[by Julien Volper[1]]
In 2019, we interpreted some photographs from museum archives in an article published in the magazine Afrique: Archaeology & Arts[2] which concluded as follows:
…photography still struggles to be perceived as a study document in its own right, and therefore must be subject to a critical methodology. Researchers such as Isen About and Clément Chéroux have summed up this recurring problem very well when they assert that the desire to make History through images could unfortunately result in making only illustrated History…
In this text, it is indeed a problem of "illustrated history" that we will discuss with the analysis of an archive image with strong emotional power used in a journalistic framework. We will see in particular how the absence of contextualization of the image facilitates its inclusion in a story of Belgian colonization to which the document can nevertheless hardly relate.
At the end of April 2021, the Dutch-language monthly Eos Wetenschap published a special issue entitled Colonialism in Verzet (Colonialism & Resistance). Although not entirely dealing with the Belgian colonial question, the case of the Congo was nevertheless addressed through certain chapters and by means of selected iconography.
Following a well-known sequence of events in the press, any mention of the colonial Congo leads to talk of Leopold II… and any mention of the “sulphurous sovereign” necessarily leads to the evocation of the affair of the severed hands. Eos Wetenschap is no exception to the rule, as evidenced by a large-format photo on the back cover showing a man with his hands and feet amputated.[3] (FIG.1).
An important detail is that the photo is not really captioned in the publication and is simply linked to a scientific expedition carried out in the North of the Congo by Armand J. Hutereau in the early 1910s. Nevertheless, given the theme of this special issue, any Belgian reader is almost automatically led to contextualize the document for themselves. Consciously or unconsciously, the mutilated man will be identified as a victim of a punishment committed against the local populations at the time of the Congo Free State (CFS).
Of course, these crimes related to rubber exploitation that took place in well-known regions have been attested for a long time: there is no question of disputing them. They are linked to the local policies of officers such as Victor-Léon Fiévez. Around 1895, for example, the latter ordered his soldiers to take the hands of people they killed during punitive expeditions. A heinous practice intended for unjustifiable accounting operations.
In 1942, in the journal Aequatoria, Father Edmond Boelaert offered an uncompromising description of the brutality of Victor-Léon Fiévez, locally nicknamed Ntange (“the bed” / “the sleeper”), in recounting these ignoble practices:
The worst of all the whites of the first era was Ntange… he waged wars everywhere, dirty battles. All the corpses killed in the field had to have their hands cut off. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier who had to bring them back in baskets. All the soldiers did this. After that he ordered all the natives to harvest rubber. The village that refused to make rubber would be completely swept away.
However, it would be wrong to think that the photo chosen as the back cover constitutes an illustration of these ignoble practices of the 19th century which have nothing to envy to those observed almost a century later during the Sierra Leonean civil war.[4] (1991-2002).
In fact, as can be seen in the original document from the MRAC archives (FIG.2), the man is presented as: "Zande mutilated by Bali, brother of Djabir, for adultery."
This name of Djabir/Boyoko was that of a potentate of the end of the 1891th century in the North-East of Congo. Initially allied with the Belgians, Sultan Djabir was, in 1905, one of the rare local chiefs to join the Force Publique with an officer rank, that of captain. However, in XNUMX, he was designated as a rebel leader in the EIC and his territory was militarily occupied.[5].
There are some other photographs also taken in the North-East of Congo which show men of Zande culture with cut off hands, or even castrated genitals, designated as guilty of adultery. This type of punishment, which is evidenced in the photographs, is very clearly attested by the work of the British anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) who carried out field surveys among the Zande of Sudan between 1927 and 1930. In a posthumous work Man & Woman among the Azande (1974), one chapter addresses the issue of adultery and the terrible mutilating punishment that awaited anyone who dared to seduce another's wife. On this subject, Evans-Pritchard's Zande informants were relatively precise, particularly those who, like the man named Gbitarangba, had undergone this punishment with certain variations (cutting off the ears and/or the upper lip, etc.)
In an article by Evans-Pritchard dated 1970 and entitled Sexual Inversion among the Azande Here is also what said the so-called Ganga, one of the officers of the Zande chief Gbudwe who died in 1905:
This is about how men married boys when Gbudwe was lord of his domains. In those days, if a man had relations with the wife of another the husband killed him or he cut off his hands and his genitals. So for that reason a man used to marry a boy to have orgasm between his thighs, which quieted his desire for a woman.
Ultimately, it appears that, in order to denounce a colonial crime, Eos Wetenschap chose to use a cliché that reflects a cruel traditional Zande judicial practice. Was this a mistake or was it a desire to place a "shocking" cliché on a pressing subject at all costs? The question remains. It is undoubtedly necessary to illustrate the crimes of an era, but this should not be done at the cost of the truth.
Addendum
The voluntary or involuntary change of context of a historical document is of course not specific to the magazine Eos Wetenschap. There are many similar cases, like the one we saw in the second part of the hit documentary. Decolonizations directed by Karim Miské and Marc Ball and broadcast on Arte in January 2020[6]. A little before the 18th minute, the narrator's voice explains:
Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Hồ Chí Minh) was a teenager at the time of the first anti-colonial revolt, when the severed heads of the rebels ended up on the postcards that the colonists sent to their fiancées who remained in Dijon or Marseille.
To illustrate this point, the documentary presents viewers with about ten old photographs/postcards on the subject of the death penalty by decapitation in Indochina. Of course, none of these images are analyzed as they are supposed to speak for themselves.
Yet this work would have been quite interesting to do. Thus, one of the selected photos (FIG.3) is not at all related to the sentence pronounced by the narrator…unless we maintain that Hồ Chí Minh (1890-1969) began his puberty at the age of four. In fact, this photo was indeed published in the form of an engraving in the weekly L'Illustration dated August 11, 1894, where it was captioned as follows: “Heads of the pirates decapitated after their escape from Hanoi prison.” (FIG.4).
It can certainly be specified here that, in colonial Indochina at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, this term "pirates" could encompass both people engaged in acts of brigandage and pillage as well as men fighting against French imperialism... keeping in mind that the border between the "two categories" could be relatively porous. However, if the execution of these thirteen people took place, it was not because they were guilty of being "pirates" or "rebels" but rather because of the crimes committed during their escape.[7] particularly bloody on June 19, 1894, during which a sentry, three militiamen and an innocent villager were killed.
