This article argues for the importance of rewriting the conventional atrocity narrative about violence in King Leopold's Congo Free State in relation to the present, the ongoing war‐related humanitarianism and sexual violence in the DRC. The central idea is to push beyond the shock and tenacity of the visual, the ubiquitous mutilation photographs that tend to blot out all else; and instead seek weaker, more fragile acoustic traces in a diverse archive with Congolese words and sounds. This sensory, nonspectral mode of parsing the archive tells us something new about the immediacy of violence, its duration in memory, and the bodily and reproductive effects of sexually torturing women. The sound of twisted laughter convulsed around forms of sexual violence that were constitutive of reproductive ruination during the rubber regime in Leopold's Congo. The work of strategically tethering the past to the present should not be about forging historicist links across time but about locating repetitions and difference, including differences among humanitarian modes and strategies in the early 20th and the early 21st centuries.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies.Today we do not make any decisions about spacing the births of our children....Our ancestors had stronger children because they were not born too close together. Today parents no longer worry about their children getting sick. They think that they can always buy medicine and then the child will get well. This is why couples no longer separate their beds after the birth of a child, as they used to in the time of our ancestors.1 A group of Western family planning experts elicited this remark from one Zairian while investigating "traditional" methods of birth control in Kasai and Shaba in 1976 and 1977. The survey team was interested in the "cultural precedent" of Zairian mothers' abstaining from sexual intercourse while nursing. This way of "regulating fertility and spacing children" seemed to indicate that "long before the influx of Western ideas, the understanding of the importance of child spacing to maternal and infant health was widespread in these cultures." The researchers were alarmed by Zaire's population growth rate, and feared the country's 27 million people would double in size within the next twenty-five years. They recommended that family planning projects "capitalize" on "this ancestral precedent" by using it as a "banner" in encouraging the use of biomedical contraceptives. Their assumption was that African birth spacing customs had disappeared because of "the breakdown of their traditions in the face of modernization."2 Some fifty years earlier, other groups of Western expertscolonial doctors, missionaries, mine owners and officialsalso viewed these African reproductive practices as a kind of birth control. They were not interested in making it a "banner" of any of their projects, however.Birth spacing in Africa, and in the Third World in general, is of growing interest to demographers, health professionals, development policy planners and anthropologists. There is an extensive interdisciplinary literature on the relationships among postpartum abstinence, birth intervals and breast feeding; their effects on fertility and maternal and infant health; the socioeconomic factors responsible for their decline; and the cultural resiliency of birth spacing 1Ronald S. Waife, Traditional Methods of Birth Control in Zaire, Pathfinder Papers No. 4 (Chestnut Hill, MA, 1978), 4. I benefited from the advice and critical comments of several people during various stages of the conceptualization, research and writing of this paper. Gracious thanks go to 402 NANCY ROSE HUNT cus...

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This paper highlights analytical and historical commonalities between Belgian African anti-polygamy measures and the unusual practice of taxing urban un-married women. Secondly, it interprets the 1950s rebellion against this tax in Bujumbura in light of how the colonial category of femme libre and a 1950 antipolygamy law converged in the Muslim African community of Buyenzi. Colonial categories and camouflage, name-giving and name-calling, noise and silence are central to the interpretation.Belgian African anti-polygamy attitudes and measures are first reviewed, including polygamous wife liberations in the Leopoldian period; the introduction of supplementary wife taxation in 1910; demographic anxieties from the 1920s; and post-World War II worries about ‘camouflaged polygamy’, leading to the passage of the anti-polygamy law in 1950. The published evidence of ‘camouflaged polygamy's’ noisiest critics, élite African ‘new men’ or évolués, suggests that polygamy was increasing in rural areas due to forced labour obligations, and becoming camouflaged in response to pro-natalist rewards for monogamy. A second section analyses the urban single women's tax in terms of the embarrassed silence surrounding this new form of moral taxation, which was introduced following legislation in the 1930s designed to better differentiate ‘customary’ space from urban sites of ‘evolution’. A third section draws on Buyenzi women's oral memories to reconstruct their noisy rebellion against the tax. The conclusion analyses these Muslim women's outrage in light of the contradictions of gaining municipal revenue through moral taxation, an urban surveillance process which necessitated naming the category of persons taxed. The etymology of the term femme libre demonstrates that polygamous wife and prostitute were associated categories in colonial thought from the Leopoldian period. Colonial authorities lost control over these categories in this atypical ‘extra-customary’ township super-imposed on a pre-colonial ‘customary’ community. The new African need for camouflaging plural wives, created by the strong urban expulsion powers of the 1950 anti-polygamy law, converged with the name-calling of the single women's tax, resulting in a local struggle to control the naming process. The category of women created by the tax coalesced around the sexual insult embedded in the tax's name, embarrassing colonial authorities into exemptions and inciting the men of their community into a tax rebellion.

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