• 1 As Joseph Conrad famously described the region in his 1899 novel.

1“At least the Belgians built hospitals.” The phrase is generally heard in defense of Belgium’s colonial past, increasingly subject to critiques. In fact, the claim that the Belgian Congo was a “medical model colony” may be the most common argument in today’s public debates on Belgium’s colonial history. True, the colonial government built a network of hospital infrastructure that was impressive in comparison to many other African colonies. Nevertheless, the argument is rooted in colonial propaganda that essentially sought to legitimize colonial rule by portraying Belgium as a benevolent colonial power bestowing the boons of Western medicine on the denizens of Africa’s “Heart of Darkness.”1

• 2 Mark Crinson, “The Powers That Be: Architectural potency and spatialized power,” ABE Journal, no.. (...)
• 3 Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience(...)
• 4 G. A. Bremner, Johan Lagae and Mercedes Volait, “Intersecting Interests: Developments in Networks (...)

4This subdivision of scales and architecture reflects two broader trends in the historiography of colonial architecture. One focuses on what can be termed the “politics” of architecture; i.e. its sociopolitical and power-related aspects. The other emphasizes the autonomy of the field, aside from its political aspects, as a key factor in understanding the colonial built environment. All of my considerations of the three “scales” deal particularly with politics. As Marc Crinson has already stated, “what lies at the heart of colonial architectural history… is power.”2 This strand of architectural history is thriving, and effectively covers a range of different scales. On the one hand, inspired by postcolonial studies that began emerging in the 1980s, architectural historians began focusing on symbolic public buildings as a “highly visible and politicized image of power.”3 On the other hand, more recently, a number of architectural historians have started to question whether these exceptional, symbol-laden edifices are the most accurate lens for the examination of such “politics of architecture.” Often inspired by a Foucauldian framework of “governmentality” — of which Marc Crinson was, in fact, rather critical in the aforementioned text — they have argued that the “anonymous” or “grey architecture” of the “neglected ordinary colonial built environment,” such as warehouses, medical outposts, or administrative offices, was much more important to everyday colonial statecraft.4 From the small, where I focus on some of the Belgian Congo’s most architecturally ambitious hospital projects, to the large, which explores the “anonymous” architectures within the colony-wide healthcare network, and including the medium, which bridges both, colonial hospitals form an incredibly rich and varied typology to study the entire spectrum of the “politics of architecture,” and to contribute to broader socio-political histories of colonial Congo.

• 5 Michel Foucault, Anne Thalamy and Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Les machines à guérir : aux origines de (...)

5I examine three flagship hospitals for Africans in Boma (1885-1921), Léopoldville (1921-1945) and Elisabethville (1945-1959) as illustrations of how colonial authorities explicitly deployed medical architecture to consolidate and legitimize colonial rule. All three complexes were advertised in colonial propaganda as modern, spotlessly clean medical facilities following the latest Western best practices of hospital design. They were indeed well-oiled machines à guérir (healing machines), as French philosopher Michel Foucault has termed them, designed to cure and control the indigenous population.5 In reality, however, these prominent medical centers rarely achieved the steep ambitions of cure and control. The hospital in Boma most explicitly served as an architectural form of window-dressing to counter international critiques of the “red rubber” atrocities occurring in the Congo Free State. Administrators at the highly publicized and symbolic hospital in Léopoldville, the colonial capital, struggled to make ends meet. To face budgetary challenges, the staff often relied on informal collaborations with the families of African patients to ensure simple logistical tasks such as food supply. Lastly, the post-war hospital project in Elisabethville, although designed as an important landmark of the “medical model colony,” was never constructed, hampered by strenuous negotiations and political tensions between various branches of the colonial administration.

• 6 See e.g. Luce Beeckmans and Johan Lagae, “Kinshasa’s syndrome-planning in historical perspective: (...)

6The medium scale investigates how colonial hospital infrastructure was embedded within the broader urban tissue. From the 1920s onwards, especially, colonial town centers were increasingly segregated along racial lines. European parts of town were separated from the African quarters by what was then termed a “cordon sanitaire,” or “quarantine area” — a neutral zone that was essentially an empty strip of land. Various historians have mentioned that medical arguments were key in implementing segregation in colonial cities. Africans were pathologized as the main carriers of tropical disease, and thus had to be spatially separated from the European population.6 Although insightful, this exclusively binary description of the colonial city nevertheless fails to fully grasp the more complex realities of colonial urban environments, as other historians pointed out later. Colonial hospitals offer an interesting perspective from which to join in this academic debate, since they reveal a more detailed history of colonial segregation. With hospitals for Europeans separated from those for Africans, urban hospital infrastructure at first glance reflected segregation. It seems to confirm a straightforward binary reading of the colonial city. Nevertheless, closer analysis of the urban planning of hospital infrastructure in Boma (1885-1921), Léopoldville (1921-1945), and Coquilhatville (1945-1959) brings a more complex history to the surface. In Boma, the small yet cosmopolitan capital of early colonial Congo, medical segregation was never truly considered a priority in the economy-driven urban policies of the municipal authorities. In Léopoldville, segregation was implemented from the end of the 1920s onwards. However, the hospital for Africans was already located on the “wrong side” of the neutral zone — the European side — and was thus considered a threat to the health of the European population. It was never relocated due to budgetary shortages. And whereas the medical department of the colonial administration had been strong proponents of racial segregation during the interbellum, it became an important advocate of unifying hospital infrastructure in the post-war period, even though these progressive policy guidelines were often watered down on the ground, as was the case in Coquilhatville.

• 7 Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, New Haven, CT; London: Yale (...)

7In the large scale, I explore three consecutive construction plans implemented throughout the colonial period: the Plan Renkin, launched in 1910, the Plan Franck, followed during the 1920s, and the Plan Décennal, dating from 1950 to the end of the colonial period. Each of these plans included extensive campaigns to build an increasingly dense rural network of hospital infrastructure across the colonial territory. While genuine ambitions to improve the health of the African population underpinned all three building campaigns, they were driven by other political motives as well. Hospital building campaigns sought to parry external critiques and legitimize colonial rule, ensure a healthy and economically productive African workforce, and extend state presence and control across the colonial territory. All three vast and politically crucial infrastructural programs included the construction of multiple, comparable medical centers. In order to build them efficiently, colonial authorities repeatedly relied on the use of standardized type-plans that were developed by the central departments and then distributed to the various provincial and local administrative branches. The top-down implementation of these infrastructural plans suggests that the Belgian colonial government functioned like a well-oiled, omnipotent, and strongly centralized state apparatus. This was a reputation that the Belgian Congo already had during colonial times, and that was later theorized by historian Crawford Young.7 He utilized the metaphor of the omnipotent “Bula Matari” — or “Breaker of Rocks,” the nickname the Congolese populations had given to the Belgian colonial government — to argue that colonial governance, with Belgian Congo as the prime example, was quintessentially characterized by strong, monolithic, and autocratic government administrations. Nevertheless, a close examination of the administrative processes behind these infrastructural plans, and mappings of their actual realization, raise questions about the Belgian colonial administration as a top-down, monolithic “Bula Matari.” Instead, I argue throughout these three cases that the everyday modus operandi of the colonial apparatus was often messy, characterized by ad-hoc improvisations to make do with the numerous budgetary problems, issues of manpower, and logistical challenges that continuously plagued the colonial administration.

• 8 Sibel Bozdoǧan, “Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Chal (...)
• 9 Johan Lagae, “Momo in the ‘heart of darkness’: challenges to the documentation and conservation of (...)
• 10 Sibel Bozdoǧan, “Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Chal (...)
• 11 For an extended historiographic account that explores how bilateral connections, as well as Englis (...)

8Throughout these scales, I mainly zoom in on the sociopolitical dimensions of colonial hospital infrastructure. Overemphasizing the politics of architecture, however, raises a crucial issue particularly pertinent to the colonial context. Architectural historian Sibel Bozdogan asked the question in 1999: “How does one talk about the politics of architecture without reducing architecture to politics?”8 Although it is undeniable that colonial architecture served the state’s ambitions of power, politics, and economy, the autonomy of architecture as a profession and of the architects themselves still needs to be acknowledged. Johan Lagae has made a similar argument, warning that by “reducing the role of architecture and planning to that of a mere instrument of power,” architectural historians risk “erasing the degree of disciplinary autonomy through which designers always respond to political, social, economic and cultural conditions.”9 In architecture, I aim to complement the political analysis explained above with more balanced “accounts of buildings that do not privilege either the politics of architecture or the autonomy of the architectural object.”10 I do so by charting how transnational flows of architectural knowhow on hospital construction circulated to and within the colonial world, and how local building practices translated this architectural expertise to the local context. The cases explore diverse architectural themes, ranging from how the materiality of colonial hospitals was shaped by local Congolese building practices (1885-1921), or how Western hospital typologies were translated to the tropical and colonial context (1921-1945), to how postwar hospital plans, designed for Western patients, were adapted to African users (1945-1959). Together, these cases make it possible to highlight not only the longue durée of transnational knowledge exchange on hospital construction, but also the importance of intercolonial and transimperial networks that go beyond those bilateral connections between métropole and colony that have remained the main focus of many architectural historians.11