8 August 2024. Beehive Seminar: Evangelical Lutheran Mission, Law, and the Colonial State as Corporation: The ‘Thick’ and the ‘Thin’ of Sovereign Power in the Congo Free State with Matilda Arvidsson.
8 August 2024. 2 - 3 pm
Melbourne Law School
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Beehive Seminar. Evangelical Lutheran Mission, Law, and the Colonial State as Corporation: The ‘Thick’ and the ‘Thin’ of Sovereign Power in the Congo Free State.
In 1881 Swedish Evangelical Lutheran missionaries from The Mission Covenant Church of Sweden (Svenska missionsförbundet) arrived at the entry of the Kongo river – there to stay until Congolese independence in 1961. While nominally in Congo to ‘christen the heathens,’ and to provide the teachings and structures needed to build a Christian model society, the Swedes became actively implicated in the colonial works of state-building. Several became civil servants – Officers Civile d’Etat – in the Free State. Yet, as the Free State gradually emerged as a ‘thin’ state, primarily operating as a corporation aiming at extracting natural resources from Congo – maximizing commercial profits for export to Europe, and implementing capitalist structures of labour and taxation – the Swedes took on ‘thick’ sovereign powers of state building: performing as Rule of Law actors in makeshift courts of law – implementing a combined version of pre-colonial Bakongo norms, Congo Free State Decrees, and Swedish Lutheran theological norms – setting up an education system, health clinics, and not the least insisting on eradicating the Bakongo matrilineal kinship structures and putting a strictly patriarchal, heterosexual, nuclear family structure in its place.
This paper is based on archival work of the largest surviving archive on pre-colonial Congo and the Congo Free State, at the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet) in Stockholm. In contrast to previous research, which place the Swedish missionaries as colonial actors, I argue that the Swedes were state builders and Rule of Law actors deeply implicated with the Congo Free State, providing the ‘thick’ work so that the colonialists of the Free State could pursue its ‘thin’.
Due acknowledgement to my project partner Dr Simon Larsson, University of Gothenburg, for his extensive archival work enabling this paper, as well as to Maxim Buchet, for research assistance and translation of original research documents from the French.