Contracts (or “Contracts”), Services, and the Categories of the Setup of Forced Labour

Both public forced labour and contract labour characterized the colonial Middle Congo until 1946 and even beyond. However, varieties of contexts and overlapping routines make it complicated to pinpoint practices. The road towards definition is therefore thorny, and there have been relatively few attempts; generally, the thriving field of global labour history tends to work around the absence of a definition.Footnote ¹⁹ We will refer here to a colonial form of forced labour, which uses the possibility of physical coercion and legal punishment against those refusing to work for the colonial state or its agents, in the widest sense of that word, as one crucial element. This definition comes close to the actual 1930 Forced Labour Convention C29 of the International Labour Organization, but it includes penal labour.Footnote ²⁰ As we will discuss below, our definition of colonial forced labour integrates contract labour under certain, and very common, colonial conditions: “contracts” for which recruitment took place through coercion by state agents, and from which colonial law criminalized “desertion”, need to be part of that definition.Footnote ²¹ The whole system certainly enabled capitalist exploitation in colonies, serving the interests of both European firm owners and of the colonial state’s fiscal apparatus.

Nevertheless, it is worth questioning whether such forms of forced labour were exclusively a response to capitalist needs.Footnote ²² In colonial contexts, obtaining workers where there were none available, introducing “civilization” through “hard work”, and finishing infrastructure projects to better control the colonies were all part of the overall strategy, and the colonial state pushed for all these objectives. In other parts of colonial Africa, taxation was an alternative means of compelling locals to accept hard labour. In the Middle Congo, however, the French administration and the agents of concession companies never trusted this method entirely. Instead, they relied on obligatory corvée labour and intimidation into allegedly voluntary labour contracts.Footnote ²³ Repression against “vagrancy” was another option for punishing “loafers” through corrective labour. While some of the penal labourers deployed on work sites may have been contract “deserters” who were apprehended and sentenced accordingly, the debate on vagrancy only became important after the official abolition of forced labour in 1946. It was only at that moment that colonial administrators began to view vagrancy laws as a potential strategy for retaining certain “perpetrators” within the labour system under the guise of corrective labour.Footnote ²⁴

In the interwar period, international scrutiny of compulsory forms of labour became far more aggressive in some cases, particularly through the formulation of new norms.Footnote ²⁵ However, while this led to legal and economic rhetoric insisting on the principle of fighting any forms of “slavery” and outlawing “forced labour”, the practical implications remained complex. The logic of mise en valeur (modernization of the colonies) made access to a substantial, stable labour force ever more necessary. As colonial agents saw it, and as Colonial Minister Albert Sarraut formulated it in a famous publication, this imperative also served the interests of private investors operating locally.Footnote ²⁶ Forestry and railway construction, which were private ventures partly relying on public concessions of projects, thus profited from the massive intervention of colonial agents in providing the necessary labour force.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, while capitalist logics of exploitation based on compulsory recruitment had their place, they were not the exclusive motor of what the agents of the colonial state did: in the AEF, economic expansion and the rhetoric of the “civilizing mission” went hand in hand in the 1920s.Footnote ²⁸

Voluntary contract labour was difficult to secure, at least in sufficient numbers. While the earliest, most violent practices of forced recruitment in the first phase of the colonial presence were, in theory, no longer welcome, the routines remained contradictory and mostly coercive.Footnote ²⁹ The observations of colonial lawmaker Arthur Girault at the start of the twentieth century remained valid: to have a stable labour force, private agricultural, mining, and forestry properties needed forced recruitment and compulsory mechanisms in the management of contract labourers implemented by the colonial state.Footnote ³⁰ Yet, the risk of strong international criticism became a reality in the interwar period: according to ILO Convention C29, the threat of penalties during recruitment for a contract fell into the category of outlawed forced labour practices.Footnote ³¹ The French government did not ratify the convention before 1937, but its existence created an international mood that obliged colonial administrators to better justify their behaviour. Therefore, while the direct effects of ILO intervention in French Equatorial Africa were limited – since French colonial administrators were not required to implement the anti-forced labour convention before World War II rendered it temporarily obsolete – it pushed the colonial administration to report on forced corvee labour in particular throughout the 1930s. Colonial officials also provided more information on their efforts to improve labour conditions in general.Footnote ³²

The gigantic CFCO project had the potential not only for internal scandal, but also to conjure international accusations. Official reports therefore insisted on the “voluntary” nature of workers’ recruitment, which they claimed was based on “encouragement”. The literature of the 1960s already shows awareness of the general panic among many Congolese when faced with the prospect of being drafted for these “contracts”.Footnote ³³ Moreover, in the case of the CFCO, contractual relationships operated at different levels. The Government-General of French Equatorial Africa and the Société des Batignolles had an agreement, obliging the former to supply the workforce for the project up to a maximum of 8,000 men.Footnote ³⁴ Thus, behind a rhetoric of “volunteers” and “administrative encouragement” was forced recruitment, as denounced by André Gide in his influential text Voyage au Congo, published in 1927, in which he exposed the absence of real contracts and the coercive reality (Figure 2).Footnote ³⁵

Figure 2.

Workers cutting a 40 meter slope during the construction of the Congo-Océan Railway, 1923–1924.

Source: Alamy.

More recently, in his attempt at an overview of forced labour in the French Empire between 1900 and 1946, Peter Gaida quotes the 1926 report by Inspector Bernard Sol concerning CFCO recruitment. In this previously unknown discussion of the nature of contract labour, the French inspector insists on the entirely artificial nature of the contract: its existence was pure fiction, but the fiction gave overseers and the administration the means to criminalize desertion and “laziness” at work, and to inflict punishment.Footnote ³⁶ The contract allowed the Société des Batignolles to keep a reluctant labour force under control without admitting that the public administration forced locals to work for “the machine”, i.e. in railway construction (Figure 3).Footnote ³⁷

Figure 3.

The soil is removed in baskets during the construction of the Congo-Océan Railway, 1923–1924.

Source: Alamy.

There were exceptions to the general pattern of recruitment. From the early phases of construction of the CFCO, for instance, the Société des Batignolles needed more highly skilled workers and therefore recruited some trained personnel in Gabon. However, the logic of forced recruitment into labour contracts was omnipresent. It was not limited to the CFCO either: in 1931, for example, the administration intervened to force 200 workers into contracts for the wood concession of former administrator-turned-settler Harquet, in Kayes.Footnote ³⁸

The role of forced recruitment for private employers disguised as “contract work” lingered on during the 1930s. However, six years after the completion of the CFCO railway line, in 1940, the administration had entirely changed its tone regarding contract labour in official correspondence in the Middle Congo. Colonial agents claimed that the “natives” refused to sign “real” labour contracts because they preferred a life marked by frequent changes of employer – one that, in their view, verged on vagrancy. Thus, the comment of Gabriel Fortuné, Inspector of Administrative Affairs, while visiting the subdivision of M’Vouti – a region where construction work for the CFCO had been especially harsh – is revealing. Referring to the gold prospecting company Romano – one of many enterprises unable to secure contract labour and forced to rely on unstable day labourers, he remarked as follows:

The “fiction of the contract” therefore helped colonial agents to systematically sidestep the legal framework created for compulsory labour in the French context. In the case of the CFCO, this allowed administrators to recruit in more brutal and aggressive ways, as Daughton has shown for one particular agent, Georges Pacha.Footnote ⁴⁰ Employers profiting from such schemes managed to avoid appropriate remuneration or any negotiation regarding wages. By eagerly pushing for forced recruitment through contracts that favoured private firms, at least until 1936, colonial agents kept up a double discourse, hiding the colonial state’s inability to conform to its own legal standards in the colonies: while forced labour for private employers was officially banned, contracts that only existed in theory and into which workers were compelled through forced recruitment presented a patina of sound procedures. Interestingly, during the years of the war effort, from 1940, the tone had already changed, and the alliance between firms and colonial agents had become shaky. The Société des Batignolles, the former construction firm of the CFCO, massively deplored mass desertions and the locals’ refusal to accept contracts. The representatives of the company argued that the administration’s 1922 decree on labour organization undermined the contract as an economic method. This argument was certainly absurd for the early 1920s, when the administration disregarded individual refusals during recruitment drives for the private firm. However, in 1942, and even under the hardship of war conditions, local populations had a better idea of their legal rights, and administrators no longer had the courage to ignore these legal provisions. As we will show, abuses persisted for several years in other fields, notably in public labour.Footnote ⁴¹

Finally, it is useful to emphasize that during the interwar period, the question of colonial forced labour in the Middle Congo unfolded in four principal, though at times overlapping, stages. The first period involved the phasing out of concession company rule and the establishment of regular administrative control over the often massive tracts of land that had formerly been left in the hands of company administration. This process was largely complete by the mid-1920s. A second period was concerned with administrative consolidation, in which the colonial state tried to shift forced labour to use it primarily for public tasks, like road and infrastructure maintenance. This evolution, which continued throughout the 1920s, remained notably incomplete, because administrative officials never managed to emancipate themselves from the economic sway of the most important private firms.Footnote ⁴² A third period is defined by the Congo-Océan Railway construction project itself. With its insatiable demand for ever more workers during the construction period, between 1921 and 1934, the CFCO project created conditions in which the daily organization of forced labour for the colonial state was, for the individual administrator, often subordinated to the obligation to guarantee the labour force for the railway’s construction sites. Finally, a fourth period is characterized by the reform projects of the Popular Front, whose impact between 1936 and 1938 is far better documented for French West Africa.Footnote ⁴³ Colonial administrators and inspectors, while of course not discussing specific periods of the organization of labour in their domain, were nevertheless aware of the shifting demands of each of these periods, and some were very outspoken – and, at times, critical – about the processes.

Overburdening: Forced Public Labour and Compulsory Contract Labour in the Late 1910s and 1920s

The presence of an administrative inspector sent to the subdivision of the Bakongos in the Middle Congo to investigate shocking conditions, gives an important first window on the realities of forced labour in a district of that territory after World War I. Edouard Picanon, a particularly critical inspector of administrative affairs, came to enquire into administrative malpractices. Some issues were unrelated to compulsory labour and repression, but he reported extensively on malnourishment of penal workers under the indigénat, describing many of them as “human skeletons” affected by multiple illnesses and ailments.Footnote ⁴⁴ During Picanon’s earlier travels as an inspector, he had already criticized the organization of corvée labour on the roads of the military-controlled districts in Gabon as chaotic and unreliable, often resulting in excessively harsh labour conditions, even by the standards of colonial practice.Footnote ⁴⁵

In the subdivision of the Bakongos, rural road maintenance, the clearing of village roads, and the provision of straw bundles used as ceilings for huts and their porterage all belonged to the realm of compulsory labour for the colonial regime. Picanon criticized the fact that these practices were applied to all kinds of roads, including major overland routes, for which, according to colonial legislation, only free labour was supposed to be used.Footnote ⁴⁶ The inspector’s views of internal organization are a rare glimpse into local negotiation processes: Picanon held that while the recruitment exercise in 1918 should have left every able-bodied man in the subdivision with seven days of work during that year, “the practice” was quite different. Administrators indeed delegated the organisational task to local “traditional” chiefs, discussed in the report as “tribal chiefs” or “chiefs of the land”; these chiefs were responsible for the constitution of work gangs. The leeway given to internal hierarchies within villages was thus fundamental. The native guards in the service of the colonial administration, assigned to the practices of recruiting public labour, were no more knowledgeable about the mechanisms of designating individuals as workers than the European administrator of subdivision himself. The inspector commented that the method of trusting “native custom” was probably very adequate; he remarked, nevertheless, that there was a risk of abuses and that the administration had to tackle and remedy this potential for mistreatment. Picanon himself admitted that the chiefs, by forcing female household members to feed the work gangs, played into an abusive interpretation of state obligations in corvée labour: in principle, colonial legislation gave the administration the task of providing food for the labourers, but this was not translated into practice.Footnote ⁴⁷

For many individuals, the combination of male corvée labour for public works and porterage, and the intimidation and compulsion used by colonial agents to help private employers find waged contract labour led to massive overburdening. Conditions actually deteriorated in the decade after Picanon’s criticism. The overview from 1926 provided by Harquet, then administrator of the Madingou subdivision – one of the most troubled spots at the crossroads of various forms of labour services – demonstrates how much the implementation of forced labour and forced recruitment led to this constant overburdeningFootnote ⁴⁸ of the local populations:

1. bullet During the third trimester, the Subdivision of Boko-Songho-Madingou gave an immense effort:

• – 29,138 days of porterage both for the Administration and commerce.

• – 5,400 days of labour on the work sites of the automobile route.

• – 3,500 days of labour for the construction of the Post.

• – 24,000 days of labour on the work sites of the C[ongo] O[céan].

1. bullet And one needs to add:

2. bullet For a total of: 62,038 days remunerated.

• – 5,290 days for the maintenance of the roads of the Subdivisio[n]

• – 5,850 days for the transport of provisions to the store at Madingou.

1. bullet In total: 73,178 days meaning labour days per valid man.

2. bullet The native has responded well to the different demands of the administrator of the subdivision during this trimester.Footnote ⁴⁹

The two main problems of using corvée labour concerned obligations that the administration was, in principle, called upon to respect, such as transport and provision of food, and observance of the stipulated days of work per year and per corvée labourer. The latter officially remained limited to between twelve and twenty days annually in the interwar period, making it difficult to create a cheap, stable labour force. This problem was often less relevant in practice, but there was nevertheless a legal framework limiting administrative exploitation, at least in theory. There were yet other alternatives: in his 1919 report, Picanon had pointed out for the subdivision of the Bakongos that the administration could also rely on the penal labour of those charged with minor infractions by the administrator as a viable alternative. Although, in Picanon’s report, this accounted for only 15,980 days of penal labour for the years between 1912 and 1918, the option was nevertheless attractive: in the case of such forced workers, for whom work was part of their punishment, there was even less evidence of restraint in the severity of their treatment.Footnote ⁵⁰

Harquet’s 1926 report for Madingou is such an unusual and important document because it shows that contract labour for the CFCO constituted (for the 300 workers recruited in the subdivision) only one third of the days of labour that local populations “gave”. While the forced contracts with the Société des Batignolles building the railway line were the most notorious, the overall setup of overburdening local populations was much harsher as a result of the combination of forced labour in the public sector and for public tasks and the constant risk of being channelled into severe penal labour in case of infractions.

A glance at neighbouring Gabon, where local populations were less likely to be affected by the CFCO construction, confirms this observation. The 1929 revolt of the Awandjis and Udassas under Chief Wongo in the Gabonese Adoumas subdivision was, according to the critical if partly apologetic report of the subdivision’s administrator, Louis Turenne, to be found in general malaise: the harsh modalities of corvée labour, reliance on local chiefs to designate these public workers, their use of much-hated porterage tasks, and constant use of penal labour to punish infractions such as “desertion” from contracts or public work, all fed into local anger and sparked insurrection.Footnote ⁵¹ Equally, attempts by administrators in Gabon to explain their problems controlling labour in 1930 – given the new international mood of condemnation of colonial forced labour and more discussion and scrutiny – constitute some useful insights in comparison with a Middle Congo that was still in the shadow of the railway project. The reports in question have elicited little interest since the publication of Christopher Gray’s book.Footnote ⁵²

The Gabonese reports are clear on the percentages of compulsory or “encouraged” work according to descriptive categories used and according to the possible available labour force. In the Woleu N’Tem district in the first half of 1930, 6,770 of the 18,000 persons deemed eligible for recruitment for corvée labour were actually drafted.Footnote ⁵³ In the region close to Gabon’s colonial capital of Libreville, the subdivision of Estuaire-Nord, the percentage was similar: of 1,986 “able-bodied men”, more than half were channelled into contracts with wood concessions and private plantations, while the administration used 648 individuals for public road construction and maintenance; however, it remains an open question whether that really meant that no one was actually drafted for both kinds of tasks in the same year.Footnote ⁵⁴ As René Hauchecombe, the administrator of the subdivision of the Ouroungous, close to Port-Gentil, maintained, the principal administrative challenge was the complex search for a balance “regarding the employment of one third of the able-bodied male population and the execution of labour tasks that one should demand from the natives (originaires) of the subdivision, without putting at risk the good work of the European companies”.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such logic was certainly close to being the basis of the administration’s repressive action in the Middle Congo.

Finally, the observations from Gabon help us to understand administrative strategies and hesitations beyond the influence of the CFCO. Administrators would refrain from massive recourse to corvée labour on roads in regions such as the Nyanga, threatened by famine, and instead invest themselves and their native guards in surveillance and enforcement of the production of surplus agricultural products.Footnote ⁵⁶ As in the case of the Okano, close to the border with the Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea, they would moderate their pressures to avoid constant flight across the border.Footnote ⁵⁷ Conversely, the case of the Woleu-N’Tem subdivision demonstrates particular hardships in public road labour, when, in 1930, many were forced to march to their labour sites between Minvoul and Oyem, which constituted a long trek of nine to ten days in each direction, coming on top of the ten days of road labour.Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, when, in early 1930, the administrator of the Woleu-N’Tem decided he needed forced labourers for the construction of a school building in Oyem, he noted that the vast majority of eligible men lived in remote places that meant a long walk to work on the roads.Footnote ⁵⁹ It seems, therefore, that failures in organization and difficult transport conditions were the norm.

In the Middle Congo, the intersection of public corvée and needs of the railway project gave the experience of overburdening a particular form. Porterage services were essential and occupied the majority of workers in the vicinity of the railway line.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, once the men were recruited for a CFCO site, access to labour for porterage became limited, sometimes with catastrophic consequences for whole communities: there was a lack of men to carry food to the “volunteers”, and in some cases this also affected the production of food in adjacent regions. An example given by Gilles Sautter provides illuminating statistics: 161 men working as porters were necessary to guarantee provisions to a shop in Mboukou-Nsitou, located about ten kilometres from the terminus of the trail. The continuity of this service, destined to be abolished by the newly built road, led to a high mortality rate, as the administration sent the weakest to carry out porterage while the strongest were contracted into work on the site. However, sometimes the construction work needs were such that all relatively able-bodied men were required, leaving few available for porterage.Footnote ⁶¹

Even more devastating than the forced transport of food to labour sites was the CFCO construction project’s dependence on the food production of nearby communities, which was enforced by guards and local chiefs. By the end of construction in 1934, the administrator of the Madingou-Mouyondzi subdivision commented that forced food production was now “unsatisfactory”, in his view; this gives us an important impression of the degree of compulsion between 1921 and 1934.Footnote ⁶² Generally, local workers sometimes referred to themselves as “slaves of the governor”, although this term was mostly vague, as the idea of being enslaved was more widely used for forced mechanisms of military recruitment in the Middle Congo and Gabon. The terminology was complicated by the fact that some individuals used for both labour services and as military recruits were indeed former domestic slaves of local notables: this was the case for Emmanuel Ganga, former slave of Pierre Kouka, a paramount chief judged and deported during the Amicale Affair of 1930.Footnote ⁶³ Administrators were generally insensitive to such accusations: they held that economic successes remained contingent upon forced labour, as “[m]easured and paternal compulsion – much more than anarchic laissez-faire – very often leads to these happy outcomes”.Footnote ⁶⁴

However, while the CFCO contracts were the epitome of physical hardship, the harshness of public compulsory labour was not far behind. On paper, the system was strictly controlled, and although, by the mid-1930s, the number of days per person and year had increased to a maximum of twenty, that was still thought of as limited, and officials claimed that the labourers were protected by rigid control.Footnote ⁶⁵ The actual situation was different: firstly, corvée labour on secondary roads remained frequently unpaid, against imperial stipulations.Footnote ⁶⁶ Moreover, in addition to road maintenance, labourers in the Bouenza region had other tasks to fulfil: while penal labourers were used for water corvée and some harder practices of working the soil, regular corvée labourers had to clear brushwood.Footnote ⁶⁷ Guards accompanying the groups of labourers were often violent, and judicial files also hint at sexual violence against the wives of corvée labourers providing food, although officials claimed that notorious cases such as that of native guard Rakoutio were rare.Footnote ⁶⁸ Food was difficult to come by for tasks on more remote sites;Footnote ⁶⁹ and, in some cases, French gendarmes channelled penal labour into their own plantations, as with the abuses documented for Chiron in Tchimbamba.Footnote ⁷⁰

Local populations were not at all content with their obligations, but in the Middle Congo they had few options before the mid-1930s to buy themselves out of service, while some of Gabon’s districts were forerunners in that regard. In Gabon’s Estuaire, administrators argued that even after two decades of constant pressures for labour services, the Pongwé and Fang residents in the subdivision refused to accept corvée labour as something normal. Scorn for these services was so widespread that locals would rather use their existing wages from other sources, minimal as they might have been, to pay the tax (the rachat) that freed them from compulsory public labour. While colonial officials often held that Gabonese or Congolese colonial subjects preferred hard physical work during a circumscribed period over “civilized” practices of tax payment in currency, these examples show the opposite, and offer a window onto interpretations of the local victims of forced labour.Footnote ⁷¹

In other regions of colonial rule over African populations, locals appropriated themselves the material advantages of becoming free road workers; in particular, María José Pont Cháfer has suggested the importance of such a mechanism for the British Gold Coast’s Northern Territories, which ultimately made forced labour obsolete.Footnote ⁷² However, while the administration in the Middle Congo needed skilled workers for certain tasks and was ready to offer them better conditions than the meagre wages given to forced corvée labourers, such free labour remained in the shadow of corvée until 1946. Even with the rachat providing some resources to the administration, which naturally had to be invested in contract road labour, colonial agents continued to be focused on corvée.Footnote ⁷³ Local populations did not have any opportunity to change these dynamics before 1946, although, as we will show, in some parts of the territory, administrators continued to respect the rachat during the war years and reluctantly enlarged the group of free waged workers.

From 1946, the public sector needed wage labour more urgently, but experienced serious problems: instead of becoming a dynamic field of wage workers accumulating financial resources, road work remained unpopular, as private firms – now experiencing the consequences of forced recruitment of contract labour having become outlawed – had to offer serious daily wages, which made public-sector day labour unattractive for the time being. Like in Impfondo, the high prices or the absence of merchandise in shops aggravated the situation: while by 1948 colonial inspector Landrau remarked that too many Congolese wage workers had abundant “paper money” and few occasions to spend it, the colonial administration could not even match these wage conditions.Footnote ⁷⁴

Generally, the victims of forced recruitment in Gabon ran away or tried, where possible, to buy themselves out of labour obligations. They benefitted from closeness to borders; they sometimes tried to play the administration off against the large companies. However, while forced labour and desertion found an uneasy balance in the Gabonese case by 1930, the even more dramatic conditions of the Middle Congo led to fiercer and longer-lasting reactions.

Reacting to “Contract Labour” and the Almighty Corvée: Overburdening and Responses between 1925 and 1940

Measuring the reactions of locals simultaneously faced with “contract labour” and “public labour” is difficult. There are no reliable statistics on who fled, and administrators were reluctant to say too much about their shortcomings in controlling local populations. However, some episodes of flight are especially telling, and we will try to interpret them as expressions of such reactions.

Crises triggered by mass flights were frequent and appeared very early during the French colonial presence in the Middle Congo. Episodes of runaway bands crossing the border into neighbouring territories were common; administrative correspondence from the region since the turn of the decade notes these incidents. Occurrences of mass flight in 1909 and 1910, orchestrated by an influential paramount chief, had the German colony of Cameroon as a destination.Footnote ⁷⁵ But after World War I, other French colonies such as Gabon and Oubangui-Chari also became adequate places to hide.

Work for the CFCO tended to lead to the strongest reactions. In 1927, one of the largest drives to get contract labourers in Madingou, through a group of native guards, led to hundreds fleeing from the subdivision in a huge panic.Footnote ⁷⁶ Some of André Gide’s public attacks against Jean Weber, director of the Compagnie Forestière Sangha-Oubangui, belong to that context.Footnote ⁷⁷ In 1926, when none of the 300 contract labourers rounded up in Madingou fled immediately, colonial officials considered the situation highly unusual.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moreover, flight movements could be extensive: in 1925, nine whole villages from the Madingou region disappeared into the Belgian Congo, and although, with Belgian support, the French authorities ultimately managed to recapture the refugees, this episode was exemplary for the potential for flight in the region.Footnote ⁷⁹

As correspondence from the Haute-Sangha region demonstrates, running away from CFCO recruitment in the area was endemic at different times and flight tended to be towards distinct geographical areas.Footnote ⁸⁰ Runaways accepted life-threatening risks, for example when hiding on the steep slopes of Djimber Mountain. As Sautter has pointed out, fear of recruitment was so massive that inhabitants integrated this panic into local religious beliefs.Footnote ⁸¹

The immense problems of flight from the CFCO labour in Madingou in 1931 led the administration to finally involve local dignitaries, i.e. village chiefs, in the recruitment task, and no longer just to round up “contract labour” via native guards. During forced recruitment, “traditional” chiefs had significant leeway to designate those eligible for the “contract”. By 1931, some administrators demanded what they called an “impartial recruitment”, and they tried to advertise the fairer treatment now to be practised to prevent local panic and flight.Footnote ⁸² According to the administration, this option of internal “persuasion” within the communities caused an immediate “improvement” in terms of numbers of runaways.Footnote ⁸³

Forced labour on public sites had similar effects: again, workers were keen to run away. Generally, for the Badondo communities living close to the border with the Belgian Congo, officials argued that the administrator needed to function as a kind of gendarme.Footnote ⁸⁴ At Boko Songho in 1933, corvée labourers fled into the Belgian Congo, leaving many of the labour sites on the roads deserted. Some administrators argued that direct discussion with the Badondos to convince them of the economic advantages of settling on the French side of the border would encourage them to tolerate the corvée obligations.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Mayama, the administrator held that public labour was impossible to sustain given the huge number of runaways: in 1937, he opted for a substantial reduction of corvée periods, limiting them to ten days – something that was well in line with the more generous rhetoric of the Popular Front in the Metropole, and potentially successful in stemming the tide of constant flight. In a place like Mayama, this decision cost the administration 25,000 days of labour and could only be implemented using loans conceded by the Metropole.Footnote ⁸⁶

World War II aggravated the situation and led to massive tensions. Due to renewed pressures and harsher mechanisms of drafting individuals for corvée, labourers fled into the deep forest, and the administrators admitted no longer having the necessary labour force. Meat and other resources were frequently unavailable. Eric Jennings has already sketched the panorama of degradation of living conditions in French Equatorial Africa under the Free French, due to the use of compulsory labour for the “war effort”.Footnote ⁸⁷ But it is also compelling to look at the continuities of earlier local reactions: in Mayama, in 1942, the administrator confessed that work on the roads had become so arduous that he needed to systematically target the entire population for corvée road labour, abandoning the remaining restraints of part of the 1930s, or even the 1920s. Village communities, understanding this change, refused the administration’s calls to resettle close to main roads and stayed hidden in the rainforest.Footnote ⁸⁸ The other reaction was to insist on the rachat, whose legitimacy as a measure of choice for colonial subjects had been reinforced by the Popular Front and more frequently reached the Middle Congo, while it had already been more common in parts of Gabon, as pointed out above. In Mayama, in 1942, demand for the rachat increased fifteenfold.Footnote ⁸⁹ In the Brazzaville region, in 1943, the entire eligible population chose to pay the rachat, an unprecedented situation that led the administrator to complain that current funds for waged workers were at one quarter of the pre-war level, with rising wages, making it impossible to replace forced public labour with waged work despite the growing number of men paying the labour tax. Even so, in 1944, compulsory road labour became obsolete close to the capital due to these demands to buy one’s freedom.Footnote ⁹⁰

This ultimately provided an impetus for abandoning omnipresent forced public labour shortly before its official abolition in 1946, under massively altered political circumstances. In 1942, in places like Mayama, larger groups of free labourers were still a rare occurrence, like the eighty men recruited for road labour for a daily wage of 2 francs.Footnote ⁹¹ But by 1944, the combination of ever more desertions and pressures from Paris to accept the rachat, as previously promised, finally led to the demise of corvée labour. While the administration would search for other strategies to maintain part of the forced labour logic in the Middle Congo and Gabon, mass compulsory recruitment for public labour had ended.Footnote ⁹² The official abolition of forced labour simply confirmed this process.

Essential Roles: Intermediaries and Flight in the Middle Congo’s “Horror Region” of Forced Labour in the Interwar Period

In their “crisis correspondence”, officials discussed dangers emanating from local individuals escaping administrative control and using their position as intermediaries against the interests of European firms and the colonial state, even if they worked for the latter. An important example of such “crisis correspondence” includes three long, confidential letters from February and March 1929 discussing a whole network of subversion of colonial control, set up by the interpreter Milan to save individuals from forced recruitment for the CFCO.Footnote ⁹³ While certainly biased and partly speculative, the administrative discussion elucidates how such intermediaries managed to mobilize impressive resources locally, and to create entire networks.Footnote ⁹⁴

As pointed out, in 1929, flight from the Haute-Sangha region had become a regular phenomenon. To deal with this problem of runaways, the administrator Jeandin recommended punitive measures against deserters hiding “in the bush”.Footnote ⁹⁵ He also suggested better control of local populations through the introduction of passes, and better and updated census operations to avoid the overburdening of locals with labour tasks; finally, he wished to elaborate on ethnic categories to find out who came from which side of the border.Footnote ⁹⁶ Based on this three-pillar strategy, the administrator hoped to reduce the number of runaways to the neighbouring territory of Cameroon in particular, and to avoid a sharp decline in recruitment numbers from the area. Having recently arrived at his position, Jeandin reiterated the explanations of his predecessor that pointed to bush camps maintained by influential locals, who were said to hide runaways in the forest and falsely report them to the administration as having fled to Cameroon. Jeandin’s predecessor had already discussed three names as being related to these clandestine practices: the chiefs Mintama and Makangla and an interpreter called Milan.Footnote ⁹⁷

Reacting to this letter, the administrator Chefdrue insisted on curtailing cross-border travel between Cameroon and Middle Congo. He held that many had used such routes to flee to Cameroon in the hope of avoiding recruitment for railway construction, and, once escaped, they also helped their relatives and friends. The new system, in which the runaways never actually left the Middle Congo, was said to rely on bribes paid to influential persons in Souanké.Footnote ⁹⁸ The interpreter and the two chiefs managed to avoid enquiries, explaining the absence of the missing local populations to the colonial authorities as flight to Cameroon.Footnote ⁹⁹ This mechanism of saving “natives” from the most demanding work elicited a series of responses from the colonial regime. The sources are clear about the effects but remain obscure about certain details. Milan and the two chiefs allegedly set up bush camps near the road between Souanké and Sembé, hiding the local runaways in these places. However, nothing is said about the three ringleaders’ personal movements or any assistance they may have received to set up this infrastructure.

With evidence found for this scheme, local officials attempted to intervene and to punish those responsible for disrupting colonial labour recruitment practices. The administrator Gatau suggested assigning Milan to a different post, insisting that such a move would diminish local recalcitrance and that the interpreter was easy to replace. The administrator of the subdivision disagreed: despite suspicions about Milan’s loyalty, he held the interpreter’s role to be indispensable given his unique knowledge of the region and actually irreplaceable because of his – unspecified – services to the administration. Milan’s importance was thus given greater weight than the negative opinion of administrators of subdivisions.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Accordingly, Milan was given responsibility for a post in the bush. This post had been unoccupied since 1925 due to lack of personnel and financial resources within French Equatorial Africa. Putting the interpreter into that role, the colonial administration openly asserted its power through an intermediary, without having to pay him as much as French civil servants. These contradictions within the colonial chain of command and internal negotiation processes show the limits of control. While knowing that such intermediaries already had a record that included helping runaways, the colonial system nevertheless used them to work in remote areas, allowing them to acquire considerable power and respect from local populations. In more extreme cases, the administration then lost its direct control over the locals to these individuals. Chefdrue, as administrator of the subdivision of Abong-Mbang, insisted that the whole affair was impossible to investigate if Milan remained in his position in the region: the interpreter had become a person of trust, an advocate of the locals, and, given his immense prestige, local populations refused to cooperate in any serious investigation.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The Milan affair is an impressive example of incomplete colonial control, which allowed an intermediary to remain indispensable for the administration while at the same time setting up a whole system of runaway routes. Chefdrue pressed for the interpreter’s removal because he held that such conditions were frequent in the territory. In fact, in the district of N’Goko-Sangha, administrators also decried the “power” of auxiliaries with a long career in the colonial service, due to the recognition they received from European officials. The author of the letter indicated that severe penalties had to be taken against Milan if the latter confessed his guilt in hiding local runaways.Footnote ¹⁰²

The case of Milan and his two allies amongst local dignitaries is therefore a common “exception”. The phenomenon was certainly not limited to the district of Haute-Sangha but existed in the interwar period in the Middle Congo (and Gabon) in broader dimensions; administrators’ remarks about its prevalence in neighbouring subdivisions are telling. Therefore, ambiguous intermediaries appear as an important part of systems of colonial control and their subversion. Intermediaries created spaces of freedom within their regions, both for personal interest and organizing or accompanying flight movements of local groups.

For the case of village chiefs as intermediaries, analysis is sometimes more straightforward, because their role is more frequently described. A substantial proportion of those incited their populations to run away; remarkably, as in the case of Milan, they even returned from their refuges from time to time, to engage in border-crossing commerce. A well-documented example is that of Gavouka in the Madingou region, who, after running away with much of his community, was replaced by his brother, but continued to be relevant both as a trader in the region and with informal authority over the remaining villagers.Footnote ¹⁰³ By 1931, in Mouyondzi, for example, several runaways timidly returned from “the bush” – an outcome the administrator indicated as somewhat positive – but the administration needed the initiative of the intermediaries, especially chiefs, to achieve these results.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the 1930s, while most administrators tried to advocate a balance between repression and concessions to deal with the runaway phenomenon and to win chiefs as intermediaries back to the colonial cause, some played the card of extensive violence: Jean Lagadec sought out fugitives in the bush and systematically torched their camps, while offering incentives only to the most important regional chiefs. In the Mayama district, this strategy was successful in the mid-1930s, but local populations once again started to run away on a large scale as soon as the war situation from 1940 tipped the balance towards ever more dramatic hardships.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In Komono, in 1944, a number of village chiefs led their populations to disappear in the deep forest. Some of them were found afterwards; many complained about bad treatment from overseers, which had led them to go into hiding.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Discussing these problems, colonial officials claimed they were much in favour of improving the living conditions of the “natives”, allowing them to get more viable wages instead of exploiting them through public labour or channelling them into badly paid contracts.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ However, in spite of such promises, forced labour continued to be important until its official abolition two years later. This was for rubber collection specifically, which again became fundamental under the war conditions: free labour was impossible to organize and compulsory means were key.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The same contradictions can be found concerning European firms using African labour, which were visited by the colonial inspector Fortuné in 1940: in principle, he described employers as more benevolent, insisting on surveillance of workers, especially on the use of passes to avoid desertion, but being much more open to offering better conditions of work.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ However, this possible change of mood was not yet widespread. In 1945, when the administration recruited mining labour for the Chantiers des Mines de M’Fouati company, they again relied on compulsory measures to get “volunteers” into contracts, with the proprietor, Maarten, holding that he preferred labour without any real paper contract at all.Footnote ¹¹⁰ And even after the official abolition of forced labour, the local mechanisms of forced recruitment resisted this abolition: the French administrator of Franceville in Gabon complained vividly that local populations from his district fled to Ewo in the Middle Congo in an attempt “to escape the recruitment of workers for Gabon”.Footnote ¹¹¹

Shortly before the abolition of forced labour was voted for in the metropole in April 1946, the logic of compulsory measures was challenged, but was, as yet, unbroken – and running away from such hardships remained an essential response to continued abuses. Only gradually did the presence of certain new middlemen change this situation. African public sector employees who were better informed about the new rights became such intermediaries, and they motivated local groups working under constraints, for example in the provision of food for workers’ gangs, to mobilize for better conditions: the employee Ayama in the Kouilou was such a case, and, as a result, he was much-despised by the local administration.Footnote ¹¹² Even then, the Governor of the Middle Congo recommended heavy-handed intervention and compulsion where it was the best method to find workers for new agrarian initiatives, such as more extensive rice production.Footnote ¹¹³ At the same time, Fourneau deplored the bad state of the public infrastructure, including of the buildings, which, according to him, was due to the end of compulsory road labour services.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The end of compulsory labour between 1940 and 1948 was thus uneven. Colonial officials had difficulties departing from coercive strategies, local populations were always ready to run away from forced labour where feasible, and the importance of intermediaries helping in or even orchestrating escapes from labour services and forced recruitment in favour of private employers remained an important factor. Certainly, trends towards less violent and coercive solutions played themselves out from the late 1930s, and the official abolition of forced labour in 1946 created the conditions for massive change. In the years immediately after World War II, the overburdening of local populations by forced labour would gradually stop. However, the effects of compulsory labour needed time to trickle out, and the logic of these practices remained very present in the colonial mindset.