Labour recruitment in the Belgian Congo

The extractive logics of Belgian colonialism quickly forced the Belgian Congo’s government to rethink their export infrastructure, inherited from Léopold II’s Congo Free State. The harbour of Matadi —their only seaport— had simply become too small for the growing export. In 1921, the government therefore ordered the construction of a new transport complex: new harbors in Matadi and the neighboring village of Ango-Ango, along with a railway line between them.

The materialization of these  ambitions relied on the hands of construction workers. The Ango-Ango transport complex is a prime case to investigate how  recruitment policies of the ‘modern’ Belgian Congo shifted from those of the accursed Congo Free State, as its construction started after the official abolishment of forced labor. Archival sources of the Ango-Ango complex, suggest these official rules had little on-the-ground effect. One state recruiter’s racist complaint, for instance, shows how common violence remained in recruitment processes:

“There is no hope of being able to supply 80 workers for Ango-Ango simply by asking. Black people don't have the energy to go to work without being pushed: [...] they're waiting for some kind of violence, which they want."

As the complex' harbours were realized by private contractors and the railway by the government’s Public Works Department, the Ango-Ango case also allows to study the differences between state and private recruitment. An archival collection of official feuilles de routes, reveals how the state recruitment system transported people from across the colony towards the railway’s construction site. Private recruiters, on the other hand, primarily sought workers in neighboring colonial territories — off-limits for state recruitment. Although archival sources on private recruitment are sparse, the Ango-Ango case raises questions about their methods: were they indeed ‘human traffickers’ or did these recruiters have to provide better renumerations and conditions to the immigrant workers they wanted to attract?

Despite the evident use of violence, this recruitment history of the Ango-Ango complex also shows resistance. During the railway construction, for instance, numerous workers deserted the building site. Although these ‘deserters’ had no legal rights, the attorney general granted them ‘pardon’ due to the harsh recruitment methods. Further complaints about their ‘unreasonable’ demands indicate such social struggles —predating any African unionization— on the construction site: “They no longer agree to work for less than 2 francs wages and a franc ration per day. They set the working day at 5 hours and warn that if one of them is molested, they will all quit.” At the harbour's construction site, a strike brought work to a standstill. The central role of immigrant workers from Angola in this strike corroborates that these workers were far from mere powerless victims of a colonial recruitment system. Finally, these recruitment policies also had a strong impact on Matadi’s urban development in the next decades: the location of the workers’ camps triggered discussions about the dualistic scheme of racial segregation developed for the port city. Once again, the workers claim a say in these matters, as moments of social urban unrest so vividly disclose.