“Model” workers’ villages?: Company rule and adobe-brick houses in late colonial Africa

Abstract

In the early 1920s, a severe influenza epidemic in the Panda mining camps, recently founded by Union Minière in southern Belgian Congo, shed light on the importance of housing material conditions. Due to medical studies and reports, a solution was soon to be found in single-family adobe houses. Bricks arguably offered plenty of “benefits”: they were cheap, made with local raw materials, easily assembled on site and did not require much expertise or heavy machinery. For the following decades, adobe was put forward by mining enterprises as a tool for and a symbol of control, neatness, salubrity, productivity and social hierarchy. When industrialization and urbanization issues became strongly entangled in the 1950s, the materialization of workers’ houses was not only a case study for scientists but also a key instrument to counter international politics and anxieties about African housing. This paper questions the role of the adobe-brick components in shaping the built environment in late colonial Africa. What was their impact on house design, construction sites and building teams? To what extent did they compete with other technologies, namely concrete and stone? The overlooked histories of mining villages’ construction illuminate significant trans-imperial circuits of knowledge transfer, running from the first on-site connections to the late international expert meetings. Far from being “workingman’s paradises”, as most company official reports suggested, adobe villages materialized multiple combinations of economic, social, moral and power guises, thus offering new perspectives on colonial construction, away from canonized actors, materials and norms.