A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo - Brossura

Hunt, Nancy Rose

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822323664 ISBN 13: 9780822323662

Casa editrice: Duke University Press, 1999

Riassunto

A Colonial Lexicon is the first historical investigation of how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Rejecting the “colonial encounter” paradigm pervasive in current studies, Nancy Rose Hunt elegantly weaves together stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, to reveal how concerns about strange new objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu’s Zaire.
Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu’s Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of “colonial middle figures”—particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives—to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today’s postcolonial Africa.
With its close attention to semiotics as well as sociology, A Colonial Lexicon

will interest specialists in anthropology, African history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and women’s and cultural studies.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Nancy Rose Hunt is Assistant Professor of History and Obstetrics/Gynecology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a coeditor of Gendered Colonialisms in African History.

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A COLONIAL LEXICON

Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the CongoBy NANCY ROSE HUNT

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2366-2

Contents

Illustrations...............................viiAbbreviations...............................xiAcknowledgments.............................xiiiIntroduction................................11 Crocodiles and Wealth.....................272 Doctors and Airplanes.....................803 Dining and Surgery........................1174 Nurses and Bicycles.......................1595 Babies and Forceps........................1966 Colonial Maternities......................2377 Debris....................................281Departures..................................320Notes.......................................331Glossary....................................413Bibliography................................417Index.......................................447

Chapter One

CROCODILES AND WEALTH

Crocodiles had "for many months been taking steady toll of men, women, and children" on the Upper Congo River not far from Yakusu. Dr. C. C. Chesterman described the terror in the Yakusu Quarterly Notes (YQN) in October 1933: "Never in living memory have attacks been so frequent and escapes so few." The crocodile killings suggested "special interventions of Providence," he added. Some rumored that somebody had "engaged the brutes in his service" to seize the Lokele from their canoes. Others thought that "large sums of money have been collected and oered and accepted in order to buy o this malevolence." One day, the hospital's hunter, Lofoli, shot one of these crocodiles, and its skin was mounted at the hospital "as a trophy and a nine days wonder for the curious." Local Congolese nicknamed the crocodile Avion. There was a historical specificity to this moral metaphor comparing an airplane with a human-eating water creature. Chesterman sensed the significance of this connection: he teased that local people were "putting two and two together and making five as usual," pointing out that the "saurian supremacy" coincided with the first routine schedule of flights to the nearby city of Stanleyville.

The crocodile attacks continued, and Chesterman sought more trophies. The next time that the doctor went out on medical tour by boat along the Congo River, he added Lofoli to the party. They were about sixty miles downriver from Yakusu and opposite Yaokombo, a bms chapel and dispensary site, where a Yakusu-trained nurse called Likenyule worked, when Lofoli shot another crocodile. Yakusu's senior missionary woman, Edith Millman, reported the incident in a private letter: "A big, fierce man-eating crocodile has been picking o men, boys, women, and girls. Our hunter went down and shot it. Great rejoicing. Sixty miles away from us, but these people are our neighbors." The triumphant party was greeted by "surging, dancing crowds," echoed Chesterman. He had the dead creature towed to Yaokombo. The next day was Sunday, and one reward for Dr. Chesterman's new trophy was an extra-crowded, open-air service where he read the names of the twenty-two crocodile victims who had died: "No need to ring the Church bell. From up and down and across the river and from the forest towns they came to mock, and stayed to pray." That evening, there seemed to be little question about who owned the crocodile. The gun had been the doctor's, and he sold o the meat. The butchering, however, was not so simple. When some men gathered to cut up the meat, Chesterman observed: "The butcher band hesitated at the water's edge, itching to get at the meat, yet fearing the penalty, till an old wizened fellow stepped forward. 'I am nearly in the grave' he said. 'What matter if I get it?'" What was "it," this "penalty" to which Chesterman referred? It was fala. Yet the doctor did not write this Lokele word. He translated for his British readers instead: "there lurks the fear of a mutilating disease (tertiary yaws) from contact with the crocodile."

In 1934, the Yakusu mission was over forty years old, the Yakusu church about thirty years old, and the Yakusu medical school and hospital some ten. I begin amid mission history, therefore, with this complex bundle of transactions that Dr. Chesterman narrated as a baing, enchanting story about the meaning of crocodiles. Chesterman, like all Yakusu missionaries, would have read "Lest We Should Waddle," an early conversation between a Yakusu missionary and a man called Saili, which was prominently interposed in H. Sutton Smith's circa 1911 book, Yakusu, the Very Heart of Africa.

"What are they doing there?"

"Buying meat, white man."

"What meat, Saili?"

"Crocodile's meat."

"Where did they get it from?"

"Oh, the owner of the hut there caught it in the night up the Lindi."

"Oh, let me see the head, Saili?"

"No, you can't see that."

"Why not?"

"Because it is all covered up."

"Well, you can uncover it to show it to me."

"No, we daren't do that, for if its eye sees us we are afraid that our legs will get like the crocodile's, and we shall all waddle."

"Well, what will you do with it?"

"Oh, when all the flesh is sold the man who found it will call all his friends round and he will provide plantain and fish, and we shall have a feast."

"But what about the crocodile's head?"

"Oh, that is put in a big pot and boiled, and boiled; then it is ground into a powder, and when a man is caught stealing or doing anything of that kind, he has to take some of this medicine to prove by the result whether he is the culprit or not."

"And does nothing happen to those who eat the flesh?"

"No, because during the feast the man who found it goes round with a twig in his hand, and strikes with it the arms and legs of his friends so that they may not get bandy-legged."

This conversation suggests that a specific event with implications for wealth and knowledge-the killing of a crocodile-prompted a ritual of medicine making, feasting, and flagellation. It also explains the ambivalent character of crocodiles, menacing yet necessary for poison-ordeal medicines. The poison used in such judicial procedures would derive its capacity to discern and judge from its consecrated character, its very derivation in spirit substance. The substance, in this Lokele case, was pulverized crocodile head. The conversation might well be an early rendition of a libeli-associated feast, translated into innocent, cryptic language for one of Yakusu's first missionaries. Crocodiles were also important in libeli medicines; after being in the forest for a week, initiates would have a mixture of medicines called bote rubbed into incisions in their backs. Bote consisted of crocodile bones, along with several kinds of lizards, millipedes, and a snakelike creature called litutandiya, which means water spirit.

Nothing disturbed Yakusu's missionaries more than the supposed flagellation, sumptuous feasting, and deceit of libeli. A dramatic series of events in the life of a village and often a district, libeli lasted for three or four months as male youth learned a secret language, took special oaths, and became scarred with special medicines. Libeli was simultaneously a rite of male initiation, social reproduction, and healing, a rite of composition and recomposition of-perhaps even alienation from-wealth. Adolescent boys, their already initiated male guides-known in Lokele as "mothers"-and elders withdrew into a small forest rich in medicinal plants for traumatic bodily trials, gestures of giving wealth to ancestral spirits, and fattening feasts. Symbolic replication was intricately reproductive in imagery, as men and boys metaphorically mimed phases of childbearing and female seclusion. In its ritual form and vocabulary, libeli simulated female reproduction and the dangers of childbearing. Yakusu's missionaries reductively regarded it as a masculine farce to deceive women. They were quick to notice that women were imaged as sources of pollution during libeli, but were also used as food producers and cooks. Libeli also involved composing, distributing, and consuming food and other goods of wealth. Bodily flagellation and scarring during libeli transmitted authority to invoke its power in word and gesture, in missionary words, to pop lilwa. This menacing, cursing movement of the hand and arm, like the gash on the back that conferred the right to make this aural, piercing gesture, was an expression of cutting lilwa.

Embedded in the English doctor's published account-and in a letter published by Yaokombo's nurse, Likenyule-was an anonymous, elliptical refrain, compendious of popular moral review, equating crocodiles with airplanes. Some complex understanding of the mischief of colonial magic and terror, of what Michael Taussig has called "magical mimesis on the colonial frontier," inhered in this metaphor. The coupling compared new human-controlled crocodiles or ndimo-murdering men transformed into crocodiles-with the new, equally lethal rainbows of the skies, airplanes. This was, after all, a Congolese world of leopard-men and crocodile-men, a world where people made power and won battles through magic and feasting, through poisoning stomachs and blocking wombs, and through killing and making medicines from body parts. Was the killing of a crocodile intended to kill an enemy ndimo and make medicines from his body? This seems likely. Certain is the fact that Chesterman's quest was to prove that the crocodile was just a crocodile, not a sorcerer's agent metamorphosed into one.

Chesterman's goal was not only to kill the "real" crocodile, but also to slay fala and libeli beliefs. His logic of surgery and surrogacy, of cutting out malignancies and inserting substitutes (such as church services and yaws injections), was mechanical. He wished to kill the demon of "superstition," and replace it with Christianity and medicine. Such brittle formulations survive only if we imagine this history as a colonial encounter of Europe confronting Africa, "moderns" confronting "traditionals." It is not enough to reverse these terms to say that the colonized confronted their colonizers. Congolese drew on a repertoire of metaphors and practices in flexible, creative, and dierential ways. They asserted their control, at least symbolically, over the objects that these new colonizers carried-papers, monies, airplanes, shots-as they forged relationships that served them in their new situations. Colonialism also produced violence, conflict, and excess; its multiple translators often struggled over their ingredients and their meanings.

Chesterman's narrow surgical formula of the-doc-kills-the-croc has a violent history in BMS-Free State complicities and erasures. His narrative is not unrelated to what has become an iconic site of imperial lies, of brutes exterminating so-called brutes in the name of civilization, of colonial racist and sexual fantasies gone mad in darkness. Nowhere perhaps illustrates better than King Leopold's Congo Free State what Taussig has termed a "colonial mirror of production," that is, "the mimicry by the colonizer of the savagery imputed to the savage." Henry Morton Stanley and King Leopold's lie of a Free State, this quintessential colonial negativity, produced-and was reproduced in-Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, E. D. Morel's Red Rubber, and Roger Casement's beleaguered diary entries: "Poor frail, self-seeking vexed mortality dust to dust-ashes to ashes-where then are the kindly heart the pitiless thought together vanished." It was also produced and reproduced in and near Yakusu's district, boosting the missionary premium put on enchanting stories.

"Red rubber" and the bodily violences that accompanied it certainly cried out for cults of healing, yet we must not romanticize libeli, either as the reproduction of tradition or as colonial rebellion. Similarly, we cannot romanticize nonmedicalized, nonhospitalized childbearing as "natural" or "traditional," as a shared experience of communal sisterhood. Libeli was not about preservation or community; those terms would be too inertial, that model too flat. Nor did libeli equal resistance. To see the situation in those terms would be to adopt the egocentric missionary model of a Dr. Chesterman. Libeli, like birth, was about danger and death, and it could be a violent, traumatic process for those who underwent it. It made boys men, able to kill and mutable, capable of transforming themselves into likenesses of spirits from the forest and water, likenesses of leopards and crocodiles. Libeli gave birth-gave new form and power-to men through a wrenching experience, not unlike being pushed and ripped out of a blocked birth canal. Wars and rivalries produced libeli, and those who claimed power and followers worked through pushing and cutting, marking and mutilating, through violent birthing.

A history of libeli opens up layers of memories associated with a water goddess named Ndiya and a rainbow counterpart known as Bonama in a region where crocodiles were key to healing and harming, cutting and cursing. Libeli takes us to the core of the ambivalent meanings surrounding human metamorphosis-whether in cutting, birthing, or eating-in a region where sorcery powers have long been morally imagined as capable of transforming humans into violent leopards, crocodiles, and invisible, hardworking slaves. This tangle of meanings is much more than a parallel symbolic realm that will, in turn, help us understand the realm of childbirth. Rather, a history of libeli provides the best introduction to the extraordinary social turbulence in this region from at least the time when the Zanzibari first began raiding for ivory and slaves during the 1870s through multiple colonial violences of conquest, red rubber, forced labor, taxation, hyperinflation, and medicalization. This history is also essential if we are to give proper weight to the bloated heroics and reductive platitudes of the obtrusive, if ever earnest, missionaries of this study.

Their willful ignorance and infringements contributed to producing the seemingly "docile bodies" of Yakusu and its vicinity. Studying libeli reveals aspects of reproductive ritual and body marking that are critical for understanding a history of birth work and medicalized childbearing in this colonial situation. As Nurse Gladys Owen recalled, when she first arrived in 1923, having "a woman patient was almost unheard of & I myself was never called out to a midwifery case." By 1929, a hospital was nearly completed, and Owen was wondering why local people were agreeing to hospital births and autopsies for the first time. This simultaneity in assent is uncanny. What produced this shift toward docile bodies cannot be understood, however, through a history of colonial biopower alone. Studying male reproductive ritual will yield broad insight into the meanings of birth work by men and women, providing essential context for understanding the history of medicalized childbearing in the Yakusu region from the 1920s on. It will broaden our focus from reproduction narrowly defined in demographic and medical terms as fecundity and the birth of children, to social and cultural reproduction. It will also shift our analytic entry point from colonial eugenics to a local therapeutic economy. In the context of the violence and aictions in the Congo at the turn of the century, a future hardly seemed assured. Reproduction of ospring and a patrimony, of libeli and social memory, was at risk. A history of libeli demonstrates how historical subjects, both individual and collective, reproduced themselves dierentially in the face of this aggression. This reproduction was neither homogeneous nor unified; it involved social division and struggle, violence and creativity; and it produced colonial evangelical middle figures who dared to imagine libeli big men and their followers as a world of uncivilized, pagan "lows."

This chapter and the following one consider how crocodiles figure in libeli as history and as therapeutic form. Yakusu missionaries observed public aspects of libeli on four occasions: twice before the founding of the Yakusu church, in 1900 and 1902, and twice afterward, in 1910 and 1924, when these performances were tumultuous for the church. Chesterman's version of events in 1934 contains a vocabulary of crocodiles and lilwa that was part of debate, conflict, and competition among missionaries and local Congolese from at least the turn of the century. This chapter traces this vocabulary in history and ritual through 1910, and situates libeli in the historical context of raiding, conquest, and violence before and after the arrival of the first missionaries in 1895. Chesterman also combined this older vocabulary of lilwa and crocodiles with another set of ingredients-airplanes, doctors, nurses, fala (tertiary yaws), and a hospital hunter bearing a gun-suggesting the newly medicalized, mobile, and fast modernity that emerged during the interwar period. The second chapter turns to this new, hybrid, and often divisive lexicon of the 1920s and 1930s. Together, these two chapters comprise a history of struggles over wealth and youth between the new church and Lokele elders. These struggles began over new forms of generating and composing wealth, of marking the body (clothing) and inscription (papers). They metamorphosed by the 1920s into competition over the signs and practices of missionary medicine.

These chapters have two purposes. One is to use this mischievous crocodile = airplane metaphor of the 1930s to immerse us in such doubling and shattering of meanings in the concrete, missionized world of Yakusu's district in the Belgian Congo; and then to trace these elements so deployed (crocodiles, airplanes, guns, doctors, and the like) in the memories and histories of this same little mission world as it hovered over and combined with the violences of Leopold's Free State in the Rome-Stanley Falls stretch of the former "Arab Zone." This first purpose is about creating a context for a history of wombs and docile-and not so docile-bodies in the Congo.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Duke University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 1999
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0822323664
• ISBN 13: 9780822323662
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 496
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile