Revisiting accounts of indigenous resistance in Ubangi-Shary and Moyen-Congo: a critical reading of the colonial archive

The Kongo-Wara War was one of the most important anti-colonial uprisings of the interwar period in the French Colonial Empire in Africa. It involved three colonial territories (Ubangi-Shary, Moyen-Congo and Cameroon) and lasted about three years (1927–1930). The insurrection pitted the colonized Bayas and Panas populations, determined to throw off the colonial yoke, against the colonial state, which was mobilized to restore order by military force. Through the reports, correspondence and interrogation records French colonial authorities produced throughout the conflict, an imposing narrative emerged that magnified their “pacifying” action and blamed the indigenous people, deemed primitive, as responsible for the disorder. Based on a critical methodological approach to political and military archives, and interpreted through key concepts such as messianism, resistance and “commandement,” the essay sets out to deconstruct the biased official narrative. Indigenous resistance is not an expression of the backwardness of the colonized. It is a response to the perverse political and economic effects of colonial rule. Indigenous agency is thus characterized by the implementation of a militant ideology centred on messianism, which enabled them to subvert the colonial order for three years.