# Belgian Congo Belgium annexed the [[Congo Free State]] on 15 November 1908 and governed it until independence on 30 June 1960. The Colonial Charter nominally prohibited forced labour. In practice the state continued to compel it by less conspicuous methods, and the historiography — Vellut, Seibert, and the Oxford *Research Encyclopedia* treatment — reads the transition as **more continuity than change.** ## The colonial trinity Rule rested on three interlocking institutions: the **state**, the **Catholic missions**, and the **companies**, with the administration routinely assisting the companies against labour resistance. By the Second World War, Société Générale de Belgique controlled roughly **70% of the Congolese economy**. The three great chartered parastatals were founded within a decade of each other and mapped the country's mineral geography as it still stands: - **[[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]]** (1906) — copper, cobalt, uranium, radium, in the Katanga copper belt - **Forminière** (1906) — diamonds at Tshikapa and Bakwanga in the Kasai, with 25% American money behind it via Thomas Fortune Ryan and Daniel Guggenheim - **Kilo-Moto** (gold confirmed 1903, state *régie* 1919) — the Ituri and Haut-Uélé goldfields ## How labour was obtained Not by wages, at first. The **Bourse du Travail du Katanga** (1910) recruited through chiefs paid ten francs a head, backed by soldiers and company police, with quotas assigned per village. **Hut and poll taxes** were the state's instrument for forcing men into wage labour; identification systems tracked deserters. In 1922 Belgium legalised physical violence, including whipping, to enforce labour contracts. Mine-worker mortality between 1913 and 1917 ran at **70 to 140 deaths per thousand per year** — the sharpest number in the whole labour record. The shift came in 1927–28 with **"stabilisation"** under UMHK's medical director Léopold Mottoulle: three-year contracts replacing six-month tickets, mandatory by 1931 and covering 98% of the workforce, with families brought into company camps and given schools, clinics and rations. This is usually told as a humanitarian improvement. It is better read as the moment coercion was converted into total institutional control — the company acquiring the worker's whole life rather than renting his labour. In the countryside, *cultures obligatoires* compelled peasants to grow cotton, coffee, groundnuts and rice for export under administrative supervision, intensifying sharply during the wartime *effort de guerre*. ## Elisabethville, 9 December 1941 Wartime inflation raised the minimum annual cost of living 71% between May 1940 and August 1941, to 1,503 francs, against worker earnings of roughly 700. UMHK refused to negotiate. African workers struck and assembled at the Elisabethville football stadium; the governor ordered troops to fire. The official toll was 45 men, two women and a child killed with 74 wounded; roughly 50 more are thought to have died of wounds, and some accounts put the total above 100. Two days later UMHK granted a wage rise of 25–50%. The governor was promoted and decorated. Organised African labour resistance in the Congo was effectively broken for the rest of the colonial period — which is the point of the episode. ## The uranium The [[Shinkolobwe]] deposit, identified in 1915, was worked first for radium and gave UMHK a near-monopoly of that market by 1926. Its uranium was a near-worthless by-product until 1939. What [[Edgar Sengier]] then did with it — see [[Shinkolobwe and the Manhattan Project]] — connects a Katangan mine shaft to Hiroshima, and remains the single most consequential thing ever taken out of Congolese ground. ## The exit By 1960 the colony had produced perhaps a dozen African university graduates and no Congolese army officers at all. UMHK was supplying 60% of the West's uranium, 73% of world cobalt and 10% of world copper; Katangese copper alone generated a third of all Congo revenue. Independence arrived on 30 June 1960; the Force Publique mutinied on 5 July; the copper province seceded on 11 July. See [[Katanga Secession]]. ## See also [[Congolese History Hub]] · [[Congo Free State]] · [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] · [[Zairianization]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]