Erotics of Sin: Promiscuity, Polygamy and Homo-Erotics in Missionary Photography from the Congolese Rainforest

Abstract

Through a contextualized reading of a series of photographs taken by Premonstratensian missionaries in the Belgian Congo, this article shows the “porno-tropic” dynamics at work in their photographic practices and politics of representation. The analysis of pictures of black women and girls, black men and boys, reveals a missionary economy of desire as an “erotics of sin,” fueled by tensions between morality and pornography, and integrating both misogynous and homo-erotic aspects into its imaginative geography of transgression.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to Fr. Ivo Billiaert of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Postel for helping me with my archival research and for allowing the reproduction of some of its photographs; and to Prof. Filip De Boeck, Dr. Theodore Trefon and Prof. Christian Lund for reading and commenting upon the manuscript of this article. All original photo captions in Dutch have been translated by me.

Notes

Note the differences between Fanon [1986], Fabian [2000], Hyam [1990], Stoler [2002] and Young [1995]. For a discussion of colonialism and homosexuality, see e.g., Aldrich [2003] and Holden and Ruppel [2003].

While I regularly came across stories about sexual relations between Congolese women or girls and Belgian state agents or European workers for colonial companies, I have never found any indication of similar relations with missionaries. Of course, the absence of such stories cannot be taken as proof of the missionaries' (interracial) sexual abstinence but it nevertheless points to their self-conscious behavior which, according to villagers in the region, contrasted strongly with the actual sexual practices of Congolese priests.

In 1898 the vast Uele area in the northeast of the Congo Free State was appointed to Belgian missionaries from the Premonstratensian Abbey of Tongerloo, who started their activities from the military outpost of Ibembo on the Itimbiri River. After the takeover of the colony by the Belgian state in 1908 they created a new post in Moenge on the southern shore of the Itimbiri in 1913. In 1921 they founded the post of Lolo at the source of a small river of the same name and moved it toward the Itimbiri in 1924. In 1926 the Abbey of Tongerloo transferred the area around Lolo and Moenge to its Belgian sister abbey in Postel. This area of approximately 10.000 km² comprised the southwestern portion of the Uele area, and would later become the small diocese of Lolo. The missionaries from Postel took over Moenge, made Lolo their principal base, and founded the post of Ekama near Bunduki in 1936. In 1937 their unofficial mission area became officially independent from the Tongerloo missionaries in Buta, as the Apostolic Prefecture of Lolo. In 1938 Protestant missionaries from the U.F.M. (Unevangelized Fields Mission) settled in nearby Ekoko and set the stage for decades of religious rivalry. During and after World War II more and more missionaries arrived in the prefecture to found other posts: Yaligimba (1941) in the labor camps of the oil palm plantations of the Huileries du Congo Belge, the posts of Loloka (1941) and Yamolota (1957) south of the Itimbiri River, the small and isolated post of Mombwassa (1958) near the northeastern edge of their prefecture and the post of Tsimbi (1959) in the northwestern corner. After independence the prefecture was granted the status of a fully-fledged diocese in 1962 and white missionaries started to work alongside Congolese priests. Nevertheless the white bishop Mgr. Waterschoot remained in office until 1988, when he was replaced by his Congolese successor, Mgr. Maemba. From 13 white missionaries in 1938, their number gradually increased to 30 just before independence, and then diminished again until the few remaining missionaries left at the end of the 1980s.

Vansina [1966] claimed that the Mbuja and Binza people were closely related, while the Baati were part of a different group of Apagibeti-Boa. Pre-colonial regional history is scarcely known, yet survives in local stories about regional migrations and warfare between Mbudza, Bati and Zande chiefs from the north. It appears that by the end of the 19th century the region was dominated by different Mbudza groups whose legendary heartland of Okombo lies at Wasalaka, a group of villages near the Lolo mission.

A trading firm founded in 1892 under the control of King Leopold II. It acquired a concession of 160,000 km² in the Mongala Basin and concentrated on the violent extraction of natural rubber [Buelens 2007].

All the translations from Dutch in this article are mine: from Pillot [1966], Van den Bergh [1933] and all quotations from the monthly magazine Molenijzer.

All references to Molenijzer indicate the year of publication, volume number and issue number, as in [MI 1952, 5(10)].

Interview with several neighbors of the mission, Lolo, November 23, 2010.

See note 8.

Interview with village elders, Bunduki, October 28, 2010.

For a recent account and contextualization of “soul-stealing,” see Behrend [2011]. For more examples of ponoli tales, see Hunt [1999: 189] and Droogers [1980: 57–58].

Interview with a ponoli victim, Kpengbe, May 10, 2011.

While ponoli stories about missionaries are quite common, similar stories are absent in any memories of agents working for colonial companies. This remarkable difference might be explained by the relative visibility of labor exploitation: quite obvious and clearly visible in plantations and factories, and ponoli tales were not needed to explain the origin of wealth; while the hidden source of money at the mission posts required additional explanation translating the exploitation of the body into the kidnapping of the “soul.” At the same time ponoli stories about other white men are extremely scarce, as they were considered to be firmly outside the sphere of witchcraft, while missionaries were perceived as being particularly competent in “mystical practices.”

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Thomas Hendriks

THOMAS HENDRIKS, currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, in Leuven, Belgium, specializes in issues of labor, race and desire in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Having worked there for the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium), his current doctoral research is based on an ethnography of a logging concession in the Congolese rainforest. E-mail: [email protected]