Belgium annexed the Congo Free State in 1908 after the rubber atrocities, but retained compulsion in altered form: the cultures obligatoires required peasants to plant fixed acreages of cotton, rice or palm; the head tax forced entry into the cash economy; and recruitment agencies supplied labour to the Katanga copper mines and Kasai diamond fields under penal contracts. Administrators regrouped villages along roads for tax collection and medical control, and the sleeping-sickness campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s created cordons, screening camps and lazarets that moved and confined populations. Resistance was punished by force, most severely in the Pende revolt of 1931 in Kwilu, suppressed with several hundred deaths. During the Second World War the effort de guerre intensified quotas for copper, rubber and palm oil and lengthened compulsory labour days. Belgium abolished most compulsory cultivation only in the 1950s; the system is far less studied than the Free State period that preceded it.
The Belgian colonial state and concession companies compelled Congolese to grow set crops, work in mines and move their villages to roads and cordons
The colonial administration's first full enumeration, in 1924, put the Congo at about 10 million people; by 1958 the count had reached roughly 13.5 million. Under the cultures obligatoires regime peasants were required to plant set acreages of cotton, rice or palm, villages were moved to roadsides and cordons sanitaires for administrative convenience and sleeping-sickness control, and the Union Minière and other companies recruited hundreds of thousands of workers for the Katanga mines under quota systems administered through chiefs.
No aggregate exists. Mortality in mine and plantation labour camps was high in the 1910s and 1920s and fell after companies invested in stabilised workforces; deaths in the 1931 Pende repression are usually put in the hundreds. Excess mortality from the compulsory cultivation regime has not been quantified.
Belgian colonial ordinances, company records and the parliamentary and missionary criticism of the interwar years document compulsory cultivation, penal labour contracts and detention for tax and labour default.
Dem. Rep. Congo