S, M , L , XL ». Mapping a colonial taskscape along the Matadi-Kinshasa railway line, DR Congo, from a transimperial perspective

In the last two decades, the attention of architectural historians for the built legacy of colonialism on the African continent has increased considerably. This growing interest has run parallel with a shift in focus, with scholarship moving from an attention for architecture ‘overseas’ or an obsession with documenting traces of an overlooked heritage of modernist architecture designed by prominent figures, to investigations of the more ‘grey’ production of buildings and infrastructures that were crucial for what constitutes, using Michel Foucault’s words, colonial “governmentality”. While there has been quite some attention for colonial infrastructures and material remains in other disciplinary fields of the humanities (from history proper to area studies and anthropology), only now are architectural historians starting to look more seriously at the typologies of workers’ camps, hospitals, schools, post offices, or the often rather anonymous buildings that accommodate colonial administrations. But also the more large-scale infrastructure of roads, railway lines or hydraulic dams have become topic of innovative studies in the last years. In such work, the focus has shifted from the individual, creative architect to more aggregate actors like Public Works Departments and other technical services in the colonial administration, while also the mode of production and the process of building itself are gaining currency as areas of investigation. Some scholars, for instance, have started to look at those sites and factories crucial in producing the building materials that shaped the colony. In this chapter, l address how such shifts have also informed the research that we have been conducting at Ghent University on the built infrastructures along the Matadi-Kinshasa railway line, a 400 kilometer long trajectory crossing the Lower Congo region connecting Congo’s main port city with what was from 1923 onwards the capital city of the Belgian colony. By zooming in and out on this mythical piece of infrastructure, the origin of which goes back to the late 19th century, this chapter presents a multi-scalar analysis which enables us to assess how landscapes in the Lower Congo region became radically transformed by the colonial project and how generic building types were transformed to local contexts in sometimes striking ways. But it also enables us to illustrate that even the tiniest piece of infrastructure, such as public toilets, could be informed by practices from far and away testifying of unexpected direct links from S to XL. Via a series of specific cases, this chapter argues that any meaningful assessment of the building practice in the Belgian Congo needs not only to relate it to that in the metropole but also, and perhaps more importantly, to what was happening in other colonial territories. The Lower Congo example thus reminds us that a real challenge for future research might well reside in writing more globally connected histories across scales of the mundane and grey legacy of colonial infrastructures in Africa.