights how imperial careers in their own right constituted and drew from classed, racialised, and gendered notions of expertise and exploitation. (Show less)