Associations and sociability between is and ought (1944–1953)

Abstract

During his trip through the Congo Free State in 1899, the mayor of Brussels lamented the lack of associations. According to him, European colonial society required protected social spaces if its members were to come together in ways appropriate to their social status and cultivate bourgeois manners even under adverse circumstances.1 Over the course of time the association developed into Europeans’ most important form of sociability in the Congo. Beginning in the 1920s, however, Congolese too, primarily graduates of mission schools, started to organize themselves into associations. In the colonial situation, the practices and forms of association-based sociability were subject to a complex transformation.2 The association culture of Congolese differed from that which arose in the eighteenth century along with the European and US-American bourgeoisies, especially in its relationship to political and religious authorities. While associations in the trans-Atlantic world were distinguished by a certain autonomy,3 in the Belgian Congo they were closely tied to the institutions of state and church and were subject to their patronage and control. It is no coincidence that the colonial state’s involvement in African associations began in the mid-1940s. During the war years, the colonial administration had taken wary note of the growth of informal associations in the cities, though without doing anything about it. The authorities overlooked the fact that these were often mutual aid societies established by new city dwellers, organized based on their places of origin, whose members sought to help each other cope with the challenges of everyday city life.4 In the eyes of the authorities, these bodies were “hierarchical sects,”5 which they suspected of being potential hotbeds of messianic and subversive movements. These free associations were