Korina® plywood

In 1949, Charles and Ray Eames’ celebrated case study house n°8 was built. As US Plywood Co. sponsored its construction, plywood panels, including a new brand Korina®, were used throughout the house. Apparently, such marketing endeavors paid off: from the end of the 1940s Korina® became wildly popular in the USA. This paper investigates how this sudden American craze deeply affected the Congolese Mayumbe forest.

Industrial forestry, as well as its connected infrastructures and actors, completely transformed the Mayumbe forest. Forestry companies used all their political acumen to obtain logging concessions, even advocating the regrouping of ‘small’ Mayumbe villages on land “less interesting from a forester’s viewpoint”. Dendrologists classified new tree species, explicitly drawing upon indigenous knowledge in their quest to find the next marketable timber. And chemists introduced the highly toxic herbicide pentachlorophenol to enhance Limba’s quality without compromising its aesthetic appeal.

These practices of industrial forestry left clear traces in colonial state and company archives, the primary sources of this study. While these sources predominantly reflect the perspectives of the foresters —James Scott aptly states they replaced actual trees by abstract lumber quantities— this paper contends that an attentive reading of these sources allows to rewrite the Korina® story with the forest’s landscape as its protagonist. Drawing on Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's argument that disturbances offer a valuable lens to unravel the polyphonic assemblages of landscapes, the American craze for Korina® provides a powerful framework for comprehending the polyphony of affected actants: be they Limba trees, Lyctus Brunneus beetles, resisting Bayumbe villagers or poisoned loggers.

In 1958, the Korina® craze ended as abruptly as it had begun. However, this sudden halt did not entail an instantaneous ‘restoration’ of the forest. Instead, the processes of industrial ruination impacted the forest’s landscape in different, yet equally profound ways.