In the early 1890s, a chartered company called the Compagnie du Katanga was exploring Katanga to add territories to Leopold II’s Congo Free State (CFS) by surveying unknown lands and persuading Africans to submit to the CFS’s authority.1

In 1891 the company dispatched an expedition led by Captain William Grant Stairs—who like many of Leopold’s agents was not Belgian (he was British)—to bring the Garenganja Kingdom and its leader Msiri under Leopold’s rule.

Msiri himself was not from Katanga; rather he was a Nyamwezi trader from Tabora, located in modern-day Tanzania, who had established a powerful empire in the Katanga region.

Stairs’ task was not easy. Previously asked to submit to CFS rule, Msiri had responded, ‘I am the master here, and so long as I live the Kingdom of Garenganja will have no other master besides me.’² When Stairs arrived at Msiri’s Bunkeya headquarters, Msiri welcomed him, thinking that because Stairs was British he could cultivate the captain as an ally against the Belgians. When he found out that Stairs was working for Leopold, Msiri grew alarmed and refused Stairs’ entreaties to raise the CFS flag at Bunkeya. After arguing with Msiri for a few days, Stairs simply hoisted the flag, prompting Msiri and his men to decamp to a nearby village to regroup. Stairs dispatched an armed group led by Belgian captain Omer Bodson to retrieve Msiri, but when they arrived and Bodson entered the Garenganja ruler’s hut, Msiri declined Bodson’s request that he return to reconfer with Stairs. Threats were exchanged. Bodson drew his revolver, fired three times and killed Msiri. One of the king’s bodyguards then drew his gun and shot Bodson, mortally wounding him by piercing his stomach and shattering his spine. After his death, Msiri’s empire eventually fell to Leopold II, in no small part because many locals were glad to see him go because of his heavy-handed and destructive reign, including continual ivory raiding by his forces.

The Stairs expedition is a clear instance of colonial violence, the subject of this chapter. The meaning of ‘colonial violence’ seems straightforward enough in the context of recent Western empires.

Benefiting from technological and industrial superiority, Western states used military force to conquer and rule foreign peoples in Africa, Asia, the Near East and elsewhere, leading to bloodshed and then physical, social, economic, sexual or psychological violence towards indigenous populations. This violence extended into the era of decolonisation, either when Europeans used force to cling to their colonies or when they botched decolonisation, as in the case of India’s partition. For all this, the term colonial violence remains difficult to define. Does violence that took place in Europe count, such as the events in Paris on 17 October 1961? That night, in the midst of the Algerian War, French forces brutally cracked down on thousands of Algerians peacefully protesting in the streets of Paris. Hundreds were injured and dozens killed, including many who were beaten, stabbed, shot or drowned in the Seine. Bodies were fished out of the river for days. Complicating the picture is the fact that many of the troops called out to assail the protestors were harkis, Muslim Algerian troops fighting for France who, in this case, were stationed in and around Paris.³ Does violence by Algerians against Algerians in France count as ‘colonial’?

The meaning of colonial violence is not cut and dried in strictly colonial settings either. Of course violence in colonies did not always specifically result from the colonial encounter, but even when it did the picture could be ambiguous. For example, Aboriginal peoples in Australia killing white settlers in response to settler murders of Aborigines might be considered self-defence rather than ‘colonial violence’.⁴ Even if such violence by colonialism’s victims might be categorised as blameless, local collaborators who gained from Western expansionism sometimes helped propel it, often leading to violence. All the same, a substantive difference between violence by the coloniser and the colonised stems from the fact that the colonial situation existed in the first place because the coloniser initiated an encounter.

European expansionism, for instance, was the condicio sine qua non for indigenous collaboration; the latter did not precede the former. A useful analogy is found in the controversy over the Allied bombings of Germany in the Second World War. When considering how destructive of human life they were, one cannot lose sight of the fact that the bombings occurred in reaction to Germany having started a war, nor that Germany was first to carry out horrific bombardments, including of civilians in Guernica, Warsaw and London. As historian of the Second World War Gerhard Weinberg put it, ‘If this was the sort of war that Germany wanted, Britain would oblige them.’⁵ When Western colonialists picked a fight over resources overseas, local peoples responded with violence.

A conclusive definition of colonial violence is unnecessary to recognise that it took many forms, the most obvious of which was physical, including warfare, murder, beating, kidnapping and the like. Europeans co-opted or destroyed native power structures, disrupted communities through the drawing of arbitrary (to indigenous peoples) colonial borders and imposed all sorts of burdens, including forced labour, new taxes, compulsory agricultural schemes, tariffs and European monopsonies or monopolies. There was sexual violence, in particular but not only against women. There were numerous less obvious forms of violence, encompassing physical displacement or forced migration, which often resulted in reduced crop yields, depressed birth rates, lower economic potential, and greater risk of disease, thirst, hunger, even starvation. Land appropriation was devastating since colonial subjects, like most everyone around the world, were primarily agriculturalists or pastoralists. Colonisers did violence to subject populations’ cultures by imposing European norms, languages and religions.

To further explore violence and Western colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the remainder of this chapter examines an infamous case, that of Belgium and the Congo. It begins by sketching the origins of Belgian rule in central Africa and the history of violence there under Leopold II before juxtaposing that history with violence in other Western empires. It concludes by addressing the historiography of CFS atrocities and recent popular and academic interpretations of Belgium, Leopold II, the Congo and colonial violence.

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Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

In the early 1890s, a chartered company called the Compagnie du Katanga was exploring Katanga to add territories to Leopold II’s Congo Free State (CFS) by surveying unknown lands and persuading Africans to submit to the CFS’s authority.1

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