Ebook: Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870-1960

What's in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners' physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range-resulting in often trenchant critiques. Adapting long-standing conventions about the naming of strangers, inhabitants of the Congo translated their observations into nicknames that both encapsulated the identities of individual Europeans and reflected colonial conditions more broadly. By naming Europeans, Likaka argues, Africans turned a universal practice into a mnemonic local system, which recorded and preserved the village's observations, interpretations, and understandings of colonialism as pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations. As both outside readers point out, Likaka's exploration of naming practices represents a methodological innovation. Drawn from both the colonial archive and oral interviews, the names he analyzes form a rich, largely untapped body of evidence detailing daily life under colonial rule. In some cases, the significance of a name is readily apparent from the translation. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents, for instance-the home burner, Leopard, Beat, beat, The hippopotamus-hide whip-clearly convey the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols. Expressions complimentary on the surface, Likaka shows, could either flatter or undermine, or do both simultaneously. In the hands of disgruntled villagers, the moniker Bwana Mzuri (Mister Handsome) was less a comment on the recipient's good looks than an underhanded remark about the emasculated manhood of a typical European bureaucrat. In a society that resisted monogamy, Mondele Madami (A Man Who Is Always with His Wife) reflected similar contempt for Western ways. Reconstructing the social history of rural Congolese society through their naming habits requires, of course, a thorough understanding of both linguistic and cultural context. Midst the complexities inherent in this subject matter-the multiplicity of languages spoken in Central Africa, the inadequate translations handed down by some sources, the new or competing connotations that have accrued with the passage of time-Likaka encounters a welter of coded fragments. Through careful research and detailed analysis, he deftly teases out meaning. Naming, he finds, allowed the Congolese to express their concerns and recount their own experiences. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.