On the 18th of October 1908, the Belgian parliament voted in favour of the Belgian take-over of the Congo Free State from the Belgian king Léopold II, who had privately owned the Congolese territory but was forced to give up ‘his’ colony after the international outcry over the well-known Congo atrocities. With this vote, the Congolese territory officially switched hands, and the Belgian rule over Congo would remain in place until 1960. The advocates of the reprise had held up prospects of great gain by referring to the enormous mineral wealth of the colony, whereas the adversaries acutely remarked that the colony would only remain profitable if Belgium would continue on the same plundering elan than their internationally condemned king. The reality-check came quickly, when one of the strongest advocates, Jules Renkin, visited the Belgian Congo in his new role as the first minister of colonies. After a five-month journey through ‘his’ colony, he realized that for the material realization of the colonial ambitions to be economically and practically feasible, a cheap, locally produced building material would be of quintessential importance. However, as the colonial presence was justified through the paternalistic image of ‘helping’ the African inhabitants on their ‘path to modernity’, this colonial building material could not be one of the existing local building materials, as these were publicly denounced for being non-durable, insalubre [unhygienic] or even puant [stinking] — although in reality they remained in use for all sorts of colonial buildings throughout Belgian colonialism. Though seemingly a deadlock, the technocrats of the Belgian Congo remarkably quickly formulated an answer to this question: Concrete. Once a local cement plant would be established —which eventually only happened in 1921 after several failed attempts— concrete would be the deus-ex-machina that could resolve the apparent contradiction between the economic necessity to use local materials on the one hand and the cultural disdain towards ...