Edmond Leplae, ‘“Plans et photographies d’habitations pour plantations coloniales,” Bulletin Agricole du Congo belge II, no. 1 (March 1911): 1–77.
For a—hagiographic—biography, see M. Van den Abeele, “Edmond Leplae,” Biographie Coloniale Belge, vol. IV, Brussels, 1955, 515-518.
The pioneering era can roughly be defined as the period of the Congo Free State, starting in 1885 and running till 1908.
All translations from Leplae’s original French text are ours.
In contemporaneous sources this operation was described as a “peaceful penetration.” On the history of the Mission Agricole, the underlying politics and its ultimate failure, see Charlotte Vekemans en Yves Segers, ‘Pénétration pacifique’ en agrarische ontwikkeling. Landbouwkolonisatie in Katanga, 1910-1920, Journal of Belgian History, XLVIII, 2018, 4, pp. 38-66.
Of the 219 images produced, several were published in later issues of the Bulletin Agricole du Congo Belge. This photographic survey is part of the photo-collection of the Africa Museum in Tervuren, and part of the Office Colonial fund, with reference nos. AP.0.1.16xx, AP.0.1.17xx and AP.0.1.18xx.
Edmond Leplae, Plans et photographies, op. cit., p. 5.
The notion of “tool of empire” was first coined in the seminal, yet by now contested book by Daniel R. Headrick entitled The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism In the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford university press, 1981). The year 1885 is commonly see as the start of Belgium’s colonization, with the founding of the Congo Free State. In 1908, the Belgian government would take over the Congo Free State from king Leopold II, and renaming the territory the Belgian Congo. Congo gained its independence on 30 June 1960.
Johan Lagae, ‘Modern Living in the Congo: the 1958 colonial housing exhibit and postwar domestic practices in the Belgian Congo’, Journal of Architecture, vol. 9, Winter 2004, pp. 477-494.
An extensive body of literature exists today on the notion of the “[colonial
archive,” including contributions from scholars like Achille Mbembe, Ann Laura Stoler, Carolyn Hamilton, and Ariella Azoulay to name but a few. An interesting discussing of this notion in relation to writing a critical architectural history is to be found in Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture In Germany (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).
For a first investigation of this theme, drawing on a broad range of contemporary source material, see Johan Lagae, ‘In search of a « comme chez soi ». The ideal colonial house in Congo (1885-1960)’, Cahiers Africaines, nos. 43-44, 2001, pp. 239-282.
Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain : Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton (N.J.): Princeton university press, 2009. One of the ways to do this is to engage in artistic practices of remixing, performing, and even violating the archive. See Maëline Le Lay, Dominique Malaquais & Nadine Siegert, Archive (re)mix. Vues d’Afrique, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015.
Several of the architectural drawings he presented in the Bulletin Agricole can be traced back to contemporary publications such as the Bouwkundig Album. Verzameling van Ontwerpen uitgevoerd door den Waterstaat en ‘s Lands Burgerlijke Openbare Werken in Nederlands-Indië, published in 1900 by the Vereeniging van Bouwkundigen in Nederlandsch-Indië. Berkhemer, K.A., Bouwkundig Album, Vereeniging van Bouwkundigen in Nederlandsch-Indië. National Archives, The Netherlands, inventory no. 862.
Leplae, Plans et photographies, p. 5.
On Hector Maertens’ mission and the consequent reform of the Public Works Department it initiated, see Johan Lagae, “Kongo zoals het is”. Drie architectuurverhalen uit de Belgische kolonisatiegeschiedenis (1920-1960), PhD dissertation, Ghent University, 2002. Simon De Nys-Ketels and Robby Fivez have further investigated this topic in their PhD research on respectively the design of hospital infrastructure and the introduction of concrete technology in colonial Congo (for full references, see footnote 23).
Among others, German military officers and engineers, as well as Italian judges and doctors, were recruited. See, for instance, Jean-Luc Vellut (ed.), La mémoire du Congo. Le temps colonial, Tervuren/Gent : Africa Museum / Snoeck, 2005.
For a discussion of the practice of “selective borrowing” in colonial Congo, see G. A. Bremner, Johan Lagae & Mercedes Volait, ‘Intersecting Interests: Developments in Networks and Flows of Information and Expertise in Architectural History’, Fabrications, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 227-245.
Dirk van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur : Deutsche Planungen Für Eine Erschließung Afrikas 1880 Bis 1960, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004.
This also becomes clear in a later, 1931 publication in which Leplae presents a wide array of historical typologies of farm buildings in a longue durée-perspective : Edmond Leplae, Les constructions des exploitations agricoles en Belgique et au Congo belge, Leuven : Leuven University Press, 1931, 3 vols.
Leplae, Plans et photographies, p. 15.
Irène Cheng, ‘Structural Racialism in Modern Architectural Theory’, in Irène Cheng, Charles L. Davis II & Mabel O. Wilson (eds.), Race and Modern Architecture. A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the present, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburg, 2020, pp. 134-152. Recent scholarship has convincingly argued that in terms of building techniques and materials applied in early colonial constructions, Belgian colonizers drew in significant ways on local and situated forms of knowledge. Simon De Nys-Ketels, Myths and realities of the Belgian medical model colony : a genealogy, PhD dissertation, Ghent University, 2021 (esp. pp. 133-173); Robby Fivez, A concrete state : constructing materials and building ambitions in the (Belgian) Congo, PhD Dissertation, Ghent University, 2023 (esp. the chapter ‘The Lime Hypothesis’, pp. 135-186).
See Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment, London: Paul Kegan, 1976; Jiat-Hwee Chang & Anthony D. King, ‘Towards a genealogy of tropical architecture: Historical fragments of power-knowledge, built environment and climate in the British colonial territories’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, no. 32, 2011, pp. 283–300.
The voice of doctors would remain prominent in the debate on architecture in the Belgian Congo throughout the colonial period. Johan Lagae, ‘In search of a « comme chez soi », art. cit. (footnote 11).
Leplae, Plans et photographies, p. 14.
Leplae, Plans et photographies, p. 17.
For a discussion of the use of domestic servants in the Dutch Indies, see Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Women in the Colonial State. Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000, pp. 89-91.
This practice nevertheless also allowed for forms of self-empowerment and was part of the long history of the so-called ‘sapologie africaine’, the peculiar phenomenon of transgressing European vestimentary codes that continues till today in cities like Brazzaville and Kinshasa. The work of scholars like Didier Gondola and Manuel Charpy can be mentioned here. See, for instance, the 2017 podcast by Manuel Charpy entitled ‘Une histoire de la sapologie africaine’, https://www.ifmparis.fr/fr/podcasts/une-histoire-de-la-sapologie-africaine.
See, among others, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu & Rosario Giordano (eds.), Lubumbashi 1910-2010. Mémoire d’une ville industrielle. Paris : l’Harmattan, 2010. For a particularly stimulating spatial investigation of the lived realities of domestic servants, see Rebecca Ginsburg, At Home with Apartheid : the Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service In Johannesburg, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Leplae, Plans et photographies, p. 5.
Catenius-van der Meijden, J.M.T., Ons Huis in Indië. Handboek bij de keuze, de inrichting, de bewoning en de ‘Verzorging van het huis met bijgebouwen en erf, naar de eischen der hygiëne, benevens raadgevingen en wenken op huishoudelijk gebied. Semarang: Masman en Stroink, 1908, pp. 9
Johan Lagae, ‘Educating the Colonial Spouse or Pushing the Agenda of Tropical Modernism in the Belgian Congo? Architecture and the Coloniser’s House in the pages of the Bulletin de l’Union des Femmes Coloniales’, in Alice Santiago Faria, Anne Shelley and Sandra Ataíde Lobo (eds.), The Built Environment through the Prism of the Colonial Periodical Press, Routledge, Oxon/New York, 2023 pp. 130-157.
As Ann Laura Stoler noted: “colonial control and profits depended on a continual readjustment of the parameters of European membership, limiting who had access to property and privilege and who did not.” Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 39.
Hilde Heynen and André Loeckx, “Scenes of Ambivalence: Concluding Remarks on Architectural Patterns of Displacement,” Journal of Architectural Education 2, 1998, 100.
Leplae, Plans et photographies, p. 17.
Ibid., p. 17.
J.M. Jenssen, Le matériel colonial, no. 9, 1913, p. 456.
The practice among European men of having an African concubine was not only widespread during the early decades of Belgian colonization in Central Africa, but at the time rather tolerated by the colonial authorities. From the 1910s onwards, it became gradually questioned as part of a policy of replacing colonial bachelors with families. See Amandine Lauro, Coloniaux, ménagères et prostituées au Congo belge (1885-1930), Loverval: Labor, 2005.
See Nicolas Esgain, ‘Scènes de la vie quotidienne à Élisabethville dans les années vingt’ & Laurence Feuchaux, ‘Vie coloniale et faits divers à Léopoldville (1920–1940),’ in Jean-Luc Vellut (ed.), Itinéraires croisés de la modernité au Congo Belge (1920–1950), op cit., pp. 57–70 & pp. 71–102.
Vekemans en Segers, ‘Pénétration pacifique’ en agrarische ontwikkeling’, art. cit. (note 5).
Important work on dismantling such hegemonic narratives has been done by scholars like Nancy Hunt, Benoit Henriet, or Gillian Mathys. The need for such a perspective is also explicitly mentioned in the substantial report of the Congo Commission (DOC 55 1462/003), submitted to the Belgian Government on 26 October 2021 (in particular in the contributions by historians Sarah Van Beurden and Gillian Mathys). For a synthetic overview of the current research on Congo’s colonial history, produced by a wide array of scholar and targeting a broad readership, see Idesbald Goddeeris, Guy Vantemsche & Amandine Lauro (eds.), Le Congo Colonial : Une Histoire En Questions, Waterloo: Renaissance du livre, 2020.
Johan Lagae, ‘Modern Living in the Congo’, art. cit. (note 11).
Most of the images that accompany this article are film stills taken from the double screen projection “Objects that are dear to him,” 12’45”, HD video loop, 2023, an installation by Paoletta Holst and Johan Lagae first presented at CIVA, Brussels, in the context of the exhibition Style Congo. Heritage & Heresy. The video project addresses the guidelines on how to build in the tropics put forward by Edmond Leplae in a 1911 issue of the Bulletin Agricole du Congo belge, and confronts these archival materials with the photographic survey Leplae produced between 1910 and 1914 in Katanga. Through a series of comments by historian Donatien Dibwe Dia Mwembu (Université de Lubumbashi, DRC) and architectural historian Johan Lagae (Ghent University, BE), and reframing the materials by means of different hands, the projection seeks to mobilize the colonial archive as the beginning of a reflection on how such guidelines can form the starting point today to write an alternative, critical history of architecture as a tool of empire.
The video loop “Objects that are dear to him” as well as this essay are based on research conducted in the context of ongoing investigations on colonial architecture at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Ghent University, in particular as part of the FWO-funded research project no. G.090522N, entitled “Interior(ized) Frontiers. Spatializing colonial housing politics and domestic cultures in the former Dutch East Indies through a mobilization of the ‘colonial archive’” (supervisors: Johan Lagae & Wouter Davidts (Ugent), David Setiadi Hutama (Department of Architecture, Universitas Pelita Harapan, Indonesia); and PhD candidate: Paoletta Holst). The authors would like to thank Sammy Baloji, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Silvia Francheschini for inviting them to contribute to the Style Congo. Heritage & Heresy-exhibition at CIVA, Brussels, and to Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu and Mamadou Sanogo for their contribution in the production of the video-project.