Employment-tied Housing in (post)colonial Africa

In the decades immediately before and after independence, an unprecedented demand for housing a basic requirement in urban life impelled governments into thinking about the provision, planning and building of houses. The research projects overall objective is to examine how employment-tied housing served as a tool of empire (and later of independent African states) to project power and exercise domination over societies and to discipline colonial subjects (and later citizens) throughout the so-called development era from the 1940s to the 1970s. To achieve this we will use three different (yet related) analytical layers: agency, language usage and governance. We intend to grasp those layers by elaborating on who was involved in employment-tied housing (agency); on what communication means the involved players applied (language usage); and, on how a set of rules, norms, decisions and actions related to employment-tied housing (governance) each produced and sustained shifts in power relations. Worker housing represented the commonest built element in the colonial landscape and dominantly shaped cultural urban space. Three case studies (Livingstone, Lubumbashi, Thika) will serve as magnifying lenses to understand the constantly changing frictions and relations between the state, key employers and society. We will focus on medium-term changes and continuities in housing conditions of (and for) men and women living and working in the mining industry, commercial agriculture and as clerks in local administration. We intend to explore developments over time and space in employment-tied housing and we wish to shed light on the why and how behind these changes. This project represents an outstanding example of practised interdisciplinarity. As an interdisciplinary research group, we rely on sets of expertise, knowledge and methods such as: a) a socio-historically oriented reconstructive approach based on an analysis of various primary sources from archives and private holdings; b) language, discourse and visual analysis; and, c) oral history and qualitatively designed interviews. Highly innovative, this project has a great potential to offer new insights to the international academic community through combining housing issues and government control in three atypical urban communities. No systematic and comparative attempt has been made so far to document in a long-term perspective how the implementation of housing for Africans worked. Moreover, we will place our selected African cases (DR Congo, Kenya, Zambia) into a broader discussion on housing and urban development and thus not only create a comparative, inter-African perspective between them, but go beyond Africa and relate them to their respective metropolises (Brussels and London). Overcoming the more conventional colonial/ post-colonial divide we will highlight underlying continuities and changes in employment-tied housing across two crucial periods, at times even point towards contemporary housing and urban developments.

The research project dealt with the question of how and whether housing served as a tool of empire (and later of postcolonial, independent states) throughout the so-called "development era" from the 1940s to the 1970s. It focussed on three analytical layers, a) agency (actors involved), b) language usage (communication means applied), and c) governance (rules, norms, decisions and actions forming power relations) as they evolved in the three different, yet interrelated settings of Thika (Kenya), Lubumbashi (DRC) and Livingstone (Zambia). Our research added to the knowledge about the provision of housing in (post)colonial settings in small(er), more marginalised African cities, which have received little attention only. In all these settings, housing was neither generally nor always integrated into a larger, more comprehensive urban development agenda. In the colonial context urban planning did not necessarily aim at creating a sense of community and "belonging" among dwellers in town. Findings generated within the project attest to the following: - In their attempt to contain and control labour forces and accommodate African populations, the colonial powers disrupted, reshaped and colonised the most intimate living space: the home. In many ways they even created ideas of home which in the "urban" sense had not existed before. - Housing provides a fruitful analytical lens to a) question and b) analyse more complex developments and transformation processes which shape societies more generally. Housing served as an instrument of social engineering and as a means towards the creation of productive and obedient citizens. It also shaped a discourse about promises and expectations which affected both an emerging middle class and industrial workers. - Housing policies rarely represent an end in itself. They are put to effect other aims of achievement, security, and control. - Issues of housing may be pursued through the interrogation of a variety of documents and spoken words. A virtual plethora of available sources ranging from bureaucratic correspondence to personal memories enable us to retrace the complexities of housing politics and the experience of dwelling, of experiences made in the past and aspirations cultivated for the future. It is worthwhile consulting a diversified scenario of sources to tease out the particularities of housing in historical contexts. We worked in a highly interdisciplinary setting with field practitioners from architecture, engineering (risk management) and an art centre in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The project also tackled the issue of merging official points of view and knowledge as expressed in archival documentation with more people-centred views and bodies of knowledge.