After Red Rubber: Violence and Early Colonial Governance in Belgian Congo (1908-1914)

When the Belgian government took over the Congo Free State in 1908, officials readily proclaimed a rupture with the atrocities committed under King Leopold II’s “red rubber” regime. However, historians have challenged the idea of an immediate break with Leopoldian exploitation schemes, and instead have proposed a more nuanced picture of early Belgian governance as a transition phase lasting until the First World War. This article is the first to add empirical heft to the continuity narrative by examining three case studies about different incidents occurring in the forested Aruwimi District between 1908 and 1914. Concessionary violence, ruthless military repression, and the sexual exactions of a civil servant each provide complementary insights into early colonial governance from a bottom-up perspective. If these cases Position the young Belgian Congo as the direct inheritor of its predecessor’s brutal methods, the deployment of violence in the field occurred against a markedly different background. The depletion of wild rubber, the international outcry against the Free State, and the alleged moral ambitions of a young empire generated new points of friction. The correspondence sparked by these violent incidents reveals frictions between colonial principles and field practice, as officials disagreed about the legitimacy and amount of violence permissible, as well as about who could administer it. Despite the government’s initial commitment to curb “excessive” brutalities, multifaceted violence thus remained at the core of everyday colonial practices in “Belgian” Central Africa.