Chapter One Chapter

Notes Chapter One 1. This narrative of events is taken from the official government report, as reported in the Ugandan newspaper The Monitor (18 January 2002, 13). 2. For good discussions of Kabila’s life and his early career as a rebel leader, see Kennes 1999 and Wilungula 1997. 3. Hall also notes that: “Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power” (Hall 1996, 4). 4. My use of discourse and discourse analysis is drawn from the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, who accept that a discourse is a relational totality of signifying sequences that together constitute a more or less coherent framework for what can be said and done. 5. Enunciating this Gramscian interpretation, Stuart Hall argues: “It becomes the horizon of the taken-for-granted: what the world is and how it works, for all practical purposes. Ruling ideas may dominate other conceptions of the social world by setting the limit to what will appear as rational, reasonable, credible, indeed sayable or thinkable, within the given vocabularies of motive and action available to us” (Hall 1988, 44). Chapter Two 1. Mehmed Emin Pasha, a German explorer, was the governor of an Egyptian province in the Sudan, but had been cut off from contact with Europe by a Mahdist revolt. Stanley left from Zanzibar with over eight hundred men and, after months of forced march and hunger, found Emin Pasha. However, Emin Pasha no longer wanted rescuing and Stanley had to forcibly persuade him to leave the Sudan, but was unsuccessful in bringing Emin Pasha back to Europe. 2. Leopold II ascended the Belgian throne in 1865 at the age of thirty. The king was almost as old as the country itself. Belgium, born in 1830 after a popular uprising against the Dutch, was not a homogenous nation. There were significant cultural, 184 Kevin C. Dunn linguistic, religious, and class divisions within the country. In fact, it has been noted that the small state owed its existence to various international norms and regimes (Grovogui 2000; Clapham 1996, 32). In order to ensure the continental balance of power at that time, the dominant European powers guaranteed Belgium’s right to self-determination and sovereignty for its pledge of neutrality. The new country of Belgium established itself as a constitutional monarchy and chose a German prince as its first king, Leopold I. Yet, it was his son who would thrust the small country onto the stage of international politics because of his obsession with acquiring colonies. For Leopold II any populated region of the globe would do, as long as it was his/Belgium’s possession (Slade 1962, 36). 3. The claims I make in this section derive from my readings of many of Leopold II’s writings and speeches, as well as work produced by his colonial agents operating in the Congo, Europe, and the United States. I have also studied the three popular colonial publications: La Belgique Coloniale, Le Congo Illustré, and Le Mouvement Géographique. These materials are available at the Bibliothèque Africain, housed in the Belgian Foreign Ministry in Brussels. For a good discussion of Le Mouvement Géographique in particular, see Brugailliere 1993. 4. The diversity of the social, cultural, political, and linguistic groups in the region that became known as the “Congo” has been documented best by Jan Vansina’s Kingdoms of the Savanna (1966a). 5. As V. Y. Mudimbe has noted, “the explorer’s text is not epistemologically inventive. It follows a path prescribed by a tradition. Expedition reports only establish a very concrete, vivid representation of what paintings and theories of social progress had been postulating since the Baroque period. In what the explorer’s text does reveal, it brings nothing new besides visible and recent reasons to validate a discipline already remarkably defined by the Enlightenment. The novelty resides in the fact that the discourse on ‘savages’ is, for the first time, a discourse in which an explicit political power presumes the authority of scientific knowledge and vice-versa. Colonialism becomes its project and can be thought of as a duplication and a fulfillment of the power of Western discourses on human varieties” (Mudimbe 1988, 15–16). 6. For example, David Hume (1711–1766) justified European imperialism, slave trade, and colonialism with a racial argument of European superiority, stating: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to Whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than White, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation” (quoted in Gould 1981, 40–41). In France, Montesquieu (1689–1755) asserted that humans evolved from the state of nature at a different pace, depending on their mastery of reason. The Europeans had achieved such a mastery, while others had not. Thus, non-European societies could not be regarded as equal. Referring to Africans, he wrote “It is impossible that we suppose that these people are humans; because, if we suppose that they are humans, we would start thinking that we are not Christian ourselves” (quoted in Grimsley 1974, 12). Meanwhile in Germany, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) divided the world up into enlightened and nonenlightened, where the former enjoyed rights and privileges while the latter did not. Kant and his German counterparts followed other European thinkers in holding that the salvation of (unenlightened) Africa depended entirely on its subordination to Europe (Grovogui 1996, 34). 7. This summary is an obvious oversimplification of complex intellectual currents across several centuries. For more detailed treatments of the non-European Other Notes 185 in European thought, see Pieterse 1992; Mudimbe 1988; Lorimer 1978; Said 1978; and Hammond and Jablow 1970. 8. For good recent biographies, see John Bierman’s Dark Safari (1990) and Frank McLynn’s Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer (1989). 9. For a good discussion of the invention and evolution of the concept of “race,” see Hannaford 1996. For an excellent discussion of “race” in international relations, see Doty 1993. 10. Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1992) has noted that the use of the cannibal image has historically served as a marker of cultural difference. McClintock observes that for whites, “the fear of engulfment expresses itself most acutely in the cannibal trope . [through which they] attempted to ward off the threat of the unknown by naming it, while at the same time confessing a dread that the unknown might literally rise up and devour the intruder whole” (McClintock 1995, 27). 11. One of his contemporaries, Samuel Baker, wrote: “African savages is [sic] quite on the level with that of the brute, and not to be compared with the noble character of the dog. There is neither gratitude, pity, love, nor self-denial; no idea of duty; no religion; but covetousness, ingratitude, selfishness, and cruelty” (Baker 1866, 152–3). 12. The 1894 World’s Fair in Antwerp was the first to feature Africans. An “authentic” village was built and sixteen Africans were brought for display. Three died during the fair and four fell seriously ill. At Tervuren, seven Africans died. 13. In terms of gender, the colonial project turned on a definition and performance of Belgian masculinity. The Congolese were cast as effeminate, helpless victims that needed rescuing, while the African environs was imagined to be an inhospitable testing ground for the strength, courage, and virility of the white male. Belgian masculinity was intimately tied to the conquest and colonization of the Congo and Congolese. Thus, gendered elements were central aspects of the Belgian-Congolese relationship from its inception. 14. It should be noted that support for the colonial project was not universal by any means. There was strong domestic opposition to Belgian colonialism from many quarters, including the Labor Party. 15. As Pratt notes: “From the point of view of their inhabitants, of course, these same spaces are lived as intensely humanized, saturated with local history and mean- ing, where plants, creatures, and geographical formations have names, uses, symbolic functions, histories, places in indigenous knowledge formations” (Pratt 1992, 61). 16. William Connolly refers to this as the “civi-territorial complex” (Connolly 1993 and 1996). Kennan Ferguson summarizes it as “the location and creation of civilization in a specific consumption of the land, as well as the subsequent delegitimation of those with different conceptions of it. The use of land in a particular way . justifies the claim of civilization and forms the foundation for denying the nomadic people previously occupying the land claim to the earth. It is cultural judgment realized through the imaginary of terrain” (Ferguson 1996, 169). 17. As John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge have argued: “The system of territorial states developed important legal and economic underpinnings as a wide range of spatial practices became more and more bounded by state-territorial limits. Through a social process of recognizing other spaces as potentially ‘developed’ and ‘modern’ insofar as they acquired the trappings of territorial statehood (armies, judiciaries, etc.), the state-territorial form of spatial organization came to encompass in some degree most of the world’s population” (Agnew and Corbridge 1995, 14). 186 Kevin C. Dunn 18. Stanley’s invention of his Western identity was grounded in his simultaneous performance of “whiteness” and “manliness.” As Gail Bederman argues in Manli- ness and Civilization: “During the decades around the turn of the century, Americans were obsessed with the connection between manhood and racial dominance .

Load more