In the previous two chapters, I began with two temporally distinct moments of epiphany sharing a similar astonishment and a lingering scepticism about the humanity of the African “Person.” They were used to capture what has been described as an enduring struggle within (modern) Western philosophical and political traditions. Indicative of the slow but
substantial shifting that has occurred over this period, it is hard to fathom today that such statements then represented a progressive perspective. And yet, as alluded to at the end of the preceding chapter, there is certainly evidence of the continued presence and relevance of this enduring struggle for the ensuing trajectory of the nation and by extension, the contemporary struggle for peace. The purpose of this chapter is to move us to the contemporary moment and to again ask the question which opened Part One, “How do colonial histories matter in the world today?” In doing so, I return to solidify my central contention; that the struggle for peace in the DRC occurs in the context of a contemporary global landscape intimately bound up in enduring legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Reframed with the added emphases from the previous chapters, my contention is that the contemporary struggle for peace occurs in the context of that enduring struggle and the consequential birth (and death) of “the man,” an ontological violence through which modern “imperial” man has been created by differentiating “him” from and imposing him over the “Other;” and the devastating impact of that ontological violence evidenced in the “death” of peoples and their own ways of being-in-the-world, but also the continued resistance,
resilience and thus “resurrection” of peoples in the face of such a “death.”
The structure of this chapter will thus reflect a statement I made earlier, that the task of
Finding Peace Amongst Restless and Unatoned Bones refers to a double necessity: the need
to unpack the ongoing influence of the enduring struggle on dominant narratives on humanness, violence and peace in the DRC, in turn destabilizing their power; as well as the need to consider its enduring influence on the local ontological landscape on which the struggle for peace is enacted today. Accordingly, I begin with an exploration of those dominant narratives, drawing attention to a duress evidenced not only in the continued
representation of the DRC as a perennial “heart of darkness,” but also in the continued Eurocentric bias in dominant peace interventions and strategies; and in the continued subjugation of alternative peace traditions. Here I will highlight the DRC as a powerful case for the argument that a pessimism about humanness more broadly, exaggerated by an even deeper pessimism about African humanness, has reduced both curiosity in exploring the roots of violence and creativity in responding to it. In recognizing the need for alternatives, this chapter then shifts focus to the “decolonial turn”43 gaining momentum over the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries which has been asserting the need to move beyond the history of an enduring struggle, finally enabling alternative ontological realities, previously denigrated, suppressed, and marginalized, to occupy their own valued places in contributing to our shared global future. Taking up the possibilities offered by the “decolonial turn,” I turn to the central concept of Búmùntù. Whilst positioning this thesis in the context of existing literature, I will also articulate the rationale for a dialogue on Búmùntù as an exercise in border thinking for its contribution to the struggle for peace.
A HEART OF DARKNESS: A STORY THAT BEGINS WITH THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF VIOLENCE AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PEACE
To situate ourselves in the contemporary moment, let me first return to the voice of a triumphant Lumumba proclaiming the Congo “now in the hands of its own children,” and calling all Congolese towards the “sublime struggle that will lead our country to peace, prosperity, and grandeur” (Watson Institute for International Studies 2005, p. 49). This was a moment of hope which was almost immediately interrupted by the image of his dead body hacked to pieces and dissolved in sulphuric acid. In fact, this marked a more profound interruption; the 30th June, 1960, which was envisioned to be the birth of an independent (and peaceful) nation, became instead a bloody miscarriage of the Congo Crisis (1960-1965). To move from this pivotal moment in history to the contemporary struggle for peace which is the focus of this chapter, I offer one particular account of post-colonial Congo from Bisanswa (2010, p. 69). Although the finer details of each moment within this condensed and not
apolitical summary are worth further scrutiny,44 I choose to use this account in full because it
points to the tenacity, complexity and oftentimes overwhelming nature of a seemingly interminable history of violence, its striking disjuncture with Búmùntù, earlier offered as a motivating factor for the approach taken in this thesis.
Political independence on 30th June 1960, followed by army mutinies, the
parachuting of Belgian troops, ‘Katanga’s secession and then [South] Kasai’s, and intervention of United Nations troops; the mysterious death of the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, the arrest and assassination of Lumumba, Mulele’s rebellions, two coups d’état by Mobutu, two wars in Shaba, and temporary seizure of Moba by pro-Kabila troops; the
democratization process, a long and incomplete transition, and a student massacre in Lubumbashi; embargo by the international community, Mobutu’s expulsion of all Belgian cooperation experts, closure of all Belgian consulates in Eastern Zaire, and lootings in Kinshasa and in major towns in the country; assassination of Burundi’s democratically elected (Hutu) President Melchior Ndadaye, massacre and massive exodus of Hutus to Eastern Zaire,
assassination of Presidents Habyarimana of Rwanda and Ntiamirira of Burundi, flight to Eastern Zaire of Hutu populations of Rwanda, and the death of ten Belgian blue helmets; Opération Turquoise, the 1996 war waged in the Congo by Burundian, Ugandan and Rwandan troops, and the dismantlement of Rwandan refugee camps in Eastern Zaire; the advent of the former guerrilla Laurent-Désiré Kabila and the exile and death of disease-stricken Marshal Mobutu in total solitude in Morocco; a new devastating war started in August of 1998 by Burundian, Ugandan and Rwandan troops, bringing panic and desolation to the civilian population (4 million dead) in Eastern Congo; the mysterious assassination of Kabila and, against all expectations, his succession by his son Joseph Kabila, who, it is said, has no political culture and no better intellectual preparation than three months of military training in China, yet curiously is supported by all Western powers; inter-Congolese dialogue
44 Comprehensive accounts of the trajectory of Congolese history following independence can be found
followed by a new transitional government, despite growing insecurity and attempts at destabilization by Rwanda and Uganda — and so on (Bisanswa 2010, p. 69).
Whilst this particular account may be criticized for reducing Congolese history to a “series of subjugations narrativized in a seamless continuity” (Mbembe 2002, p. 243),45 it does capture
the sense of a seemingly interminable history of violence. Importantly, whilst I have
represented it as a disjuncture when placed alongside the concept of Búmùntù, from another angle, this history of violence is not at all interpreted as a disjuncture. Instead, the ongoing violence and intense hardships of the present can also serve as an affirmation of colonial narratives of the “savagery” and “inherent” violence of Congolese, which once provided a justification for the use of violence as a necessary evil in the civilizing mission.
It has been argued that the turmoils of contemporary times has provided a nostalgic veil for some in remembering the colonial past (Bisanswa 2010). In a particularly striking example of this nostalgic veil, in a speech of February 2004 directed to the Belgian Senate, current President Joseph Kabila paid homage to the “memory of all those pioneers,” “the Belgian missionaries, colonial agents and contractors who believed in the dream of King Leopold II to build a state in the heart of Africa” (La Libre Belgique 2004). Rather than the speech of the proudly nationalist Congolese leader, his address instead echoes that of the patronising Belgian King Baudouin described in the preceding chapter. Writing of this bizarre praise of the dream of a King, which “was the nightmare of countless Africans,” Bakaly Sembe (2006, p. 101) comments that this lack of historical insight can be found amongst many Congolese within what he argues to be an “ahistorical society” where colonial narratives of pre-colonial Congo as “a savage land with no history or achievement to be proud of” persist. Bisanswa (2010, p. 71) suggests that such perspectives both amongst Congolese and the broader international community, seem to identify Belgian colonial intervention in the Congo as merely a “parenthesis,” or quoting Jewsiewicki “an interlude between the precolonial past and the postcolonial present” as if a full circle has been turned, back to “primitiveness,” “savagery” and “darkness.”
45 Mbembe (2002, p. 243) makes this criticism of the instrumentalist paradigm of African philosophy
more broadly which has been characterized by a mechanistic and reified vision of history where history is ever imposed upon Africans.
Given a dearth of empirical research on local perspectives, it is difficult to ascertain how widespread these views may be at the local level and how the persistence of such colonial narratives might influence local understandings of violence and the struggle for peace.46 In
contrast, there is a considerable amount of scholarship examining how their persistence continues to impact international (Eurocentric) representations and analyses of violence and peace (Autesserre 2009, 2010, 2012; Baaz & Stern 2008; Chiwengo 2008; Dunn 2003;
Eriksson Baaz & Stern 2010; Mertens 2017; Ndangam 2002). As a consequence, it is more possible to consider its continued influence on the struggle for peace.
Having researched the international peace-building effort during Congo’s transition from ‘war to peace’ (2003-2006), Autesserre (2010) writes of a widespread view amongst many
international actors that Congo was “inherently” violent (p. 74-81) and that the ongoing violence in the east of the country was not seen as evidence that war was continuing. Instead, it was viewed as a “normal feature of a peaceful Congo” (Autesserre 2010, p. 67). Expanding on this, she offers the following analysis:
…they usually emphasized the unending, puzzling, and gruesome character of the violence; the state of quasi-anarchy and chaos; the polarization of the society according to ethnic issues; and the ‘folkloric’ aspects of the Mai Mai militias, such as reliance on supernational powers and fighting naked. They continually referred to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and used the words “barbarian and “barbarous.” They often analysed the conflict and the peace process in Hobbesian terms. These recurring tropes portrayed the Congolese as irrational savages and constructed their actions as senseless and utterly foreign to civilized Western minds (Autesserre 2009, p. 264).
In essence, citing the words of one Western diplomat who was interviewed, “Hobbes would have been right at home” (Autesserre 2010, p. 69). Importantly, according to her analysis,
46 One exception to this is an exploratory article by Rubbers (2009) which examines four dominant
narratives that individuals in the province of Haut-Katanga (neighboring Haut-Lomami) offered to explain the causes of post-colonial crises. I will return to explore the way in which these four narratives reflect the theme of colonial duress later in this chapter.
the persistence of colonial narratives of the “savagery” and “inherent” violence of Congolese further reinforced a dominant characteristic of the “liberal peace” discourse that
decentralized violence remains a problem of the absence of a common power. This, she argues, ultimately contributed to a fundamentally flawed approach to peace-building, whereby international actors were able to justify the preclusion of action to address local conflicts and endorsed the focus on interventions at the national and regional level ̶ an almost exclusively top-down intervention.47 Worse still, she argues that international efforts
exacerbated the problems they aimed to combat ̶ for example through state reconstruction programs that boosted the capacity of an authoritarian regime to oppress its population (Autesserre 2012, p. 4).48
Importantly, Autesserre’s (2010) criticism of the international peacebuilding effort in the specific context of the DRC is not an isolated one. It exists in the context of a broader debate which, according to Richmond (2010, pp. 1-2), has “developed the contours of an epic intellectual struggle” and has “touched upon the heart of political, economic, social, and cultural systems; institutions, ideologies, and norms that have been held to be the core of liberal political theory for hundreds of years; and, currently, of generally held assumptions about IR, peace and conflict.” Accordingly, dominant peace interventions and strategies promoted by leading states, leading international organizations and international financial institutions have increasingly come under severe criticisms, and have even been argued to be
47 It is important to note that such a criticism does not preclude the value of “top-down” approaches to
peace-building. The Congo wars, during their height, directly involved over six African nations and more than a dozen armed militia groups, who ultimately carved up the nation into a series of rebel-held territorial enclaves (Beneduce et al. 2006). The Congo Wars have been described as civil wars to
overthrow a dictator, as international wars in self-defence, as the spill-over effect of Rwanda’s Hutu-Tutsi conflict, and as resource wars with Africans as pawns to greater powers outside the continent (Autesserre 2010; Lemarchand, Rene 2009; Prunier 2009; Turner 2007, 2013). As is evident amongst these
explanations, there is a strong rationale for the emphasis on the national, regional and international dimensions of the conflicts. And yet, there are also severe limitations to an exclusive emphasis at these levels. Numerous scholars have instead drawn attention to the local drivers of conflict, largely ignored by international peace-builders, including conflicts over land, mineral resources, traditional power, local taxes and the relative social status of specific groups and individuals (Autesserre 2009, 2010, 2012; Baaz & Stern 2008; Beneduce et al. 2006). In contrast to an Hobbesian vision of local actors engaged in a “senseless” violence in the absence of a common power, these accounts show local actors as agents who produce violence for functional purposes (Beneduce et al. 2006).
48 See also Marriage (2013) who has argued that the “formal peace” established in 2002 answered the
security concerns of the international community by strengthening formal institutions to provide
containment and control, whilst the priorities of the Congolese population for agency and predictability in their pursuit of security were undermined.
in a state of crisis (Cooper 2007). This “liberal peace” has been criticized for its almost exclusive focus on state-building as the principal vehicle of peace, promoting Western-style governance with the core elements of security and stabilization, reinforcing states,
democratic governance and economic marketization (Campbell, Chandler & Shabaratnam 2011; Richmond 2010). The conventional wisdom is that state fragility itself engenders violent conflict. By consequence, state-building in regions of state fragility is viewed as a central task of contemporary policies, an assumption being that top-down interventions will naturally filter down to the local level. Even more relevant to the theme of an enduring struggle specifically related to the non-Western “Other,” critics have drawn attention to the imperial legacy and the ongoing hegemony of the “Liberal Peace,” likening it to a “new imperialism” and “neo-colonialism” (Chandler 2006; Charbonneau 2014; Jacoby 2007). Jacoby (2007, p. 536), for example, likens the modernisation of conflict-affected states
through the reconstitution of their polities and societies to a “mission civilisatrice” which “has been a way of both pursuing prosperity and minimising dissent (internal and external).”
Whilst the persistence of colonial narratives of the “savagery” and “inherent” violence of Congolese in dominant representations and understandings of violence may represent the more overt and tangible evidence of the enduring struggle, one may argue that the
dominance of the “liberal peace” to the exclusion of alternative local peace traditions may represent the more subtle, often unquestioned, evidence of that same enduring struggle.
Extending this relationship further, it is — once again — worth drawing attention to the presence of Hobbes, remembering that earlier he was presented as one of numerous influential thinkers who appear to have “built their understanding of the political on the recognition of the irreducibility of violence in human affairs” (Oksala 2012, p. 3). In Chapter
One, I drew attention to an argument that the enduring struggle to which this thesis refers
may well represent an exaggerated form of an already existing struggle; that Conrad’s tale was not just a tale about an Imperial “heart of darkness” or an African “heart of darkness,” but also a human “heart of darkness;” and that a “pessimistic trend” which has long depicted human beings as having a natural inclination towards self-interest, competition, and — ultimately — human destructiveness has had quite a profound influence on the study of human violence (de Zulueta 2006, 2007). In a very direct way, Autessere’s (2010) unearthing
of the presence of Hobbes in the voices of international peacebuilders is suggestive of that legacy. However, even without referring to Hobbes, it is worth asking to what extent his legacy may be embodied in dominant peace interventions and strategies and to what extent other thinkers representative of a “pessimistic” trend are also present. Certainly, it should be acknowledged that contemporary understandings of violence and approaches to peace- building are complex and multi-dimensional, deriving their form and function from diverse ideological traditions and movements. Individual actors involved in peace-building efforts are even more diverse. The delicate dance, then, between the micro and the macro, the local and the global, and top-down and bottom-up is complex, even without the possibility that a long-entrenched pessimism is at play. Nevertheless, it is a question worth asking, particularly in light of the aforementioned “epic intellectual struggle” (Richmond 2010, pp. 1-2) currently occurring regarding peacebuilding theory and practice. In the specific case of the DRC, it is the interaction between a “liberal peace” (and its Eurocentric bias) and its application or imposition in the context of an imagined “heart of darkness” which leads me to suggest that the DRC may well provide a powerful case for the argument that a pessimism on humanness more broadly, exaggerated by an even deeper pessimism on African humanness, may have reduced both curiosity in exploring the roots of violence and creativity in responding to it.
This returns us to the aforementioned “epic intellectual struggle” currently taking place regarding peacebuilding theory and practice. Summarizing its key positions, Richmond (2010, pp. 1-2) identifies it as increasingly a debate between “dogmatic liberal and statist positions towards peace” and a more “critical and reflective position centred on social and public concerns in their everyday political, social, economic, and cultural contexts….” Framed in another way, it has also been described as a struggle between the “top-down” and the “bottom-up” (Charbonneau & Parent 2012). According to Richmond (2010) as the “Liberal Peace,” and the assumptions of the international community regarding its capacity to control and govern, has begun to unravel, so has the vibrancy of the debate. A “renaissance” of interest in the “local,” labelled as the “local turn” has in turn arisen in the study and practice of peacebuilding (Mac Ginty & Richmond 2013). According to Mac Ginty and Richmond (2013, p. 763) this “local turn” represents a “terra nullius” for the liberal peace, “a dangerous and wild place where Western rationality, with its diktats of universality and modernisation, is challenged in different ways.” It is in light of such a debate that this thesis argues the need
for an alternative, or indeed many alternatives, through which the themes of humanness,