Born from Lament

The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa

Emmanuel Katongole

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467446983
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

There is no more urgent theological task than to provide an account of hope in Africa, given its endless cycles of violence, war, poverty, and displacement. So claims Emmanuel Katongole, an innovative theological voice from Africa. In the midst of suffering, Katongole says, hope takes the form of "arguing" and "wrestling" with God. Such lament is not merely a cry of pain—it is a way of mourning, protesting, and appealing to God. As he unpacks the rich theological and social dimensions of the practice of lament in Africa, Katongole tells the stories of courageous Christian activists working for change in East Africa and invites readers to enter into lament along with them.

PART ONE

A Hope-less Continent?

CHAPTER 1

The Possibility and the Nature of Hope in Africa

We are living on top of our dead.

Pastor Philippe

A Landscape of Lament

Few books about Congo’s recent history are as moving as Jason Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. If Congo is a huge and complex country, its recent history is even more complex and difficult to grasp. In the last twenty-five years, this second largest nation in Africa, the size of Western Europe and a quarter the size of the United States, has been the center of a series of wars and fighting that have left over 5.4 million dead, millions displaced from their homes, tens of thousands of women raped,¹ and its 67 million people among the world’s most impoverished. At a certain point, the numbers stop making any sense, and all one is left with are media images of red-eyed and gun-wielding militias roaming the African jungle, raping and killing in the most outlandish way imaginable. If, for many in the West, these images confirm the long-held suspicion of Africa as a “dark continent” (Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness”) that lies beyond the pale of reason and/or humanity, for many Africans, especially those in countries such as the Central African Republic (CAR), Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, Liberia, Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, the images are eerily familiar.

But what is going on? What explanation, what rationale might there be for the fighting in the Congo and the senseless violence it has unleashed? Perhaps, if one were to make sense of the violence in the Congo, one might be able to see the connections with similar cases of fighting and violence in the other parts of Africa. For, in many ways, Congo is a mirror of the violence in postcolonial Africa; or, to use Frantz Fanon’s famous image, Africa has the shape of a pistol, and Congo is the trigger.² Yet, Congo is not merely a symbol. It has a long, contingent, and singular history of violence, and part of the challenge of trying to make sense of the contemporary topography of violence in the Congo is this complex history. How does one make sense of a conflict (or better, conflicts) that at its height involved the armies of nine countries, multiple groups of UN peacekeepers, and twenty armed groups?

In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, Stearns attempts to unravel the many interlocking strands of this complex tale of Congo’s recent turmoil, which is helpful on at least two levels. First, concerning historical reconstruction, Stearns provides a vivid and moving chronicle of the Congolese civil wars, which began in 1996 in the wake of the Rwanda Genocide and ended Mobutu’s thirty-one-year reign and installed Desire Kabila. He covers Kabila’s tumultuous and short-lived time as president, his assassination, and the installation of his son, Joseph Kabila, and the young Kabila’s first few years in office. Stearns not only sheds light on the key actors, their complex calculations, motivations, and agency during the war; even more important, he locates the fighting within the context of Congo’s political history.³

The second level on which I find Stearns’s book helpful is in terms of the personal testimonies and close-up portraits of ordinary people caught up in the fighting. By way of these stories, one is able to glimpse the depth of suffering, as well as the national, communal, and individual trauma under way in the wake of the violence.

By taking time to explore these two aspects of Stearns’s work, I will be able to highlight why and how this kind of violence is thinkable within the context of Congo’s political imagination. Accordingly, reflecting on Dancing in the Glory of Monsters provides an opportunity to rehearse some of the key conclusions of The Sacrifice of Africa, where I located the ongoing performance of violence within the imaginative landscape of modern Africa. But reflecting on the social and personal trauma of both the agents and the victims of the violence in the Congo raises deep theological questions. How can one even begin to think about hope and what hope would look like in the context of Africa’s ongoing realities of war, violence and social disruption? The story of Congo serves as a good theological starting point.

Making the Violence in the Congo Thinkable

In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, Stearns seeks to move beyond the standard picture of the fighting in the Congo as “a morass of rebel groups fighting over minerals in the ruins of a failed state” (327). Accordingly, his goal is not simply historical reconstruction, but to explain the fighting as an expression of political violence. Rather than simply narrating what happened next, he sets out to inquire into “what kind of political system produced this kind of violence” (6). To this end, at various places in his historical reconstruction, he provides enough analytical anchors that help to locate the violence within Congo’s political history. What he notes about the Congo rings true for other African countries. For as Michela Wrong notes, Congo is in many ways “a paradigm of all that was wrong with post-colonial Africa,”⁴ even though as a case of “negative excellence” Congo seems to embody within its history the faults of any normal African state and pitch them one frequency higher. Capturing some of Stearns’s observations about the Congo helps to confirm some key conclusions of The Sacrifice of Africa.

Institutional Weakness of the State

Without trying to reduce the causes of the fighting to one factor, Stearns points to the institutional weakness of the Congolese state as a major factor. Stearns begins by locating this institutional weakness of the state within Congo’s political history, looking first at how King Leopold “killed or mutilated hundreds of thousands and pushed millions of others to starvation or death from disease” (70). Second, within the history of the Belgian colonial administration and the subsequent postcolonial politics of Mobutu’s dictatorship, Stearns observes that

since 1970 until today, the Congolese state has not had an effective army, administration, or judiciary, nor have its leaders been interested in creating strong institutions. Instead they have seen the state apparatus as a threat, to be kept weak so as to better manipulate it. This has left a bitter Congolese paradox: a state that is everywhere and oppressive but that is defunct and dysfunctional. (126)

What Stearns’s narrative makes clear, and what is important to keep in mind, is that the Congolese state’s dysfunctional nature does not reflect a “failed state.” There is also nothing culturally “African” or “Congolese” about it. As Stearns rightly notes, “the lack of responsible politics is not due to some genetic defect in Congolese DNA, a missing ‘virtue’ gene, or even something about Congolese culture. Instead, it is deeply rooted in the country’s political history” (215). Congo operates just the way it was meant to from the very start of its contact with and inception into modern Western history. Its institutional weakness is part the legacy of its unique story.

[Modern Congo] was the victim of one of the most brutal episodes of colonial rule, when it was turned into the private business empire of King Leopold; under his reign and the subsequent rule by the republican Belgian government, the Congo’s remaining customary chiefs were fought, co-opted, or sent into exile. Religious leaders who defied the orthodoxy of the European-run churches faced the same fate: the prophet Simon Kimbangu died after thirty years in prison for his anticolonial rhetoric. (215)

Mobutu just continued the same manipulative “taming” of the state institutions and turned them into personal fiefdoms. He did so not only for private gain but also in order to prevent any challengers to his power from emerging, a policy that effectively ended up eroding that very power in the process (126).

Anyone familiar with recent developments in Africa will immediately recognize this pattern of “taming” and “eroding” of political institutions by African leaders bent on extending their stay in power (witness, e.g., the attempts at constitutional amendments to allow for a “third term” and other clientalist representation). As I noted in The Sacrifice of Africa—and what Stearns helps to illuminate with respect to Congo—this institutional weakness of the state is not an incidental glitch that can be repaired by some technical and ethical education; it is part of the social imagery of Africa’s modernity—the way modern Africa was imagined from the very start.

“Fighting” and the Politics of the Belly

While the fighting in the Congo may have started with an ideology or set of ideologies, in the end it came to reflect and confirm the self-serving la politique du ventre, as various national forces and local militias fought for control of Congo’s rich mineral and natural resources. In 1996, Rwanda led an invasion of the Congo, ostensibly because it needed to destroy the Interahamwe-controlled refugee camps that continued to pose a threat to Rwanda. However, the most significant aspect of this first Congo war, apart from the speed with which it succeeded in toppling Mobutu’s regime, was the international coalition it was able to piece together in order “to liberate Congo” from Mobutu’s dictatorship. Led by Rwanda, the coalition brought together Ugandan, Congolese, and Angolan fighters, and had the support of Burundi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. This united front seemed to represent “the heyday of African Renaissance.” However, no sooner had Kabila come to power than the coalition began to crack and, with the assassination of Kabila, to break apart. Congo would become the theater of “Africa’s World War” as various former partners found themselves on different sides of the fighting. Even the two closest allies, Uganda and Rwanda, would eventually fight it out in Kisangani. What the infighting revealed is that while the genesis might have been steeped in ideology, greed and plunder had become the main motives for conflict in the region. “Within several years, the Congo was to become the graveyard for the lofty rhetoric of African leadership as preached by Mbeki” (56).

It is within this unique chemistry of a struggle for power and plunder, especially evident in the proxy war between Kigali and Kinshasa, that one can see how the entire country became increasingly militarized. This was especially true of eastern Congo, where local Mai Mai militias formed in protest of Rwandan occupation. Without providing any training, Kinshasa dropped tons of weapons and ammunition at various airports in the jungles of eastern Congo for the Hutu militia as well as for Mai Mai groups (250).

However, as the country became more militarized, discontented and unemployed youth joined militias and set up roadblocks to tax the local population. Family and land disputes, which had previously been settled in traditional courts, were now sometimes solved through violence, and communal feuds between rival clans or tribes resulted in skirmishes and targeted killings. (250–51)

The Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), the Congolese Rally for Democracy, Rwanda’s main allies in the east, responded in kind. In both South and North Kivu, governors created local militias, “[b]ut instead of improving security, these ramshackle, untrained local militias for the most part just exacerbated the suffering by taxing, abusing, and raping the local population” (251).

It is within this context that one has to understand the ethnic dimension that the fighting in eastern Congo would soon take on. Here Stearns’s analysis is lacking. For it is misleading to suggest that “if the fiercest ideology of ethics that can be found in the country is ethnic, that is because no other institution has been strong enough for the people to rally around” (216).⁵ Though such an observation may be descriptively true, it does not take into full account the way in which, within the unique nexus of the politics of plunder and power, ethnic identification has not been a stable and unchanging form of social identification, but rather is one that is constantly manufactured, reproduced, and recruited as the elites fight for political spoils. “Congolese rebel politics since the 1960s has been either an elite or an ethnic affair, or—most often—a mixture of both” (232).⁶

Anyone familiar with African politics will easily recognize a similar pattern and logic within the endless regimes of “fighting” and the reproduction of militia rebels. Whereas the fighting might often be couched in lofty ideologies of “liberating” our people, quite often it is neither liberation nor even the capture of state power that is at stake. Just as in the Congo, the armed groups “are not so much about controlling territory as about controlling civilians, who are brutalized in order to obtain resources and as retaliation for attacks by their rivals” (329). This not only redefines the notion of “sovereignty”; it also points to a social context where millions of young, vulnerable, unemployed youths become an easy target for either recruitment or abduction into the militia forces.⁷

Illusory Salvation

That a number of young people found themselves easily drawn into the fighting in the Congo is perhaps not surprising. Mobutu’s thirty-two years in power had not only destroyed the country but had left millions of Congolese, the youth especially, without any viable options for the future. For many young people, fighting gave them a sense of purpose. In this respect, Stearns’s interactions and interviews with some of the young former combatants are quite illuminating. Hundreds of street children, unemployed youths, and pupils were recruited, and each was given one hundred dollars—five times the monthly rent for a house. But even more importantly, the new recruits were told that they were being enlisted to fight Mobutu, who had ruined the country and had made people corrupt and tribalistic. They were fighting to liberate their country and to establish a new future of democracy and development. In order to do that, they were instructed in various ways of confronting and killing the enemy. Kizito, a young boy (“Kadogo”) who was recruited into the “rebellion” by Kabila in 1996, captures the significance of what was being offered him. “It was obvious to me. . . I had no future in Bukavu. They were offering me a future. . . . It was like a dream. I was so excited” (144–45).

But as Stearns’s narrative follows Kizito’s story, the promised future soon turns into a nightmare as the young recruits, trained in various modes of combat, fight and kill their way through the jungle. In fact, Stearns devotes an entire chapter, “This Is How You Fight,” to a description of how the recruits were turned into soldiers. In one particularly grippin...