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The ‘Thick’ and the ‘Thin’ of Sovereign Power in the Congo Free State with Matilda Arvidsson: New Pod Cast episode from Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law

During her research visit to Melbourne Law School, this research project's PI Matilda Arvidsson recorded a pod-cast episode that is now publicly available (see link at the end of this overview). In the talk Arvidsson shows that Swedish missionaries played a crucial role in implementing legal and social structures, such as a patriarchal family model and a combined legal system, which supported the resource-extraction goals of the Congo Free State. This involvement highlights their significant contribution to the ‘thick’ state-building efforts that complemented the Free State’s more superficial colonial administration.


In 1881 Swedish Evangelical Lutheran missionaries from The Mission Covenant Church of Sweden (Svenska missionsförbundet) arrived at the entry of the Kongo river – there to stay until Congolese independence in 1961. While nominally in Congo to ‘christen the heathens,’ and to provide the teachings and structures needed to build a Christian model society, the Swedes became actively implicated in the colonial works of state-building.


Several became civil servants – Officers Civile d’Etat – in the Free State. Yet, as the Free State gradually emerged as a ‘thin’ state, primarily operating as a corporation aiming at extracting natural resources from Congo – maximizing commercial profits for export to Europe, and implementing capitalist structures of labour and taxation – the Swedes took on ‘thick’ sovereign powers of state building: performing as key legal actors in makeshift courts of law – implementing a combined version of pre-colonial Bakongo norms, Congo Free State Decrees, and Swedish Lutheran theological norms – setting up an education system, health clinics, and not the least insisting on eradicating the Bakongo matrilineal kinship structures and putting a strictly patriarchal, heterosexual, nuclear family structure in its place.


Figure 1: Matilda Arvidsson



This talk is based on archival work of the largest surviving archive on pre-colonial Congo and the Congo Free State, at the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet) in Stockholm. In contrast to previous research, which place the Swedish missionaries as colonial actors, I argue that the Swedes were state builders and key legal actors deeply implicated with the Congo Free State, providing the ‘thick’ work so that the colonialists of the Free State could pursue its ‘thin’.


The talk was recorded and published in the research program’s podcast series. You can access it here: ‘Evangelical Lutheran Mission, Law, and the Colonial State as Corporation: The ‘Thick’ and the ‘Thin’ of Sovereign Power in the Congo Free State, 1881–1908’.

 

Due acknowledgement to my project partner Dr Simon Larsson, University of Gothenburg, for his extensive archival work enabling this talk, and to Maxim Buchet, for research assistance and translation of original research documents from the French.

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