Collecting fingerprints

While Congolese wood was barely used before, its adoption in Horta’s Art Nouveau or Van De Velde’s modernist masterpieces, turned Congolese wood into a (luxurious) building material by the beginning of the 20th century. The sudden economic value of certain tree species attracted numerous companies and fortune seekers to the Mayombe forest. These lands, however, were not as empty as their logging concession requests contended. Projecting the 121 concessions granted by 1932 on a detailed, hand drawn map of the area, we can start to fathom how forests were ransacked, how native structures of “chieftaincies, villages, markets, burial sites and trading posts” were erased, and how villagers were forced into labor camps (epitomizing the capitalist wage system). A report of 1950 disclosed how, “due to the generous concessions in the Mayombe, 41 out of 76 chieftaincies no longer dispose of enough land to sustain themselves”.

In this paper, I will use the land registration files to understand how the Mayombe got entangled into a global supply chain of tropical wood since the beginning of the 20th century. While in documenting the process of “acquiring, distributing, and exploiting of lands” (Mudimbe, 1988) these files are indeed “monuments to these configurations of [colonial] power” (Stoler, 2009), they also contain subaltern voices in conversation with the (fragmented) power of the colonial state. In questionnaires, reports or land sales, we can read stories of resistance against land occupation, of native land uses and ownership, or of attempts to profit from the land’s capitalist revaluation. While in African history, the concept of ‘fingerprints’ points at African agencies in colonial documents (De Nys-Ketels, 2021), here, they are the literal and bodily traces of the suspension of those agencies: an inked thumb marked the release of all native land rights and the land’s final entry into capitalism.