The Apocalyptic Interlude: Revealing Death in Kinshasa Author(S): Filip De Boeck Source: African Studies Review, Vol

The Apocalyptic Interlude: Revealing Death in Kinshasa Author(s): Filip De Boeck Source: African Studies Review, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Sep., 2005), pp. 11-32 Published by: African Studies Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20065093 Accessed: 27/08/2010 06:55 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=afsta. 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African Studies Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Studies Review. http://www.jstor.org ASR FOCUS Mourning and the Imagination of Political Time in Contemporary Central Africa The Apocalyptic Interlude: Revealing Death in Kinshasa FilipDe Boeck in Kinshasa is of a Abstract: Temporality contemporary very specific eschatological in more in the Book kind and takes its point of departure the Bible, and particularly an in of Revelation, which has become omnipresent point of reference Kinshasa's life in collective imagination. The lived-in time of everyday Kinshasa is projected canvas of a against the of the completion everything, completion which will be not about doom and brought about by God. As such, the Book of Revelation is only a the of destruction, it is essentially also book of hope. Yet popular understanding centers on of evil. This article the Apocalypse very much the omnipotent presence on on in focuses the impact of millennialism the Congolese experience, which daily is into terms as reality constantly translated mythical and prophetic apocalyptic interlude. est R?sum?: Le concept de temporalit? dans le Kinshasa d'aujourd'hui d'une et trouve son la esp?ce eschatologique bien particuli?re origine dans Bible, plus est un pr?cis?ment dans le livre des R?v?lations, qui devenu point de r?f?rence omnipr?sent dans l'imagination collective des habitants de Kinshasa. Le temps v?cu est au canevas de la vie quotidienne ? Kinshasa compar? de l'ach?vement ultime, un sera tant ach?vement qui accompli par Dieu. En que tel, le livre des R?v?lations African Studies Review, Volume 48, Number 2 (September 2005), pp. 11-32 a Filip De Boeck is professor of social and cultural anthropology and head of the Africa Research Center of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Since 1987 he has conducted extensive field research in both urban and rural envi ronments in current the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). His state theoretical interests include processes of collapse, local subjectivities of cri sis, postcolonial memory processes, and youth and the politics of culture in Cen recent tral Africa. Among his publications is "Kinshasa: Tales of the 'Invisible City'," in Okwui Enwezor, ed., Under Siege: Four African Cities: Freetown, Johannes burg, Kinshasa, Lagos (Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003). 11 12 African Studies Review essen ne se concentre pas seulement sur la fatalit? et la destruction mais c'est un livre la tiellement d'esp?rance. Et pourtant, conception populaire de l'apoca tourne autour de la notion du mal. Cet article se concentre lypse principalement sur sur dans r?alit? l'impact du mill?narisme l'exp?rience congolaise, laquelle la se constamment en termes et comme quotidienne traduit mythiques proph?tiques interlude proph?tique. sont Les morts qui n'ont pas de vivants malheureux, aussi malheureux que morts. les vivants qui n'ont pas de are (Without the living the dead unhappy, as as unhappy the the living without dead.) (Sony Labou Tansi, 1979) Introduction: The Place of Death in the Realm of the Apocalyptic Interlude This article intends to explore the changing place and meaning of death one of the Democra and time in of Africa's largest cities, Kinshasa, capital tic Republic of Congo.1 As in other cities around the continent, Kinshasa as a ismarked by the rise of Christian fundamentalism propagated by great number of Pentecostal churches and other "miracle" churches of spiritual new churches have become the awakening.2 Since the early nineties, these norm rather than the exception. Drawing hundreds of thousands to their come to more prayer meetings, they have gradually supplant other, often that syncretic, prayer movements and independent churches sprang up suc during the long life of the Mobutist reign. They have also been very a cessful in attracting great number of Christians who previously identified themselves with the traditional Catholic and Protestant "mother" churches. This new strong wave of flourishing faith that has overtaken the city of Kin and as a whole is set the of a socioeconomic shasa Congo against backdrop and conditions of and political context marked by deep crisis, war, material hardship, hunger, lack, and poverty. Without any doubt, the harsh living conditions that prevail throughout the country have contributed dramati new cally to the rapid spread of these church movements. One of the central questions this article addresses is what happens so when people's material conditions of life become incredibly hard that their very conceptions of what constitutes reality are affected. I will try to The Apocalyptic Interlude: Revealing Death in Kinshasa 13 provide some answers to that question by looking at the changed place of death in this urban world and by analyzing the apocalyptic time scale that the churches have introduced and that profoundly pervades daily life in Kinshasa, a city that feverishly attempts to make sense of its own crisis. In such an urban context, the religious transfiguration of daily urban reality, with its juxtapositions and contradictions generated in the "telescoped" experience of the passage of time and of events as laid out in the Bible, and more precisely in the Book of Revelation, produces a constant and often astonishing switch from the social to the semiotic, leading to what could be described as an or an of that overproduction "overheating" meaning gives expression to a disturbing unmooring of the social imagination. Death is the site that becomes most Death has become where unmooring tangible. a so omnipresent in Kinshasa, and in Congo as whole, that the labor of loss and mourning has ceased to be meaningful. Invaded by an ever increasing amount of dead that cannot be put to rest, the society of the living has stopped mourning them. By focusing upon the newly emerging place of death in the urban Con golese context, I will analyze how the changed value of death, and the on experience of what I call the "apocalyptic interlude," affects the city's daily life and above all, its capacity to symbolize and produce meaning and sense. I will that common structures of themselves have argue meaning in the changed process. "Siting" the Imaginary L?vi-Strauss and Lacan postulate the supremacy of the symbolic in relation to the imaginary. In this respect the signified is, to some extent, subordi are a nated to the signifier; symbols imbued with larger reality value than that which they symbolize, that is, the levels of the imaginary and of what Lacan calls "the real" (that which is neither imaginary nor symbolic). More recently Godelier (1996) has offered a critique of these classic interpreta tions in which he turns around their primacy. For Godelier, the levels of the are symbolic and the real materializations of the imaginary, which (re)cre ates and institutionalizes society. Here the symbolic is not a mental struc ture an a but internalized social structure, deriving from social logic that is unconscious but that constantly externalizes itself as social essence in the domains of sexuality, power, and politics. It is the concentration of the three orders of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the r?el that makes social reality, the social life of people, but it is the register of the imaginary that offers the fixed points from which a society invents itself. But what happens if the very nature of the imaginary as flexible but organized field of social practices has become disorganized and has lost, at least to some its force and its to create continu extent, localizing capacity ity, to produce sociality? The imaginary is the dimension of the invisible, 14 African Studies Review but what if the invisible becomes visible, and the dead replace and become more no alive than the living? What if the imaginary is longer the socially productive phantasmagoric but constantly crosses the boundaries and invades the real in an unmediated, nonsymbolic way? What if the imaginary is no longer the irr?el but the indiscernibleness between r?el and irr?el (see Deleuze 1990, quoted by Bayart 1996:138)? What if, in other words, the dual and therefore nonalienated relationship with

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