The lives of others: selecting the Congolese elite (1948–1956)

Abstract

His superior’s assessment, the many articles in the press and his post as president in multiple associations were testimony to it. The contents of his kitchen and the arrangement of his living room left no room for doubt either: the selection committee was quite clear that they were dealing with a “genuine” évolué. In the summer of 1954, Patrice Lumumba was granted immatriculation and could now be entered into the “Register of the Civilized.”1 Like all those enjoying this legal status, from now on Lumumba no longer had to fear floggings, had equality with Europeans under penal law and was permitted to socialize and drink wine in European districts at night. In brief, he was a member of what colonial policy envisaged as the Congolese elite. But how were holders of this status selected and by whom? What were the key criteria? Who was granted this special legal status? And what advantages did the status reforms confer? We may describe the practical implementation of these reforms as an attempt to translate the attributes of the “perfected black,” as negotiated and propagated in the media, into bureaucratic test criteria. Ultimately, the selection procedure for the carte du mérite civique and immatriculation turned out to be a perfidious practice of colonial rule, with dual objectives. Despite the authorities’ declared commitment to reforms, the goal was to uphold the social order while lending new legitimacy to the hegemony-stabilizing colonial distinction between European and African society. It is important to reaffirm that, despite resistance from the European colonial milieu, the elite’s demand for legal equality with Congo’s European population managed to effect an initial shift of political direction. But the introduction of the carte du mérite civique in July 1948 was only a partial victory. As we will see later in more detail, the relevant decree merely promised several benefits for its holders, to be granted little by little, and the abolition, in part, of the indigénat. This did not, therefore, constitute full legal assimilation of the kind initially demanded by Congolese authors. The carte du mérite civique was no more than a transitional solution through which the architects of colonial policy wished to gain time in order to lay the ground for a more far-reaching reform of immatriculation. At the same time, therefore, Colonial Minister Wigny had instituted an ex-