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Séverine Autesserre, Dangerous tales: Dominant narratives on the Congo and their unintended consequences, African Affairs, Volume 111, Issue 443, April 2012, Pages 202–222, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adr080
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Abstract
Explanations for the persistence of violence in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo blame the incendiary actions of domestic and regional leaders, as well as the inefficacy of international peace-building efforts. Based on several years of ethnographic research, this article adds another piece to the puzzle, emphasizing the perverse consequences of well-meaning international efforts. I argue that three narratives dominate the public discourse on Congo and eclipse the numerous alternative framings of the situation. These narratives focus on a primary cause of violence, illegal exploitation of mineral resources; a main consequence, sexual abuse of women and girls; and a central solution, extending state authority. I elucidate why simple narratives are necessary for policy makers, journalists, advocacy groups, and practitioners on the ground, especially those involved in the Congo. I then consider each narrative in turn and explain how they achieved prominence: they provided straightforward explanations for the violence, suggested feasible solutions to it, and resonated with foreign audiences. I demonstrate that the focus on these narratives and on the solutions they recommended has led to results that clash with their intended purposes, notably an increase in human rights violations.
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The Real Problems of the Congo: From Africanist perspectives to the African Prospectives (Patience Kabamba)
Abstract
The paper is a response to Autesserre's "Dangerous Tales: Dominant Narratives on The Congo and Their Unintended Consequences" published by African Affairs Advance Access on Februray 9, 2012. My main critic is that by focusing on the United Nations and state building Autesserre is taking concepts from one social space to a totally different social space and expecting them (naively and in a simplistic way) to have the same usefulness and meaning. I argue that this focus on state and other imported concepts misses the possibilities that Africans want to use on their own, as given by the Nande example in North Kivu. This paper also notes how frustrating it is for African scholars to observe how non Africans seem to have a stranglehold on how Africa is discussed and in defining the terms of the academic debates on Africa.
"War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State...We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State...War is the health of the State" (Randolph Bourne, "The State" 1919)
Introduction
The prominent place of the Congo in western literature on Africa is uncanny. From Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness at the turn of the twentieth century to Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible (1998) and more recently, John Le Carr?'s The Mission Song (2006), the Congo has swayed cultural representations of critical junctures in Africa's history vis-a- vis the global economy. Conrad's multi-layered novel, considered by some to be racist but by others to indict colonialism and imperialism (Said 1993), was written as the colonial era and the belle ?poque of global capitalism were reaching their heights (Silver and Arrighi 2003). The Congo assumed a salient position in these upheavals. Polanyi (1957) observed that people in the periphery could not protect themselves against the ravaging international imperialism destroying pre-capitalist communities of kinship, neighbourhood, profession and creed...all forms of indigenous, organic societies. In the Congo, the demolition of these communities was motivated from the outset by the search for minerals. But since 1996, the year of the first war of liberation led by Laurent Kabila with Rwandan troops, Congo has been experiencing a protracted war with multiple consequences. Many analyses have been done on the DRC predicaments. The most recent one published by African Affairs is the Severine Autesserre's "Dangerous Tales: Dominant narrative on the Congo and their unintended consequences." (2012). Autesserre's piece is interesting in the sense that it is an Africanist perspective which needs to be complemented by an African view of the situation. In this paper I will summarize Autesserre's argument and show why her reading of the situation in the Kivu calls for more than what she gave us.
Dangerous Tales (Autesserre 2012)
In this piece published by African Affairs in February 2012, Autesserre discusses the dominant narratives on the Congo which focuses on " a primary cause of violence, the illegal exploitation of natural resources; a main consequence, sexual abuse against women and girls; and a central solution, reconstructing state authority (Autesserre 2012:3). Autesserre's argument is that these narratives are too simple and ignore the complexity of the situation that only field research can provide. According to Autesserre the narrative explaining the cause of war in eastern Congo by the existence of lootable mineral resources is simple and insufficient because it overlooks other explanatory variables such as "land conflicts, poverty, corruption, local political and social antagonisms, and hostile relationships between state officials, including security forces and the general population." (p.4). The consequence of this understanding of the cause of war in the Kivus is that the response by international community based on three goals: " regulating trade of minerals, providing care to victims of sexual violence, and helping the state extend its authority in the expenses of all other necessary measures, such as resolving land conflict, promoting inter-community reconciliation, jump-starting economic development, ensuring that state authorities respect human rights, and fighting corruption." ( p. 4) Autesserre has emphasized the fact that focusing uniquely on this one narrative has had a boomerang effect. "It has diverted attention from much more needed policy actions, such as the resolution of grassroots antagonisms, the fight against corruption, and the reform of the state administration." (p.11) One explanatory narrative, according to Autesserre, results to a focus on one specific consequence which is rape and sexual violence on women and girls. For Autesserre, the extreme focus on sexual abuse has also a boomerang effect of encouraging warlords who wanted to attract international attention to engage in gang rapes and other female tortures. In addition, Autesserre suggests that the focus on sexual violence against women and girls has made it difficult to attend to other victims of the war such as the rape of boys which constitutes "at least 4 to 10 percent of all rape victims" (p.15). One explanatory variable, existing easily exploitable minerals, one specific consequence, sexual abuses, and one solution, the state building. These are the triple singular narratives Autesserre is denouncing. The solution to the problem of sexual abuses caused by the war of minerals in the Congo is the reinforcement capacities of the state. Autesserre suggests that the focus on state building has unintended consequences of supporting predatory state. Her argument is that the Congolese state is a predatory state since its conception, and for example "throughout the eastern Congo, people often experience the state as an oppressive, exploitative, and threatening machine, instead of seeing it as structure set for their benefit" (p.18). The author notice that the dominant narrative insists on reinforcing the capacities of a state which failed to protect human rights, and this policy only "replacing one group of perpetrators (foreign and Congolese rebel groups) with another (state authorities)" (p.19). At the end of her paper Autesserre admits that none of the people she talked to challenged the idea that state building is the indispensable response to the Congolese project; there was no alternative to the state.(p.20)
Global governmentality While I agree with the general argument of Autesserre's paper that a singular mother narrative which silences others perceptions of the reality of war is likely to be simplistic and miss the dynamics of the conflict in the DRC, I find that the paper is not really engaging the real debate on the Congo issues. I assumed that as Africanist the author is addressing her remarks to international partners of the DRC. As Congolese I have the impression that Autesserre is giving too much agency to external world of UN, NGOS or diplomats to turn the course of events in the DRC. This is completely flawed because first, the task of restoring order and stability in the Congo should not be devoted to the UN and International Non-government organization. Before coming to Congo, many of the international agents have language training, technical training, but not historical course, not any reading list where one could find the work of Mudimbe (2008), Mbokolo (1995), Mamdani (1996), Ndaywel (1998), or AbdouMaliq Simone (2006), etc. These critical discourses are not denied, but it is as if it was understood that such discourses were suspended in the interests of groundwork-type basic rights and amenities-type project at hand. The complexities of the local histories and genealogies are simply differed. UN people, NGO agents and diplomats in the DRC imagine themselves as purveyors of those necessary goods of modernity, such as 'freedom' and 'security,' and think of themselves as capable of moving across social spaces without being subject - in any sense - to those same social spaces. They are then a sort of global actors engaged in the elaboration of what may very well be a new or incipient kind of global governmentality, for whom Congo and Congolese are purely objects - and never properly historical subjects - upon which various formulations combined 'compassion' and international and military policing must be directed in the presumably correct proportions in order to maintain or reinstitute law and order. What is creepy about this sort of discourse is that it is with specific political content, but they dissimulate and pretend to be only about reportage and universal ethics.
The why question, the African question Autesserre never ask herself why the Congolese state is a predatory state in the first place and what should be done with it. The title of this paper suggests that Africanist can only go that far to observe and describe. The rest of the task is for Africans to incorporate in their analyses the genealogies and trace the long term transformative prospective. Quoting Trefon's Congo Masquerade (2011), Autesserre states that "Congolese state remains a predatory structure, as it has been during most of the Congo's history." (p.18). This remarks satisfied the Africanist, but leave the African wonder why the Congo has always been a predatory state. As African I want to know the root cause in order to transform this structure.
Inside Africa, the debate among African scholars is oriented towards understanding the structural reasons why state in many African countries in general and in the DRC in particular is predatory. A consensus amongst scholars seems to point to what Mamdani (1996) refers to as' paradigm of state-civil society' (1995 and 1996). For Mamdani, the key to understanding the state in contemporary Africa is the historical fact that it was forged in the course of colonial occupation. The colonial state was then organized around the central and overriding dilemma: "the native question". How can a tiny and foreign minority rule over an indigenous majority? Colonialism created different institutions that enabled minority over majority rule. Instead of racializing the colonized into a majority identity, as did nineteen-century direct rule, twentieth-century indirect rule dismantled this racialized majority into many minorities. Furthermore, indirect rule in colonial Africa meant that the linkage between state and society was constituted by African collaborators, whether they were 'native' authorities or new rulers created by colonial administration. For most of Africa, Mamdani argues, the 'decentralized despotism' of chiefs was the unique mediated linkage with the colonial state that shaped their access to resources through patronage of the state. Thus, political authority that emerged from the national independence process seems to have taken the role played by chiefs during the colonial period. The new class of rulers, not bothering to articulate a social dream, was concerned primarily with keeping an ethnic and regional patronage. The colonial world has only been turned upside down without being changed. True, there is a state collapse, but it is just not any state that is collapsing; it is specifically what remains of the colonial state in Africa that is collapsing. For Mamdani, postcolonial African elites are predators like their colonial masters rather than real leaders interested in political reform of state inherited from colonialism (1996:179).
Along the same line than Mamdani, Claude Ake (2000) shows us that the colonial powers could only justify colonialism with the fiction that Africans were less than human and could not be entitled to the amenities of civilization, especially democracy. In the colonial era, political discourse excluded not only democracy but also the idea of good governance. After political independence, the African nationalist leaders continued this legacy by turning against democracy. The independence in Africa resembled to the change of the manager of the State, but not the arbitrary and totalitarian of the state. Ake explains that the African elites who came to power decided to inherit and exploit the colonial system to their own benefit rather than transforming it democratically. The use of force increased the mutual alienation between the elite and the masses, which increased the reliance of rules on coercion. To explain this behavior of the post-independent elite, we quote Franz Fanon (1963) who characterized African post-colonial elite as an "envious man." "The look that the native turns on the settler's town is a look of lust, of envy; it expresses his dream of possession - all manner of possession to sit at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible." And Fanon warns that if Africans want to move away from envy, from an appropriation without understanding, they must turn over the leaf and work out new concepts. In his analysis of postcolonial Cameroon, Achille Mbembe (1992) has underlined the fact that the grotesque and ostentatious display of gluttony and sexual excesses through which postcolonial regimes inscribe their grandeur cannot be reduced to simple dichotomies of domination and resistance. Mbembe sees the "banality of power" precisely in the "conviviality of ruler and ruled" (1992: 25). For Achille Mbembe (2000) the logic of the colonial state remains but it increasingly becomes a simulacrum; fiction without content in the postcolony. Postcolonial governments continue to pay salaries, for example, not as exchange of labor power, but as a way of buying political clients. People respond to this elites buying political subjection instead of building the state with jokes, grotesque cynicism.
This is the reality of the State in Africa. This state is not at the services of public good, but it is an instrument used by politicians to enrich themselves. Today there is a sort of obsession with the state and with state functions among academics. This obsession is partly due to Western guilt or frustration at the high levels of inequality in the world. In order to relieve their guilt at so much wealth stolen from the rest of the world, they want to bring the rest of the world closer to their level, and the main way they want to do this is through the actions of the state, or they think it cannot be done without the state. In contrast to this, and from my ethnographic experience as native of the Congo, I think that the arguments should stress on "mediating institutions" (or middle level ones), like the family, ethnic groups or kinship communities (Berger and Neuhaus (1976); Hyden, Goran and Donald Williams 1994; Kabamba 2010, 2011, 2012).
The state in the Congolese context is the problem and the internal dynamics are working to make it as weak as possible while the external dynamics supported by the UN and the international community is making it stronger. The war is prolonged by this obsession with the state and by this sort of analysis which emasculates the Congolese and gives the major role to the international community.
The terms of the debate The first year following independence in Africa were an exciting time for scholars who rushed to observe the emerging politics of new states across the continent. The analytical frameworks these scholars brought with them for the purpose of interpreting what they saw ere largely borrowed from mainstream models derived from the study of American politics that were widely popular at the time. However, soon after the early independence era (1956-1966), it became obvious that a sole focus on the formal structures and functions of state and society revealed little about the actual practice of politics. Across the continent, governments were suffering from constitutional failures, an inability to offer a consistent application of regulatory mechanism or enforceable law; and few states could ever extract sufficient revenue to support either pre-existing colonial era governmental structures or the many new ambitions projects undertaken by politicians soon after independence. As Jonny Steinberg (2012) recently puts it about the African National Congress (ANC), It was an illusion to think that state will change things in South Africa. ANC like other African powers realizing that the state couldn't change people's life, they start using it to enrich themselves. As newcomer in the independence movement ANC learned at its expenses that It was delusional to think that people could be in control of their destiny. Globalization means that many things do not depend on countries' decisions. It is time to realize that the ethnocentric Western standard of state structure is not universal. It is a model in the sense that each group should construct its own organizational capacities responding to its history and internal struggles. The alternative to State could be found in the direction of intermediary institutions like ethnicity or village communities where it could be possible to corner the areas which could be controlled or organized for the good of the community. The nation as unit of analysis is too big and too complex and open to uncontrollable forces. Scholars have generally shied away from ethnicity and have rarely taken it seriously because it has been almost as politically incorrect as being a "racist." A serious analysis of ethnicity from a political economy and historical materialist perspective rather than namby-pamby culture or post -colonial crap might get us somewhere.
One of the directions In the past ten years endemic conflict has given rise to the collapse of public authority and the brutal disintegration of the formal state in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The facts about this are well known - four million dead, entire zones of the country controlled by foreign armies, the withdrawal of the state from effective presence in multiple regions. In the midst of this chaos, however, certain ethnic groups have been able to take advantage of the absence of state in order to prosper and institute new forms of order and development. Indeed, in the absence of effective state sovereignty and national government and in the presence of numerous armed contenders for power, ethnically bounded traders manage to build and protect a self-sustaining, prosperous transnational economic enterprise in eastern Congo. Their transnational activities are part of State (re-) formation.(Kabamba 2010)
As the twentieth century came to a close with "globalization" reaching new heights and as state decrepitude reinforced communal boundaries to the advantage of more "ethnic" based sub-national polities, particularly brutal contradictions were generated in Africa's heart once again. In the gap left by the state's retreat, a form of new governance has emerged among ethnic groups in the DRC in which non-state actors or sub-state ethnic actors adopt the art of governing. From the brutal reconfiguration of the DRC state, new forms of domination have emerged around new loyalties - non-national ones, but ethnic ones. Today, in the face of incapacities of the state structures to live up to people's expectations, Africans need to explore the historically specific material and practical preconditions of an "ethnicity"-based framework. African scholarship would have to refocus discussions of future African social formations onto what may be appropriately characterized as the postcolonial 'afterlife' of ethnic differences.
In the midst of an abundant anti-ethnic literature in African studies, this paper argues that there may be a renewed usefulness and necessity in theorizing the salience and continuing production of 'ethnic' differences in a manner that problematizes and challenges the notion that ethnicity was merely a devious and divisive invention of colonialism that must simply be overcome. Of course, as Mahmood Mamdani (1996) notes, ethnicity was "re-invented" under colonial regimes. Therefore, since capitalism has not transformed life as quickly or completely as "modernization" advocates of all stripes thought it might - and as Mobutu's long reign in the Congo twisted ethnicity to his own needs - it has stayed on with a long, long afterlife. Today, it is important to comprehend and theorize how ethnicity is being re-invented, yet again.
Conclusion In the midst of political incompetency and inhibitive state structures, some ethnic groups have astonishingly prospered. In North Kivu where Autesserre's study is focused Nande traders has shown us that ethnicity could positively model our social progress. Indeed, in the absence of national government and state sovereignty and in the presence of numerous contenders for power, Nande traders manage to build self sustaining and prosperous transnational economic enterprises in North Kivu (Kabamba 2010, 2011, 2012). The same could be said of Igbo in Nigeria, Bamileke in Cameroon, Wolof in Senegal or Kikuyu in Kenya. Indeed, the current recourse to ethnicity in Africa is not at all a result of involution or frustration (Chretien 1991, Mbembe 1987), it is rather the expression of the dynamics of the distinctiveness of African historicity and a part of endogenous rationality. The paper argues that rather than continuing to view ethnicity as a namby-pamby pomos and regrettable if not detrimental residue of the past, scholars need to inquire into the relation between contemporary productions of ethnic differences and, precisely, new forms of life we are witnessing on the ground. Defined in those terms, the debate meant to answer the following questions: how does ethnicity play out in African political relations and to what extent can ethnicity be considered as an explanatory variable for the current social and economic "order" or (dis) order in Africa? What is it about the ethnic organization that makes this "order" possible? How does this peculiar history, in relation to the DRC's particular conflict, (re)constitute African notions of identity, as well as a distinctly attenuated relation to national belonging within the DRC state? Indeed, if ethnicity is understood as social group with a homogeneous "culture", a common language, and a common territory, then there is no such thing as ethnicity in Africa, as Amselle (1995) correctly objected. However, ethnicity as a social group that recognizes a common identity with respect to its relations to others and not as a self-contained and homogenous group, more closely resembles the Nande ethnic group. Indeed, Nande "ethnic" particularity congeals only over time and in relation to particular historical and socio-political circumstances. Ethnicity is different from other social identities such as political community, class, etc. because it is constructed in terms of a special relation to ancestry: members of an ethnic group think that they share the same historical origins (Petit 1996). Nande ethnic identity is constructed around the idea that they all share the same origins which go back to the Bantu migrations some centuries ago. If ethnicity, like other social identities changes according to the contexts, it is precisely through these changing contexts that it needs to be understood. Nande ethnicity is indeed a constructed social fact. It is a construction based on multiple historical bases. Nande ethnic identity is an ideological fact as well as an objective reality; it is a sort of social strategy, which defines the zones of solidarity and the zones of conflict. Indeed, like all ethnic identities, Nande ethnicity is not a simple expression of the present time. These questions open up African prospective strongly needed to supplement the Africanist perspective of the inevitability of the state structure. This is an Africa that is slowly divesting itself of the neo-colonial links which seemed dominant in the years after independence and that some Africanists keep on nostalgically reproducing. The Nande seem to determine the direction towards which Africa really is moving. The horrors of war in the eastern Congo may be blocking what we wish to think of as 'development' but they might also be speeding these processes along.
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Conflict of Interest:
None declared