What to read on the Congo

April 26th, 2011 § 7 Comments

In the spirit of my recent post about what to read on Rwanda, here’s my take on the DRC:

Other recommendations?

Elections & Peace Consolidation in the DRC

April 7th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Wrapping up my backdated blogging of DRC events from earlier this year, I attended an interesting speech in January by Ambassador Roger Meece, the UN’s Special Representative for the DRC, at the Wilson Center.  As the head of MONUSCO, and a key player in the international effort to support the 2006 elections in the DRC, Meece seemed to take a perhaps overly rosy view of the country’s stability in this public forum, but there were some good points raised regardless.

On the note of the MONUC –> MONUSCO shift, Meece pointed out that stabilization was initially a question of removing foreign armies during the war.  The 2006 elections were seen as an exit strategy for MONUC in some quarters, but obviously questions of stability remain pressing.  Today, whilst the necessity of economic development for stability is broadly accepted, he feels that peacekeepers remain uncomfortable talking about this.  (Of course, economic growth is well outside MONUSCO’s mandate.)

Meece also felt that the 2006 elections are often given short shrift, saying that they “changed governance in the Congo permanently” through both the inculcation of democratic mores and the practical implications of creating new regional assemblies and granting some independence to parliament.  That said, he curiously elided the topic of Kabila’s decidedly non-democratic constitutional tinkering, even after I asked him about it directly.  (He responded with a reiteration of his belief [or hope] that Kabila is “committed” to the 2011 elections.)  However, he also heard that a number of opposition leaders came to MONUSCO whilst he was out of the country and said that a single round of elections was acceptable, which he found quite surprising.

News sources on Rwanda & the DRC

April 4th, 2011 § 6 Comments

A thought continued from my last post: I think I tend to view outside “experts” (assign that term what value you will) as oft-credible sources of information about Rwandese politics in part because it’s difficult to get high-quality, objective information from within the country.  I’ve stopped reading the New Times, as it’s analytically not very helpful, and Rwanda Focus seems similarly uncritical.  Beyond Nkunda Rwanda I’ve found few active Rwandese bloggers.  If readers have links to additional resources, I’d love to hear about them.  (Congo, on the other hand, has a comparative wealth of local papers and several good blogs, all in French.)

There is also, I think, the question of what right foreigners have to be blithely writing about politics and conflict in central Africa.  It’s a fair query; after all, I only lived in the region for a year, in capitals both times, and my Kinyarwanda and Lingala/Swahili skills are negligible.  (My Tshiluba and Kikongo skills are totally non-existent.)  I make no claim of privileged information on my own behalf.  But that said, the entanglements of our globalized world are here to stay.  I have to believe that, as a foreigner, working towards more proximately accurate understandings of such complicated regions – responsibly, honestly, and self-critically – is in the end more useful than withdrawing from conversation.

Update as of April 5:

  • Via Tom of A View From the Cave, I’ve learned that Owen Barder has also written eloquently on the topic of privilege and African politics.  He reaches different conclusions, though.  Well-worth a read.
  • James Wilson links to FSI language programs in Lingala and Swahili.
  • Commentator zebrapad links to a useful Kinyarwanda vocab list.
  • Another Kinyarwanda resource is Speak Rwanda.

Congo: The UN Mapping Report & the Responsibility to Justice

March 28th, 2011 § 14 Comments

Continuing my quest to catch up on Congo-related conference blogging, I wanted to share some notes from the December 2010 Great Lakes Policy Forum discussion of the UN mapping report.  The GLPF’s official summary can be downloaded here, and Laura Seay has her own summary here.

One commentator took on the political economy of the report’s publication, noting that many Congolese found psychological and emotional value in seeing the UN provide proof of crimes they had long known to have occurred.  However, the report’s existence also complicates peacebuilding efforts in the region.  “There’s blood on almost everyone’s hands,” as almost every government in the region has some members who’ve been guilty of massive human rights abuses at some point.  This is clearly visible in Rwanda’s treatment of Laurent Nkunda, who will “probably never go on trial” because he knows too much about the crimes committed by all sides during the wars.  In the end, she believes that transitional justice is unlikely to happen unless outside donors put strong pressure on regional governments.

Another commentator provided a bit of historical perspective on both violence and justice in eastern Congo, pointing out that political and social coalitions around justice in the DRC are very weak and fragmented now compared to 5 or 6 years ago.  There has been a simultaneous growth in the entrenchment of violence with economic interests, especially trade and mining.  Part of this entanglement was due to the desire of foreign armies to “do war on the cheap” by getting locals to do their killing for them, which provided space for “sophisticated entrepreneurs of violence” to use access to weapons to their own commercial ends.

Whilst the report itself only covered the period 1993 – 2003, the ensuing discussion also touched upon more recent developments in both Congo and Rwanda.  As one speaker pointed out, there’s been a welcome increase in Western attention to gender-based violence in the eastern DRC of late – but it’s important to avoid reducing issues of justice to the prosecution of rape and war crimes.  What the Congo ultimately needs is a “massive institution-building project” on the scale of decades, in order to rebuilt judicial systems that might handle everything from property rights and contracts to war crimes.  The international community has also largely elided the issues of land rights and citizenship for Rwandaphone Congolese in the Kivus, which remain at the heart of the ongoing conflict in the region.

That said, the “idea that the Congolese are doomed to fight each other is ridiculous.”  There are spaces in the DRC that are relatively well-governed, such as Butembo and Katanga.  More attention is needed to the factors that enable better governance in the Congolese context.

Finally, a number of interesting points that didn’t quite fit in elsewhere in the above narrative also came up:

  • Rwanda was described as “a boiling cauldron under a surface that looks calm,” with Hutu resentment running high, and ethnic identities remaining highly salient despite official attempts to ban their use.
  • The US values stability over all else in the region.  Kagame and Mobutu both contributed to stability, as did Museveni, and the US is willing to turn a blind eye to many other abuses because of this.
  • Africa more generally is “kind of the neglected stepchild of diplomacy,” with some dedicated diplomats, but others who got dumped there with little previous knowledge of the region.

Did anyone else attend this meeting of the GLPF, or the one that took place on March 24 on human security in the DRC?  Would love to hear thoughts if so!

Don Alvaro, King of Kongo

March 18th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

It’s interesting to remember that there was a pre-colonial time when the European imagination hadn’t yet essentialized Africa into a land of savages.  I purchased the image below – a reprint of an engraving from a 1668 book on African exploration – on a trip to South Africa last year, intrigued by seeing a European artist using European symbols of power to demonstrate the position of an African king.  (In other words, he is rather reasonably providing an accessible visual interpretation of African “power” for his audience.)  Note the Latin inscription “Don Alvarez, Rex Kongo” and the elegant European-style interior:

“Don Alvaro, king of Kongo, giving audience to the Dutch in 1642″

The Kingdom of Kongo, as it turns out, had a long and fascinating pre-colonial history.  From origins just south of Matadi (in the present-day DRC), it expanded to cover an area from the north of (modern-day) Angola to the south of the Republic of Congo, and remained extent as a political entity from roughly 1400 to 1914.  Its territory was divided into anywhere from 6-15 provinces and sub-provinces, with provincial rulers taxing local trade and paying revenues upward to the king.  In the early 17th century, the population of its capital, Mbanza-Kongo, and the surrounding hinterland was estimated at 100,000 people.

So whence this engraving?  The Portuguese came into contact with the Kongo in 1483, when Diogo Cao made his famous voyage up the Congo River.  Subsequent relations seem to have ranged from amicable to strategic to hostile, mostly centered around the slave trade and factional struggles for the throne of Kongo.  By the 1600s, however, the Dutch were competing with the Portuguese for the spice trade, and they captured Luanda from the Portuguese in 1641.  In 1642, Kongo agreed to provide them with military assistance, and in return the Dutch helped the then-king of Kongo, Garcia II, put down a rebellion in the south.  (Garcia’s predecessor, who died in 1641, was Alvaro IV.  Presumably either the name or the year in the print above is incorrect.)

Kongo held out, through wars, factional struggles, and a post-Berlin wave of Portuguese colonialism, until 1914.  But even today, the kingdom’s afterlife continues.  The DRC-based religico-political group Bundu dia Kongo has pressed for a revival of the Kongo culture and kingdom since the late 1960s, and has gotten attention more recently for demonstrating against (and being brutally suppressed by) the Kabila regime.

Gerard Prunier on recent news in the Congo and Rwanda

March 14th, 2011 § 14 Comments

I’ve been lax in sharing the interesting points raised at the lectures I’ve attended on the DRC over the past several months.  One of the most wide-ranging was a November 2010 speech by Gerard Prunier on the Congo and Rwanda, which ran the gamut from the DRC’s foreign relations to Rwanda’s waning moral legitimacy in the eyes of the West.  Some of the main points:

Congo

  • Economically, the DRC is doing much better than it did after the immediate end of the war.  However, it’s barely integrated into the world or even regional economies, and very few industries have national reach (except for banking and transport).  Funds mostly flow from regional governments to Kinshasa, not the other way.  China is now its biggest aid donor.
  • The DRC’s interactions with the rest of the world are conducted by the “thin sliver” of government that presents the integrated Congo.  “From an economic and administrative point of view, the country doesn’t exist.”  However, it’s still very much in existence as a political entity.
  • Despite the ongoing war in the east, most of the country is at peace.  Only ~20% of Congolese live in the east.  That said, the Kabila regime has proven better at diplomacy than at either economic management or state-building & conflict resolution.
  • The Kivus are really more connected to Uganda/Rwanda/Burundi than to western Congo.  It would have been appropriate to have two settlements to the ’98-’02 war: one for the Kivus, and one for the rest of Congo.
  • When this speech occurred, Prunier felt that the government was behaving in an increasingly brutal and arbitrary manner towards its opponents, whilst there was no direct threat to its security to warrant this.  (The recent assassination attempt might have changed that calculus.)  At the time, however, he pointed out that the CNDP and its offshoot militias in the Kivus were in no position to overthrow the government.
  • The increase in state brutality might reflect Kabila’s concerns for his political survival – or it might mean that he’s losing control of his security apparatus.  Angola is well-positioned to put pressure on Kabila about this and other issues, but they don’t want to destabilize the DRC.

Rwanda

  • Rwanda is among the most opaque countries on the continent, comparable to Ethiopia and Eritrea.  One can reproach the Congolese for many things, but at least politically “nothing is hidden, they let it all hang out.”
  • There does appear to be fighting in the RPF’s inner circle.  There’s been a recent wave of assassination attempts and arrests of regime figures, including a former army chief of staff and the deputy commander of the Rwandese UNAMID force in Darfur.
  • Putting Laurent Nkunda on trial is undesirable for Kagame, because Nkunda knows too much about abuses committed by the RPF.  Prunier estimates that Kagame has killed 13 people who used to work with Nkunda, and is aiming to kill as many as he can.
  • There are rumors that the (Tutsi-affiliated) CNDP is talking to the (Hutu-affiliated) FDLR in eastern Congo, and considering using it as a base to overthrow Kagame, just as the RPF used western Uganda as a base for their attacks on the MRND.  Internal ethnic politics are also unsettled, as Tutsis who returned from Congo/Burundi/Tanzania are being marginalized in comparison to Ugandan Tutsis.
  • The UN mapping report, with its revelations that the RPF had massacred Hutu refugees in the Congo from ’96-’97, has diminished Rwanda’s moral authority in the eyes of the West.  Kagame had benefited tremendously from the developed world’s willingness to turn a blind eye to his authoritarianism out of guilt.  Prunier believes that a number of photogenic development initiatives, like the banning of plastic bags and the installation of wifi in public buses in Kigali, are “completely designed for the wazungu.”

I’d welcome thoughts from readers who know the region better than I do.

NB: To address the points raised by several commentators, I don’t think Prunier intended to imply that Rwanda has had no policy achievements of value under Kagame.  In many ways (especially health and economic policy), Rwanda is a good example of the benefits that can come of a strong, development-oriented African government.  This should be acknowledged along with the continued political repression and lingering grievances of the genocide if one hopes to take a more balanced view of the country.

James Ferguson on seeing what isn’t there

February 24th, 2011 § 4 Comments

Over at the wonderful Theory Talks, James Ferguson, the Stanford anthropologist, responds to the question of the “biggest challenge in global studies”:

One of the things that bothers me about a lot of what I read the in social sciences that’s, as you say, ‘globally oriented’, is that it seems to start with a bunch of certainties, a bunch of assumptions – a kind of Western liberal common sense – that we know how countries ought to be organized. They ought to be democracies; they ought to respect human rights; they ought to guarantee the rule of law; they ought to be at peace with their neighbors. And then you look at, say, a country in Africa and all you’re able to see is a series of lacks – of things that should be there but aren’t. And you end up constructing huge parts of the world as just sort of empty spaces where things ought to be there but aren’t. And it leads to a kind of impoverished understanding, I think, because you don’t really understand what is going on here. How do people conduct their affairs? How is legitimate authority exercised? How are rules made and enforced? You know, all the kinds of questions that ought to be the starting place tend to disappear or recede into the background. So, I think the real challenge is to approach this whole question with a sense of openness, a willingness to be surprised and learn something new and not to be so deductive.

I certainly believe that there are a number of Western development practitioners who have taken this perspective – of the limits of their own understanding – to heart, in useful ways.  And it’s also quite clear to me that any number of practitioners persist in seeing the developing world as a series of gaps and lacks, filled with people who are not inherently passive, but are still incapable of generating substance and meaning on their own.  When you look at a dirt road, and immediately wonder why it isn’t paved, rather than pondering the ways that people use it and the spaces it connects, your normative vision of the world is likely standing between you and a more proximately accurate understanding.

Shoe vendor, Kinshasa

I remember having this instinctive reaction myself when I took the above photo in Kinshasa (on my BlackBerry, apologies for the poor quality).  Ha, a Congolese shoe store!  That’s not the right way to move beyond bricks-and-mortar retail… I didn’t notice the creative display (maximum visibility of shoes in a minimal space, compared to piling them on a table).  I didn’t think about the processes by which sending Western cast-offs to developing countries, to be purchased by the bale by clothing merchants, had become a normal and even admired aspect of globalization.  It didn’t even occur to me that this particular vendor had thoughtfully specialized in white trainers.  I only saw what wasn’t there.  It’s the steady challenge of life, and especially work, in a globalized world, to learn to focus on what is there.

Six months

December 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment

I left Ghana six months ago today, and I must admit that it still feels odd to be back.  As Glenna Gordon aptly wrote about her return to New York a few months ago,

That time I was standing on a table in the middle of a tshirt factory when the owner walked in, I didn’t think, how did I get here? Or stranded on the side of the road somewhere between Sierra Leone and Liberia when the bush taxi broke down and we all sat on logs waiting for another car to come by and shepherd us to the next town, I didn’t think, how did I get here? …  I know how I got to those places. The question is just how I got back.

Waking up in my own apartment, with running water and central air and electricity to keep the fridge going, still feels stranger to me than piling into a matatu in Kigali with twenty other people and a few chickens.  Stranger than walking back to Walewale after a day surveying in rural villages, using the Tigo cell tower next to my office to navigate my way through dusty fields.  Not quite as strange as the double economy in Kinshasa, where one could pay US$8 for mangoes imported from Belgium at City Market or 20 cents for local mangoes at the bus stop – but still.  The thought of six months passing since last I stood in Ghana is unreal.

It is in memory of this that I’ve been flipping through all of my Africa photos again, and thought I’d post a few favorites from countries beyond the usual suspects:

A tree grows in Kampala

Mosaic from a monument at Place de la Revolution, Bujumbura

Drinking local in Addis

The social norms of bribery

May 9th, 2010 § 5 Comments

Police at the Gombe station, Kinshasa, DRC

Aid Watch had a good post a while back about why “failed state” is a failed concept, which sums to the recognition that current use of the phrase A) offers no coherent definition of state failure and B) offers no analytical insight into the political trajectories of states considered failed.  Unsurprisingly, this contributes to a lot of confused thought about the Congo, which often gets termed something like “the world’s largest failed state.”  The sloppiest reporting & analysis end up portraying the country as an economic free-for-all, with chaos envisioned as the inevitable consequence of the absence of Western standards of legitimate taxation & property rights, among other things.  (Texas in Africa recently did a great take-down of Jeffrey Gettleman on a variant of this mode of thought, with specific regard to the war in eastern Congo.)

This is a very two-dimensional way of looking at a place as fascinatingly complex as the DRC.  Case in point: the social norms that have developed around the endemic corruption of the Kinshasa traffic police.  Bribe-seeking is technically illegal & unregulated behavior, and can look rather chaotic to the first-time observer.  If you’re wealthy enough to be traveling by car in downtown Kin, you may rest assured that the roulage will be looking for any pretext to stop you and ask for payment of an imagined fine.  (In the situation leading up to the photo above, a friend had parked quite legally in a designated parking spot outside my apartment – after which we were surrounded by police & escorted to the station on claims that we were blocking the road.)  Interestingly, though, the key word here is pretext. I never saw any interaction between the police & drivers that did not involve some sort of legalistic claim to the driver’s money, even if both parties knew that the accusation was false.  By contrast, white foreigners probably look just as wealthy walking down the street as they do when in cars, but the same police officer who stopped us morning after morning whilst we were driving to work scrupulously ignored me when I walked past him on my way to lunch.  Imagined moving violations are presumably easier to justify than imagined walking violations, and the group norm specified that bribery in this particular location had to have a legal pretext.  (This is likely not representative of all corrupt Congolese police all the time – but it was always the case in my personal experiences with them.)

All of which is to say that it’s a blinding misconception to think that the opposite of a strong state is chaos.  Order (organic if not judicial) can be found everywhere, if you take the time to look.

On microloans & credit cards

August 6th, 2009 § 5 Comments

Patriotic plastic chair (“Let’s Reconstruct the Congo!”)

Ah, I have so much to write about after 2.5 months with FINCA in the DRC, and so little free time in which to do it!  But one comment that I’ve been turning over in my mind for some time now is something my father said to me when I was explaining the concept of group microlending to him.  I pointed out that most clients don’t borrow for discrete events, like buying a car or paying for college, but rather take out multiple sequential small loans to finance everything from business activities to children’s educations.  (Granted, many microfinance clients aren’t supposed to be using loans for consumption purposes, but even the social pressure of group lending can’t always prevent this.) My father’s response was that this type of lending sounded much more analogous to owning a credit card than taking out a “traditional” Western loan.  And I’ve been increasingly fascinated with this idea as its implications have sunk in.

Consider the long-dominant narrative of microloans as a pathway out of poverty, now coming up against a more nuanced narrative of microloans as consumption smoothing tools whose efficacy in moving borrowers out of poverty is also dependent on the individual borrower.  (See the end of this post for more on individual variation.)   I don’t actually find these positions contradictory, just varying in their levels of nuance, but for those who do find them mutually exclusive, I think the credit-card-vs.-traditional-loan idea may resolve many of the apparent contradictions here.  “Traditional” loans are usually aimed at smoothing consumption around the type of significant investments that provide positive, and lasting, long-term shocks to income levels.   Borrowing to finance a university education is a good example of this.  Credit card companies, on the other hand, make few claims about their beneficial effects on one’s long-term financial health – and are better served overall when a portion of their customers spend themselves into debt and pay hefty fees for the privilege.   The whole point is to smooth consumption of inexpensive-to-midrange products & services, and few people consider them a substitute for a larger “traditional” loan unless they’ve no other choice.  (Have you discussed putting a $180,000 undergraduate education on a credit card with your friendly local admissions officer? [Hello, Dartmouth, you expensive old dear.] I didn’t think so.)

In short, the “pathway out of poverty” narrative expects microloans to function similarly to “traditional” Western loans, and play a significant investment and capacity-building function on a personal level.  The consumption smoothing narrative, on the other hand, is redefining microloans as something closer to cash-only versions of credit cards.  (Without so many options for punitive fees for defaulters, and with a greater risk of an angry group of Congolese women coming to your house at 6 am to repossess all your plastic chairs as punishment for a missed payment.)  There are a thousand interesting directions one could go with this thought, but what I think it mostly points to is the fact that the formal economic structures of microfinance are still going through a dramatic period of evolution.  There aren’t many Western banks that wake up wondering if their primary product is a mortgage loan or perhaps really a credit card, after all.  And that leads into implications for product design, and the unbanked’s perceptions of and interactions with formal banking institutions, and on and on into what I’m sure will be many future blog posts.

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