A portrait of King Leopold II greets visitors upon entering the Africa Archive’s reading room in Brussels (Fig. 1). No note to explain that he was the private owner of the Congo Free State and responsible for widespread violence perpetrated against Congolese people. No disclaimer to inform the visitor why the former colonial state still controls and manages the archive. In fact, the visitor gets the impression of an organized and quiet institution. Walking into the reading room, you inhale the past: the old ledgers, stacks of brittle papers, and the grandeur of the building all convey a sense of rationalized order.

Yet, a closer examination of both archival text and image, and of the archive itself, quickly dispels the illusion of order. Looking beyond formal procedure, imperial stateliness, and elegant scriptures, messiness and nervousness begin to show. First, the institution: the system is illegible to the visitor, accessing documents is lengthy and costly, there is no functioning digital database, boxes are often misplaced, and folders are full of stains and torn pages. Stored away from the people who live(d) in Congo, the archival records are largely inaccessible and subject to the management of the former colonial state. Second, nervousness is evident in colonial rule itself: the records obsessively document the routinized tasks of colonial agents and list, in orderly columns, the profits and losses of an exploitative economy, deaths and land grabs, and the number of rubber baskets collected through forced labor (Fig. 2, left-side). Documents exhibit formal headings and imperial authority, yet the delicate and calligraphic handwriting narrates the story of a 15-year-old girl, Matuli whose mother was decapitated by sentries (Fig.2, right-side). As a pluralistic site of knowledge, the ambivalences of the archive suffuse both the workings of colonial rule and the archive, therefore conceding its “own confusions and contradictions” and showing the anxieties of a colonial history that refuses to be tamed.

In the Africa Archive, we found a colonial regime that was entrenched in the idea of material progress and bodily discipline but, under the guise of bureaucratic reason and civilization, exhibited the characteristics of a “jittery, nervous state.” The paradoxical order-messiness of the archive reflects the underlying anxious, panic-driven politics of empire, which is centered specifically around bodies, gender, and sexualities.

This is visible in the record-keeping practices of Western agents when reporting on widespread rape and sexual abuse against Congolese women in the Congo Free State. The British Congo Reform Association (CRA), which waged a campaign against King Leopold’s rule, explicitly made rape perpetrated by the colonizers “unprintable” and, therefore, unsayable (Fig 3). E.D. Morel, who led the inquiry, erased the testimonies and the voices of Congolese women to protect the CRA’s work and its liberal readership. Paradoxically, this historical disfigurement and violent (re)production of women as always already violated or silenced is reactivated in the current moment: the archive’s white male gaze persists in the continuing erasure of Black women’s experiences and the “oversayability” of sexual abuse. 

Compulsively policing moral, sexual, and racial boundaries, a paranoid colonial regime tried to maintain the illusion of a state that advances reason and (respectable) betterment while, in reality, it displayed highly mystified, personified, and privatized characteristics that one still finds, although in different guises, in present-day governance in the Congo. 

The figure of the white male colonial agent exerting “respectable” masculinity in family life and state affairs was central to the colonial enterprise. For instance, the creation of an elitist class of évolués––“evolved” Congolese––whose lifestyle and family structure revolved around the male household heads, was meant to support the Belgian “civilizing mission” (Fig.4). While this policy aimed to legitimize colonial rule, it generated further political anxieties as it became obvious that a growing number of educated Congolese people demanded equal rights. An informant interviewed in Kinshasa in 2015 recalled: 

The évolués were expected to emulate the European lifestyle. White state agents would come to their homes unannounced to check they were properly dressed, their children went to school, their kitchen was clean, and their houses were tidied. Their houses had to resemble Belgian ones. But then, they also had to cut ties with their extended family and friends who had stayed in the village. It was no longer possible to see our nephews, uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins … They became schizophrenic. … There was a separation inside Black people themselves.

The archives are thus the written echo of the colonial project’s “schizophrenic” politics, which produced deep societal fractures and turned everyday life into a dystopian reality for Congolese people. Race and gender became the organizing social trope, and colonialism took shape around domesticity and the idea of the home. Behind a facade of tranquillity, the Belgian colonial state suffered from pervasive political, sexual, and racial anxieties, which produced a type of slow violence that stretched far beyond formal colonial rule and heavily shapes present-day politics in Congo. These colonial anxieties gesture to the global logics of coloniality and urge us to question evolutionist perspectives that view political formations in Africa, and in the Congo in particular, as inherently violent because of its supposed failure to replicate the Western/liberal state. Interestingly, however, the colonial archive also “contains within itself the resources of its own refutation,” Mbembe once put it. It is in those moments when Congolese women or men do represent themselves that the archive has tremendous potential. The first-hand accounts we do have, though rare, are “snapshot” moments of humanity that obliterate all forms of objectivity, and it is to those we should turn to recover silenced histories and resist the enduring racialized narratives on the “post-colonial state” and sexual violence.

The King’s portrait at the entrance of the archives’ reading room makes him the guardian of the archives, which illustrates a racialized and exclusionary order: the archive is the privileged terrain of whiteness and is still managed and controlled by the former colonial state. 

Our work demonstrates that much of the violence that Congolese citizens experience today is deeply entangled in a long history of archival, intellectual, and material dispossession. But it also shows that different, anti-colonial readings from the archive are possible. Lila Abu-Lughod asks what archives should look like for people without a state, whose knowledge and memories are being annihilated and who live under brutal settler colonial occupation, to build a people’s archives of some sorts? We took up her call to think hard about the “conditions of archiving and to attend closely to the ways archives are and could be used.” Critically engaging with the archive is not merely about questioning its power and knowledge production, it is also about heeding and using its emancipatory potential precisely because it contains the possibilities for its own undoing. It already holds “the archive yet to come.” Indeed, in recent years, due to the collective efforts of historians, archivists, and researchers , much work has been done to decolonize and declassify the archives. The Africa Archives are currently being transferred to the State archives which will make them more accessible. But our contemporary moment demands more than this—it requires radical change and a promise of justice. What if visitors to the colonial archives were met with photographs critically displaying the faces of colonizers? What if the archive was specially designed to speak to the needs and desires of diaspora and Congolese communities—taken out of its guarded walls and mobilized as a critical device for (re)thinking and knowing violence? Could this be the beginning of an anti-colonial, living archive?