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Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity
Understanding the current civil war in the Congo requires an examination of how the Congo's identity has been imagined over time. Imagining the Congo historicizes and contextualizes the constructions of the Congo's identity in order to analyze the political implications of that identity, looking in detail at four historical periods in which the identity of the Congo was contested, with numerous forces attempting to produce and attach meanings to its territory and people. Dunn looks specifically at how what he calls 'imaginings' of the Congo have allowed the current state of affairs there to develop, but he also looks at the broader conceptual question of how the concept of identity has developed and become important in recent international relations scholarship.
232 pages, Paperback
First published May 30, 2003
About the author
Kevin Dunn
26 books17 followersKevin Dunn plays in several bands, runs a small record label, publishes zines, and works at a small liberal arts college, where he teaches and publishes on a range of topics from African politics to international relations to global punk. He and his family split their time between Western New York state and Western North Carolina. The author of numerous scholarly works, such as Global Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life, Inside African Politics, and The Politics of Origin in Africa.
Vicious is My Middle Name is his first novel.
Vicious is My Middle Name is his first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 29, 2011
Kevin Dunn makes the point that in order to understand dreadful history of war, internal armed violence and destruction of both the environment and the social order that has characterized the Congo/Zaire/DRC for the past century, one must examine how the Congo has been imagined: how it has been defined, who has defined it and for whose benefit.
While it is commonplace wisdom that history is written by the winners it is also influenced by the dominant narrative during the time that history happens. If the Congolese are cannibals, savages or children in a state of nature needing the Belgians to bring them civilization, salvation and capitalism we have one way of looking at the 80 years of Belgian rule. If the men from Brussels are serf herding racists who see Africans as just another resource to be exploited, not quite human and worth less than the rubber they harvest, there is another quite different view of things.
Since independence, if the Congo/Zaire/DRC is considered an economic and cultural wasteland run by kleptocratic dictators who are accepted or simply endured by a quiescent population, one will think differently of it than if the period since 1960 is seen as a continuation of colonial attitudes and policies with an overlay during the Cold War of great power politics which propped up sticky-fingered louts like Mobutu Sese Seko.
Here is a telling example of how competing imperialist forces used similar images to describe the Congo and its people: under Leopold II, whose representatives ruled with lash and gun, the Congolese were said to be barbarians lacking the civilizing touch of the Enlightenment and as hapless victims who needed rescuing from evil Arab slave traders. The reform movement portrayed them still as savages and also as victims but of Leopold’s greed and cruelty. The reformers managed only to change the Congo Free State into the Belgian Congo, turning it from the personal possession of the king into a colony of Belgium but the Africans were still considered to be barely human. As it happens with a few exceptions like committed human rights campaigners Roger Casement and Edmund Morel the Congo reform movement was only interested in insuring the free trade rights with the Congo and not with the well-being of its inhabitants.
Perceptions didn’t change much during the next 70 years or so. In 1955 a Belgian academic wrote that “the great mass of the Congo’s inhabitants are incapable of governing themselves. This will be so for a long time to come...” while a survey of Belgians found that many of them expressed the views that the Congolese were savages newly introduced to civilization.
The differences were most clear at the independence ceremonies for the colony in 1960. King Baudouin’s speech repeated that the colonists were in Africa to open up backwards countries to European civilization; he looked back to 80 years of bringing civilization and salvation to the people of the Congo River basin. Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo said that “our lot was eighty years of colonial rule; are wounds are still too fresh to be driven from our memory.” He spoke of Congolese being beaten, thrown into prison, killed and banished; of horrendous living conditions, different laws for whites and Congolese and the contempt with which Congolese were addressed by Belgians, with “familiar verb forms not indeed as with a friend but because the honorable formal verb forms were reserved for whites.”
The essence of colonialism, according to a text by John and Jean Comaroff quoted by Dunn, is “less in political overrule than in seizing and transforming 'others' by interacting with them on terms not of their own choosing; in making them the pliant objects and silenced subjects of our scenarios; in assuming the capacity to represent them.” This is particularly important in Dunn’s analysis since he draws on the Edward Said’s reading of “The Prison Notebooks” by Antonio Gramsci. One of the key concepts that Said takes from Gramsci is that subjects are the product of historical processes that seem not to leave traces—that are considered natural and normal. Gramsci argues that the first step in critical inquiry of colonial people is to make an inventory of those traces to counter the ability of the dominant class or nation to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as inevitable and the way things should be.
Patrice Lumumba interpreted the colonial period as one of exploitation, repression and resource extraction. Since he opposed the colonial narrative in every way he was seen as particularly radical, unstable and dangerous. He was demonized, isolated and murdered—it would be an intriguing counterfactual history to look at the history of the Congo if Lumumba had been allowed to continue as Prime Minister.
While it is commonplace wisdom that history is written by the winners it is also influenced by the dominant narrative during the time that history happens. If the Congolese are cannibals, savages or children in a state of nature needing the Belgians to bring them civilization, salvation and capitalism we have one way of looking at the 80 years of Belgian rule. If the men from Brussels are serf herding racists who see Africans as just another resource to be exploited, not quite human and worth less than the rubber they harvest, there is another quite different view of things.
Since independence, if the Congo/Zaire/DRC is considered an economic and cultural wasteland run by kleptocratic dictators who are accepted or simply endured by a quiescent population, one will think differently of it than if the period since 1960 is seen as a continuation of colonial attitudes and policies with an overlay during the Cold War of great power politics which propped up sticky-fingered louts like Mobutu Sese Seko.
Here is a telling example of how competing imperialist forces used similar images to describe the Congo and its people: under Leopold II, whose representatives ruled with lash and gun, the Congolese were said to be barbarians lacking the civilizing touch of the Enlightenment and as hapless victims who needed rescuing from evil Arab slave traders. The reform movement portrayed them still as savages and also as victims but of Leopold’s greed and cruelty. The reformers managed only to change the Congo Free State into the Belgian Congo, turning it from the personal possession of the king into a colony of Belgium but the Africans were still considered to be barely human. As it happens with a few exceptions like committed human rights campaigners Roger Casement and Edmund Morel the Congo reform movement was only interested in insuring the free trade rights with the Congo and not with the well-being of its inhabitants.
Perceptions didn’t change much during the next 70 years or so. In 1955 a Belgian academic wrote that “the great mass of the Congo’s inhabitants are incapable of governing themselves. This will be so for a long time to come...” while a survey of Belgians found that many of them expressed the views that the Congolese were savages newly introduced to civilization.
The differences were most clear at the independence ceremonies for the colony in 1960. King Baudouin’s speech repeated that the colonists were in Africa to open up backwards countries to European civilization; he looked back to 80 years of bringing civilization and salvation to the people of the Congo River basin. Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo said that “our lot was eighty years of colonial rule; are wounds are still too fresh to be driven from our memory.” He spoke of Congolese being beaten, thrown into prison, killed and banished; of horrendous living conditions, different laws for whites and Congolese and the contempt with which Congolese were addressed by Belgians, with “familiar verb forms not indeed as with a friend but because the honorable formal verb forms were reserved for whites.”
The essence of colonialism, according to a text by John and Jean Comaroff quoted by Dunn, is “less in political overrule than in seizing and transforming 'others' by interacting with them on terms not of their own choosing; in making them the pliant objects and silenced subjects of our scenarios; in assuming the capacity to represent them.” This is particularly important in Dunn’s analysis since he draws on the Edward Said’s reading of “The Prison Notebooks” by Antonio Gramsci. One of the key concepts that Said takes from Gramsci is that subjects are the product of historical processes that seem not to leave traces—that are considered natural and normal. Gramsci argues that the first step in critical inquiry of colonial people is to make an inventory of those traces to counter the ability of the dominant class or nation to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as inevitable and the way things should be.
Patrice Lumumba interpreted the colonial period as one of exploitation, repression and resource extraction. Since he opposed the colonial narrative in every way he was seen as particularly radical, unstable and dangerous. He was demonized, isolated and murdered—it would be an intriguing counterfactual history to look at the history of the Congo if Lumumba had been allowed to continue as Prime Minister.
September 11, 2015
Interesting look at the Congo and how perception is part of reality.
Page 152: "Thus, the "reality" imagined by these forces was not grounded in Western discourses of national identity, the state, or sovereignty. These regional discourses were spatially and temporally different from those produced by Western forces over the past hundred years. Yet, it is important to recognize the contexts in which theses discourses were being produced, lest one fall prey to deterministic assumptions about "ethnic hatred" being universal, apolitical, and ahistoric. Such readings of these discourses are untenable and highly misleading. ON the one hand, these discourses are neither irrational or apolitical; quite the contrary. As Fisiy notes, the "centrality of social memory lies in the ability of political entrepreneurs to manipulate it in the construction of a collective identity to support their own agendas" Furthermore, we need to return to the recognition of violence as a discourse, mentioned in previous chapters. When alternative outlets are closed off, some individuals seek expression through bloodshed. Violence can be seen as a tool in the authoring and policing of socially constructed identities and memories, particularly for the dispossessed."
Page 152: "Thus, the "reality" imagined by these forces was not grounded in Western discourses of national identity, the state, or sovereignty. These regional discourses were spatially and temporally different from those produced by Western forces over the past hundred years. Yet, it is important to recognize the contexts in which theses discourses were being produced, lest one fall prey to deterministic assumptions about "ethnic hatred" being universal, apolitical, and ahistoric. Such readings of these discourses are untenable and highly misleading. ON the one hand, these discourses are neither irrational or apolitical; quite the contrary. As Fisiy notes, the "centrality of social memory lies in the ability of political entrepreneurs to manipulate it in the construction of a collective identity to support their own agendas" Furthermore, we need to return to the recognition of violence as a discourse, mentioned in previous chapters. When alternative outlets are closed off, some individuals seek expression through bloodshed. Violence can be seen as a tool in the authoring and policing of socially constructed identities and memories, particularly for the dispossessed."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews