Elusive natives
Escaping colonial control in the Leverville oil palm concession, Belgian Congo, 1923-1941
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2140665 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Benoît Henriet (0000-0002-5123-1664, Centre de Recherches en Histoire du Droit et des Institutions (CRHiDI), Université Saint-Louis, Brussels, Belgium, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 339-361 |
| Publication date | 2015-05-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0008-3968 • E-ISSN: 1923-3051 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00083968.2015.1057855 |
| OpenAlex | W2126952872 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 25 |
Throughout the inter-war period, in the Belgian Congoâs largest oil palm concession, thousands of colonised workers and their families managed to escape administrative surveillance and authority through schemes of dissimulation and elusiveness. The shared nature of sovereignty imposed on this territory, distributed between private and public agents, along with a sparse territorial occupation, left extended areas unsupervised by Western actors and indirect rulers. In these remote places, palm-fruit cutters, with the blessing of their employers, could settle without having to answer to authority. After exposing the specific policies enforced in the concession, this paper highlights how natives were able to maximise their autonomy regarding both the production imperatives imposed upon them and their obligations to the public authorities. The last part details the administrationâs consecutive failures in its endeavours to tackle workersâ elusiveness. The conclusion challenges the notion of âresistanceâ as an appropriate concept to recover the fruit cuttersâ adaptation to the imperatives of colonial rule and large-scale manual labour within the rainforest
Administration (probate law · Agency (philosophy · Agroforestry · Archaeology · Autonomy · Blessing · Colonialism · Geography · Palm · Palm oil · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scale (ratio · Sociology · Sovereignty · African history and culture studies · Law
Colonial Impotence
Freedom of movement versus freedom of work? Coping with the mobility of indigenous workers in a palm oil concession in French Congo (1910-1940)
Catalysing Socio-Ecological Change
The transformation of the global palm oil cluster
We Are Left with Barely Anything’
Challenging Colonial Forced Labor? Resistance, Resilience, and Power in Senegal (1920s–1940s)
Planning Belgian Congo’s network of medical infrastructure
Belgian Rule and its Afterlives
Paths of authority, roads of resistance
Business investment in education in emerging markets since the 1960s
Qu'est-ce qu'un « travailleur africain » ? Marché, coercition et mobilité en Afrique équatoriale française (1911-1940)
More Continuity Than Change? New Forms Of Unfree Labor In The Belgian Congo, 1908-1930
Hégémonies en construction
Hégémonies en construction
Biopower Today
Political consciousness among African peasants in the Belgian Congo
Conflict and Connection
Extraordinary Insights on Ordinary Conflicts
Unilever Overseas. The Anatomy of a Multinational
The Great Depression and the Making of the Colonial Economic System in the Belgian Congo
Le Bebe en Brousse
Weapons of the Weak
Weapons of the Weak
A Colonial Lexicon
Trends in Native Policy in the Belgian Congo
The Politics of Lever's West African Concessions, 1907-1913
Rural Protest
Returns on investments during the colonial era
Le Congo belge entre mythe et realite. Une analyse du discours demographique colonial
La contestation sociale et la naissance du proletariat au Zaire au cours de la premiere moitie du XX e siecle
Colonial Governmentality
Peasants and politics
La contestation sociale et la naissance du prolétariat au Zaïre au cours de la première moitié du XXesiècle
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,22 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2023 (7) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 11 |