‘C’était bien à l’Époque’: Work and Leisure among Retrenched Mineworkers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the significance of work and leisure in (post)colonial Lubumbashi as it emerges from the narratives of ex-workers of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) and its successor, Gécamines. In the ex-mineworkers’ narratives, kazi (work) refers to a period when employment stood for prosperity, reflected in material benefits such as housing, food, wages, healthcare provision, education, prestige and, not least, leisure activities. The ex-mineworkers in question are members of the Collectif des ex-agents de la Gécamines, who all lost their jobs in 2003 in a deal with the World Bank to save the run-down company. Following a severe and sustained economic decline in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which began before the workers lost their jobs and continued for a long time after, the ex-mineworkers speak of this work life and of the attendant leisure activities with an immense nostalgia for an ‘object of loss’. This article examines the narratives of loss of income and the subsequent radical redefinition of leisure – which is also seen as a loss – paying particular attention to the ways in which the ex-mineworkers link these matters to notions of masculinity.

KEYWORDS:

• Union Minière du Haut-Katanga
• Katanga
• leisure
• nostalgia
• masculinity
• mineworkers

Acknowledgements

This article was written within the scope of the Austrian Science Fund granted project ‘Employment-tied Housing in (post)colonial Africa’ (Project no. P29566-G28, Department of African Studies, University of Vienna). All translations are the author’s own.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was declared by the author.

Notes

1 The welfare policy was gradually introduced between 1890 and 1944 (Vanthemsche 2012, 47).

2 For a detailed discussion of this approach during this research see the work I did with Carl-Philipp Bodenstein (Bodenstein & Waldburger 2021) and also work I published in 2021 (Waldburger 2021).

3 In the context of the narratives as expressed by the interviewees, deuxième bureau is a term used by married men to describe an extra-marital affair.

4 Elisabethville was planned according to a drawing-board plan that would implement Belgian colonial apartheid: initially a ‘white town’ that was separated from the township for the Africans, which was called cité indigène, and a neutral zone (cordon sanitaire) separating the two areas of the city – a common practice in sub-Saharan colonial cities. For a discussion on this, see, for example, Piet Clement (2013); Johan Lagae, Sofie Boonen and Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu (2016) and Johan Lagae and Sofie Boonen (2015).

5 Timothy Makori (2019, 111–116) who also writes about the ODV and their nostalgia, raises the question what configures the local experiences of time: ‘[g]iven the tumultuous history of the emergence of pensioners and creuseurs in Congo, what particular event can be designated as the rupture that fundamentally altered economic life in Katanga?’ Makori’s interest focuses on his interviewees’ experiences in ways that often confound strict periodicity such as ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ era, ‘industrial past’ and ‘liberalized present’, or the end of the Cold War.

6 On average, wages had not been paid for 21 months (Rubbers 2015, 214).

7 By creating these foyers, the UMHK acted in line with the Belgian welfare programme. The UMHK and its successor actively promoted the nuclear family and women’s roles and responsibilities. For a detailed discussion on the intertwining fields of health, hygiene, home and women’s roles in the same period, see Waldburger (2020). The social foyers were, as Nancy Hunt (1990, 449) writes, ‘a colonial project to revise and refashion gender roles, family life, and domestic space enacted by European nuns and social workers and African women within classrooms, households, and an African urban community’.

8 The films had to be commented on by a person responsible for the screening, as the films were produced by the Services de l’Information du Congo Belge for a country that had a wide variety of spoken languages. However, the commentary was not only seen as necessary because of the correct choice of language for the region, but also because the ‘information service leaders soon noticed that simply translating the subtitles was not enough. The images required a more elaborate commentary in order to avoid any misunderstanding of the educative message’ (Bouchard 2010, 95).

9 The UMHK believed it was vital to start teaching in Swahili so that it would become the general language throughout Haut Katanga. Hence, the schools provided for the workers’ children – envisaged as the company’s future workforce – prioritised Swahili from the moment of enrolment. However, knowledge of at least basic French was also promoted among the children of blue-collar workers. For the company’s future managers and senior workers, French was vital and was therefore taught and regarded as the language of prestige and power.

10 All interviewee names have been changed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniela Waldburger

Daniela Waldburger is a senior lecturer in the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD (2012) in African Studies from the University of Vienna. Earlier she studied social anthropology, African linguistics and general linguistics at the University of Zurich. Since 2004 she has been teaching Swahili and linguistics (sociolinguistics, language and power, discourse analysis, visual grammar etc.) at the Department of African Studies. Beside her research interests in Swahili studies she has a strong research interest in the intertwining fields of language (mis)use and power (ab)use and she is working with a ‘shared authority approach’ in rethinking African studies.