Through a medical history of Belgian Congo, Nancy Rose Hunt offers the notion of “ nervousness To characterize both imperial violence and relations between Europeans and natives.
The editions of theEhess publish a French translation of the very beautiful work has Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo Initially published in 2016 (Duke University Press) by Nancy Rose Hunt, professor of history at the University of Florida. In his introduction, a piece of bravery of conceptual density and methodological clarity, Nancy Rose Hunt delivers the key to the notion of “ nervousness Which gives his title to the work. The idea would have come to him by contemplating, distraught, the “ Rhetoric of the characteristic unreason of the George W. Bush presidency From 2001 to 2009 (p. 7). The heuristic parallel with the Leopolian state of the Congo (1885-1908), then the Belgian Congo (1908-1960), then appeared to him more and more striking.
The colonial situation from a clinical angle
It is therefore through immediate American history that the analysis was structured, the nervousness becoming during the test a recurring metaphor, used to include both the biopolitical mechanisms of the colonial state, “ stressed And in a hurry to fight against the decline of the population, and at the same time the vernacular forms of tensions, where the medical register and the armed struggle were neighboring, since the healers have often been opponents.
The semantic field is therefore floating and claimed as such. The reader is brought to rub shoulders with the Pranoic Belgian Congo agents, seeking at all costs to “ calm The situation, women who have nightmares of night rapes, or even flying guitarists. Officers in Cran, intoxicated settlers, enraged penitentiary colonies: all are “ nervous », The book analyzing both the colonized and the colonists from the angle of the affects.
Since the extractivist brutalities of the 1880s and the “ rubber wars Who gave rise to intense spectacularization of colonial violence, until independence in 1960, Nancy Rose Hunt offers a “ New kind of medical history (P. 24) which leads to rethinking the entire colonial state. The history of health encompasses a vast political and cultural history of the Congo. Returning to the definition of Georges Balandier of the “ colonial situation “, Nancy Rose Hunt underlines how it is based on a clinical criterion, showing a company” sick », Entering resentment, phobia and falling under the« pervert (P. 44-45). With a wide range of sources (missionaries, medical reports, songs and lomongo stories), the author describes the haunt of the Belgian colonial state for the “ degeneration Populations. Sleeping disease, denatality, venereal diseases, sterility are the subject of numerous surveys and scientific missions.
“” Racial suicide “, Fall of fertility, loss of” lifetime »: Doctors, state agents and governors got down to the task, without reading the colonial causes of these depressions of the populations. It is a formidable blindness in question, where the very consequences of colonization are not analyzed, even where medicalization leads to an additional violence.
Indeed, the repression was extremely strong against the rebels who refused to comply with medical policies. Leaked tactics, uses of charms to get rid of the colonial yoke, songs mocking doctors: in return, the colonized developed responses where the healing envisaged often surrounded with the frontal political rebellion. Nancy Rose Hunt underlines how the therapeutic practices have regularly slipped towards the insurrection: “ healers could turn into rebels (P. 9). Like two components of the same violence, security and medicalization are analyzed as two modes of colonial presence.
Rubber wars and cut hands
Nancy Rose Hunt chooses the shape of the fragment to describe the wars of rubber and the colonial situation. Six chapters mark out the work in as many micro-descriptions, flush with archives, medical surveys and police reports.
Chapter 1, entitled “ Violence in its registers », Is devoted to the rubber wars and the extraction led by ABIR (Anglo-Belgian India Ribber Company). An important place is made to the circulation of photographs of the cut hands, taken by Alice Harris in 1904, which had a very wide echo in Great Britain and the United States, initiating powerful anti-colonial movements in general and anti-leopoldians in particular. Crossing several reports cited at length, Nancy Rose Hunt suggests the voices of witnesses, horrified by multiple sexual violence they witnessed (rapes, mutilations, tortures), but also with survival strategies showing the ambivalence and complexity of colonial situations.
Within a region in connection with old slave trade networks, true “ Mille-feuilles complex of trafficking “(P. 75), the author pays great attention to the acoustic dimension of the archives, in particular uncontrolled voices. THE “ nerve laughter From desperate husbands to be able to find their wives, certainly kidnapped by sentries or agents of the ABIR, give the opportunity to develop on the place of the body in the archives (p. 80-81).
In this context of extreme violence, resistances have intertwined therapeutic practices and political opposition. The second chapter is, for example, devoted to the portrait of Maria N’koi (literally Marie “ to leopards ), At the origin of a fiscal rebellion in 1915 in Ikanga. She opposed the collection of the Copal and denounced the spread of sleep disease. Nancy Rose Hunt shows how this therapeutic rebellion is part of an international consciousness of the issues of conscription, while Belgium is occupied by the Germans.
Investigating with descendants in Ikanga in 2007, it also shows the place of the story in the therapeutic practices of Marie N’koi:
She treated by metaphor, cleaner the bellies full of bad storiessnakes or frogs. She was serving, eliminated waste, exactly as stories can arouse change and evacuate ills(p. 165).
To treat, Marie N’Koi also used the trees healing, while other trees were dismissed, because they contained “ bad stories (P. 166).
Medicalize so as not to see colonial violence
It is blindness that is at the heart of the story of Nancy Rose Hunt: medicalization is used above all not to question the very conditions of the colonial situation. Everywhere, within the colonial administration, there is this trope of degeneration. Archetypes of this colonial rhetoric, the Boelaert and Hulstaert Fathers published for example in 1937 a Lomongo booklet entitled A region that dies : “ Do you not see with your own eyes that this region lacks inhabitants ? (P. 241)
The blindness of the administration is demonstrated in a particularly effective way by covering the work, taken up in the course of development (p. 268), of a photo taken by the DR Barger to show the staff of the Bolenge hospital in 1924, without even mentioned one of the fourteen people with hands cut, “ only visual proof of the existence of a man who survived the rubber wars », Note the author.
Nancy Rose Hunt endeavors to describe the absence of conscience, on the part of these colonial doctors (Ryckmans, Van Hoof, Schwers), that their surveys on the Dénatité were carried out in areas ravaged by the rubber wars thirty years earlier, these doctors mentioning only “ Dehistoricized tremors (P. 271) In a past considered to be over. These hands cut off from the photography of the DR Barger spectacularly manifest that violence did not belong to the past in the 1920s, but that they were on the contrary constituting colonial time.
Strollings and wanderings
Say the constraint and also the margins of “ latitude (P. 416). Say “ atrophy And plasticity ” For “ give back to situations »(P. 15): Nancy Rose Hunt offers avenues to read dreams, amazes, revolts and laughter in a sensitive way.
To do this, the author describes in particular the public performances of the epic of Lianja, which she considers as “ rich poetic archives “(P. 48), or the tales relating to the loss of children and sterility, in connection with ogres with baskets of cut hands. In what the author calls the “ colonial reverie », The motif of the cut hands intervenes both in colonial photographs and in Nkundo tales to define the ogre.
The final chapter, entitled “ Movements », Condenses the reflections carried out during the work on the role of stories as a capacity for imagination of possibilities and reservoir of fantasy emaniptations. Thus dreams of American liberation, in Loma, where a resident declares: “ When the Americans arrive, they will give us rifles to hunt other whites. And we will make doctors (…) to kill you (P. 363).
These awakened dreams of reversal of power are magnificent examples of the power of stories, articulating medical power and colonial power. The author concludes with several other cases of “ strolls “(Whose exact contours are not well defined, except that the stories describe the colonial Congo and the city’s noises), including a night wandering from Graham Greene to Léopoldville, or that of Henri Maliani alias Bowane (p. 388), arrested by safety for having stolen a phonograph, before becoming one of the nursing Pioneers of the Congolese rumba.
Dense, as close as possible to sources, the work intends to show that the medicalization of the colonial Congo generates a climate of generalized nervousness among the colonized as well as the colonists. Many times resumed, the term “ nervousness »Ends up covering all social and cultural interactions, so that the argument ends up being less proven than repeated. Nevertheless, the immense scholarship and archival gluttony make this book a beautiful investigation into the counterpouss of colonial violence. Nervous laughter, nightmares, prophecies, tales are taken seriously and compared to the colonial archives. It is undoubtedly one of the best successes of this work than to show the political force of fictions.