Identity and language in a proto-colonial boomtown : Nouvelle-Anvers (DR Congo) in the late 19th Century and its afterlives

Nouvelle-Anvers, a colonial post founded in 1884 as “Bangala Station” in northwestern Congo, and today known as Mankanza, soon after its inception became a frenetic boomtown, attracting not only local Congolese from nearby areas but also, and mainly, people from very remote backgrounds, many of whom were forcefully moved there as labor, or willfully drawn by trade and employment opportunities. This influx of diverse populations turned the town into a crucible of linguistic and identitarian transformation during the 1880s and 1890s. To manage the linguistic diversity, colonizers introduced an existing pidgin based on Bobangi as lingua franca, which came to be known as “Bangala” (and later, after 1901, as “Lingala”). Because of its high prestige and purchase in Nouvelle-Anvers, Bangala also became a symbol of shared identity, with Congolese adopting it as a marker of belonging in the dynamic urban environment of Nouvelle-Anvers and of distinction with the outside. In the process it also contributed to the solidification and African appropriation of the category “the Bangala,” an ethnic construct originally fabricated by colonial ignorance in the late 1870s. Nouvelle-Anvers thus stands as a pivotal urban site in the historical development of both Bangala/Lingala as a language and “the Bangala” as a collective identity.