title: "Elusive natives": Escaping colonial control through mobility in the Leverville  oil palm concession (Belgian Congo), 1923-1941
creator: Henriet, Benoit
subject: 8. Belgium and colonial justice
subject: 2. General information on colonial period (economy, (forced) labor, society,...)
subject: 3. Violences and maintenance of law and order
subject: 4. Congo
description: Throughout the inter-war period, in the Belgian Congo's largest oil palm concession, thousands of colonised workers and their families managed to escape administrative surveillance and authority through schemes of dissimulation and elusiveness. The shared nature of sovereignty imposed on this territory, distributed between private and public agents, along with a sparse territorial occupation, left extended areas unsupervised by Western actors and indirect rulers. In these remote places, palm-fruit cutters, with the blessing of their employers, could settle without having to answer to authority. After exposing the specific policies enforced in the concession, this paper highlights how natives were able to maximise their autonomy regarding both the production imperatives imposed upon them and their obligations to the public authorities. The last part details the administration's consecutive failures in its endeavours to tackle workers’ elusiveness. The conclusion challenges the notion of “resistance” as an appropriate concept to recover the fruit cutters’ adaptation to the imperatives of colonial rule and large-scale manual labour within the rainforest.
date: 2015
type: Article
type: PeerReviewed
identifier:   Henriet, Benoit  (2015) "Elusive natives": Escaping colonial control through mobility in the Leverville oil palm concession (Belgian Congo), 1923-1941.  Canadian Journal of African Studies/ Revue canadienne des études africaines , 49  (2).   pp. 339-361.      
relation: http://www.just-his.be/eprints/7328/