M(g)r. De Hemptin(n)e, I Presume? Transforming local memory through toponymy in colonial/post-colonial Lubumbashi, DR Congo

Abstract

In 2010, the Congolese city of Lubumbashi celebrated the centennial of its foundation. Numerous activities were organised on the occasion, most of which celebrated rather than critically assessed the city’s colonial past. It was precisely during this year that Moïse Katumbi Chapwe, the current provincial governor of Katanga and one of Congo’s rising political stars, decided to re-baptise one of the central avenues in Lubumbashi’s city centre, changing its name from Avenue de Tabora to Avenue Mgr. Jean-Felix de Hemptinne. Making a tribute to the head of the missionary congregation of the Benedictine fathers and a notorious figure of Lubumbashi’s colonial history was a rather remarkable decision, all the more so since this particular avenue had been the symbolic axis of Belgian colonial power during colonial times. One can wonder then to what extent Katumbi’s initiative was an act similar to what the prominent Africanist scholar Valentin Mudimbe, who was born and trained in Lubumbashi, described in his 1994 book Les corps glorieux des mots et des êtres as the conscious transformation of (local) memory through a new colonial toponymic inscription in space. Drawing on archival research, fieldwork and local history, we will demonstrate in this chapter that the urban history of Lubumbashi offers a number of telling examples of how power has been imprinted in the minds of the city’s inhabitants via the urban text that is constituted by names of streets and avenues. Focusing on a limited number of examples, the chapter will illustrate that such practice was, however, not exclusive to the colonial, but continued into the post-independence era. As such, we will argue, the changing toponymy of Lubumbashi offers us a particular insight in the shifting position of the city and, by extension, the province of Katanga, in the minds of local as well as central authorities in Congo. Resituating Katumbi’s initiative of renaming the Avenue de Tabora in this larger narrative will allow us to define it as an impulsive rather than a thoughtful act, more informed by post-colonial amnesia than by a profound engagement with colonial urban memory.