A Matter of Life and Death

Asbestos-cement was one of the most widely used construction materials of the twentieth century, yet its toxic histories are unevenly understood. While extensive scholarship exists on asbestos histories in the West, research on the mineral in Africa, and particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), remains scarce. This gap is significant and acute, as critical environmental historians emphasize how the ‘slow violence’ of toxicity has disproportionately affected former colonial regions such as the DRC, where asbestos-related diseases are increasingly being diagnosed by medical experts. This research investigates the colonial roots of these contemporary asbestos-related health issues in the DRC. On the one hand, it examines asbestos-cement production in Belgian Congo, circumventing the public inaccessibility of archives of many global asbestos players such as Eternit by focusing on local manufacturing firms. In particular, it traces the development of Belgian-Congo’s first asbestos cement manufacturing site in Lubudi, founded in 1927, charting how and if questions of race were entangled with toxic on-site labour conditions. On the other hand, by analysing understudied archival sources such as architectural plans, construction details, or building specifications, it explores how such manufactured asbestos-cement products were deployed in colonial housing construction across the Congolese territory. It thereby seeks to understand how toxic building materials inserted environmental health hazards into the privacy of the colonized home, and how such domestic toxicities mapped onto colonial segregated housing policies. In doing so, this research recentres asbestos histories away from the West, investigating how colonial logics structured labour and domestic exposure to toxicity, and arguing that race and colonialism still warrant a more central position in global histories of occupational and environmental health.