Conclusion: The concession experience

Abstract

This book has taken the Leverville concession as a starting point to study the experience of colonialism in the Kwilu basin, a region which has often been neglected in the historiography of Central Africa. Leverville was positioned on the margins of the great “arteries” through which power, peoples and commodities flowed in Belgian Congo. However, Leverville remained connected to the colony’s circulatory system and its skeletal network of strategic enclaves and corridors by its very own vessel, the Kwilu river. HCB steamboats were practically the only ones that navigated this waterway, building a bridge between the remote tropical utopia of Lord Leverhulme and the wider world. Although relatively isolated and certainly peculiar in its strategies of ruling and exploiting, Leverville can nevertheless be used as a vantage point to (re)consider the deployment of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. The concession was a tropical outpost of Lever Brothers, which was already a prominent player in interwar global capitalism. Furthermore, Leverville can be connected with other early 20 century utopian projects fostered in the global South, where private entrepreneurs attempted to build model, “orderly” societies in what they perceived as “savage” environments. Finally, the daily exercise of governance and capitalist extraction in Leverville epitomises the complex and often conflicted relations of European administrations and private companies in colonial settings. In this book, I employed the overarching concept of colonial impotence in order to articulate Leverville’s historical idiosyncrasies with the discernible patterns of colonial intervention it could help illustrate. Colonial impotence forms a red thread, which runs through this book; it is a metaphor that is reflected in the many facets of the daily experience of colonialism I sought to investigate. Colonial impotence speaks of the gap between the virtuous and the violent guises of the Leverville project; of the refusal of Europeans in the field to conform to the behaviours and attitudes demanded from them; of the agency of indigenous communities which hampered HCB’s project; and of the impossibility for the company to bend the Kwilu’s environment to its designs. Archives and memories collected through this research implicitly spoke of the Leverville concession’s impotence by shedding light on the contradictions, frustrations, angers and fears of those who worked and lived in it. However, such conflicted feelings and emotions not only saturated Leverville; they also played a key role in determining the course of many other colonial endeavours. The micro historical study of this enclave can, therefore and hopefully, contribute to a better understanding of the joint deployment of colonialism and capitalism in the field.