Pesticides & Planning

In preparation of King Baudouin’s mediatized trip around Belgian Congo on May 16, 1955, the colonial capital of Léopoldville was decontaminated with over seventeen tons of DDT, combatting malaria and other tropical diseases. Propaganda particularly celebrated the ‘flight sanitaire’, in which ‘Tsé-Tsé’ – the apt name for the sanitation helicopter – roared past the SABENA towers, icons of the blossoming cityscape of tropical modernism, covering the streets in chemical clouds. As part of a longstanding propaganda campaign on colonial healthcare and sanitation that trumpeted Belgian Congo as a medical ‘model colony’, this imagery still feeds into current-day public debates on decolonization in Belgium.

While these images mark the apogee of colonial pesticide policies, this paper aims to explore its underlying broader history of post-war colonial chemical sanitation campaigns in both rural and urban Congo, by analyzing colonial propaganda, archives, and recently rediscovered graduation dissertations of colonial doctors. On the one hand, the colonial medical authorities conducted large-scale insect eradication experiments within rural Congo through domestic and aerial spraying. The test zone – the rural region bordering the colonial capital of Léopoldville, an important and densely populated agro-industrial region – was not randomly selected: these experiments both aimed to ensure an economically productive hinterland, and to appease persistent anxieties about the pestilential tropics of the capital’s European residents. When trials did not yield the aspired result, however, this strategic importance forced the medical authorities to nonetheless continue the ineffective and costly program ‘to satisfy the public's demand for what it considered to be a panacea’ – as the médecin-hygieniste would state in 1955.[1] On the other hand, the pesticide programme focused even more heavily on the large urban centres, chemically complementing the interwar urban segregation policies. Whereas decontamination of the European ville had been the first priority, the capital’s medical service redirected its 1952 DDT campaign toward Congolese cités indigènes, feared as hotbeds of tropical disease. As colonial propaganda highlighted, the colonial administration went much further than sending helicopters to decontaminate water pools and public spaces from afar. Mobile squads were dispatched on the ground, lining up all the area’s African inhabitants outside their houses for chemical spraying before entering the privacy of over 50 000 homes for decontamination – despite concerns about the ‘spectre de cancer’, and DDT’s inverse impact on mosquito resistance that were already haunting the medical department.[2]

‘Colonialism is toxic’ – this paper aims to confirm Samia Henni’s powerful opening statement of her latest book and her plea to read colonial toxicity across its ‘spatialities and temporalities’, while also emphasizing its highly performative nature.[3] It not only seeks to reveal how urban planning and pesticides were intricately intertwined within the tropics, highlighting how chemicals were an essential tool of a toxic urbanism that spanned beyond the conventional confines of the colonial city. It also questions the colonial residues of such toxic urbanism, which are not confined to the (colonial) past, but may impact both present and future, through persisting colonial views and propaganda, and more crudely through increased resistance across Congo’s ecologies.