The Colonial Occupation of Katanga consists of a translated and richly annotated edition of the personal correspondence of Lieutenant (later Captain) Clément Brasseur, the military officer in charge of Lofoi, the first post of the Congo Free State in Katanga, between September 1893, the month of his arrival in the region, and November 1897, when his violent life came to a violent end. All of the letters included in the volume are addressed to Brasseur’s elder brother, Désiré, a fellow military officer; most of them take the form of regularly updated journals and travelogues. Brasseur’s dense c ... More

The Colonial Occupation of Katanga consists of a translated and richly annotated edition of the personal correspondence of Lieutenant (later Captain) Clément Brasseur, the military officer in charge of Lofoi, the first post of the Congo Free State in Katanga, between September 1893, the month of his arrival in the region, and November 1897, when his violent life came to a violent end. All of the letters included in the volume are addressed to Brasseur’s elder brother, Désiré, a fellow military officer; most of them take the form of regularly updated journals and travelogues. Brasseur’s dense correspondence describes in exceptional detail both his day-to-day activities in Lofoi and the numerous military operations that he and his local allies, the Yeke of Mukanda Bantu, undertook with a view to impressing upon Katangese communities the need to comply with instructions relating to taxation in kind and labour. The striking candidness of the records presented in this edition challenges top-down understandings of the violent workings of the Congo Free State, casts unprecedented light on early colonial state-building in Katanga and shows that the latter process was deeply informed by African strategies and interests.