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Colonial Propaganda In The Belgian Congo Through Postage Stamps (1894–1960): A Quantitative Content Analysis
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Colonial Propaganda In The Belgian Congo Through Postage Stamps (1894–1960): A Quantitative Content Analysis
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Journal Article
Colonial Propaganda In The Belgian Congo Through Postage Stamps (1894–1960): A Quantitative Content Analysis
2025
Overview
Despite extensive scholarship on colonial propaganda, the use of postage stamps as tools of imperial messaging remains underexplored. This study aims to examine how Belgium employed postage stamps to construct and disseminate propagandistic narratives about its African colony, the Belgian Congo. Using quantitative content analysis, the research analyses a corpus of 149 stamps issued between 1894 and 1960, tracing how visual themes evolved across different phases of colonisation. The results indicate that Belgium adapted its messages throughout the different phases of colonisation, from the exoticism of the landscape and the primitivism of the native person, to highlighting the supposed civilising benefits. The native person appears on postage stamps as being preferably male, vulnerable and dependent, exotic in his semi-nudity, who must be cared for like a child, but at the same time useful to the metropolis as a labour force. Analysing the general vision that the Belgian metropolis wants to show of itself through postage stamps, two-thirds of the stamps show neutrality or that the native person lives in freedom, as if colonisation did not exist, thanks to the profusion of images of animals, plants and landscapes, or to showing the native people carrying out their ancestral activities. This study may be of interest in the fields of the history of Belgian colonialism, communication, political propaganda, and the representation of the other, whether ethnically or culturally different. To this end, it uses postage stamps issued for the Belgian Congo as historical documentary sources, implying a novel approach, not only in the type of source chosen, but also in the method used to extract data from them..
