Research project B2/233/P2/DICOLJUST-2 (Research action B2)
Building on the promising results of the first phase of the pilot project DIGICOLJUST ("Colonial Violence, Subaltern Agency and Shared Archival Heritage: A Digital Platform of Colonial Judiciary Sources" 2020-2022), and given the proven track record of the team of coordinators (SAB/ULB/VUB) in colonial archival heritage and history, the project DIGICOLJUST-2 "Military Violence and its (Dis)Contents in Colonial Congo: Sharing the Records, Writing the History" aims at renewing the archival, scientific and societal knowledge of the history of military crimes and their repression in Colonial Congo (1885-1908-1960). Based on a combined input of heritage science and scholarly expertise, this project responds to political and historiographical debates on the contested heritage of Belgian colonial archives and on the violent history of Belgian imperialism. Pursuing the uncovering of a long-considered lost collection of 5,200 court records encompassing 70 years of testimonies of colonial military crimes, DIGICOLJUST-2 will allow for the development of state-of-the-art solutions designed in collaboration with Congolese archivists for further sharing this heritage, and for the production of innovative historical research. It will offer new insights into the deployment, routinisation and escalation of armed violence in colonial Central Africa (i.e. the "content" of military violence), as well as into the complex relationship of Belgian colonial (military) authorities to impunity and soldierly misconduct (i.e. the "discontent" with this violence embodied in the judicial process).
The results produced by the initial phase of the DIGICOLJUST project have confirmed the crucial interest of the records of colonial courts-martial. In less than 24 months, the project's team has been able to map the archival materials, retrace their history, to conceive a format of online access, both user-friendly and scientifically sound, for the already-completed digitisation of the pilot program (1,147 casefiles/27,650 scanned pages from the military court of Léopoldville, 1891-1956), and to build an effective partnership with the INACO (Institut National des Archives du Congo) in DRC. In spite of the impediments caused by the Covid-19 and by the time-consuming decontamination and transfer of 5,200 case files to the State Archives, the main objectives of the project were met by the end of 2022. DIGICOLJUST-2 will therefore offer a full return on this investment by pursuing a complementary series of key objectives:
(1) Cataloguing, making accessible and digitising the 350+ case files of the "field" [en campagne] courts-martial produced during the two World Wars.
(2) Studying the (re)organisation and functioning of Military Justice on the Battlefields by delving into the above-mentioned archive of the "field" courts-martial of the Force Publique. The study will allow us to better grasp the fluidity between peacetime and war and colonial conceptions of ‘legitimate state violence’.
(3) Researching the history of military violence and justice through thematic case studies (on military crimes in Leopold II's Congo and their legacies, on gendered violence, on the international mobility of Congolese Soldiers during World War II, and on what was specifically “colonial” in wartime colonial military justice) also conceived as ground-breaking contributions to the international historiography of colonial armed forces;
(4) Developing the praxis of sharing archival/digital heritage between Belgium and Congo in a bilateral dynamic of conservation and research, notably through a collaborative research guide connecting the military court records kept by the AGR with the Force Publique's files kept by the INACO.
DIGICOLJUST-2 will have a multifaceted impact. It will significantly deepen the existing historiography of colonial Congo, more specifically in the fields of military history, the history of justice, and the bottom-up history of violence. It will constitute a significant achievement in the ongoing development of North/South partnerships in heritage sciences, especially regarding the shared archival legacy of colonialism.
