Belgian Congo administered in Dutch instead of French?

As we know, Belgium is half French half Dutch. And also as we know, Congo emerged as a Francophone country.

So, could Belgium have decided to administer Congo in Dutch rather than French? What effect would it have?
 
I believe Dutch was also used under Belgian rule, but it was decided upon independence to focus on French as the lingua franca.

Theoretically Dutch was co-official OTL (it was proclaimed co-official in 1908), but in reality Dutch wasn't used, even before independence. OTL Congolese natives including Mobutu used to mock Flemish administrators in the Congo for their poor French.

Because Flemish was low-prestige and already marginalized in Belgium proper at the time, it saw almost no use in the Belgian Congo. You'd need some sort of Austro-Hungarian compromise or other POD in Belgian politics to force Flemish to be co-official in all spheres. OTL Belgians didn't even propose the idea of using Dutch in the Congo until 1955, which was way too late.
 
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You pretty much need Leopold to set up Dutch as the administrativ3 language of the Cong Free State, and the Belgians simply keeping status quo afterward.
 
You'd need to avert the political dominace of the Walloons in Belgium. Find some reason for the Belgian government to favor Flemish as the language of government at home, and then they are more likely to extend that to their colony.
 
It's difficult to make happen. The Congo was not established as a Belgian colony but a personal possession of King Leopold, and Leopold was Francophone.
Any change to Belgium that's fundamental enough to make Dutch a prestige language is a change that's fundamental enough to change the royal family, and any change that fundamental will certainly butterfly away the possession of the Congo.

And by the time that the Belgian government takes possession in 1913, you've got the best part of two generations of governance exclusively in French.
 
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You'd need to avert the political dominace of the Walloons in Belgium. Find some reason for the Belgian government to favor Flemish as the language of government at home, and then they are more likely to extend that to their colony.

That's tough because Belgium was established as a francophone state and only gradually did Flemish gain legal equality.
 
Theoretically Dutch was co-official OTL (it was proclaimed co-official in 1908), but in reality Dutch wasn't used, even before independence. OTL Congolese natives including Mobutu used to mock Flemish administrators in the Congo for their poor French.

Because Flemish was low-prestige and already marginalized in Belgium proper at the time, it saw almost no use in the Belgian Congo. You'd need some sort of Austro-Hungarian compromise or other POD in Belgian politics to force Flemish to be co-official in all spheres. OTL Belgians didn't even propose the idea of using Dutch in the Congo until 1955, which was way too late.

This basically sums it up. The predominance of French in Belgian Congo was pretty much accepted, even by the Dutch speaking colonial officials who made up most of the lower ranks of the colonial administration (not to mention of the missionaries). According to the New Encyclopedia of the Flemish Movement, when the first Duch language decision of a magistrate of a court of justice was issued in Elisabethville in 1956 (four years before independence), this resulted in the court of appeals asking the Minister of Colonial Affairs to relieve said judge of his functions ... This incident (and the judicial process which ended with the Court of Cassation - the Belgian "Supreme Court" if you will - deciding in favour of the "Flemish" position) was basically the first time it became a political issue of some degree of importancy.

Some protests from inside the administration were uttered, especially starting in the 1940s (with some one man activism by Wilfried Borms - some of Flemish nationalist leader August - in the late 30s), but even then, I've got the impression that most of their attention was centered on the use of Dutch within the confines of the colonial administration itself and that very few suggested using the language in contacts with the native population or imposing it in education (most of which wasn't in state hands anyways). The first time the use of Dutch in native education seemed to have been "seriously" suggested, was within the (at the time rather unimportant) Flemish nationalist party (Volksunie - or rather its "think tank" the De Raet Foundation) in 1958 - as in: children would chose between French and Dutch (most likely only in secondary school). And even then, even these Flemish nationalists believed French should remain the primary language of education ... None of these demands were popular with the native population, who feared they would have to learn yet another foreign language to climb up in the colonial administration. Dutch was also not that popular with the native population to begin with - not only because of the influence of the Belgian sociolinguistic attitudes (where it was, as is said, a low prestige language), but also because (a) they associated it with the low ranking colonial administrators they came into contact with, in other words, those most likely to administer punishments etc. and (b) the only "officious" public use of Dutch was basically in a police context - it was used for radio contacts during riots etc., because then police would be certain the native population wouldn't understand them.

This being said, how to change this? One would need a major change in Belgium itself, probably well before the Congo Free State. However, considering Belgium's economic development, it's difficult to imagine something happening that would either cause the Belgian (including the Flemish) elite to give up on French as a sign of social status or the rise of a rival Dutch speaking economic elite (an important factor that contributed to the sociolinguistic changes in Belgium, especially after WO2) - barring an outright French attempt of invasion stirring up nationalist sentiments and stimulating Dutch (or "Flemish") as a sign of national distinctiveness, but that might butterfly away Belgian colonialism to begin with.
 
Did the Belgian Congo, after transitioning to being a proper Belgian colony as opposed to being Leopold's personal possession, have any trade links with other colonies in Africa? If so, considering many of their neighbors are Francophone, it would have made even more sense to just keep using French over Dutch for international reasons.
 
Did the Belgian Congo, after transitioning to being a proper Belgian colony as opposed to being Leopold's personal possession, have any trade links with other colonies in Africa? If so, considering many of their neighbors are Francophone, it would have made even more sense to just keep using French over Dutch for international reasons.

No. As a near-general rule, Europeans didn't allow their African colonies to have trade links to each other. To make a phone call from British Gold Coast (Ghana) to French Ivory Coast, the call was sent to London, routed to Paris, and then routed to the Ivory Coast. The same principle applied with intercolonial trade in order to maximize colonial profits. Even today you will notice most railroads in African countries lead from mines/plantations to ports for international export, while there are comparatively few railroads linking neighboring countries.

This basically sums it up. The predominance of French in Belgian Congo was pretty much accepted, even by the Dutch speaking colonial officials who made up most of the lower ranks of the colonial administration (not to mention of the missionaries).

I agree, although I would add that something we should note is that French wasn't even the predominant language of colonial administration, nor is it the predominant governmental language in post-colonial Congo. The true lingua franca in both cases is and was Lingala, which was an unusual case of an African language being taught by Belgian colonial administrators to other African subjects who were previously unfamiliar with the language. Even today the concept of the Congo being a francophone country is a little misleading. It's really hard to estimate the percent of French speakers in the Congo because the only organization that has attempted to do so is the OIF which is notorious for overestimating the prevalence of French. As an aside to illustrate this point, they claim that up to 42% of Haitians can speak and understand French when virtually every other authority, including native Haitians, agree the true figure is nearly 5%. Having said that, while I'm not quite certain how many Congolese can speak French, it still occupies a position below that of Lingala (and arguably below Swahili too) when it comes to interethnic communication.

This affects the OP because a lot of the arguments against introducing Dutch were premised on saying that expecting natives to learn 3 foreign languages (Lingala, French, and Dutch) to participate in colonial administration was unrealistic. Dutch has a better fighting chance if the Belgians follow the lead of the British in Ghana or the French in Mali and simply impose European languages as local lingua francas rather than taking the unusual step of promoting Lingala as an administrative language.
 
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I agree, although I would add that something we should note is that French wasn't even the predominant language of colonial administration, nor is it the predominant governmental language in post-colonial Congo. The true lingua franca in both cases is and was Lingala, which was an unusual case of an African language being taught by Belgian colonial administrators to other African subjects who were previously unfamiliar with the language. Even today the concept of the Congo being a francophone country is a little misleading. It's really hard to estimate the percent of French speakers in the Congo because the only organization that has attempted to do so is the OIF which is notorious for overestimating the prevalence of French. As an aside to illustrate this point, they claim that up to 42% of Haitians can speak and understand French when virtually every other authority, including native Haitians, agree the true figure is nearly 5%. Having said that, while I'm not quite certain how many Congolese can speak French, it still occupies a position below that of Lingala (and arguably below Swahili too) when it comes to interethnic communication.

This is anecdotal, but the Congolese I have met (I have not been to the RDC but have worked with people from there) generally could speak French well, actually better than some from West African countries. But then, these have mainly come from Kinshasa so this may not be a representative sample.

OTOH, the Haitians I've known generally spoke very limited French.
 
This is anecdotal, but the Congolese I have met (I have not been to the RDC but have worked with people from there) generally could speak French well, actually better than some from West African countries. But then, these have mainly come from Kinshasa so this may not be a representative sample.

OTOH, the Haitians I've known generally spoke very limited French.
Haitian creole is related to French.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole
 
This is anecdotal, but the Congolese I have met (I have not been to the RDC but have worked with people from there) generally could speak French well, actually better than some from West African countries. But then, these have mainly come from Kinshasa so this may not be a representative sample.

OTOH, the Haitians I've known generally spoke very limited French.

I'm Haitian, and have worked/lived in the Congo. The issue with this is that Congolese in Kinshasa speak French very well because it is the capital city, but the vast majority of Congolese do not live in Kinshasa. Try getting around in French in Mbuji-Mayi or Lubumbashi, it won't work well if you try to talk to anyone who isn't the police. Although I was placed there for my French skills, every time I left the Bas-Congo region I relied on Lingala with no opportunity to use French.

We see this pattern in most of "Francophone" Africa (put in quotes because French is honestly not that widespread there), where French is the main language in Abidjan but not used in the rest of Ivory Coast, or also widely used in Bamako but Bambara is predominant in the rest of Mali, etc. As for your second example, if you had only spoken to Haitians from the Port-au-Prince/Petionville metropolitan area you probably would have gotten the anecdotal opinion that Haitians generally speak French well.


They're related, but in the sense that Spanish is related to Latin. I speak both languages natively and they're mutually incomprehensible both directions. Creole speakers can't understand French grammar, while French speakers can't understand Creole vocabulary as the entire language is comprised of words that sound like French words but have deceptively different meanings.
 
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I'm Haitian, and have worked/lived in the Congo. The issue with this is that Congolese in Kinshasa speak French very well because it is the capital city, but the vast majority of Congolese do not live in Kinshasa. Try getting around in French in Mbuji-Mayi or Lubumbashi, it won't work well if you try to talk to anyone who isn't the police. Although I was placed there for my French skills, every time I left the Bas-Congo region I relied on Lingala with no opportunity to use French.

We see this pattern in most of "Francophone" Africa (put in quotes because French is honestly not that widespread there), where French is the main language in Abidjan but not used in the rest of Ivory Coast, or also widely used in Bamako but Bambara is predominant in the rest of Mali, etc. As for your second example, if you had only spoken to Haitians from the Port-au-Prince/Petionville metropolitan area you probably would have gotten the anecdotal opinion that Haitians generally speak French well.

Yes, I could see that. The big cities gather people from all the different regions (and some foreigners) so it is easier for French to become a common language, while in the countryside the traditional linguistic patterns continue.

I will say that all of the Haitiens I met knew some French, probably because of the shared vocabulary with Créole. But they often struggled to express themselves.


Related yes, but definitely a separate language. The vocabulary mainly comes from French but the grammar, really not at all - word order, conjugation, prepositions are all different. I can recognize some words but it's hard to understand what the whole sentence is saying.

There are also quite a few "false friend" words which have changed meanings (or they have kept the old meanings and in French they have changed).
 
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I agree, although I would add that something we should note is that French wasn't even the predominant language of colonial administration, nor is it the predominant governmental language in post-colonial Congo. The true lingua franca in both cases is and was Lingala, which was an unusual case of an African language being taught by Belgian colonial administrators to other African subjects who were previously unfamiliar with the language. Even today the concept of the Congo being a francophone country is a little misleading. It's really hard to estimate the percent of French speakers in the Congo because the only organization that has attempted to do so is the OIF which is notorious for overestimating the prevalence of French. As an aside to illustrate this point, they claim that up to 42% of Haitians can speak and understand French when virtually every other authority, including native Haitians, agree the true figure is nearly 5%. Having said that, while I'm not quite certain how many Congolese can speak French, it still occupies a position below that of Lingala (and arguably below Swahili too) when it comes to interethnic communication.

This affects the OP because a lot of the arguments against introducing Dutch were premised on saying that expecting natives to learn 3 foreign languages (Lingala, French, and Dutch) to participate in colonial administration was unrealistic. Dutch has a better fighting chance if the Belgians follow the lead of the British in Ghana or the French in Mali and simply impose European languages as local lingua francas rather than taking the unusual step of promoting Lingala as an administrative language.

While it is true that the language of contact between the Belgian administration and the Congolese population was not French, but rather Lingala (especially in the Northern and Western areas) but also, in a lesser extent, Swahili, Kikongo and Tshiluba, and that the spread of Lingala is in no small part due to its use as language of command in the army (Force publique), I don't think you can say that the language of administration as such (the paperwork, the judicial process etc.) was Lingala. Paperwork and everything behind the scenes of the Congolese administration and economy was squarely in French. (It's anecdotical, but I’ve spent some time searching through archives relating to the FP, but have only encountered French language documents.)

All this goes for both the public as well as the private sector. After all, if even a European language as Dutch, which was already co-official in the “motherland”, was deemed to be an unfit instrument of administration and other “serious stuff”, I can’t imagine the Belgian authorities granting such a status to Lingala, which most of them no doubt viewed as too much of a “primitive” language.

Certainly by the 1950s, native Congolese did have access to certain functions, both in the private as well as in the public sector. Of course, given the fundamentally racist and discriminatory nature of colonialism, these were all just low-level functions with no influence on decision-making and certainly with no possibility of being in a position of authority towards a white person (e.g. postal office clerks). Indeed, I believe Lumumba himself worked as an office clerk for Union minière for a time. In such a position, one would certainly have to be able to speak and write French in order to write reports, fill in the paperwork, etc. The addition of another language, such as Dutch, would be seen as an additional burden.

Of course, this is a factor that’s only relevant for the small number of Congolese that actually were working in such positions or wishing to do just that – the so-called évolué class and those aspiring to become an évolué. For the great majority, it would’ve been a moot point: the vast majority of Congolese by 1960 only had a limited, primary education, given to them in Lingala, Swahili or their local language by (catholic but also protestant) missionaries (so much for the mission civilisatrice), with no or only little knowledge of French and zero perspective of playing a role in colonial administration.

But, all that being said, the Congolese matter very little when discussing the possibility of replacing French with Dutch as administrative language as proposed in the OP - the truth of the matter is that those things were decided by the Belgians, and the Belgians alone. If Dutch were even introduced in secundary education (as proposed by some in the late 50s), that would have been a Belgian decision, motivated by Belgian domestic concerns, and nothing the Congolese could've influenced.
 
Huh. So what I'm getting hear is that Belgium was overwhelmingly Francophone until recently?

No, but French was the socially dominant language - the language of the upper class, bourgeoisie and nobility, and the social marker adopted by those who wanted to "climb up the ladder" - and therefore the language of public administration during the 19th century and de facto a considerable part of the 20th century. Dutch was a lower prestige language. Hence the language shift in favour of French in Dutch (dialect) speaking territory during the last two centuries, most notably Brussels.
 
No, but French was the socially dominant language - the language of the upper class, bourgeoisie and nobility, and the social marker adopted by those who wanted to "climb up the ladder" - and therefore the language of public administration during the 19th century and de facto a considerable part of the 20th century. Dutch was a lower prestige language. Hence the language shift in favour of French in Dutch (dialect) speaking territory during the last two centuries, most notably Brussels.
Would it have been possibly for Belgium to become completely Francophone?
 
Would it have been possibly for Belgium to become completely Francophone?

I guess that, with earlier generalised and French speaking primary education (e.g. starting in 1882 like in France instead of after WO1; I believed it was one of the ideas toyed with by a liberal government - Rogier II? - during the 1850s to remedy the social problems in the Flemish provinces)) and a somewhat different (that is, even more delayed) economic development of the Flemish provinces (but also an earlier and easier upward social mobility and/or integration of the eventual Flemish small business elite within the Belgian upper class), there are timelines thinkable where Belgium is as much frencified as France is (that is: with Dutch dialects still being spoken, but mainly by an aging rural population), yes. I've seen reports that made it seem very likely based on mid-20th century trends, that Ghent was going to go the Brussels way, with French slowly making some headway in the lower middle class.
Not without any trouble, though, given demographic factors, but not unthinkable.
 
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