A Colonial Lexicon

Abstract

a hyaena, he would not join in.As we were under military discipline, I laid him down, and gave him a half a dozen of the best for insubordination, and attained my object with the help of a native Christian teacher, and procured an interesting skeleton, but even forty years later it is not an easy thing to do.≤ This book lies at the juncture of this kind of evidence about colonial violence, medical research, and bodies in Africa.Such a source does not tell us as much as we would like to know about how colonized subjects interpreted the fixations and intrusions of colonial doctors.Yet to treat Cook's anecdote as a discursive representation of colonial disciplining of the body alone would render unintelligible the social action contained in this tale of colonial doctors searching for pelvic bones, an ill domestic servant, and a compliant ''native Christian teacher.''The harsh economy of colonial power is bared.The servant said he was too sick to dig up the dead, and the doctor whipped him for feigning sickness.Dr. Cook had greater social power, but the insubordinate ''native boy'' mocked and accused with an animal metaphor expressed behind the doctor's back.Also present in Cook's tale, however, was a ''more intelligent'' native.This Christian teacher's mediating action remains unclear, as it likely was to Dr. Cook.But the source flags how basic a middle figure was to colonial representation and violence; this book argues that such middle figures were also central to processes of translation in a colonial therapeutic economy.This history seeks to mine such ''tales of colonial folly,'' ≥ while conceding limits as to how far one can read interpretations of the colonized into and out of such an account.It tests these bounds nevertheless, by reading and listening to ethnographic, spoken, and Congolese-authored sources, and by vying with (as with Cook's anecdote) chronic narrative shapes, geographies, and closures in Africanist colonial histories.∂ This study's central focus is ex-Zaire, the vast central African country formerly known as the Belgian Congo.∑ It, too, had Protestant missionaries among its colonial doctors and safe childbearing among its hygiene goals.∏ The Congo was known as the Congo Free State from 1885 until 1908, an empire evoked by Joseph Conrad in 1899 as the ''heart of darkness.''π This period, when the Congo was King Leopold II's private colony, became notorious for ''red rubber,'' a brutal system of forced rubber collection and severed Congolese hands.When the Belgian parliament assumed control in 1908, the colony became the Belgian Congo.After independence in 1960, the new nation-state was called the Republic (later, the Democratic Republic) of the Congo until 1971, when Mobutu Sese Seko, who assumed power in 1965, changed the name to Zaire.In May 1997, after leading a new generation of rebels in a war that brought down the Mobutu

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