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Abstract
This dissertation investigates the rocky beginnings of colonial rule from 1886–1905 in French Congo through the lenses of land control and labor practices. I argue that French Congo’s failure to succeed economically in its first two decades was the result of a search for domination over land and labor fraught with a lack of or implicit bias in explorers’ observations and knowledge about the land and its inhabitants, used to make decisions intended to attract and appease commercial interests. Often arbitrary, land-control decisions were taken, tested, found lacking in features of control, and rewritten. Precolonial practices and treaties written in Gabon and Moyen Congo laid the foundation for colonial practices that pertained to land control after 1886, but in a much different international environment that followed the Berlin Conference on West Africa. This dissertation questions how French actors’ struggle to self-explain French rights to domination over sovereign land was affected by a narrow focus on economic development. It also questions the consequences of the constitution of domanial land as a factor in the division of French Congo into 40 large concessions in 1899.
The dissertation argues that three sets of stakeholders experienced the consequences of colonial rule and land control in French Congo: the French State, commercial entities or companies small and large, and central African indigenous populations. In this dissertation, land control is construed by a classification system that features four categories of land: private property, communal property, French public land, and domanial land, this dissertation’s intervention. Domanial land was the pivot point in French Congo; it was where attempts at control were centered, although that control was not fully codified until 1899. Until 1899, land control was subject to arbitrary actions by colonial actors. Knowledge and land control constituted land rights, and it was in the assigning and reassigning of land rights to stakeholders that control was found and labor practices were based. Through time, stakeholder rights altered on a slow continuum in colonial spaces where rights and stakeholder behavior shifted. Land rights were codified in law and policy within the limits of boundaries and borders, but they also existed in access and usage, simultaneous land rights that were better expressed under the rubric of colonial spaces in domanial land. This dissertation demonstrates that observations and knowledge amassed, alongside land-control decisions led to a comprehensive set of legislative acts in 1899—known collectively as the Concession Acts—that classified land solely in the interest of French entrepreneurs. It also demonstrates that during the same years, as central African land rights eroded, so did labor practices. Located between the failure to develop economically and the use of violence against central Africans, French Congo’s efforts at land control coincided with its failure to thrive. In a broader context, the attitudes towards land and labor developed in that colony in that time speak to international events today.
