Policy and Practice of Forced Labor in the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo

Abstract In the collective memory, forced labor in Belgian colonial history is directly linked to the rubber boom in the era of the Congo Free State. In fact, the labor regime established in the Congo Basin between 1890 and 1904 was characterized by the extreme exploitation of human labor in the context of harvesting rubber. International criticism of the atrocities in the Congo led Belgium to annex the Congo Free State, which had been under the administration of the Belgian King Leopold II since its foundation in 1885. This annexation was, therefore, interpreted as a clear rupture with the practices of forced labor. Indeed, in 1908, Belgian officials tried to introduce a new concept of exploitation (mise en valeur) in the now state-controlled colony. In 1908, they passed a series of laws that enabled the administration to regulate the colonial economy. This included, in particular, the abolition of forced labor for private companies, the introduction of taxes on the African population and a new legal basis for employment contracts. However, the end of the Congo Free State did not mean the abolition of forced labor in the Belgian colony, as the attempt by Belgian politicians, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and missionaries to abolish the use of coercion in employment relationships was ultimately unsuccessful. “Free” wage employment relationships only became established very slowly, and, in many places in the colony, the free labor market was not fully developed until the country’s independence in 1960. Violence was repeatedly used to suppress worker resistance and overcome the reluctance of the local population to work by forcing the local population to sell their labor for wages. The history of forced labor in the Congo is, therefore, also a history of unintended consequences. For example, the attempt by Belgian politicians, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs in 1908 to overcome coercion in colonial labor relations led to increased violence against the local population, and a social and economic consequence of this development was the slow implementation of wage labor. The history of this mobilization—which on the eve of independence in 1960 had led to the integration into the colonial economy of 1,182,871 men as wage laborers, and 874,000 Congolese households as producers of cotton and other cash crops—shows how central coercion and violence were to the economy of the Belgian colony.