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OSUMAKA LIKAKA, Naming Colonialism: history and collective memory in the Congo, 1870-1960. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press (pb $26.95 - 978 0 299 23364 8). 2009, 224 pp.
Congolese called their colonizers names - they named them and expressed what they thought about them through the epithets they chose. Historians of colonization could not but be aware of that practice but, with few exceptions, it went without saying. It is the merit of this study, not only to present a wealth of information but to demonstrate the methodological and epistemological significance of inquiry into 'naming colonialism' for our understanding of how colonial rule was experienced, conceptualized, remembered, and, more often than not, denounced, lamented and ridiculed. Naming colonizers, as the author points out repeatedly (with reference to James Scott), was a powerful 'weapon of the weak'.
The Introduction sets the scene, chronologically and geographically, formulates the outlines of the argument, and discusses the sources. Chapters 1-3 provide the context and an overview of pre-colonial naming practices. '[W]ithout succumbing to the tyranny of taxonomy' (p. 26), Likaka distinguishes three major 'traditional' categories of names and shows, with the help of numerous exemplary names, how the 'village world' responded to colonial rule and its principal forms: forced cultivation of cash crops, the building of roads and railroads, mining, the legal system, and the (mainly) Catholic...