Modern living in the Congo: the 1958 Colonial Housing Exhibit and postwar domestic practices in the Belgian colony

Introduction With seven pavilions covering a built surface of over 20,000 m2, the section of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi in the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958 was by far the largest and most impressive display ever of Belgian colonisation at an international event. It still celebrated the Belgian colonial project in Central Africa through a triumphalist mise en scene, even if it opened its doors less than a year before the bloody riots in Leopoldville of January 1959, that would lead to the hasty declaration of Congo’s independence on June 30, 1960. In a corner of the section’s jardin colonial, that evoked an imaginary African landscape, stood a small construction (Fig. 1): a fully furnished and equipped model house for ‘white colonisers’, designed as a prototype for export to the Belgian colony. As a representation of the ‘modern’ way of living in the Congo, this model house, however, did not stand on its own. It formed part of a larger display located in the colonial pavilion dedicated to the themes of Construction, Engineering and Transport that presented various aspects of the contemporary colonial dwelling, ranging through building materials, household appliances, domestic equipment and a sequence of furnished rooms. I will use this two-fold Colonial Housing Exhibit of the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair as a starting point for a discussion about housing design and domestic practices in the postwar Belgian Congo. It will be pointed out how this display was informed by earlier discussions on dwelling and domesticity, discussions that have their roots in the interwar period and even in the late nineteenth century, when Belgian colonisation in Central Africa took off. I will argue that in some respects, ideas on the colonisers’ dwellings hardly changed over time, even if from the point of view of architectural design and building technology, major changes did occur during the colonial era. Because the colonisers were living in an environment that differed significantly from the one in the mother country in climatical, social as well as cultural terms, they found themselves in a condition of ‘displacement’, a condition defined by Hilde Heynen and Andre Loeckx as a ‘situation in which the meaning of things and places – even the most common ones – is not a shared convention, but part of contested territory’. Such a condition forces people to ‘construct new ways of behaviour or new modes of signification’, as appropriate schemes are no longer available to guide practical behaviour. In this respect, the coloniser’s house not only answered the basic need for shelter, but through its formal appearance, its planimetric lay-out and its interior decoration, also became a powerful tool to construct meaning and to regulate behaviour in the colonial context. While the debate on colonisers’ housing designs and domestic practices in the Congo thus has a particularity of its own, it can in some respects also be linked directly to discussions about ‘modern living’ in Belgium. In fact, one aim of the 1958 Colonial Housing Exhibit was to illustrate that contemporary living standards of colonisers in the Belgian Congo 477