The Spiritual in the Secular by Harries Patrick;Maxwell David;

Author:Harries, Patrick;Maxwell, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

The Editors, Contributors, and Critics

As editors of the Aequatoria journal, Edmond Boelaert and Gustaaf Hulstaert, both Catholic priests in the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC), were central to debates on colonial policy. Although neither had been formally trained in Belgian colonial institutions,4 their research and publications met high scholarly standards. Yet, scientific knowledge was never their final goal: they always remained missionaries and viewed research as a means to improve their missionary praxis. In the colonial era, their work had a real but limited influence on colonial practices. Their legacy includes an enormous number of publications, constituting a lasting contribution to the present-day understanding of the language and literature of the Mongo people and of Bantu linguistics in general. They were both members of prestigious institutions of colonial affairs. In Belgium they participated in the Colonial Academy in Brussels and in the Commission for African Linguistics in Tervuren (Musée Royal du Congo belge). Hulstaert was, moreover, a member of the Colonial Commission pour la Protection des Indigènes (1953-60), established in the Congo, and a consultative member of the Institute of Scientific Research in Central Africa (IRSAC). He was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa by the Universities of Mainz (1972) and Zaïre (1973) for his scholarly publications on Bantu linguistics and ethnological fieldwork. Boelaert was also a member of the Council of the Equateur Province, a body that assisted the governor.

The great impetus came from Father Gustaaf Hulstaert, who lived and worked in the Congo from 1925 to 1990 and acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s language, people, and natural history. His extreme curiosity pushed him to scrutinize and study every aspect of the human and natural environment. He was consecutively headmaster (1927-34), inspector for the diocesan schools, and finally local superior of his missionary association, from 1936 to 1946. In 1931 he started publishing on Congolese affairs. Father Hulstaert had a Catholic vision of the world but combined this with certain humanist ideas. He preferred to engage with the broader cultural, social, and political issues debated in Western academic circles in the thirties such as democracy, the characteristics of Western civilization, and the legitimacy of colonization. The major influence on his early ideas came from Catholic authors such as Léon Bloy, Jacques Maritain, Daniel Rops, Alexis Carrel, Georges Bernanos, Jacques Leclercq, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Arthur Beales, and a few others like Christopher Dawson, Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu, and Oswald Spengler. During that same period, Hulstaert thought he was progressive and even in the vanguard: “Do you know,” he wrote to Mgr. Égide De Boeck, the bishop of Lisala, an adjacent town, “that I adhere to modern and revolutionary tendencies that in the eyes of some, seem to touch on heresy?”5 Although this chapter focuses on Hulstaert’s contribution to the disciplines of history, ethnography, and customary law, he made considerable contributions to other areas of secular knowledge such as zoology and botany, mostly related to the equatorial forest.6

Edmond Boelaert was active in the Belgian Congo from September 1930 to September 1954 as a teacher at the junior seminary at Bokuma and as a “traveling father.

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