What's in a Name? Likaka on Names and Naming in African Colonial History

Charles Van de Lanoitte was a Belgian colonial administrator in the Congo in the 1930s. The Congolese villagers in the district where he was a tax collector knew Van de Lanoitte by a more sinister name: Tshoma-Tshoma or “he who burns people.” Osumaka Likaka open his monograph, Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870 – 1960 with an epigraph from Van de Lanoitte, and later uses Van de Lanoitte as an example of a colonial official who understood and exploited the power of a violent reputation embodied in his Congolese name. By taking full advantage of his reputation as an official who inflicted devastating violence on the villagers in region, Van de Lanoitte was able to achieve his colonial ends – in this case tax collection - without continuing to exercise violence.

The main thrust of Likaka's argument is about the fact of Charles Van de , and his many European counterparts, Congolese name, and the power of this name to record information about the local conditions of colonialism, and register complaints about those conditions within a community of villagers. Evidence as unexpected as a Boyscout song from the 1950s and an interview with a mother in the 1980s demonstrates the durability of these names and their negative connotations (106). With contexualization and analysis, Likaka argues, Congolese names for colonial officials “become valuable local commentaries on colonial rule and its impacts on the daily life of village people” (54).

Naming Colonialism is most interesting when it considers how both villagers and colonial agents strategically employed Congolese names. Likaka argues that although villagers bestowed names to sincerely praise their subjects, other names were apparently sincere, but in fact contained veiled criticism of a European's behavior. Europeans, in turn, capitalized on both names that praised, to suggest that villagers supported the colonial regime, and names that vilified, to remind villagers of past violence, and extract labor and taxes from them.

Although Likaka does not position his argument in these terms, evidence from Congolese names demonstrates that even in the Congo, a milieu known for its efficient brutality, colonial policy was far from monolithic in its implementation and effects. Congolese villagers resisted and adapted to Euroepan incursions in village life in a variety of localized ways. In some instances, villagers “recorded” European violence in communal memory by re-naming the European agents who perpetrated it. In others, they obliquely critiqued the brutal tactics of the colonial regime, while apparently praising their colonizers.

Similarly, Belgian colonial agents made the best use they could of resources at their disposal, including their Congolese names, to achieve their own objectives and advance within the colonial hierarchy. In some places, this meant drawing on apparent endorsements from villagers to craft pro-colonial propaganda. In others, they reminded villagers of their violent reputations to collect taxes or extract crops and labor. 

I'm intrigued by Likaka's use of names as a source, but, like a reviewer for the American Historical Review have doubts about whether the evidence of names really stands up to his claims of epistemological significance. The names do provide a glimpse of how Congolese villagers thought and talked about colonial agents, and in some cases chronicle specific offenses in particular communities. The names also demonstrate that villagers' assessments of Europeans was not uniformly negative, and that some communities had sincerely positive views of their European interlocutors. Interrogating the naming practices of the colonized provides insight into the lived reality of colonialism – an experience that is otherwise difficult for historians to recover. I don't think, however, that this painstaking collection, translation, and analysis of a previously under-utilized source constitutes a new kind of knowing for African colonial history.

After reading Frederick Cooper's 1994 article, “Conflict and Connection:Rethinking Colonial African History,” I suspect Naming Colonialism might have been a better book if it explicitly engaged with some of the theory swirling around African colonial historiography. Likaka's attention to practices and circulations of names and naming seems likely to have some interesting implications about how power is constituted and contested in the colonial world. But his conclusions about what names mean never goes far beyond asserting the agency of Congolese villagers.