Finns in the Congo

Opportunities and Colonial Experiences in a Foreign Empire

Abstract

Shedding light on the participation of actors from small states in colonial projects in the extra-European world, this article tracks two rather ordinary Finns living increasingly, and perhaps surprisingly, colonial lives far away from home in what to them was a foreign empire: the Belgian Congo of the early twentieth century. Saga Roos, a bourgeois woman traveling to join her husband, and Akseli Leppänen, an engineer and riverboat mechanic, show how mobile Europeans from the margins of Europe and from a middle-class socio-economic background took and navigated opportunities in the world of empires. Roos and Leppänen, belonging to the educated classes, were people on the move who went to the Congo to pursue leisure and work. They never intended to stay for good or to become settlers, but instead acted as mobile transmitters of knowledge, impacted by and disseminating exoticist and racialised discourses concerning ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’ that circulated far and wide in colonial settings. Although they came from a country that had no formal colonies in Africa, Roos and Leppänen attest that Finns were not outsiders, or even distant or critical observers of colonial rule. Rather, they accepted and actively took part in the co-production of colonial rule and racial order. They show how actors from small states contributed to and co-created the extra-European colonial world, revealing a pan-European colonial project of shared mindsets and experiences.