Erasing Congo at the stroke of a pen

This has been written in response to ) and Greg Mills (director of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation). [2]

With a stroke of the pen, two academics, Greg Mills and Jeffrey Herbst (MH) have offered their solution to the problems affecting the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): Just pretend that it does not exist. In the process they offer us a short cut version of what they describe as lying at the origins of its troubles, but they go further than the Otabenga Alliance for Peace, Healing and Dignity
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NOTES

[1] ‘THEY’ stands for any of the following: bankers, financiers, the richest of the rich, academics in search of approval from those who consider themselves the crème de la crème of humanity. In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire had pointed out the close affinities between colonialism and Nazism. I am arguing that the mindset denounced by Aimé Césaire has grown more virulent today than it was then.
[2] Many thanks to Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, Erroll Henderson and Pauline Wynter for reading and commenting on a previous draft. This does not mean that they agree with the final version. Just as I was sending off this essay, the DRC minister for Communication and Media, and government’s spokesperson, Lambert Mende Omalanga had responded to the same article, but I was unable to locate a website source for it: ‘RDC: Les Prédateurs ont la dent dure.’ Try [email][email protected]
[3] See: New York Times, 16 December 2008. Later reasserted by President Sarkozy in a slightly modified version, but just as predatory in its intention.
[4] One should never forget that conquering processes have been at the birth of some of the most murderous roots of capitalism, and they have continued to be an integral part of its reproduction.
[5] Doing a tabula rasa of history has been one of the most important practices of the conquering mentality. The conqueror establishes where history begins. Before the conquest, by definition, there was no history worth remembering or recounting. One of the most recent theorisers of this way of looking at history is of course Francis Fukuyama. If history is erased, so is responsibility.
[6] In one of his essays on the DRC, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba went even further by pointing out that, in a sociological sense, there is no Congolese society because a society is one which is organised as a community for the purpose of taking care of itself, but Wamba does not go from there to then suggest that the solution would be to pretend that the Congolese people’s existence and framework for existing, the State, should be wiped off the map.
[7] See Open letter to Ban Ki-moon by Richard Morse, http://www.counterpunch.org/morse04012009.html
[8] For example, as has been revealed by the BBC (see by Mike Thomson, presenter http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7984436.stm) about how the allies wanted the liberation of Paris to appear as an ‘all white’ affair even though more than 60 per cent of the troops under the General de Gaulle’s command were from Africa. In this case, the allies were all in agreement to negate the contribution of the African soldiers. This information came to me as I was finalising this essay. Clearly it deserves better than finding itself in a footnote. History-fixing from the perspective of those who were ruled not to be winners is a work in progress. This call for a piece titled ‘The history of humanity is not an all white affair’.
[9] At the same time, without apologising for the negationists, it is high time to move away from the Holocaust as the sole standard of reference for human suffering, because its tacit acceptance has been, in part, the reason why historians have not been able to let go of the logic imposed by history as framed by victors.
[10] The list is much longer. For the purposes of this exercise, a suggestion will suffice. It would be an excellent exercise to begin to build a list of questions to be submitted to the current rulers on the continent, as we go through the next 15 years of 50th anniversary celebrations of independences (2010-2025).
[11] And proclaimed as ‘nothings’ or worse, providing one of the basis for slavery.
[12] See the DVD on Pambazukanews website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZWIZX_8ub8
[13] See Herbert Weiss ‘The Enduring Idea of the Congo: Public Attitudes, the Nation, and the State’, with Tatiana Carayannis, in Ricardo Laremont, ed., Borders, Nationalism, and the African State (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press, 2004). My thanks to Erroll Henderson for this reference.
[14] MH might say that they are not historians. Maybe, but their piece, even if it is not history does seek to convey how they look at the DRC, during a span of years. Their reference to the Leopoldian ‘red rubber’ regime conveys disgust and horror. That reference is also emblematic of how they understand the relationship between the history of a state and the history of the people living in that geographical area. Surely, the history of the Congolese people goes much further back than the history of the Congo Free State as put together by the then king of Belgium.