Hunting “Wrongdoers” and “Vagrants”

Concessionary Rule and Its End: A Notable Change in Social Conditions?

The Middle-Congo was one of the most problematic territories with regard to labor obligations within the French empire in sub-Saharan Africa. For that reason alone, it is indeed very useful to take this territory as a starting point for reflections on compulsory labor. In the “French” Congo, it is possible to find, within one colony, a combination of practically all existing colonial mechanisms of pressure, brutalities and abuses—of which in most other colonies in Africa, in the first decades of the twentieth century, only a selection existed. It is unsurprising that the omnipresence of these routines had grave consequences: the reactions to labor coercion cast into question the whole framework of colonial control.¹⁶

One would need to ask how much this particular situation was an effect of the legacies of concession company rule over vast parts of the territory. Like the Belgian Congo, especially in its early phase, and like Mozambique under Portuguese rule, large parts of the Middle-Congo came under company control in the last years of the nineteenth century—a control that lasted over the first three decades of the twentieth century and was characterized by the takeover of administrative functions by private companies.¹⁷ The agents of concession companies operated as tax farmers and rubber-collecting officials at the same time. Their activity brought local populations into the maelstrom of physically demanding collection duties, which were aggravated by the rubber boom that peaked before World War I.¹⁸ The violent forms of treatment that affected the Congolese, and that led in some areas to dramatic mortality rates, were publicly decried by intellectuals such as André Gide in the 1920s. Officially, the colonial state installed better control mechanisms and ended the abusive role of the private companies.¹⁹

Conditions on the ground remained more complex. Through the decades of company presence, a number of routines had become established in which the “private” and the “public” were mixed. Colonial officials recruited individuals in favor of companies, and companies demanded the support of the administration for their goals. The end of the concessions did not eradicate these practices. Capitalist firms remained in the territory after the end of their monopoly concessions, and their agents expected to have the support of colonial officials. The issue was further complicated by the fact that the most ambitious, and most feared, infrastructure project in the region, the Congo-Océan Railway line, not only meant the creation of transport facilities to be used by the capitalist economy, but also became a kind of ideological goal of the administration. Local populations feared railway construction work so much—because epidemics were typical during this work and the death rates extremely high—that they were likely to do everything possible to avoid recruitment for such tasks.²⁰ The Congo-Océan Railway line has remained a principal axis of economic life in the postcolonial Republic of Congo, but its traumatic memory also lingered on: during the 1970s, the hardships during railway construction work were frequently referred to as a colonial crime and national trauma, and when in 1985 President Dénis Sassou-Nguesso reopened the railway after important repair work, he and other politicians also had to refer to these bitter memories.²¹ This demonstrates the dramatic impact exercised by the experience of railway construction. In the 1920s, an approach to rethink railway policies could have made sense within the French administration of the territory. However, few efforts were made in the early years of the construction project to improve conditions and make the work more acceptable to the Congolese themselves. Recruitment for railway construction constituted an administrative obsession.²² Therefore, the spectacular and brutal project went on for thirteen years, between 1921 and 1934, without much improvement; while French officials claimed that the conditions were not that bad and that “natives” became accustomed to the particular form of work, the railway continued to provoke resistance and flight.

High-ranking officials in the Middle-Congo and French Equatorial Africa felt they had to respond to accusations once under the gaze of the International Labor Organization.²³ While this was in part simply to justify conditions in the region, their perspectives also reflect an entrenched belief that the end of private-sector domination within the administration also meant a relative end of abuses.²⁴ The detailed correspondence between Governor-General Raphaël Antonetti—later famous as the villain behind the Congo-Océan project—and Emile Antonelli, the Socialist deputy of the National Assembly in Paris, illustrates these beliefs. The deputy was engaged in reformist Socialist labor policy and stood for France’s participation in the ILO rulemaking process. Antonetti reflected the view of the officials on the ground in the Congo when he insisted that the use of Congolese reservist soldiers for the railway construction and other forms of drafting personnel were fully in line with ILO demands (and more than in the colonies belonging to French West Africa). Reiterating the racist colonial idea, a standard one in the interwar period, that “the natives” needed to be “educated” through hard labor, the governor-general held that Congolese who were not offering their military service to the empire had to work in other fields—and that the Congo-Océan Railway was the right place for that work. Antonetti insisted that food resources and treatment of the railway laborers were adequate, and blamed the incompatibility of clothing rules with the climate of the Congo for much of the death rates caused by influenza waves.²⁵

In the “official mind,” the processes of the 1920s therefore seemed to indicate profound changes in administrative behavior. With private companies losing their prerogatives, a more benevolent administration appeared to be in charge, which could have meant the end of the violent forms of forced labor. However, this did not happen. On the contrary, many regions of the Middle-Congo remained a model for multiple practices of compulsory labor under which African populations suffered.

Overcharging the Congolese: The End of Concessionary Rule and the Continuity of Repressive Labor Conditions

A “topographic view” needs a perspective that brings different experiences of repression and different reactions together. Obviously, the colony of the Middle-Congo was, as concerns social experiences and labor policies between 1918 and 1980, not an entirely homogeneous region. A number of factors could be mentioned in a schematic way to take account of these differences. In various regions of the territory, populations were much dispersed—but the north was heavily targeted by recruitment drives for big infrastructure projects in other regions, which led to numbers of absent contract workers. In the broader region of Brazzaville, the strength of a new messianic movement in the interwar period, that of André Matsoua, had an impact on the organization of resistance and evasion. The coastal region populated by the Kikongo-speaking Vili was the principal example for an important “traditional authority,” of the Mâ Loango, which also had a clear importance in local labor policies. However, the repression and violence that Congolese populations met with regard to labor policies, and the mechanisms of compulsion, shared a common trajectory.

Madingou was particular within this panorama. Within the Middle-Congo, the Madingou region was at the heart of the various infrastructure projects and of the multiple labor obligations that could hit the Congolese.²⁶ Apart from the tax-like instrument called prestations, typical for all colonies in the French empire, where male subjects had to work a number of days per year for the construction or maintenance of public infrastructure, other obligations also fell on the shoulders of the Congolese.²⁷ In Madingou, where the construction of the railway connection between Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville created an enormous demand for additional labor, this tipped the balance towards unbearable conditions. The situation was aggravated by the brutalities of recruitment for the labor tax and in control of local labor, and, in sum, the population in the Madingou region was simply overburdened. In October 1928—a year after Raphaël Antonetti had insisted on the notable improvements that were supposed to be linked to the phasing out of company rule—a report from Madingou gave a somber picture, and one that demonstrates how much the accumulated obligations created massive reactions: inhabitants of the region fled into the Belgian Congo and Angola, in panic, to avoid the agonizing work on the railway in particular; the recruitment for the Congo-Océan Railway aggravated the pressures caused by the 12,500 days of labor provided during eight months by the Congolese for road maintenance through the labor tax; the burdensome conditions, combined with the absence of medical services, led to a diminution of eight per cent per year of the local population and to the depletion of entire villages.²⁸ Administrative officials bemoaned this dire situation—without changing anything.

In the 1920s, the locals in the Madingou region were sent to work by the so-called “native chiefs.” The latter, although marginally following the discourse of the colonial officials in the Congo with regard to “authentic rule,” were from the administrators’ perspective essential labor agents.²⁹ Many chiefs had themselves a certain interest in the recruitment issue: not only did they expect to receive presents as compensation for their effort, but they also wished that the recruitment measure would not interfere with “traditional obligations.”³⁰ These obligations defined how, locally, male inhabitants in the villages had to work on the chiefs’ fields, and were accompanied by other practices of bondage, depending on the community.³¹ Attempts by some administrators to bypass the chiefs and begin processes of direct recruitment did not work; in various cases, the chiefs personally led the local populations to flee, and in the late 1920s, 37 villages from the Madingou region resettled on the Belgian side of the border.³² This, however, increased the spiral of violence. Panicking officials, seeing “their subjects” run away, carried out round-ups, during which some of the remaining villagers were bound or shackled, and brought to the labor sites. In 1927, populations and chiefs ran away during a recruitment drive in the region between the Louïla and the Loemba. Only 64 men could be brought to the administrative post of Madingou, in shackles. After a mass flight of fifty Bassoundis breaking out of the huts close to the post where they were held, only fourteen remained—ropes around their necks and in prison.³³

Fifteen months later, little had changed in the Madingou region, although the critical voices within the administration remained loud.³⁴ Local administrators tried to rebuild the alliances with “native chiefs” that had been strained in the moment of conflict in the mid-1920s. The secret of success seemed to lie in a strategy where the officials did not use the “native” district guards, local constables who had a tendency towards particular brutality and public humiliations of chiefs.³⁵ Given the resistance of the Kikongo-speaking Lari and Beembe populations to resettle their villages into places that were more accessible to the administration, the hold on these populations remained complicated. European officials felt they regularly had to go into the remote villages to round up individuals refusing the labor tax—but this only worked as long as the chiefs supported their endeavors.³⁶ By late 1929, 2,000 able-bodied male Congolese remained in the settlements within the subdivision, of which more than half were involved in the different forms of unfree labor. Another principal idea was to better control the borders shared with the Belgian Congo, and to trick the Belgians into supporting a joint border policy. French officials wrote with visible relief that at least the flight into Portuguese Cabinda, the northernmost province of Angola, was cut short by the more rigid forced labor practices used by Portuguese officials from the 1930s onwards.³⁷ However, the French did not at all manage to prevent the many escapes—the flow into the Belgian Congo remained strong and even Portuguese territory was at times again an attractive haven for refugees.³⁸ These movements were normally for limited time periods. The Portuguese in Angola had their own peaks of brutal recruitment, which motivated rural populations to run away into Belgian and French territory; in the Belgian Congo, spates of forced labor recruitment were less frequent, but they appeared—under the label of travaux d’ordre éducatif, or “educational work.” Rural populations thus fled and went back and forth between the three territories. They participated in a system of mobility, in which individuals were quite successful at profiting from international borders to improve their situation. Colonial administrators were unable to find methods against these strategies.

At the end of 1931, recruitment for the railway finally appeared to become less complicated, as four years after Antonetti’s unfounded positive claims, the Congo-Océan company had finally attempted to improve social conditions and the wage situation of the workers—but this did not help with regard to the overall balance of compulsory labor. While more locals now went to the railway sites, the chiefs in the villages did not manage to find compulsory workers under the labor tax and equally did not get enough for their own fields. The results were deserted villages and dissatisfied chiefs; French attempts to maintain a balance between the various forms of mostly unfree labor still did not work.³⁹

In the Madingou region, chiefs who had redefined themselves as leaders of flight groups retained important leverage over the behavior of locals. Also, they were well-informed about the changing situation in the territory even when they sought refuge on the other side of the colonial border. The Bassoundi villages of the region repeatedly fled into the Belgian Congo to avoid being recruited for road labor. The Bassoundi Chief, Kiboana, was in the 1930s a principal intermediary in convincing the locals to come back from Belgian territory or to refrain from moving—but he held that this could only be done if the administration demanded very moderate contributions in labor. Kiboana refused to travel into the Belgian Congo and to seek villagers there before this had been improved. That the French officials in the region swallowed this pill and negotiated with Kiboana illustrates how incomplete their control over the labor process really was.⁴⁰ However, this did not translate into a coherent reform policy. Although some measures were taken to lessen the burden of compulsory labor, the agents of colonial power were unwilling to reduce the labor obligations in principle, and they thus had to accept that local chiefs, with important influence over the villagers, had to remain their principal allies.⁴¹ Where this alliance was unstable, even temporary migration into neighboring subdivisions, paired with occasional flight into Belgian territory, could not be stopped. Chiefs described the conditions in Belgian territory that villagers would find as follows: “[c]ome, they say, here you do not have to work, you do not pay any taxes, you will not have to harvest palm products, in any case if the Commander registers you on the census list, you will not pay more than a half of the taxes that you pay at Mouyondzi”; a village chief, Kintouari, explained that “[h]ere you need to get up to work from 6 o’clock in the morning, down there you get up by 9 o’clock to look for food or to go hunting.” This was plainly exaggerated, but local leaders rightly noted that on the Belgian side of the border, wages were around 27 francs instead of the usual 15 in French territory.⁴²

From the perspective of historians interested in migration as a phenomenon in colonial Africa, it needs to be pointed out that the broader effects of such refugee movements would still need to be quantified and to be put into a larger framework of movement between colonies and between districts within colonies. However, as far as the Middle-Congo and neighboring territories are concerned, some claims can be formulated—they may seem bold at first, but can be built on the empirical evidence that I have discussed thus far. Migration as flight was omnipresent. It was by far the most successful and most sustained method of reacting to the unbearable demands of compulsory work in the 1920s and 1930s. Deserters had immense success in escaping forced labor, but they paid an enormous price as well: while we need many more detailed studies on these effects, it is obvious that the experiences destabilized rural communities and affected their cycles of agricultural production and their level of food security.

As far as the colonial administration was concerned, hopes were indeed set by the end of the Congo-Océan project in 1934: there seemed to be potential for a substantial reduction of the forced labor burden after the end of recruitment for railway construction, a reduction that had failed to materialize in the 1930s with the decline of the concessionary companies. Administrators were optimistic that this would allow more satisfactory conditions for African subjects. Chiefs and local spokesmen insisted that they were willing to reconsider moving back to the French colony as soon as they received information about improved conditions. However, the system of forced labor proved to be more durable, and much of the everyday life of colonial administration was too committed to labor services to give them up.

A Changing Context: Madingou and the Middle-Congo Between the End of the Railway Madness and the Abolition of Forced Labor, 1934–1946

While a number of French officials saw the end of work on the railway in 1934 as a key to preventing the discontent of locals, these colonial administrators did not understand that the replacement of recruitment for the railway by an ever increasing use of the labor tax was not the way towards a more satisfied local population. Administrators remained as obsessive about labor issues as they had been—and the Congolese in the Madingou region were as able to react as ever:

In the course of the first trimester the number of refugees has considerably increased at Mouyondzi. This is no longer an incidence of isolated departures of natives into the neighboring subdivisions, but indeed a real exodus. In this context the whole population of the surroundings of Mabondjo, led by its village chief and some twenty natives from the territory of Combo Bende, fled, some to Mindouli, others to Mayama.—The reasons brought up by the fugitives can up to a certain point give excuses for their movement: If they do not complain about the rigor of the commander of the administrative post or of the native chiefs, they claim—and in a fully justified way, we have to admit—that their tax rate (of 27 francs) is too high for their meager resources. Moreover, the obligation to carry out their compulsory labor services [prestations] on the motor road, far away from their villages, also angers them.

It is certain that the continuous maintenance work on the network of overland communications has become unpopular in the entire region. In the beginning, the population worked without hesitation because it was intimated to them that the creation of the roads would reduce the importance of porterage. In fact, these services have hardly been reduced, and the maintenance work has become increasingly oppressive.⁴³

While the French administration blamed the “natural recalcitrance” of groups like the Kikongo-speaking Beembe and Dondo to work, these groups were able to undermine the entire process of road maintenance. Where, such as at the Boko Songho post, the recruitment process via the labor tax was strict and brutal, no recruits were available. The few who had been sent to the labor sites deserted.⁴⁴ In 1935, another attempt was made in the Madingou region to improve the situation of forced workers under the labor tax. Administrators insisted on a better-controlled distribution of tasks via census lists—attempting to prevent that a number of individuals worked an excessive and disproportionate number of days on infrastructure labor—and through the enforcement of the theoretically strict rule that such workers could not be sent more than thirty kilometers to their labor sites. Much of this new initiative remained lip service, and it raised complicated issues, as it challenged the leverage that the chiefs had over the recruitment process in the Madingou region. Even so, officials saw no problems in requiring locals to offer twenty days of labor tax per year, which constituted an enormous increase and enraged Congolese villagers.⁴⁵ For the purposes of administrative routine, this system seemed much simpler: “native guards” could be sent into a limited number of villages, by random choice, and recruit a smaller number of individuals. For the guards, however, the older system had been more attractive: they had targeted villages that were interesting for extracting resources, through intimidation during the recruitment process.⁴⁶

During the period of the Popular Front, internal conflicts within the administration came more clearly to the forefront, allowing the advocates of reform to push for some changes—but this was only a short period. World War II led to a renewed increase of abusive conditions and of violent reactions. French Equatorial Africa, including the Middle-Congo, went into the Allied camp—but forms of repression, which were geared towards offering resources for the allied cause, equaled those in the West African colonies that were initially under Vichy rule. For those colonial administrators who were fond of repressive instruments, the war situation constituted a kind of paradise.⁴⁷ Suddenly, everything was allowed. It was only necessary to make the measures taken appear as beneficial for the nation’s interest and the war objectives. Even for those colonial officials who had leanings towards reformist policies, it became complicated to escape these logics of exploitation and repression. In the Middle-Congo, like in other parts of Central Africa, it seemed that rubber in particular needed to be won, and compulsory labor was in many cases the way to get it.⁴⁸

During the early 1940s, the road that had been taken found its clearest expression in the choices of personnel. Most noteworthy was the installation of Gondran, the former administrator of Sangha, who had been so prominently accused of the abuses in rubber production, as inspector of administrative affairs. In other words, a notable practitioner of coerced labor practices was transformed into an inspector and, thus, a “protector of the natives” in a territory ruled by the “Free French.”⁴⁹ However, like in the internal conflicts of the late 1930s, Gondran’s observations illustrate the complexity of attitudes in a colonial situation. The new inspector remained doubtlessly committed to repression and mandatory labor. However, he was not at all sympathetic to many demands coming from the private companies; indeed, he came to the defense of some of the interests of the Congolese populations, and showed a clear comprehension of the trauma that the railroad work, with its hardships and atrocities, had inflicted upon the population. It was less in Madingou but rather in other parts of the Middle-Congo where he believed that the “natives” needed to be protected:

In late 1942, the recruitment of a hundred workers took place in the Department in the interest of the Société Minière du Kouilou.

It is difficult to say that this was crowned by success, it is more adequate to remember that, thanks to the intervention of the administration, the SMK obtained the workforce it desired. We did not have any real incidents but a lively perturbation within production has been related over two months.

Visibly, for the natives of the Alima, the bad memory of the old recruitments for the construction of the railway has remained alive, these recruitments having provoked an important exodus of the population into the Belgian Congo and our subjects fear being compelled to leave and being once again subjected to the painful and hard labor of this earlier period, which they had barely withstood.⁵⁰

The ambiguities in the relationship between administrators and Congolese villagers are visible in these reports. While the locals continued to flee in great numbers (profiting from the inability of Belgian authorities to trace these refugees and to send them into war emergency labor on the other side of the border) French officials lived in a limbo between their massive obsession with the necessity of compulsory labor, and skepticism toward the goals of the agents of capitalist companies in the territory.⁵¹ No improvement seemed possible with regard to the policies of unfree labor. However, the Congolese improved their strategies of escape. Instead of fleeing into remote regions or over borders, these groups entered into other districts, following information that guided them to places where the administrative personnel were less strict.⁵² This technique started to become quite successful:

Following the enquiries made, during the period of approximately between 20 June and 10 July, some 400 natives belonging to the lands of Madzou-Miété, Mapana and Vouma, had abandoned their village to install themselves on the territory of the subdivision of Zanaga, governed by the Chief-Administrator Auclair. In spite of the pressuring demands addressed to him by the Administrator of the District and by the Administrator of the Subdivision of Komono, who asked for the repatriation of the refugees, Mr. Auclair does not seem to have become interested in the question.⁵³

The new strategies were a precursor of other forms of movements after the end of forced labor—but, for the moment, this end of forced labor, only some years away in the future, was barely imaginable on the ground. In spite of the fact that the principal reform conference of 1944 took place in Brazzaville, the Congolese populations did not see any immediate improvements.⁵⁴ Nor did the administrators in the Congo expect them to happen.⁵⁵ In 1942, the administration reflected upon a future with free labor, and decided that this was desirable but also unrealistic. Also, at that point, officials started to become concerned with “vagabondism;” the idea was that “vagrants,” mobile populations, were a future danger to daily life in urban agglomerations, and that such Congolese needed to be put into mandatory labor.⁵⁶ This was an important shift in objectives at a moment when, in theory, the administration could still rely on the complete set of repressive labor policies. It was to have remarkable consequences.

The end of World War II led to an all-encompassing change, expressed in imperial terms: Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government and a centre-left post-war coalition in the French National Assembly allowed African deputies to take seats in the assembly. These new deputies were very sensitive to the issue of forced labor, whose abolition was a principal demand of voters and supporters.⁵⁷ In the case of the Middle-Congo, Jean Félix-Tchicaya made himself a name as deputy through the victory against compulsory labor. The law, named after his colleague and ally from Côte d’Ivoire, the Loi Houphouët-Boigny of 11 April 1946, helped Tchicaya to stay in his post for several terms. He knew what the electorate expected from him: the Middle-Congo was one principal territory where the provisions of the law had to be pushed through.⁵⁸

The experiences of Congolese populations during the transition period were quite complex. In some regions—especially in some pockets of the territory north of Pointe-Noire, but also in the remote north of the colony—French officials in place seem to have decided simply to maintain labor obligations that were no longer legal. Like in the 1920s, the intensity of experiences with forced labor depended on the level of “obsession” that colonial administrators showed in a given region with regard to enforcing all possible methods of compulsory labor. However, in cases of brutal conditions, village communities knew quite well how to react. In the weeks after the official abolition of forced labor, the territorial services in Pointe-Noire and the government-general in Brazzaville were both flooded with (often anonymous) petitions, in which villagers complained about continuities in forced labor. This had effects: it took a number of months until all these recalcitrant officials had been disciplined, but in 1947, even they had no choice but grudgingly to accept that “state labor” was no longer allowed.⁵⁹

Indirect forms of compulsory labor remained feasible, however. In 1946, the President of the Chamber of Mines of AEF and director of the Société des Mines de Kouilou complained that the Houphouët-Boigny Law had brought complete disaster for all types of labor recruitment. Locals were no longer “convinced” by the administration to sign contracts (although these practices continued in secret). But that was not all. Administrators claimed that many were allegedly sitting in their villages in Bas-Kouilou and Madingo-Kayes regions and not working. And those Congolese who still were in contract were said to be absent at many times. The reaction to flee whenever labor conditions became too unfriendly remained an obvious element of local life.⁶⁰ This was how the capitalist firms and many colonial administrators saw the effects of the end of forced labor, and their negative assessment reflected more than just the position of “reactionary” circles whose influence was waning, producing a direct impact in the decades to come.

Compulsory Labor and Evasion Reinvented: From the Late Colonial State into the Military-Socialist Experiment

It is unsurprising that administrators and settlers in French Equatorial Africa decried the ruin of the colonies that would result from the abolition of forced labor. Over the whole of the late 1940s and into the early 1950s, they held a disciplined labor force would be a thing of the past; partly, they blamed an unwarranted international intervention by institutions such as the International Labor Organization, who were said to hold absurd ideas about labor and its needs in the African continent. In particular, the officials blatantly mixed reflections about different types of labor and laborers—and Gondran, who remained an inspector of administrative affairs after 1946, was amongst those who issued warnings, taking most of his examples, again, from the north of the territory that he knew best:

The problems of need for labor have become, at Mabirou like in many other regions of the Sangha, increasingly difficult to resolve. We have seen bankruptcy for those merchant houses that do not offer the natives the articles of first necessity that they ask for: salt, cloths, petrol, soap; this makes the eventual workers reluctant to seek liquid money, because they do not have any use for it. To keep paper money that will be eaten by the termites in their huts in the bush—this cannot be a stimulus for work. The needs of the districts become ever more difficult to satisfy after the disappearance of the disciplinary punishment. The problem is so enormous that it leads to the near-total ruin of commerce in this region.⁶¹

It is obvious that colonial officials continued to use compulsory practices wherever they could—their obsession with it was too extensive. It was no longer possible to implement the labor tax, but administrative intervention in recruitment practices went on in various parts, including in Madingou. Local dignitaries—whose authority had been bolstered by their instrumental role in the provision of “public labor”—had an interest in being complicit in these practices. As long as they had power over the decision of who was to be recruited, they maintained some leverage over the villagers:

And for that reason [the absence of a workforce in the 1940s] it became typical for the employer to address the administrator of the subdivision and for the latter to invite the local native authorities to furnish to that director of a company the respective labor contingent.

The canton chief defined the number of men to deliver per village, and each community went to send them, whether the men chosen agreed to the task or not. It is within this obligation put on the native to migrate to give his services to an employer he had not chosen, that one could still find in AEF a form of forced labor.⁶²

With the weaker mechanisms of control, however—especially through the abolition of separate legal provisions allowing the corporal punishment of “natives” together with forced labor⁶³—populations from most Congolese districts found a flexible means of escape from the power of the chiefs through migration into the growing urban agglomerations of Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire. Numbers of new arrivals in these agglomerations steadily rose.⁶⁴ It is no wonder that the officials of the late colonial state focused especially on the issue of “vagrancy.” A minor offense—and an offense of minor importance within the recruitment of coerced labor—before 1946, this “vagrancy” became a principal hope and fantasy of colonial administrators between the official abolition of forced labor in the French empire and decolonization.⁶⁵ The highest levels of the administration in Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire took part in this: officials hoped for workhouses, modeled on ideas of the early nineteenth century, where such “vagrants”—migrants into the cities—could be imprisoned and used as a flexible labor brigade.⁶⁶ This was similar to anti-vagrancy strategies in part of the British empire, which had become an issue in the interwar period. In the case of east and southern African colonies under British rule, where the attraction of urban and mining regions had an effect on patterns of migration, the British anti-vagrancy measures remained nevertheless more discourse than reality.⁶⁷ The same was true for the later attempts at punishing “vagrants” in French Equatorial Africa. Although the strategy of escaping from the countryside to the cities had its risks from the outset, as round-ups were easier to organize in the urban environment, relatively few “vagrants” ever became the victims of hard labor as punishment.⁶⁸ Moreover, the turbulent events towards decolonization in the Middle-Congo created sufficient pressure on the agents of colonial power on the ground to prevent them from putting their repressive ideas into practice.⁶⁹ In 1958, the Middle-Congo became an autonomous state within the French Community, only to reach independence in 1960.

It is an open question how much migratory movements, of individuals attempting to avoid repressive labor situations, remain an issue after 1946. It is obvious that this motive for flight movements, even when it comes to migration into Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire, diminishes in importance. However, what would be crucial is an attempt at understanding the dimensions of this decline of flight and desertion; as I have tried to show, this was an uneven process. Even for the postcolonial period, evidence points to continuities in terms of labor coercion and flight.

How do late colonial transitions refer to later, postcolonial trends in labor policies? Jean-François Bayart has pointed to a related issue, namely the practices of corporal punishment in sub-Saharan Africa and their complicated relationship with the colonial past. While the omnipresent brutality of beating and whipping during the recruitment process of labor, and during labor tasks, is characteristic for the colonial period, the analysis of the concrete continuities is extremely complicated. However, Bayart shows convincingly that colonial models have, in considerable parts of the African continent, remained within the mentalities of postcolonial elites. The use of corporal punishment became a political issue and accompanied acts of political control, especially after moments of unrest.⁷⁰

For the postcolonial Republic of Congo, the study of continuities in compulsory labor is equally complicated. The country—which became “progressive” in 1963 and “socialist” by 1968—is no easy place to start research on its postcolonial history.⁷¹ The civil war that raged in the state in the late 1990s has not helped to improve the situation. Nonetheless, as with Bayart’s reflection on corporal punishment, there is convincing, if dispersed, evidence.

First, the principal idea of drafting villagers for collective work remained strong within the postcolonial state. In 1968, still before Marien Ngouabi took power, mandatory labor services in rural zones became commonplace, and they were organized through the unity party structures of the Mouvement National de la Révolution, being dependent on the engagement of Congolese district officers. The successes were relative, as becomes obvious for the Mayama District:

No particular local fact has attracted my attention as concerns purely political issues; however, I would need to indicate that the instructions received from above are more or less respected by the inhabitants.

To be more concrete, on 9 April 1968, party members and locals of Dzoulou and the post of Mayama have started the construction of the bridge over the Loutini, which will allow us to get in an automobile from Mayama to Rénéville, where the land is very good both for agriculture and livestock-raising.⁷²

Progress was not spectacular, as the district officers pointed out. The motivations were apparently quite low. In the Ngouabi era, the use of (unfree) collective initiatives remained a kind of sacrosanct idea. Sources exist on the use of such an initiative on Mbamou Island, where, again, the party was the principal vehicle of organizing labor.⁷³

It is plausible that the use of mandatory labor services in the postcolonial Republic of Congo stands in a line of tradition of colonial coercion—but it is of course complicated to demonstrate a direct connection. After all, from 1963, the Congolese state was governed by a party organization that followed Soviet inspiration, and may have taken ideas of collective labor from there.⁷⁴ Even so, it is remarkable that Congolese officials showed little awareness of the recalcitrance of local populations facing such labor services—it goes beyond simple conjecture that the idea of necessary public labor had been transmitted as an obsession from colonial organization into postcolonial administrative settings.

This transmission becomes more obvious when we look at the treatment of “vagrants” and “floating populations” (oisifs) under the postcolonial regime. In 1960, during the transition process towards independence, the autonomous government under Fulbert Youlou charged a French labor inspector, Techer, with preparing comprehensive lists of “unemployed young men” in Brazzaville, to make them available for labor services.⁷⁵ This did not change after the first coup d’état in 1963, the second in 1968, or the turn towards a “socialist variant” of rule. Congolese authorities invented a full civil service to pressure “unemployed youth” into mandatory labor.⁷⁶ The idea to target “idlers” and “vagrants” for public labor thus had made its way from the colonial into the postcolonial state. Moreover, the chances of evasion for targeted populations became less attractive, as these measures flowed from the very path that flight movements had taken: they targeted rural populations who had come into the agglomerations of Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire.