The Contradictions in being a Luba

The success of the Luba—or, rather, the success of the Belgian state's indigenizing policies^[45] —was marked by a profound contradiction. The members of the Luba colonial elites, which constituted a potential national state bureaucracy, were condemned by virtue of their peculiar position of being in close alliance with the colonial state itself. The capture of the colonial state seemed to figure in their destiny, yet the realization of impending independence would in fact only lead to their exclusion from the national political scene. Their strengths were what contributed to their ultimate exclusion from the national political scene, as much on account of fears of a Luba palace coup as on account of the weakness of their own regional base, which could only lead to a regional secession that was condemned from the outset. The regional and ethnic reactions against the social and economic success of Luba modernization were outstanding examples of reactions, by proxy, to the pax belgica . They often represented a last-ditch effort to save the colonial order in its essence and, as such, they were encouraged by the colonial administration, as may be witnessed in the Luba-Lulua conflict.

The greatest weakness of the Luba—the very reason for their spectacular success in colonial society through adoption of the model of the ideal colonial 'native' as expressed in the legal and political concept of indigène —lay in their immigrant character in a 'national' space that had been systematically 'indigenized' since 1920. The Belgian colonial order's concept of political legitimacy was grounded in two complementary principles: seniority (history) and conquest, with the latter, having priority over the former, provided that it be compatible with the interests of the colonial state, a condition not met in the case of other nineteenth century conquerors, such as the Swahili, the Chokwe, and others.

The departure of the colonial state, set up as it was as the absolute political arbiter, came about in 1960 at the moment when 'native' political instability had reached its climax. The economic policies in effect at the time and the practical possibilities for economic exploitation and administrative penetration made it possible in the 1930s and 1940s to create a socio-political model based on regional symbiosis (or rather symbioses), pairing ethnic/regional colonial 'elites' with the political system based on the double intervention of the Roman Catholic Church and the state. The implicit regionalization of economic exploitation placed the regional training of 'modern native' elites, the ethnic elites par excellence, in the hands of religious bodies who practically monopolized the teaching profession. These future African intellectuals were already being cut off from the rural world by schooling as they became acculturated according to a normative and synthetic cultural-linguistic model.^[46] They were in residence at the mission station during the whole period, and their return to the village was discouraged. The administration directed the rural societies which, with the help of the so-called 'traditional' authorities and in the absence of the elites referred to above, had been shattered by the law into mosaics of 'native administrative units'.

The 'modern elite'—that is, the elite which was integrated into the industrial economy—was deeply involved in the building of an ethnic culture of which,

moreover, it was temporarily the principal if not sole consumer. However, through the functioning of the judicial system and the colonial political organization of the urban proletariat (operating through the para-traditional centres which, from the 1940s on, superseded the worker camps), ethnic culture and language spread to the workers who were becoming increasingly stabilized in the city and were establishing families there. Ethnic culture thus ceased to be an arbitrary construct of colonial knowledge and took on a dynamic of its own, constituting as a set of practices necessary, first, to survival and, soon thereafter, to the expression of social and political conflicts in the urban areas, conflicts which eventually spread throughout the city-country, urban-rural space. This stage, so important for understanding the formation of ethnicity as both a political culture and a social product of colonial industrialization—as well as a framework for social protest—has been largely overlooked because, at the very moment when the rapid expansion of the wage-earning class and the monetary economy in the countryside created in the 1950s the objective conditions for cooperation between the urban elites and the 'traditional' authorities, colonial sociology consecrated a firm, but bogus, dichotomy between city and country, thereby producing the dualist model of African societies and economics.^[47]

Understanding the process which I have just described should help to make the formation of class society in the rural-urban space of 'native' societies in the colonial system more intelligible. In this setting two factors are especially involved from a time prior to the acceleration of the process in in the 1950s. First, the rapid development of bonds of personal dependence occurring through the phenomenal increase of client-patron relationships penetrated every level of colonial society without regard to the barrier of race and was abetted by the arbitrary nature of the system.^[48] If it was important to have 'one's white', it was no less important to have 'one's blacks' in order to fill any office having political aspects to it. The client-patron system constituted the principal political force in the transformation of the colonial 'native' system according to the anthropological model. It was also patronage that unified the city-country, urban-rural social space.

The rapid development of interwoven patronage networks was to result in the post-colonial Zairean state's becoming the 'great absent one' while still remaining all powerful. The shifting of the state's horizons towards the juncture of the 'national' economy and the world market, which had previously been in the province of the metropolitan political apparatus, gave it, by virtue of its control over the centralization of surplus production and its investment, mastery over the matrix of relations pertaining to centralization and/or marginalization. The mechanisms for the extortion of surplus which accompany proletarianization became identified with the state, which assumed political responsibility for them. On the other hand, redistribution of surplus was carried on within the client-patron networks which could only be temporarily halted by political marginalization, which the state had control over; economic marginalization, or peripheralization, was, on the other hand, a long-lasting phenomenon, as the case of the Kasai goes to show. The political and economic mechanisms of this system were in place in the colonial society of the 1950s and are clearly demarcated in the Ten-Year Plan prepared on the eve of independence in the 1960s. Thus today one mentions Zaire in connection with its 'unending crisis' as a way of tacitly recognizing the relative stability of its political society as it is increasingly stratified along class lines.^[49] To understand why the state, by its leaving vacant the national social scene, produces such a political system, it is necessary to look into specific patterns of historical proletarianization.

The second factor involved in the formation of a class society is the social

concept of slavery. As Luc de Heusch has recently asserted, the 'two major steps towards a class society are without a doubt, the introduction of slavery on the one hand, and the development of links of personal dependence on the other',^[50] in order to affirm that for the Tetela, as for the Pende, the slave is a dependant who finds that he is an outsider in relation to the dominant social bond.^[51] It should be noted that this social bond determines the legal access to resources, including the means of production. It is only to be expected that the Tetela considered forced cotton cultivation during the colonial period as state slavery. De Heusch considers this an accurate assessment. According to the social meaning given this form of social dependence in central Africa during the nineteenth century, slavery was socially equivalent to the proletarianization that occurred later.^[52] A slave is he who, once 'liberated' from any politically recognized social bond, by force, or, more rarely, in accordance with his own will, is cut off from legal access to resources. He acquires this access by being placed, or by placing himself, in a position of dependence toward someone who, in becoming his 'father' or 'mother', re-establishes the social bond. It was completely natural, therefore, that soldiers and workers who had first been recruited by force came to be considered slaves of the state. It was also just as natural that the later mandatory cultivations which sanctioned de facto control by the state of a portion of agricultural lands should be seen as a form of partial enslavement, that is, proletarianization.^[53]

The acceleration in salaried socialization, beginning at the end of the 1930s, and in the general monetization of the rural economy in the 1950s had as a cumulative effect the destabilization of the system, which was at the same time rigidly held in political place by the administration, and the calling into question of the functions carried out by the 'elites'. In spite of colonial society, if not without its knowledge, an internal—one may say in colonial legal terminology, 'native'—control of the proletarianization process began at the end of the 1940s and during the 1950s. The chiefs, incapable of imposing a socio-economic control over those who left the rural chiefdoms for the cities, or else themselves involved in 'non-traditional' activities, became increasingly the simple agents of the colonial administration, to the extent that, in 1958, on the eve of independence, the administration was ready to replace 'tradition'-based investiture of chiefs by local elections. Many chiefs kept their distance from the administration's notion of 'traditions', attempting to maintain social and political control of their groups, exercising it henceforth in the city-country space. By so doing they came to control membership in the group as well as access to land, two areas which became arenas of confrontation with the state. It was the chiefs who held the ultimate sanction of proletarianization, to the extent that a migrant who had cut off his ties to his ethnic group could see his legitimate access to land cut off as well, the latter condition taking form in his exclusion from consultation and/or participation in the never-ending discussions over land, thereby confirming his status as proletarian/slave.

Furthermore, the reaction of the members of the 'modern' elites (évolués ) to the black soldiers' mutiny at Luluabourg in 1944, together with the alleged existence of plans for their political conspiracy, only go to show that it was not white colonial society alone that was afraid. For the first time, in 1944, the évolués became conscious of the political void in which they were suspended. What they learned about the unfolding of the revolt at Masisi and the mutiny at Luluabourg demonstrated the risks of their position.^[54]

When the demand for a particular political status to bring them closer to white society was not satisfied, the évolués turned as individuals towards the real political world where they were potential proletarians, and then set about establishing their own network of alliances. It was also at this moment that the

Church, whose monopoly of school instruction started eroding during the 1950s, reinforced its training and supervision of the évolués in the ethnic framework of the delocalized space over which it believed itself to be in control. I am referring here above all to the growing political role of associations of graduates and former students from which the future political leaders sprang.^[55]

In the political space where the évolués and the traditional authorities both moved, the political aspects of the culture of ethnicity developed quickly. It was in this context that the cultural models largely created and transmitted by the évoluées intersected with traditional political practices while the men and women who were being continually buffeted by the forces of colonial proletarianization struggled for individual and social survival.

It was therefore in city-country space—a space staked out and delimited by industrialization—and in the face of the authoritarian state, that there arose and grew the political culture of ethnicity on the one hand, and specific social practices, holding as much to patronage as to class solidarity, on the other. The 'folkloricization' of intellectual culture and of collective consciousnesses by their being arbitrarily lumped together in accordance with the models of the 'Belgian Ethnographic Library',^[56] without any regard for their real political context, erects a screen of ethnicity which obscures a whole set of social practices that in fact integrate the mechanisms of class conflict, ethnic solidarity, and national pressures. It is on account of these different thrusts that we may observe nowadays a contradictory tendency towards regional and even gradually a national standardization of collective identities and, at the same time, a race within the field of national scholarly ethnography and history to set down models for increasingly smaller groups.

The current political dynamic in Zaire which keeps the crisis of the state stable owes as much to the national grand bourgeoisie as it emerges, but sets itself off from the political clique, as it does to the limited political space^[57] , where the state is still present. In this space solidarities operate as much as a function of class positions as they are defined as a function of regional identity, for the latter refers to the political circumstances and the economic structures shaping the national space, whose guarantor remains the state.^[58]