IntroductionFootnote 1
In the past decade there has been a surge in studies on the Belgian Congo.Footnote 2 This renewed interest is the result of a number of coinciding factors, principally the fiftieth anniversary of Congolese independence, the efforts being made by former colonials to re-assess the colonial period, but also the opening up to researchers in 1997 of the Fonds du Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville (Government-General Archives).Footnote 3
The Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville’s collection is made up of the colonial archives transferred from the Congo to Brussels during Opération archives, carried out in 1960–1961. This operation involved the return to Belgium of more than nine kilometers of documents produced both by the administration of the Government-General of the Belgian Congo located in Léopoldville and by the outposts scattered throughout the territory during the colonial period (1908–1960). For logistical reasons (lack of storage space, lack of qualified staff, high costs), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had taken over from the Ministry for Colonial Affairs, deposited these documents in the National Archives (Archives Générales du Royaume de Belgique) for more than forty years. Only at the very beginning of this century were they retrieved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and made available for consultation.Footnote 4
Colonial Archives
The renewed interest in colonial studies has meant that the term “colonial archives” is now widely used. Nevertheless, very few authors have actually taken the trouble to define this term. In the view of the Dutch historians Charles Jeurgens and Ton Kappelhof, “colonial archives may be defined as process bound information that flows from the constitution, maintenance, direction, management, exploitation and development of the territories and populations which have a relationship of administrative dependency on an external ruling power.”Footnote 5 Colonial archives, in other words, can be created either in the colony itself or in the home country, but must be produced from the viewpoint of the colonizing nation.
According to this definition, the Belgian colonial archives contain the public records produced by the Governor General’s administration and its various departments, by the Ministry for Colonial Affairs, the King and the organizations set up to study the Congo (in particular the Colonial Council and the National Institute for Agronomic Studies). The archives of the Catholic and Protestant missions based in the colony are not generally considered to be colonial archives stricto sensu, because of their ambivalent and complex relations with the Colonial States.Footnote 6
The Fate of the Colonial Archives: An Archival and Political Issue
From 1959 onwards, the Belgian colonial archives were at the center of a tug-of-war between those who wished them to remain on African soil and those who felt that they should be transferred to Belgium.
The former group used arguments concerning the nature of archives. They referred to the principle of territoriality, according to which records should be devolved to the territory where they were generated, in this case, to the Congo. They quoted the examples of Indonesia and French West Africa, which retained all their records, left behind by the colonial authorities on independence. Proponents of this “African solution” also invoked the principle of institutional continuity. They highlight the need for a new State to be able to consult the documents drawn up by its predecessor, to ensure the continuity of on-going business and to facilitate efficient administration of the country.
Those who favored the transfer of the colonial archives to Belgium used mainly practical arguments: they focused, more particularly, on the conditions in which the documents would be held, as well as on Belgian administrative needs. They thus emphasized the deplorable conditions in which the documents were being kept. One wrote that the files were “stashed in makeshift storage-places, [they] suffer the devastating effects of tropical heat and humidity, are exposed to the vanguard of the archivists – termites – and are left to rot by an administration which prefers to focus on action.”Footnote 7 This group also argued that these storage conditions might well deteriorate further in the event of rioting or even a revolution linked to independence. They also invoked the principle of institutional continuity, but this time with reference to Belgium. They underlined the importance of safeguarding the dossiers produced by the Colony, since these contained vital documents setting out certain obligations for the Belgian government, and establishing the rights acquired by the colonial agents, particularly pension rights.
Nevertheless, these practical arguments were of limited importance compared to political considerations. It was this that convinced the majority of Belgian decision-makers to transfer the colonial archives to Europe. In a highly confidential memorandum, the archivist of the Belgian Congo referred to four main factors in favor of the transfer of the archives to Belgium:
1° A future Congolese government, even one with no hostile feelings towards Belgium, would find points which could spark off anti-colonial and anti-Belgian feelings. The Belgian government, if it had no access to the files in question, would not even be able to attempt to refute any accusations.
2° Some of these records could also be used to justify exorbitant Congolese financial claims against Belgium during negotiations on the transfer of sovereignty.
3° If a future Congolese government were to examine certain files, some commercial companies might be put in a position where they were unable to continue their activities, to the severe detriment of the Congolese economy.
4° The content of certain files, such as those on colonial staff, could give rise to reprisals against individuals or their families. And what would happen if some native groupings behind the iron curtain were systematically to consult these documents?Footnote 8
The resolve to transfer the archives to Belgium was thus strengthened by the need to protect Belgium, its image, its economy, and its nationals.
In parallel to these two extreme solutions, an intermediate option emerged. Advocates of this option tended to divide the records held in the Belgian Congo into two main groups - the “sovereignty records” and the administrative records. Footnote 9 These would be treated differently. The “sovereignty records” were documents setting out decisions of principle, orders or instructions issued by the Belgian colonial authorities. These were usually papers from the Governor General and the departments through which he exercised sovereignty. The administrative records, however, were documents “produced or received in the course of the administrative activities of a State or an organization,” in particular records such as civil registers, the land registers, planning documents and files relating to the road networks.Footnote 10 These sorts of documents are particularly important when a country changes regime, as they allow the new State to establish its rights and obligations, to ensure continuity of its administrative work and to safeguard the interests of the population.Footnote 11 The proponents of this mixed solution wished the “sovereignty records” to be transferred to Belgium, whilst the administrative records would be left in the Congo, except for those relating to the European agents in the colony.
The Belgian government decided to follow this intermediate course. Nevertheless, in order to preserve the administrative records from any damage or deterioration resulting from violence at the time of independence, it decided to transfer all the colonial archives to Belgium on a temporary basis. The administrative records would be returned to the Congo once it could be guaranteed that they would be properly stored and that there would be no barriers to access.Footnote 12 To this day, however, neither the records nor copies of these records have been sent back.Footnote 13
It was decided to pursue the same policy, distinguishing between the “sovereignty records” and the administrative records, for documents produced by the mandated territories of Ruanda and Urundi. In these cases the policy was fully applied, and the two categories of records were dealt with differently. The Belgian authorities decreed that the administrative records would remain in Africa, and the “sovereignty records” would be transferred back to Belgium.
Opération Archives
Once the Belgian authorities had decided to transfer all the colonial archives back to Belgium, archivists in the Belgian Congo and in Belgium worked together to organize the Opération archives. The transfer of the colonial archives was a vast and complex operation, because of the archival policy in the Congo. The records were held in the various administrative centers of the colony – the Governor-General’s headquarters, the Vice-Governor-Generals’ headquarters, the provinces, districts, territories, and chiefdoms. In order to limit the dispersion of documents and to improve their storage conditions, the archivist of the Belgian Congo – E. Neven – devoted all the necessary means to the publication of a decree on the keeping of records. The colonial text, enacted in 1957, was based directly on the Belgian law of 24 June 1955, and provided for the creation of a number of depositories (one central depot in Léopoldville and a local depot in each province) to hold public records dating back more than thirty years. An automatic transfer to these sites would free up space in the administrative centers, where records had been accumulating for several decades, some even dating back to the time of King Leopold II.Footnote 14 This decree, however, was enacted too late to have any real effect. When the Belgian government, therefore, decided to transfer the colonial archives back to Belgium, these had to be collected from all the administrative posts in the colony, which, it should be remembered, covered an area of more than two million square kilometers.
Although the transfer was a large-scale operation, it was essential for the Belgian authorities that it should proceed “discreetly and quickly.” Aware of the sensitive nature of the exercise, they wished to avoid informing the Congolese authorities. Of course, rumors of the evacuation plan reached the latter, and soon the main Congolese daily newspapers were expressing their indignation.Footnote 15
By that time, however, the Opération archives was almost completed. Between February and December 1960, several boats docked in the port of Ostend with their holds full of documents. There were daily landings on the runways at Zaventem airport of military or freight aircraft, from which were unloaded trunks, banana boxes, and jute sacks full of documentary records.Footnote 16 These were then transported to Brussels by the Belgian army. Pursuant to an agreement signed on 26 August 1960 by Auguste de Schrijver, minister for African Affairs, and Etienne Sabbe, State archivist, these colonial archives became the property of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Footnote 17 The ministry archivists did their best to organize the many batches of documents they received, and soon realized that although some officials in the colonial administration had followed instructions as to the transfer of records, others had boycotted the whole operation. In the somewhat turbulent situation in the Congo in 1960, some officials had been too busy to classify, sort, and send on archive documents. Others were convinced that nothing would change with independence, and did not think it necessary to empty their archives. For this reasons, we now have a near-complete collection from the archives of the provinces of Léopoldville, Équateur, and the Upper-Congo, but almost nothing from the provinces of Katanga or Kasai. Most of the records from these latter two provinces stayed in Africa, and suffered severe damage, since they were not kept in the proper conditions.Footnote 18
The ministry archivists were soon overwhelmed by the mass of documentation arriving from the Congo. The buildings made available – two old town houses on the Avenue Louise in Brussels – were soon no longer able to house the new arrivals. Moreover, the archives department was under-staffed for all the extra work being required of it. The Ministry had no choice but to turn to the National Archives. While the Ministry wished to maintain full ownership of the records and a monopoly on management, merely delegating classification and storage tasks to the National Archives, the latter took a different view. The National Archives refused this executive role, and demanded a management mandate, a request which was turned down by the Ministry. This difference of opinion left the colonial archives in a situation of stalemate for nearly forty years. During this time, they were mostly held in Beveren, in a national archive depository, and were not highlighted, classified, restored or made available to the public. The only colonial records, therefore, available to researchers interested in Belgian colonial history and the history of the Congo were those produced by the Ministry for Colonial Affairs held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Footnote 19 Apart from this, it was only in 1997–1998, when this Ministry moved into the Egmont Palace, that it was able to recover the archives transferred from the Congo and begin the work of sorting, classifying and drawing up an inventory of these nearly nine kilometers of archives. Although this work, which began more than fifteen years ago, has not yet been completed, researchers are now able to investigate the Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville’s and the other collections.
Following the Opération archives, the Belgian authorities organized the transfer of the Ruanda-Urundi archives. Referred to as the “Neven’s mission” after the name of the archivist of the Belgian Congo, this operation is carried out between March and June 1961 with the purpose to bring back to Belgium the main “sovereignty records” relating to these territories.Footnote 20 These records, covering the period of 1916–1961, were then deposited at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where they make up the Ruanda-Burundi collection.
The Archives Africaines
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives service has now opened up the colonial archives to researchers and has gather them under the title of Archives Africaines. They are grouped together by origin, in three collections known as the Ministère des Colonies, Ruanda-Burundi and Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville.Footnote 21
The Ministère des Colonies (Ministry for Colonial Affairs) collection, with its around fifty “fonds,” is made up of, principally, the records produced in Brussels by the Ministry for Colonial Affairs (1), the records of the main advisory bodies including the Colonial Council (2), the records of academic institutions particularly the Colonial School, the Colonial Museum and the Colonial Garden (3), the documents used to draw up the annual reports on Belgian activity in the Congo and in Ruanda-Urundi (4), and private archives (5).Footnote 22
The records produced in Ruanda-Urundi are contained in the Ruanda-Urundi collection. This has three fonds: the first contains the archives of the administration of the Vice-Governor-General in Usumbura, and the two others contain the records produced by the territories of Urundi and Ruanda respectively.
The Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville collection is the largest one of the African archives’ section. It is composed of around ten fonds including the Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville fonds. Whilst this is certainly the fonds most familiar to researchers, it is also the most obscure.Footnote 23 It is made up of all the archives transferred from the Congo, except for those removed to form other fonds of the Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville archive. It thus contains the archives of the Governor-General’s administration in Léopoldville but also archives collected from the various administrative centers of the Belgian Congo. The large number of administrations producing such records (Vice-Governor-Generals’ administrations, provinces, districts and territories, mainly), and the many tasks which they were called upon to carry out, account for the wealth and variety of the records contained in this fonds.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs archivists removed from the Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville fonds the sets of documents produced or received by certain individual bodies. These now make up the following fonds: Association des Fonctionnaires et des Agents Coloniaux (Association of Civil Servants and Colonial Agents), Affaires Indigènes et Main-d’Œuvre (Indigenous Affairs and Manpower), Cabinet du Gouverneur Général (Governor-General’s Private Office), Successions (Inheritance and Successions), Enseignement et Travail (Education and Work), Impôts des Sociétés (Corporate Tax), Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville – Justice (General Government of Léopoldville – Justice), Missions et Enseignement (Missions and Education), Mobilisation Civile (Civil Mobilization), Service du Personnel d’Afrique (African Staff Department), Service du Personnel Indigène de la Colonie (Colonial Indigenous Staff Department), and Sûreté (Security).
Of these, the Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville – Justice fonds is made up of legal files taken from the Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville fonds.Footnote 24 The fonds Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville – Justice, made up of nearly 140 meters of records, contains the files produced by the colonial judicial bodies in the Belgian Congo – the court of appeal, court of first instance, the prosecutor’s office, district courts, local police courts, court-martial appeal court and the court-martial.Footnote 25 These records can be divided into two sub-sets: files produced by the courts, and those produced by the prosecution services. The first of these categories contains all the documents relating to individual cases: the initial charge, provisional arrest warrant, documents relating to the investigation (minutes of hearings, medical certificates, fingerprint examinations, etc.), documents relating to the sentence and its enforcement (payment of legal costs, damages and interest, as well as imprisonment). The documents in the second category are more concise. These were generated by the prosecution services or their deputies, and contain sentences handed down, possibly assessments of these (excessive severity of penalty, misinterpretation of a legal provision, quality of the legal investigation) and appeal orders. These two sets of documents therefore need to be properly compared and read together in order to gain a proper understanding of the work done by the courts.
The enumeration of all these fonds and collections testifies that the situation has extensively evolved since the 1980s and the initial description made by Carole Dickerman and David Northrup.Footnote 26 The Belgian colonial archives are nowadays widely and easily accessible to researchers. Moreover, several inventories have been realized. However they cannot be consulted online yet.
Conclusions
The Belgian colonial administration, as well as the various bodies for the study and promotion of the Belgian Congo, produced many archives. Over a period of fifty years, they generated no less than nine kilometers of documents. These met various and varied fates before reaching us.
These archives, overlooked during the colonial period, were at the heart of many debates in the run-up to Congolese independence, and returning them to Belgium therefore became a priority for the government. This transfer, the so-called Opération archives (1960–1961), was undertaken primarily neither to safeguard national heritage nor, to preserve historical matter. Rather, it was an undertaking born of fear. Belgian statesmen feared that these records might be used by anti-colonial, or even communist, forces. The government therefore made significant resources available so that the documents could be collected from their many locations throughout the Belgian Congo, and transported to Belgium. Once they reached Belgium, the politicians’ worries were over, and they lost interest in the archives. From that point on, the government paid no attention to them, as shown by the structural lack of resources allocated to their upkeep. From 1961, therefore, the custodian of these archives had neither the space nor the staff necessary to look after them. When the public authorities did nothing, the records had to be stashed away in a depository belonging to the National Archives for more than thirty years.
When the colonial archives were moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1997, they were made available to researchers. Some collections, however, still seemed to be completely overlooked, as they had been since Congolese independence. It was necessary, therefore, to map the Belgian colonial archives, to make researchers aware of their existence, and, in this way, to open up new areas for study. Recently, therefore, research has begun, for example, on the institutional history and workings of the courts in the colonial period. Indirectly, the development of these new fields of research and the fresh look being directed at issues which had already been studied should allow us to update our ideas of the history of the Congo, as well as of Rwanda and Burundi.
Bérengère Piret is a PhD researcher at the University Saint-Louis (Brussels). She has published about colonial Justice in Belgian Congo between 1908 and 1960 as well as about colonial prisons. She recently published Les cent mille briques. La prison et les détenus de Stanleyville (Lille: Centre d’Histoire Judiciaire, 2014). Email: Berengere.piret@usaintlouis.be
Appendix: Practical information
The Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville, Ministère des Colonies and Ruanda-Burundi collections, as well as the various fonds, are housed in the Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs located at rue des Petits Carmes 15, 1000 Brussels. The archives service is open on Monday to Friday, between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Nevertheless, an appointment must be made with the archivist in charge of the service (alain.gerard@diplobel.fed.be) before the first visit.
Several of these fonds (including the Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville-Justice and the Security fonds) may be consulted once authorization is received from the relevant authorities.
Fonds Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville
- Fonds Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville
- Fonds Association des Fonctionnaires et des Agents coloniaux
- Fonds Affaires Indigènes et Main-d’Œuvre
- Fonds Bulletins d’Inscription
- Fonds Cabinet du Gouverneur Général
- Fonds Enseignement et Travail
- Fonds Gouvernement Général de Léopoldville - Justice
- Fonds Missions et Enseignement
- Fonds Mobilisation Civile
- Fonds Service du Personnel d’Afrique
- Fonds Service du Personnel Indigène
- Fonds Successions
- Fonds Sûreté
Fonds Ministère des Colonies
- Fonds 3e DG – Travaux Publics
- Fonds Actes officiels
- Fonds Affaires Étrangères
- Fonds Affaires Indigènes et Main-d’Œuvre
- Fonds Agriculture
- Fonds Bibliothèque
- Fonds Bien-Être Indigène
- Fonds Brevets
- Fonds Cadastre
- Fonds Service cartographique
- Fonds Colonat
- Fonds Colonisation et Crédit au colonat
- Fonds Cabinets ministériels
- Fonds Conseil Colonial
- Fonds Conseil Supérieur
- Fonds Contrôle financier
- Fonds Direction Générale des Services Administratifs
- Fonds Distinctions honorifiques
- Fonds Douanes
- Fonds École coloniale
- Fonds Enseignement
- Fonds Finances
- Fonds Force Publique
- Fonds Hygiène
- Fonds Institut Royal Colonial belge
- Fonds Impôts des Sociétés
- Fonds Inspecteur Général du Service Juridique
- Fonds Jardin Colonial
- Fonds Justice
- Fonds Justice - Successions
- Fonds Justice - Kimbanguisme
- Fonds Mines
- Fonds Missions
- Fonds Office des Cités Africaines
- Fonds Office Colonial
- Fonds Personnalités civiles
- Fonds Plan décennal
- Fonds Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones
- Fonds Presse
- Fonds Rapports Annuels du Congo belge
- Fonds Rapports Annuels du Rwanda-Urundi
- Fonds Régime foncier
- Fonds Service social
- Fonds Statuts des sociétés administratives
- Fonds Sûreté
- Fonds Terres
- Fonds Université des Territoires d’Outre-mer
- Fonds privés
Fonds Ruanda-Urundi
- Fonds Ruanda-Urundi
- Fonds Ruanda
- Fonds Burundi
