A global environmental history of a Congolese ‘concrete Monster'

Between 1968 and 1974 an imposing building emerged in the skyline Kinshasa, the then capital city of the country known today as the Democratic Republic of Congo. Initially designed as the headquarters of the United Nations in Congo, it still accommodates today the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The building which could be labelled a ‘Concrete Monster’ (SOS Brutalism, 2017), displays an obsession with the ‘vertical’ which formed an essential dimension in president Mobutu’s nation building project and is, as Achille Mbembe recently suggested, one of Brutalism’s “privileged positions” (Mbembe 2020/2024). Designed by a team of architects led by Sicilian born Eugenio Palumbo, one of the complex’s most striking features is a spectacular cantilevered folded roof plate in concrete, covering the assembly hall. Designing and constructing this roof was a challenge, as becomes clear from archival documents from the Compagnie Congolaise de Construction (CCC), the Belgian firm responsible for erecting the building. In this paper we propose, however, to focus on less spectacular fragments of its architecture, by investigating a particular source within the CCC’s archive: the extensive series of so-called “bons de commande” which enable us to trace the origin of all building materials and components used. In line with Kiel Moe’s work (2017, 2020), this source allows us to situate this particular ‘Concrete Monster’ in a wide – and oftentimes unexpected – global geography of supply chains, ranging from Congo to Belgium, to Europe and even Canada. More importantly, these “bons de commande” also offer a powerful starting point to write an environmental history of construction in post-independent Central Africa, tracing the use of materials such as concrete, copper, wood and asbestos cement and the businesses involved. Such history, we argue, inevitably confronts us with unsettling stories of labor, extraction, deforestation and (post)imperial debris (Stoler, 2013) across a wide geographical scale.