Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo: New Sources for the History of Violence and Agency in Central Africa

Henriet, Benoît

Lauro, Amandine

Juste, Renaud

November 2023

20231101

Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo: New Sources for the History of Violence and Agency in Central Africa

ArchivesOfMilitaryCourtsInColonial.pdf

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History in Africa

https://ulb.academia.edu/AmandineLauro

Article de revue

EN

This article offers an overview of the recently rediscovered archives of the Conseils de Guerre—the military court—of colonial Congo (1885–1960). As a long-considered lost collection of court records encompassing seventy years of testimonies of colonial military crimes, these archives offer unparalleled insights on the complex relation between law, impunity, and armed violence in colonial Central Africa. The article first sheds light on the history of those records and on their ongoing digitization in the context of debates about the contested heritage of Belgian “displaced” colonial public archives. It then sketches out several promising avenues for academic research and public history projects that they could help document, notably on the controversial history of violence in the Belgian empire and on the multifaceted nature of African agency under colonial rule.