Belgian colonial authorities legally defended conscripting four-year-olds against their parents’ will.

Evidence

In Leopoldstad, I had to approve the employment of a group of boys of four to five years of age, “recruited” for the coffee factory in Kinshasa against the will of their parents. I wrote to the King’s Attorney that I would no longer use my position for operations of such obviously illegal nature. The Director of Justice [sic] replied that I would thus disadvantage those children who wished to work. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 891

Categorization

• QUESTION: The “Director of Justice” claim that refusing to enslave children would ‘disadvantage those children who wished to work’ — worth tracing how ‘freedom to choose work’ becomes the vocabulary of forced labor, a direct precursor of modern ‘voluntary’ exploitation discourse.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how the child’s ‘willingness to work’ was invented as a legal fiction in Leopold’s Congo to launder child abduction — contrast with contemporary child-labor discourse.