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Chapter 3: Ordering and evading

The present chapter focuses on how the autonomous actions of Congolese communities effectively hindered both HCB and the administration’s ambitions, and therefore played a key part in making their respective agents “impotent” (see introduction and chapter 2). I share three case studies, which shed light on the agency deployed by indigenous HCB employees and their families to both counter and make sense of colonial demands. I first document the unsupervised mobility of fruit cutters and their families in and out of the Leverville concession. I then explore how elders attempted to deceive field public servants during official enquiries. Finally, I delve into the ways villages that provided workers to HCB harboured and propagated a forbidden animist cult. Taken together, these phenomena shed light on how inhabitants of the Kwango district both attempted to evade the grip of the Huileries and the state and endeavoured to bring back a form of order to social dynamics, which were profoundly disrupted by colonial demands. In the spring of 1933, squads of colonial functionaries roamed through the villages of the Kamtsha-Lubue territory. They were on the lookout for any information related to Lukusu, a secretive and rapidly disseminating anti-witchcraft practice. For about twenty years, Lukusu spread along the waterways of the Congo basin before reaching Kamtsha-Lubue, a recruitment pool of the Leverville concession, in late 1932. For Belgian functionaries, Lukusu was difficult to grasp. Its goals, devices and performances seemed to be constantly morphing. Lukusu remained shrouded in mystery; most Congolese were reluctant to disclose any specifics about Lukusu’s inner workings or about the communities which had already adopted it. Less than two years had passed since the brutal repression of the Kwango uprising when Lukusu was first spotted in villages which previously embraced the Tupelepele (see introduction and chapter 2). Public servants feared that Lukusu would also turn into a new millenarian revolt, which would be even more difficult to suppress than the last. In December 1932, the Congo-Kasai Governor had already stated that local communities were “only waiting for a signal, in this case the passage of large herds of wild animals or flocks of birds, to begin a bloody but victorious insurrection.”1 Therefore, for Kamtsha-Lubue’s functionar-