num_pages: 220
description: Whats in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers missionaries administrators and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners physical appearances behavior and cultural practices at close rangeoften resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system recording and preserving the villages understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities regions and generations. Methodologically innovative Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural processthe naming of Europeanscan provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agentsthe home burner Leopard Beat beat The hippopotamus-hide whipclearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles metaphors or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe categorize and evaluate reverses our usual optic providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.
language: English
title: Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870–1960
publisher: University of Wisconsin Press