Figures for urban consumption of beef products, Leopoldville 1950s

Econometric interpretations of the effects of modern colonial domination based on colonial statistics, and research questioning the interactions between colonial empires, colonized populations and international institutions, are sparking renewed interest in imperial statistical production. However, little is known about it.

Discover the fourth session of "Encrypting and deciphering empires, XVIII-XXIth centuries” seminar: "Figures for urban consumption of beef products, Leopoldville 1950s" with Louise Barré, a postdoctoral fellow with the ERC Cattlefrontiers (Ghent University). She is studying food supply in the cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville during the colonial period. She is the author of an article entitled “Counting to plan” (Politique Africaine, 2017) in which she exposes the forms of sample counting practiced up to the first Ivorian population census in 1974, and the patriarchal prejudices that underpin it. His current research has led him to mobilize statistical documentation on tax, trade and customs in the Belgian and French Congo during the colonial era. The book resulting from her thesis, entitled La famille patriarcale en dispute, Côte d'Ivoire 1949-1968, will be published in January 2025 by ENS Éditions.

How do you get around administrative disinterest, and hence the absence, lack or incompleteness of figures? Studies on colonial power have answered this question by exploiting the differences between metropolises and territories, or between administrative departments, or between international bodies and national administrations. This interplay of actors also guides the present foray into trade and customs statistics in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s. While the administration kept accounts of local cattle production intended to feed urban dwellers, its responsibility only extended to a limited part of the population, made up of state employees and private companies. They are the target of a recent pricing policy, which led to a number of meat decrees in the province of Leopoldville after 1949. However, urban consumption is not limited to foodstuffs controlled by the administration; it includes products traded from the environment, as well as a number of products from the global food industrialization process which, while escaping price control due to their nature or quantity, are nonetheless, according to other sources, a growing component of urban diets. This presentation aims to complete our vision of the supply of beef products, highlighting a set of international entrepreneurs who are opening up new food markets to satisfy growing forms of differentiated consumption.