6. House, Home, Health and Hygiene – Social Engineering of Workers in Elisabethville/ Lubumbashi (1940s to 1960s) Through the Lens of Language Usage

Abstract

After the foundation of Elisabethville (nowadays Lubumbashi) in 1910, one of the most important players in the mining sector in Katanga was the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK). Especially after in the 1930s, the International Labor Organization (ILO) was putting pressure on the UMHK to abandon forced labor and the UMHK had to search for a solution to secure its high demand for a permanent workforce. The company’s strategy was to implement a huge project of social engineering, including a new employment policy called “stabilization”. To foster this new strategy, in 1925 the UMHK founded a specialized department, the Département Main d’Oeuvre Indigène. Besides the provision of schools, hospitals, leisure facilities and, of course, housing for UMHK workers, the company and its owner, the Belgian colonial state, relentlessly pursued their ideas of cleanliness and hygiene. Hygiene was immanently linked to health and both aspects were monitored by authorities at different levels. On a larger scale, the Belgians’ concern for hygiene and health was visible in their policy of segregation in the city with different neighborhoods for the different city dwellers and a neutral zone (cordon sanitaire) in-between. On a smaller scale, the house became one of the core objects of the Belgians’ concern for hygiene. The provided housing was therefore not only a tool of social engineering but – as the analyzed discourse on concrete measures reveals – a constant topic in debates often linked with concerns of health and hygiene.