The Growth of a Common Luba Culture'

The course the Luba followed in the Kasai and in South Katanga was made easier by the conflicts between Luba wage-earners and agents, on the one hand, and the local African populations of the mining regions or in the future urban areas on the other, just as these conflicts would lead ultimately to the Luba's post-colonial exclusion. The Luba-speaking men initially worked as labourers, something which was considered degrading by the local peoples and as equivalent to being slaves of the white man.^[29]

Through their status as the whites' assistants, however, Luba men were able to carve out a privileged niche for themselves through the acceptance of schooling, the establishment of written Luba as an officially recognized colonial language, by their role as foremen of the established power, and by the adaptation of their social structures to the demands of the colonial world to such an extent that their culture and language became starting points for the 'discovery' by Europeans of African cultures as ethnic cultures equal to, but basically different from, the cultures of the rest of humanity. As members of the model indigenous African society of the region, during the 1930s and 1940s many Luba found it appealing to cooperate with European researchers and missionaries in selecting and assembling cultural elements in order to elaborate a Luba theodicy and philosophy as a system of thought and to work with European researchers and administrators in constructing a judicial system that conformed to their expectations.^[30] It is no accident that an ethnic philosophy on a par with its western counterparts should have been 'discovered' in Luba culture by Tempels following in Possoz's footsteps and not in some other local African culture.^[31]

The modern 'Luba' ethnic culture was thus selected and developed as a modern 'traditional' system through the combined efforts of Luba-speaking intellectuals, including catechists and school-teachers, chiefs, and other notables incorporated in the colonial administrative structure, and the colonial dispensers of learning, the missionaries, the administrators and the magistrates. The sorting out of cultural data and the creation of particular meaning for a term were all guided by the perception of a 'tradition' as being fixed and unalterable by material conditions.^[32] Such an attitude was a widespread fixture of both European and African resistance to the reality of socio-political ills engendered by colonial industrialization and of European opposition to any kind of Creole culture.

The relative success of Christianization and schooling, which made it possible from an early time to set down the elements of an African cultural pattern compatible with white men's 'law and order', played a large part in the advancement of the Luba cultural model. It was owing to this fact that 'the Luba' could be exhibited and even protected by colonial power. Rather scholarly on the whole, the Luba-speaking elite was able to propagate notions of a shared heritage, beginning with a canon of written language, 'customs' and history. There were early missionary publications for Africans, then history books, and then an anthropological literature. At the time that the chiefdoms as administrative units were being created in the 1930s, the selective reading of or listening to ethnographic surveys reinforced those cultural traits which the colonial agent as survey-taker found positive, in keeping with a dynamic peculiar to situations of unequal power. A complex set of values centring on the notion of patriarchal power, including sexual morality, is a good example of this. Furthermore, it paved the way for the creation of a pseudo-theory of demographics that held that a high birth-rate was a reward for good morals; it was another step towards what became a theory of a vital ethnic force.^[33]

It is important to emphasize, however, that between the 1920s and the 1950s, knowledge of culture, and hence the image that one projected and received of culture in one's surroundings, followed no steady upward path corresponding to any specific conscious project. Rather, it was a relationship characterized by a constant fluctuation that the Luba 'cultural brokers' kept in motion. These brought colonial 'high scientific culture', which remained prey to the epistemological blind spots which are peculiar to Western culture as it pursued its own objectives of rationalization and taxonomic classification, into contact with authentic Luba-speaking peoples cultures, which were then being transformed and homogenized under the socio-economic impact of industrialization and through the standardization of language and personal standing. Gender roles and judicial and political customs were all written down by the administration, placed in archives, and checked for accuracy, and the racial underpinnings of colonial society transformed these various locally derived elements into an applied model of common ethnic culture.^[34] The subtle balance between what was spoken of—or written about, rather—and the different sorts of lived experience was maintained, on a collective level, by the Luba 'cultural brokers' or through the changing conditions of their integration into the colonial world.

Two points should be made in connection with this process. The first is concerned with the relationship existing between the Luba-speaking cultural brokers—a modernized elite—and the so-called traditional elites, the chiefs (chefs médaillés ) and notables who were recognized as such by the administration. The former, who acted from within the colonial world, were generally learned, Christian and urbanized, and stood as the executors and manipulators of colonial power. They considered themselves the agents of progress. The latter were usually unlettered and necessarily rural. Their legitimacy, in fact, stemmed only from the authority of the administration and its fiction of a 'native' society, but their success as chiefs can be accounted for in their ability to engage in double-dealing with the colonial administration and in avoiding the use of military force against their people. In this role, they were indispensable as they granted a measure of credibility to this fiction of a coherent 'native' society and guaranteed the autonomy of the colonial state.

Even if colonial legislation formally divided the 'elites' into two groups which were separate in all respects except race (they both shared 'native' status) and reserved the exercise of local power to the so-called 'traditional' elites, it should be noted that, in practice, both the European administration and rural societies showed an empirical tendency to put in power as chiefs those who possessed at least some experience of the white world. Thus, while the principle of separation between the two elites remained strong, at the same time there were strong mutual needs drawing the two closer together. From the end of the 1920s onwards, with growing industrialization in the Congo, the majority of whites—as elsewhere throughout southern Africa—came to condemn 'westernized' and 'detribalized' blacks. The white colonial world no longer desired rootless African individuals. Urban African popular culture was also widely condemned in the 1920s.

The judicial system of urban communities did not permit Africans to have any civil status that was not recognized by 'traditional' customary law. In these circumstances it became important for urban-dwelling Africans to belong to, or at least to be said to be involved in, an ethnic 'customary' culture. At the same time, new efforts were continually being made that aimed at controlling workers' movement through legal sanction, and thus the importance of specifically written legislation in the field of customary law increased. Moreover, the spreading monetization of social and economic relations, as well as the growing ability of

chiefs to act as political brokers in the distribution and management of land, conferred on the chiefs an important role vis-à-vis both the colonial power and the urbanized members of the chiefdoms. The migration of many people to earn wages through migrant labour and for schooling, as well as the increased amount of income from cash crop production from the 1940s onwards in the rural areas, facilitated the entry of secondary cultural brokers to positions of influence in the rural sector and strengthened their bonds with those dwelling in the urban areas.

The second point that needs to be made involves successive changes that affected the role of chiefs. The chiefs of the rural administrative units (cnefferie or secteur ) that were recognized by the administration were named to their positions upon the recommendation of the territorial administrator. His advice was based on an investigation into the customary titles of the candidate and, hence, into the historical identity of his group. This situation raises an important point for understanding the revision of local perceptions of what constituted 'tradition'. This was embedded in the very concept of 'native rural district', which shifted from being in the 1920s and 1930s a chiefdom based on ethnic affiliation to an area defined on the bases of its economic organization, and the duties which the chiefs carried out, or were supposed to carry out, with respect to the rural community and the colonial power. After a short, feverish period of research into local particularities which aimed at establishing 'traditional chiefdoms' and at identifying the dominant political body within them during the 1920s and the first part of the 1930s, local cultures followed the general tendency towards ethnic standardization, probably very strongly so. Later, language usage and a rather vague historical tradition defined and fixed the 'indigenous' bases of the native administrative units for which economic viability (that is, the ability to be self-financing through the use of a supplement to the capitation tax and other local taxes) was the fundamental criterion. This change, which was embodied in a decree of 1933 and implemented from 1935, coincided with the recovery in the demand for supplies of foodstuffs and for workers from the Kasai, a demand for which the Luba would once again both pay the price and reap some profit.

Without going into the details of the events occurring between 1935 and 1958, it may be shown that this demand for food and workers, which remained strong throughout most of this period, benefited above all the Luba established along roads and the railway line. They were at the same time farmers and members of peasant groups who found themselves in a precarious property situation, involving them with neighbours who were often not Luba-speaking.

Thus, the role of the chief changed at the local level. Since 1935, it has become increasingly bureaucratized and divorced from capitalist accumulation, while the growing profitability of farm production for those near the road or railway made the chief less and less of a supervisor over agricultural work. On the other hand, his role gained in importance whenever the property lines were redrawn. He was above all instrumental in maintaining a distinct identity as against the autochthonous communities whose own ethnic consciousnesses followed the later rise of economic aspirations and expectations. In this way, the norms of the newly fashioned Luba culture were interiorized in villages being settled during the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, moreover, the community of political goals shared by 'traditional' elites and their 'modernized' Luba counterparts grew stronger. The conversion of many Luba cultivators, especially from the area surrounding the railway, into either part-time or full-time suppliers to the colonial economy, not only reinforced the monetization of social relations but also intensified individual movement between the urban wage-earning class, agriculture and the unregulated sector of small businesses, the sexual services of young women, and

other services, thereby strengthening city-country, urban-rural links.