Last January, the Congo Research Network (CRN) was organizing its sixth international conference, themed “Congolese Horizons: Weaving Temporalities in Congo Studies,” held at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University (GSU), Sharjah (UAE). Amandine Lauro and Brecht Kreynen both presented papers on the history of military justice in colonial Congo in the first panel of the conference, respectively on “Transimperial Experiences: Revisiting the History of Belgian-Congolese Armed Forces in World War II” and “Weaponizing Military Order: Debating Military Discipline in
Congo’s Military Courts (1904-1918)”.
Category: News

The DIGICOLJUST-2 team and the archivists of INACO have joined forces for a mission aiming to catalogue and ensure the preservation of an important collection of 11.335 personal files of Force Publique soldiers held in the DR Congo National Archives. This pilot project has benefited from a funding from the British Library, via the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP). EAP finances the cataloguing and preservation of vulnerable collections of historical documents, and contributes to the valuation of precious sources which often carry marginalized, subaltern and silenced voices. The present mission was an immediate follow-up to the visit of an INACO delegation to the State Archives of Brussels a few weeks prior.

In the timespan of a short week, the INACO and DIGICOLJUST-2 teams have worked together to achieve three objectives. First, to obtain a complete overview of the sources at hand. Second, to start the process of cataloguing ten percent of this collection in the form of a systematic spreadsheet. And third, to guarantee the long-term conservation of this precious archival legacy by repackaging the collection in acid-free boxes.
With the help of head archivist Albert Kulinde, the team was able to effectively assess the scope of the collection, and to adjust its work plan accordingly. In order to efficiently proceed with the cataloguing, Congolese and Belgian partners teamed up to fill spreadsheets that contained the essential information pertaining to each individual dossier (name of the file, name of the soldier, service number, year of enrollment, and general remarks regarding the file’s content). We were only able to effectively pursue this task thanks to the prior existence of an excellent paper inventory of the collection assembled by INACO archivists. By the end of the week, around 3512 files were effectively included in the new database, which amounts to more than 30% of the entire collection. This spreadsheet is being completed by INACO archivists, and will ensure a direct and efficient access to the collection to researchers, students and citizens.

Furthermore, the EAP grant allowed us to purchase and ship to Kinshasa essential archival material. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the protective containers that we brought along only reached INACO on the next to last day of the mission. Once again, only the smooth and intensive collaboration of all the involved parties allowed for the repackaging of hundred boxes – amounting to 26% of the archival series – in the span of a few hours.

Although the mission only lasted for a week, it led to several promising outcomes, and opened the door to future synergies between Congolese and Belgian scientific institutions. First, it contributed to strengthening the bounds between INACO, the SAB, ULB and VUB. Second, it improved the access and preservation of an important archival collection, which will be crucial for future research on the Force Publique and its court-martials. Third, it allow for the exchange of skills and knowledge between all the parties involved. We look forward to further collaborating with INACO, both within and beyond the scope of DIGICOLJUST-2.
Visit of a delegation from INACO to Brussels
A delegation of archivists from the National Archives of DR Congo (INACO) recently visited Brussels at the invitation and initiative of the DIGICOLJUST-2 project and of the State Archives of Belgium. This initiative, aimed at fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange in archival management and digital preservation, facilitated insightful discussions on best practices and strategies for sharing archival heritage related to the colonial past in Belgium and in Congo.





Led by its general director, Mr. Aimé Kasongo Mande, the delegation from the INACO was welcomed for several working sessions at the States Archives of Belgium under the lead and coordination of DIGICOLJUST-2’s postdoctoral collaborator Reinout Vander Hulst. Discussions took place with the various teams and projects’ collaborators working on the management of colonial archives of the AGR. The delegation also visited the Africa Museum in Tervuren and its archival collections. Last but not least, a significant part of the visit was dedicated to workshops and meetings with team’s members from the ULB and the VUB, as DIGICOLJUST-2 partners, so as to exchange on the challenges and prospects of our mutual collaboration on Brussels’ and Kinshasa’s archival collections related to the history of the Force Publique.




These discussions also aimed to prepare for the DIGICOLJUST-2 team’s upcoming mission to the INACO archives in December, thanks to the support of the British Library and its Endangered Archives Program (with a new project/funding led by Reinout Vander Hulst (AGR) and co-supervized with DIGICOLJUST-2 co-promotors Benoît Henriet (VUB), Amandine Lauro (ULB) and Marie Van Eeckenrode (AGR), more information to come). Our team is looking forward this next step of our partnership with INACO around the “shared” archival heritage of the Force Publique and its disciplinary archives.
This autumn, postdoctoral researcher and archivist Reinout Vander Huslt took part in the last Biennal Conference of the Association of African Studies in Germany at the University of Bayreuth to present and discuss some of the results and challenges of the DIGICOLJUST project. In a sesssion devoted to “Colonial Archives and Violence: Accessibility, Digitization and Ethical Challenges”, Vander Hulst reflected on archival practices in relation to the project and to the sensibility of the very nature of colonial court archives.

An event organized by the VUB and ULB as part of the DIGICOLJUST-2 and ‘Rebel Soldiers on Trial’ projects. More information on : https://shoc.research.vub.be/en/lecture-by-prof-dr-stacey-hynd
A new DIGICOLJUST publication
We are happy to announce that the article “Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo: New Sources for the History of Violence and Agency in Central Africa” has just been published in History in Africa. In this open access paper, Benoît Henriet, Amandine Lauro and Renaud Juste detail the history of the Conseils de Guerre‘s records, their ongoing digitization, and their rich epistemic potential. They use specific judicial cases to show how these archives can bring new insights into the history of violence and African agency in the Belgian empire.
On June 28, Amandine Lauro was invited by the International Research and Documentation Centre for War Crimes Trials (ICWC) at Philipps University Marburg to present DIGICOLJUST’s research results and on-going developements. The ICWC’s work is dedicated to research on international criminal law within the wider context of transitional justice as well as to the documentation of (historical) war crimes trials.
On 31 May, Benoît Henriet was at the 9th European Conference on African Studies in Cologne to present a chapter that he is currently writing with Renaud Juste. This work in progress is extensively based on the archives of the Conseils de Guerre, and shed light on their epistemic potential in the study of revolt and indigenous agency in colonial Congo.

In this paper, Henriet and Juste attempt to shed light on how the 1931 Kwango revolt both exposed and reconfigured social hierarchies and collective solidarities in Southwest Belgian Congo. The murder and dismemberment of Belgian public servant Maximilien Balot by a group of Congolese adepts of the Tupelepele millenarian movement on 31 May 1931, marked the highest point of the long-broiling discontent of local communities against their social, economic and political standing. In response to this unprecedented event, the colonial authorities put an extensive region under a state of emergency, in order to quell the allegedly fast-spreading rebellion. In this legal state of exception, which lasted between June and September 1931, civilian courts were replaced by court-martials, which were in charge of pursuing those believed to be the adepts and leaders of the movement.
The proceedings of these courts, which have never been used by historians until today, shed light on the profound transformations of the flows of power, hierarchies and solidarity entailed by the ongoing revolt. For instance, both menial objects and symbolically charged body parts garnered new meanings, values and uses. Henriet and Juste endeavour to investigate how everyday objects such as trunks, administrative documents and handkerchiefs, as well as the body parts of Balot, were enmeshed in new discursive frameworks, new value scales, and were given new meanings. As highlighted in the vignette they used in the presentation’s introduction, the parallel uses and distribution of human remains and fiscal tokens sketch out the contours of a transgressive economy, which help us better understand what revolting meant for the involved parties. In a time of uncertainty, new frameworks were devised for power in its many forms to flow in new directions, which are made visible in the mobilisation of these items in new transactional arrangements.
The presentation was part of the panel ‘Structures of Violence: punishment in Africa from the colonial era to the present’, organised by Prof. Stacey Hynd (University of Exeter) and April Jackson (University of Leicester). Stay tuned for more information soon on the published outcome of this research!
DIGICOLJUST has fulfilled its main promise in terms of the accessibility and dissemination of archival material. It is now possible to consult the entire digitized collection of the Conseils de Guerre of Léopoldville online, as well as to its inventory and finding aid.

We want to thank again DIGICOLJUST team members and job students who worked tirelessly to achieve this goal, as well as to the State Archives of Belgium who both actively supported and participated to this endeavour.
We hope that the online availability of these documents will lead to fruitful and exciting research prospects.
State Archives of Belgium’s archivists and DIGICOLJUST’s co-coordinators Marie Van Eeckenrode & Pierre-Alain Tallier have just published a new article on the challenges of decolonization as seen from an archivist’s lens. In the latest issue of the Journal of Belgian History, they situate colonial archives in the larger public debate on colonial legacies. They reflect on what the “decolonization” of archives means and confront these definitions with the current reality of the Belgian legal, political and archival context in this regard. In doing so, they come back on some of the initiatives and collaborations developped in the context of the project DIGICOLJUST.
The article is available in open access on the website of the Journal of Belgian History.
