Imagining the Congo by Kevin Dunn, published in 2004 by Palgrave Macmillan; ISBN 1-4039-6159-X. Reviewed by Guillaume Iyenda.
Over a century since the colonisation of the Democratic Republic of Congo began, the international image of this sub-continent-sized country is still insufficiently known in the western world. Nowadays, the consequences of more than six years of a deadly civil war in that country, particularly for the number of lives lost, arouse widespread concern worldwide.
This book investigates the basis for western understanding of the Congo, which still relies heavily on colonial representations generated by western explorers. The author focuses on four historical periods of identity production for the Congo: the colonial invention of the Congo by western colonisers, the country's decolonisation at the independence in 1960, its reinvention as ‘Zaire’ by Mobutu in the 1970s, and the return to the ‘Congo’ at the beginning of the 2000s. Furthermore, the book seeks to explore political consequences produced by western discourses and imagery on the Congo's identity as primitive, chaotic and savage.
Presenting results of his researches, the author analyses the invention of the Congo as a free state, the discourses produced by Henry Morton Stanley, King Leopold II and his Belgian colonial agents in the field who used coercion, extreme violence and barbaric treatment against local people to extract wealth for the king. Kevin Dunn explores in depth the way Belgian colonisers treated the Congolese by regarding them as inferior savages and childlike, and by denying them access to higher education, political rights and fora for political expression. He then examines how Stanley and his Belgian coloniser colleagues treated the Congolese, identifying them as more animal than human being and at the same time raping their women and having children with them.
An important part of the book focuses on the analysis of the discourse used by Congolese political leaders at the end of the colonial period and describes how the newly-elected power in Kinshasa challenged the former colonial power. The political discourse of Patrice Lumumba at independence on 30 June 1960 and the consequences are discussed at length, along with the destabilisation, mutinies and secessions during the first years of independence. Dunn then explores the reinvention of the Congo into Zaïre by Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Zabanga in the early 1970s. He finally explores the last discursive production of Congolese political elite at the beginning of the 21st century after the overthrown of Mobutu in the late 1990s.
While highlighting many of the Congolese concerns about their colonial history and sufferings, the author goes on to explain the extreme and unthinkable brutality used by Stanley and other Belgian colonisers against the Congolese people who employed images of the Congo as backward, uncivilised, and uncivilisable. A substantial part of the book explains how the USA and Belgium intervened militarily in the Congo and plotted to have its democratically elected leader assassinated after they defined Congolese independence as ‘chaotic’ and the Prime Minister as a communist troublemaker.
By speaking of the ‘imagining’ of the Congo's identity, Dunn draws attention to the constructed and contested nature of identity in that country. The author is mostly interested in historicizing and contextualising the construction of the Congo's identity to facilitate the analysis of its political implications in the country's life. Whereas the author does not explore in depth the multiplicity of representations of rhetorical images in political life, he recognises that the colonial rhetoric produced by Leopold II and his agents continues to be reproduced nowadays by many westerners.
Although the Congo entered the European collective imagination only after 1482, after the landing of Diego Cão on the western shores of the Atlantic coast at the mouth of the Congo River, the country's geographical and physical delimitations were agreed by the European colonial powers at the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference. The Congo then became a European creation, the property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The Congo was long regarded by many in Africa and beyond as the heart of Africa and a site for international competition between European powers, cold war superpowers and African regional forces.
Although the author focuses his book on the production and contestation of the Congo's identity, its merit is that the he speaks against the reproduction of an older trend in International Relations that still marginalises Africa and African experiences in the analysis of the concept of identity. He also recognises the fact that identity is the product of multiple and competing discourses, which construct unstable, multiple, fluctuating, and fragmented senses of the Self and Other. The author stresses the dehumanisation, beatings, brutality, humiliation, barbarity, enslavement, and execution faced by the Congolese during the entire colonial period. He points to difficult challenges that the Congolese people and the international community must meet if the potential benefits of peace and development are to be fully realised. Imagining, inventing and reinventing the Congo for development purposes should be, in my understanding, the ultimate goal for every civilised nation.
However, Dunn recognises that he did not carry out extensive fieldwork in the Congo to gather enough field data. The author is, in my view, not right when he asserts that the history of the Congo in International Relations is largely the history of the struggles over the discursive narratives and representations of identity. The author speaks less about armed resistances against the colonisers and their brutality and seems to ignore riots and struggles undertaken by Congolese people since the late 1880s against Leopold II and his agents. In the face of the common western perception of the insecurity in central Africa in today's globalise world, the author puts less emphasis than I would have expected on the role that the west should play in making that part of the world a better place to live.
Although Dunn specifically mentions that his book is not an exhaustive history of Congolese political systems and focuses his analysis on the relationship between discourse and power only, he forgets that a huge, troubled, multiethnic and multifaceted country such as the Congo, with the size of western Europe, cannot be understood by analysing only one aspect.
The book seems not to uncover something new that was not well known about the Congo. Its focus on the discursive aspect of Congolese political life is full of repetitions, especially when he analyses Mobutu's regime and when he writes about the Belgian colonial regime. He repeats ideas related to the use of discursive tools by Mobutu to dominate the country instead of focusing on the brutality of the regime, the mass murder and economic enslavement of the Congolese people, which Mobutu copied from his colonial masters. Although he invented the policy of authenticity, Mobutu did not have the intention to decolonise the country and remained the best African friend of the west during his entire regime. His neo-colonial rule benefited the cold war powers and his international backers far more than the Congolese and African people. Moreover, other African leaders and nationalists saw him as a white and American puppet in black Africa.
A way forward? Dunn does not suggest one. The Congolese crisis, instability and suffering continue. During the colonial period, one-third to one-half of the Congolese population perished. Nowadays, carved up and occupied by its neighbours' forces, mainly from Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, for more than five years, the Congo's resources are still being looted by occupying forces while killings, rapes, torture and human rights violations continue. At this time when many questions about the future of that country are still unanswered, much scientific work on its development is still needed. Although Laurent Kabila brought fresh hope to the Congolese people when his rebellion overthrew Mobutu's regime and by claiming to be the successor of Patrice Lumumba, he failed to bring democracy in the country. As a Rwandan and Ugandan puppet at the beginning of his regime, Kabila started a new page of Congolese suffering with a civil war, which is still not over. However, as at independence, the Congolese people still believe that these days will eventually become a thing of the past and that their country will become a new symbol of African development.
Neo-Liberalism and AIDS Crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa by Colleen O'Manique (2004), Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 1-4039-2089-3. Reviewed by Gill Seidel and Vicci Tallis.
O'Manique's central thesis is that international AIDS policy in Africa represents a form of neo-liberal governance. The originality of this work is two-fold: she illustrates the remarkable congruence between neo-liberalism and the hegemonic biomedical construction of AIDS. This is well argued. Secondly, she offers a critique of Uganda's ‘success story,’ questioning if, indeed, there has been a dramatic reduction in HIV infection. However, her claim that she is writing through ‘a feminist political economy lens’ is unconvincing; and there are many omissions. Perhaps there are really two books here trying to get out. The emphasis is firmly on economic rights. Whilst important, economic empowerment does not necessarily result in negotiating strengths in sexual relationships.
The introduction and chapter 1 present an overview of the global responses in the subcontinent. She shows the workings of global neo-liberalism, including patent law, and the forms of development assistance, and how these have fashioned the hegemonic understanding of HIV spread as a phenomenon limited to individual and behavioural dimensions. She goes on to show how these arrangements have been translated into frameworks within which AIDS must be addressed (like ‘cost effectiveness’, ‘burden of disease,’ citing Kelly and Doyal); and how in turn these impact on the allocation of limited health resources. Her positions on public health responses to AIDS in Africa that evolved in a context of massive debt repayments, food insecurity, and civil wars, and the failure of states to provide the basic constituents of life, are cogently argued.
O'Manique traces the trajectory of WHO's Global AIDS Programme, the setting up of UNAIDS, and their links with other international agencies; and the role of NGOs and donors, and the tensions between NGOs, government, and free trade lobbies promoting user health fees. The global history is important, but is highlighted here at the expense of the African response to HIV and AIDS. The author's position on the hegemony of the bio-medical sciences is clearly set out. She does not neglect other ‘knowledges’ within the epistemic community – those concerned with gender, global, regional, and local distribution of power and resources.
According to O'Manique, a range of competing and important discourses have emerged more recently, suggesting a form of knowledge evolution. In our view, this Darwinian frame is problematic. We would argue that these discourses have been around for nearly twenty years – in opposition. O'Manique clearly states that these non-medical discourses, not invested with social power, and not linked with high levels of funding, were systematically marginalised. However, this argument would have been more forceful had she provided discussive examples of how research inputs from critical sociologists/anthropologists were regularly dismissed, or subsumed under epidemiologists' control; and their energies directed towards the now much criticised KAP and IEC studies. Indeed, epidemiology obtained control over AIDS research early in the epidemic.
In chapter 2, O'Manique argues that the pre-eminence of bio-medicine, including in the early National AIDS Control Programmes, already operating under severe cutbacks imposed by SAPs, has had particular consequences. She then sets out to explore conceptual, ideological, and organisational links between this dominant paradigm, clinical medicine's focus on the individual, an important but westernised concept, and the values and workings of the free market. She is also roundly critical of WTO undemocratic structures and values. Drugs, for example, are not considered public goods essential to health. And she illustrates how drug research is focused on profitable diseases. In the discussion of some international and selected indigenous NGOs, she is dismissive of a number of ‘empowerment’ solutions. A surprising omission in her discussion of international NGOs is the International Community of Women living with HIV and AIDS (ICW).
The third chapter on drugs, access, and lobbying, is a general overview. Her critique of WTO and of intellectual property laws – how these have undermined the manufacture of generic medicines - are all well taken. She also takes WHO to task, whose essential Drugs and Medicines Policy only included Anti-Retrovirals (ARVs) from 2002. This was because ARVs did not meet the mix of clinical and economic criteria. AZT and nevirapine were listed – but only to prevent mother-to-child transmission. More specific references to the effects of surveillance on women (drawing on Foucault's ‘biopower’)are missing. And the effects of stigma are not discussed. In view of her proposed gender focus, some discussion of the mocrobicide lobby, and of microbicides as the only prevention under a woman's control would have been expected (www.global-campaign.org). Little use has been made of grey literature – from gender-aids network, for example, and from other advocacy organisations. This is also a general criticism that could be levelled at the work as a whole.
Two chapters, focus on Uganda. Chapter 4 charters Uganda's pre-independence history. Chapter 5 documents and analyses the Ugandan policy response (government and the NGO sector), largely based on 1992 fieldwork from her doctoral thesis. While there is a section on ‘community response’ (pp.157-165), mainly about TASO, the voices (and even actions) of the local people are weak. She challenges current orthodoxy, questioning whether Uganda does indeed represent a ‘success story.’ She recognises that the Ugandan response was unmatched on the continent – ‘but that the ACP has consistently failed to address gender inequalities which fuel the epidemic’ (p.130).
More recently, some anthropologists (e.g. Farmer), and Ugandans, have also been sceptical about the canonisation of Uganda in the war against AIDS. While she documents the various sources of funding, she does not spell out clearly how these have determined the education and prevention agenda. The Catholics, in the forefront of both prevention and patient care, were promoting and campaigning for ABC (introduced by WHO and quickly taken up by religious sector and NACPs worldwide) – emphasising the immorality of the condom. The fact that ‘abstinence’– the preference of the US Christian Right, funding programmes – is not a choice for most women could have been more clearly stated. The dynamics of the agenda empowering women is given insufficient attention. Christine Obbo's reflections are important here – she argues that so much money had been spent on development and prevention that it was in the interest of everyone to repeat and amplify the Uganda AIDS Prevention success.
The conclusion brings together most of these threads, focusing on AIDS, human rights and globalisation. This work makes a stimulating contribution to the study of AIDS policies in Africa (see also B.Grundfest-Schoepf Oxford:Blackwell, forthcoming and ROAPE). It is a suitable book for undergraduates (international relations/political science, rather than gender studies). It would have been infinitely more valuable had a substantial section been devoted to activist and feminist responses (see V.Tallis, doctoral thesis, Unicersity of Natal, in preparation). In any event, priced at £45, the book is likely to remain a library acquisition.