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Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938

University of California Press

I compiled a register of two, three hundred basic words in the Russian language; these I had translated into as many languages and jargons as I could find. There are already more than two hundred of them. Every day I took one of those words and wrote it in all the languages I could get together . . . Only because I would eventually have regretted it had I burned this mass of paper . . . did I ask Professor [Peter Simon] Pallas to come and see me. After a thorough confession of my sin, we agreed to have these translations printed and thus make them useful to those who might have the desire to occupy themselves with the fruits of someone else's boredom . . . Those who are so inclined may or may not find some illumination in this effort. This will depend on their mental disposition and does not concern me at all.

This is how Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, described the beginning of an ambitious linguistic undertaking: a monumental collection of vocabularies, and one of the first to include several African languages.1 The result was Linguarum Totius Orbis Vocabularia Comparativa, etc . by Peter Simon Pallas (2 vols., Moscow 1787 and 1789).

István Fodor restored this text to its historical significance for African linguistics. His study of the project's origins, sources, and contemporary context makes fascinating reading. The idea for the project seems to have come from the Empress. It is possible that she conceived of it as a pastime, to while away long hours in her 'well heated' room in the Hermitage (Fodor 1975: 19), but there was method in her boredom. After all, she was the absolute ruler of a vast colonial empire, and what began as a playful distraction soon turned into a model of linguistic information-gathering, anticipating polyglot wordlists and dictionaries that were put to colonial service in Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. In its later phases, Catherine's project did not remain an armchair affair. Lists were sent out to the governors of the Empire to be forwarded to official interpreters and translators. 'Consequently,' Fodor notes, 'translations were regarded as official business and the wordlists became documents of state, witnessed to with stamps and signatures' (1975: 9). Nor was the search limited to Russia. Through its ambassadors in Madrid, London and The Hague, the lists reached Spanish, English and Dutch colonies, and even China. George

Washington took a personal interest and asked the governors of the United States to participate in the collection of material (Fodor 1975: 10).

Pallas' vocabularies, in other words, were a serious contribution to 'statistics' as it was then understood: as filling administrative 'space' or rubrics with information of interest to the State. They were mirrors of ethnic and cultural diversity; they could become instruments of government inasmuch as they imposed a semblance of order on a bewildering multitude of languages and helped to create a frame for language policies. Pallas himself and his learned predecessors and contemporaries undoubtedly had detached scholarly interests in comparative language studies; but, like the philosophes of the Enlightenment (whom Catherine knew and consulted), they pursued their scientific interests with constant attention to the use to which their findings could be put by their absolutist sponsors.

I had given little thought to such deep connections between language, linguistics, and politics when in 1978 a sabbatical leave should have given me the leisure to 'write up' the results of field research in Zaire. Between 1972 and 1974 I had worked in Shaba and collected material on the role of Swahili in the context of industrial and other kinds of work. But the monograph would not take shape. My difficulties began with a vague feeling of discontent caused by the historical shallowness of my knowledge of Shaba Swahili. At the same time I lost whatever faith I still had in two assumptions that underlie much anthropological work on language. One asserts that language is somehow a representation of the world and that it is used, above all, referentially as a system of signs labeling objects in the 'real world'; the other one holds that the object of our inquiries into language, be they linguistic in a strict sense or in a wider, sociolinguistic, sense, must have the description of (a system of) rules as their object. Both problems I tried to address in ways I was capable of, but the result was articles and a theoretical treatise, not the expected monograph.2 I let myself be side-tracked, as I saw it then, by collecting more or less circumstantial evidence for the history of Shaba Swahili. This began – perhaps because it is in the nature of studying language from a safe distance (see Catherine's divertissements ) – as a pastime and a passion for obscure and odd vocabularies. A. Verbeken's Petit Cours de Kiswahili pratique had been my first introduction to the language of Shaba in 1966. Search in archives and libraries (mostly in Belgium) soon unearthed numerous predecessors whose amateurish descriptions had been eclipsed by scholarly works. At first I thought that my findings would make a bibliographic essay with limited appeal to a small circle of Swahili experts. Then I became convinced that a story could be told that would be of much wider interest.

The result was a book about colonial power – another book about colonial power. The literature on the subject is vast; students of 'imperialism' have founded their own empires through specialization in several disciplines, anthropology and linguistics among them. How it all worked and works, in global terms of domination and exploitation, is by now pretty well under-

stood. What remain obscure, as far as I am aware, are some of the preconditions for the exercise of colonial power. Inquiries into power tend to become tautological — this has been observed by students of language-spread, among others (Lieberson 1982: 41–2) — unless objects, targets (in short, the content of power) can be established in such a way that they remain outside a narrow circle of reasoning (example: Power is the ability to control X; control over X is evidence for power).

Among the preconditions for establishing regimes of colonial power was, must have been, communication with the colonized. This went beyond the (trivial) fact of verbal exchanges, because in the long run such exchanges depended on a shared communicative praxis providing the common ground on which unilateral claims could be imposed. Granted that use and control of verbal means of communication were not the only foundation for colonial rule; but they were needed to maintain regimes, military, religious — ideological and economic. In the former Belgian Congo, our area of interest, brutal, physical force as well as indirect economic constraints never ceased to be exercised, and they have been the subject of historical studies; much less is known about more subtle uses of power through controls on communication. That concept, overworked as it may be, can be fruitful if it is understood historically and politically. The aim, at least of this study, is then not to seek in Africa instances for some general theory or typology of communication (that was done long ago by L. W....