Colonial Impotence by Benoît Henriet

Author:Benoît Henriet [Henriet, Benoît]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783110648782
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2021-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

We attended a fruit buying, […] there are, so to speak, only women, their basket exactly fills a standard 25 kg fruit crate. […] On our way back, we are passing by posts where fruits are still being bought. Women, always. Three carry, in addition to their heavy basket, a small child…. One is pregnant…. […] It happens that women that left home before dawn, come back exhausted at one in the afternoon, only to go back to work again, and start all over again the next day, and the day after…60

The mobilisation of able-bodied men for fruit cutting meant that other social categories would have to assume accessory tasks, such as bringing fruit clusters to the company’s outposts. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Huileries’ impact on indigenous women – their daily life, their “morality” or the formation of conjugal bounds – became a regular point of discussion and contention among colonial actors. They were mostly articulated around the tensions between moral discourses on the “preservation” of Congolese females and households and the imperatives of mise en valeur.

One of the major issues regarding female labour discussed by company representatives and administrators was whether fruit cutters’ wives should carry palm fruits between the palm groves and HCB’s buying stations. In his 1931 report, Pierre Ryckmans summed up the discomfort of some European observers:

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