Osumaka Likaka has written a book that renews our faith in history, this millennium-old craft that has had its share of vicissitudes, debates, and crises in the postmodern era. The book is as much about methodology as it is about filling gaps in how the ‘village world’ made sense of colonialism and its hubris. Recycling some materials from his Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), Likaka sets the stage for Naming Colonialism by first tackling the dynamics of naming in colonial Congo and skillfully analyzing how naming calls to existence and determines one's life and social trajectory (ch. one). Then, in the following chapter, he presents the harsh conditions of rural life under Belgian colonialism, in which different institutions, including private companies, catholic missionaries, and abusive African chiefs, connived to exploit villagers' labor and to squeeze many communities out of their ancestral land.
In fact, and this is where Likaka's study proves invaluable, Naming Colonialism merges traditional naming practices with the oppression meted out to Congolese villagers under Belgian colonialism, a conflation that lies at the heart of his subsequent chapters. Going against the now defunct contention that only written documents consign history, the author argues that spoken words expressed through colonial anthroponyms recorded colonial experiences and should be treated by historians as sources of memories and histories and as local commentaries that not only endow colonial subjects with collective agency but also allow historians to piece together the dynamics of colonial encounters. Yet, colonial anthroponyms do not provide new information about the colonial encounter, the brutality of which is no longer a matter for conjecture. What they register is the memories of village communities, the importance and the meanings that they attached to specific events, patterns, dynamics that would otherwise be skewed and eclipsed by colonial narratives. They were used, for example, to extol the masculine virtues of certain colonial officials, as in Lingala mondele ngolo (strong white man) or its Swahili equivalent Simba Bulaya (Europe's lion). However, these names could conceal and register a duplicitous meaning, excoriating overbearing officials under the guise of praising them. Thus Simba Bulaya, as Jewsiewicki has pointed out in his work on Congolese popular painting, becomes ‘white cannibals’ and colonial Chronos, especially in a context where resources, labor, and taxation were sources of perpetual conflicts that pitted abusive colonial officials against despondent, yet defiant villagers.
As crucial as these anthroponyms might be for our understanding of the colonial era in Congo, it is also important to acknowledge, as the author does, the limits of deciphering them, because they come to us divorced from their original utterance, which, as one can surmise, involved facial and bodily gestures that could have added other layers to their meanings. But one thing is certain: these names, when attributed to both colonial agents and the generic colonial official (as in Bula Matari, for example), became ways for villagers to make sense of and name violence. This is why Likaka astutely assimilates naming colonial violence to ‘voices of protest’, ‘blows’, ‘critiques’, and ‘strategies of everyday life’, although he never actually attempts to show how these blows mitigated colonial violence and dented colonial complacency. For example, what did the name ndeke (p. 111), leveled at colonial administrators who roamed the area to burden villagers with taxes, do in undermining taxation? Rather, Likaka seems to regard naming as an outlet used by villagers to vent their frustrations against the hubris and destabilizing effects of Bula Matari. Take the name ndoki, for example. According to Likaka, it encapsulates a vision of colonization as a ‘malefic spell’ cast on the village world. Of course, this is part of a larger discussion on the power of the ‘weapon of the weak’ and its ability to undermine the status quo and to transform those who wield it into agents of change. Likaka's book stands out as one of the most recent contributions to this discussion, a compellingly wrought narrative that sheds light on the dialectics between James Scott's ‘hidden transcript’ and its translation into concrete and progressive action. By naming colonial officials through an arsenal of linguistic tricks that included ‘reduplication, suffixation, onomatopoeias, local mispronunciations, morphological congruencies, praise, and double naming’ (p. 60), Likaka contends, Congolese villagers ‘were telling colonial officials to end’ extortion and exploitation (p. 131, my emphasis). Yet, he acknowledges that contemptuous names were always ‘spoken behind [colonial officials’] back' (p. 135). So, while the main contention of Naming Colonialism is to restore agency to the colonial subjects, Likaka is also interested in the ways in which some colonial officials commandeered their names to spread fear, thus turning ‘weapons of the weak’ into weapons of terror.
Ultimately, despite its mélange of genres, Likaka's study succeeds in capturing our imagination and opening our eyes to the seemingly tangential agency of colonial subjects, who reinvented tradition to challenge a modern form of exploitation, namely colonialism.
