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David Maxwell, Religion, Colonization and Decolonization in Congo, 1885–1960/Religion, colonisation et décolonisation au Congo, 1885–1960, ed. Vincent Viaene, Bram Cleys and Jan De Maeyer, The English Historical Review, Volume 137, Issue 589, December 2022, Pages 1866–1868, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac253
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Extract
This volume has been a very long time coming. Published no fewer than ten years after the important international conference in Leuven in 2010, some of the original contributors (myself included) withdrew their essays having lost faith that the collection would ever see print. Nevertheless, after the valiant intervention of Vincent Viaene, the remaining thirteen essays, written in both English and French, and suitably updated in terms of the secondary literature, have finally appeared. Together, they make a worthwhile contribution to scholarship on Congo. As the editors argue in their well-judged Introduction, there has been a significant lacuna in research on the history of Christianity in the region, with much of what has been published concentrating on the period of the Congo Free State (CFS), 1885–1908, and the infamous atrocities that surrounded the production of Red Rubber. Though some of this familiar ground is revisited in the first of the book’s three thematic sections, ‘Religions and the Colonial State’, many of the essays engage with more recent research agendas in the latter two themes on ‘Intermediaries’ and ‘The Crisis of Colonial Missions’. The volume’s major contribution is to reinforce an emerging trend in the scholarship that unpicks the so-called ‘Holy Trinity’—the notion that the colony was dominated by a close relation between the state, Catholic missions and commerce. The essays highlight a great variation in Catholic thinking and practice and draw out tensions with colonial authorities. This revisionism is immediately apparent in the opening chapter by Jean-Luc Vellut. He explores the long history of Catholic missionary interaction with the region through the lens of shifting social ethics concerning issues of slavery and forced labour. The high-minded principles of leading missionaries—Lavigerie, Liberman and Roelens—are subjected to Vellut’s scrutiny along with their less than wholesome practice. The theme is revisited in Anne-Sophie Gijs’s essay on the rights of autochthones in Jesuit missions. Viaene’s own chapter is an impressive reinterpretation of the CFS in terms of internationalism and humanitarianism. He explains that the credibility of King Leopold’s extraordinary claims to rule a private colony came about through several overlapping transnational networks and discursive configurations including royal cosmopolitanism as a source of patronage; the charisma of explorers such as Stanley; and the support of freemasons, the anti-slavery movement and missionaries. An additional influence in the diplomatic melée surrounding the Berlin Conference (1884–5) was the Padroado, the rights ceded by the Vatican to Portugal in the administration of local churches, which is the subject of Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo’s essay. Bram Cley’s innovative chapter views Catholic–State relations in spatial terms, showing how the construction of mission stations (some as large as towns) aided the colonial state in the occupation and delimitation of the administrative area of Kasai.
