The Bula Matari (Breaker of Rock) and the Judges. Congolese Efforts in the Campaign against the Red Rubber Regime (État indépendant du Congo, 1902-1904)

The present article analyses the papers collected by the International Commission of Inquiry set up in 1904 by Leopold II to investigate the sadly known “Congo atrocities.” In particular, it examines the significant reports drawn up by an Italian magistrate, deputy public prosecutor Gennaro Bosco, who investigated some controversial crimes and assessed the validity of inspection carried out by the British consul Roger Casement. For a long time, the literature and the press have focused on the role played by different Europeans in the humanitarian campaign of the Congo Reform Movement. This article aims to apply the new research perspective that considers the centrality of African agency. Some Congolese communities used a number of discursive strategies, performances, body languages, and practices of dissimulation and resistance against the predatory red rubber regime. A meditation on these aspects is carried out together with the analysis of the “degrees of violence” in the colonial universe, and of the widespread thesis of the “terreur salutaire”(“healthy terror”).