ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 breaks from the chronological order of the previous chapters in order to pursue in more depth points arising from Chapters 1 to 4. It explores key Congolese productions of evidence, reading these as transculturated texts that reveal the impact of colonialism’s culture of terror upon the lives of colonised peoples. Chapter 5 focuses on the hand-cutting phenomenon that was synonymous, in Congo reformist writings, with atrocities. Drawing upon a small number of well-documented cases from the Equateur district in 1903–4, it investigates attempts by Congolese peoples to bring such injuries to the attention of European observers. It delves into problematic instances in which hands were cut from bodies, and corpses exhumed, to prove murders, reading these alongside the questionable nomination by Casement of the youngster Epondo as a victim of mutilation. Drawing on insights from the anthropologist Michael Taussig’s concept of cultural terror, and from the field of medical history in Central Africa and Europe, I read these examples as Congolese efforts to overcome incredulity at their stories by conforming to the colonisers’ desire for material, measureable proof. The presentation of bodies and body-parts as evidence reflected the violent rationalism of a colony in which military forces measured their productivity by collecting limbs of their slain victims, or perhaps the limbs of the living should evidence need to be counterfeited. But they also reflect ironically upon the Congo reformers’ own desire for quantifiable truth about a situation which often defied reason and proof, and they resonate with problems that the reformers shared with the colonial authorities in placing their trust in what were proverbially known as ‘black men’s tales’. Chapter 5 ends with a call to historians to focus their efforts of understanding violence in the Congo Free State not upon the evidence of missing limbs but instead upon the survivors of brutality, considering how their continuing precarious existence, and their traces in archive, can encourage reflection upon the methods and priorities of historical inquiry.
