In November 2021,  the New York Times (NYT) reported on allegations of colossal corruption regarding the management of the Congolese state-owned mining company Gécamines by Albert Yuma, its former chairman and one of Congo’s most well-known businessmen. The newspaper cited overwhelming evidence against Yuma, including mentions of secret documents and multiple interviews with insiders to the world of Congolese capitalism and politics.

Something else, the NYT suggested, seemed to indict Yuma: his character and lifestyle. The article described him as “a perpetual flashy presence,” known for his taste of Crystal Champagne, contemporary art, and luxury cars (and the article included a link to a video of a “Las Vegas-like” wedding ceremony thrown by Yuma for his daughter). The cult of elegance and the celebration of bourgeois extravagance are, of course, not foreign to Congolese society and popular culture. But the NYT’s description also carried echoes of a central colonial trope: the suspicion about improper appropriation of bourgeois culture by overdressed “Europeanized” Congolese.

In The Lumumba Generation: African Bourgeoisie and Colonial Distinction in the Belgian Congo, Berlin-based historian Daniel Tödt revisits the history of this colonial discourse, showing how the Belgian colonizers used claims about the Congolese’s supposed deficient civilized lifestyle to deny them rights to emancipation. Tödt’s book centers around the figure of the “évolué,” the evolved colonized, which became central in the Belgian colonial discourses of the 1940s and 1950s. The colonizers demanded that Congolese master the proper tenets of European bourgeois culture before they could be considered mature interlocutors worthy of rights. At the same time, they constantly questioned the performances of civilized behavior staged by the Congolese to meet their demands. Tödt’s work explains how this vicious cycle and the constantly receding horizon of reform and equality generated frustration and resentment that ultimately led many members of the colonial elite-in-the-making to turn radically against the colonial system by the end of the 1950s. In this interview, I ask Tödt questions about the historiographical interventions of his book and the role of Patrice Lumumba in the history of the Congolese évolués.