"Unfortunately, the toll is high for some of your blacks"

Throughout the Belgian occupation of Congo, construction sites were thwarted by all sorts of failures, accidents,and labor strikes. These 'moments of crisis', not only confirm the continuous struggle of empire builders to build, or the difficult translations of technologies, however. They also allow to identify the otherwise anonymous construction workers, who, ironically, often had to pay the price for mistakes made elsewhere. Guided by the theoretical approach of STS scholars, this paper understands the myriad of building site accidents happening on the construction sites of the Belgian Congo as a prism through which individuals, the relations between them, the tools and machinery at their disposal, or the conditions in which they had to work, become visible. As this conceptualization of 'moments of crisis' is the direct outcome of the crossover between construction history and colonial history, the paper also carries a meta-argument about the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries for the field of construction history.