tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/patrice-lumumba-30823/articlesPatrice Lumumba – The Conversation2022-07-27T14:49:00Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1865122022-07-27T14:49:00Z2022-07-27T14:49:00ZBelgium is reviewing its colonial past in the DRC: it’s a sensitive but necessary process<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473646/original/file-20220712-22-r756em.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">DRC President
Felix Tshisekedi, left, receives a ceremonial mask from Belgium's King Philippe in June 2022.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Arsene Mpiana/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The year 2022 is shaping up to be a critical period for the <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-king-philippe-congo-challenge-dont-do-anything-to-cause-trouble/">troubled relationship</a> between Kinshasa and Brussels. </p>
<p>In June, during a visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Belgian king Philippe <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20220608-belgian-king-reiterates-regrets-for-colonial-past-in-dr-congo-stops-short-of-apology">expressed his regret</a> for the wounds of his country’s colonial past. Prime Minister Alexander De Croo then <a href="https://english.news.cn/europe/20220621/64608b85a7b64007a8fd83618d904ea2/c.html">apologised</a> for Belgium’s “moral responsibility” for the 1961 assassination of DRC Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The country later repatriated his <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-hands-over-lumumba-tooth-family-60-years-after-murder/">remains</a>. </p>
<p>From the outset, DRC President Félix Tshisekedi has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/09/belgium-king-philippe-democratic-republic-congo-colonialism/">said</a> that the challenge for the two nations is to look to the future. He hopes in particular that stronger ties with Belgium will help attract more investments. </p>
<p>But there are those in the DRC who think Belgium hasn’t done enough yet to compensate for its past. Opposition senator Francine Nkanga, for instance, <a href="https://twitter.com/Muyumba/status/1534810273713950720">has said</a>:</p>
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<p>We will never look to the future without an apology and reparations from Belgium.</p>
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<p>So even if both Kinshasa and Brussels want to frame their relationship as one looking into the future, it’s clear that their common past still weighs heavily on their countries. </p>
<p>In July 2020, Belgium set up a parliamentary commission to look into the country’s colonial history and how to best address its consequences. </p>
<p>The commission is expected to come up with <a href="https://www.lachambre.be/kvvcr/pdf_sections/pri/congo/55K1462001.pdf">concrete recommendations</a> later this year. It’s hoped they will provide an idea of how to heal the relationships between Belgians, Congolese, Rwandans and Burundians. </p>
<p>It’s a Herculean task. </p>
<p>The commission’s mission is to shed light on a controversial history. It’s required to critically assess the roles of the state, monarchy, church and corporations during Leopold II’s regime (1885-1908). It will also cover Belgium’s colonial rule (1908-1960), and the country’s history in Rwanda and Burundi (1919-1962). </p>
<p>I interviewed Wouter De Vriendt, the chairperson of the commission, for insights into the team’s work. He said:</p>
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<p>The recommendations could be deployed in many fields: decolonisation of the public space, cultural heritage, fight against racism and xenophobia, academic research, education, and diplomatic and development cooperation relations.</p>
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<p>But some <a href="https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/politique-belge/2022/06/22/lopen-vld-et-la-n-va-renoncent-a-la-mission-parlementaire-en-afrique-centrale-pas-de-plus-value-et-un-cout-trop-important-XHCLG3VGWNF57OBSLHEQYPYB7M/">political parties</a> question this scope. Criticisms have also mounted from people of African descent living in Belgium. </p>
<p>Among other things, they say the commission doesn’t sufficiently include black and mixed-race people, and that their current struggles aren’t taken into account. In their view, the floor is primarily given to academic experts, revealing a persistent <a href="https://blogs.mediapart.fr/plis/blog/100222/pacification-du-passe-colonial-belge-auto-erotisme-et-decentrement-decolonial">coloniality</a> of knowledge. </p>
<p>As a history professor who has <a href="https://uclouvain.be/fr/repertoires/anne-sophie.gijs">examined</a> the influence of the past on current political, economic and cultural relations between Africa and Europe, I’m aware that it’s crucial yet intricate to understand the points of view of people whose experiences we don’t share. </p>
<p>The work of Belgium’s parliamentary commission crystallises some of those challenges societies in Europe face when dealing with their colonial past. It may be on a difficult path, but it’s a necessary one.</p>
<h2>Grappling with the past</h2>
<p>In 2020, <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-george-floyd-changed-the-online-conversation-around-black-lives-matter/">George Floyd’s murder</a> in the US and the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement revived long-standing claims from <a href="https://www.memoirecoloniale.be/">diaspora organisations</a> that have denounced the persistence of neo-colonial patterns in Belgium. </p>
<p>These trends still feed <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23745118.2019.1645422">racism and discrimination</a> in the country today. </p>
<p>In July 2020, Belgium’s parliament <a href="https://www.brusselstimes.com/117289/parliament-approves-commission-on-belgiums-colonial-past">appointed</a> a commission to investigate the country’s colonial past, document its consequences and propose appropriate responses. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/patrice-lumumbas-tooth-represents-plunder-resilience-and-reparation-186241">Patrice Lumumba’s tooth represents plunder, resilience and reparation</a>
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<p>The first task of the commission – with <a href="https://www.lachambre.be/kvvcr/showpage.cfm?section=/comm&language=fr&cfm=/site/wwwcfm/comm/com.cfm?com=10219">17 members</a> from across Belgium’s political spectrum – was to appoint a multi-disciplinary committee. These 10 experts <a href="https://www.dekamer.be/FLWB/PDF/55/1462/55K1462002.pdf">released a report</a> in October 2021. </p>
<p>In a bid to broaden and deepen the conclusions of this report, parliamentarians organised hearings with diaspora and civil society. A large panel of international experts also makes presentations every week on the responsibilities of the actors involved in colonisation. </p>
<p>The debate is currently focused on relevant kinds of reparation and reconciliation processes. </p>
<p>The interviewed experts change weekly, but three independent academic specialists are working with parliament permanently. </p>
<h2>A rocky path</h2>
<p>From the onset, the commission faced hurdles. </p>
<p>While public and political attention peaked with the Black Lives Matter movement, priorities shifted following the COVID pandemic in 2020 and the 2022 war in Ukraine, and their economic fallout. </p>
<p>This prompted <a href="https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/politique-belge/2022/06/22/lopen-vld-et-la-n-va-renoncent-a-la-mission-parlementaire-en-afrique-centrale-pas-de-plus-value-et-un-cout-trop-important-XHCLG3VGWNF57OBSLHEQYPYB7M/">certain parties</a> to question the importance of the commission’s exercise. </p>
<p>In particular, establishing historical responsibilities and possible financial reparations triggered <a href="https://www.rtbf.be/article/passe-colonial-l-open-vld-et-la-n-va-renoncent-a-la-mission-parlementaire-en-afrique-centrale-11017385">heated debates</a> between experts and political parties. </p>
<p>For observers, the dire humanitarian and security situation, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61092878">recently aggravated in Eastern Congo</a>, should be higher on the political agenda than the scrutiny of history. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/retracing-belgiums-dark-past-in-the-congo-and-attempts-to-forge-deeper-ties-184903">Retracing Belgium's dark past in the Congo, and attempts to forge deeper ties</a>
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<p>Some also worry about the political gains that lawmakers taking part in the commission may seek to reap.</p>
<p>In response to this, De Vriendt told me: </p>
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<p>The commission represents a broad range of Belgian ideologies and interests, and is synthesising many topics and opinions … This is the first time that diasporas have been included in a parliamentary initiative to such an extent … The three independent academics additionally help to depoliticise and objectify the work and methodology adopted.</p>
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<p>Yet the points of view shared each week can be diametrically opposed. Drawing constructive conclusions for present and future generations will, therefore, be a trying task. </p>
<p>But when I interviewed him, De Vriendt emphasised that the commission’s objective “is not to come to a shared ‘truth’ nor to create consensus around a definitive narrative on history”.</p>
<p>Its aim, he said, was to “demonstrate that Belgium is capable of an open, lucid and thorough reflection on its past and its consequences, and … practical recommendations will follow, paving the way for appeased and improved relations between Belgians, Congolese, Rwandans and Burundians”. </p>
<h2>What reconciliation means</h2>
<p>Among possible reparations, official apologies and financial retribution are most frequently listed. But they are the tip of an iceberg. </p>
<p>To move past the past, Belgium is considering other avenues. These include <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-takes-first-small-step-in-returning-art-to-congo/">restitution of artefacts</a>, joint research between Congolese and Belgians, reformed education, facilitation of visas for people from its former colonies and fighting discrimination faced by African descendants in Belgium. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/uganda-drc-reparations-verdict-raises-questions-about-the-price-of-justice-177485">Uganda-DRC reparations verdict raises questions about the price of justice</a>
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<p>The final recommendations could also apply to Belgium’s development policy in central Africa to foster more inclusive and equitable partnerships. </p>
<p>Given the scope of competencies targeted, all layers of the Belgian state will likely be called to action in the final report expected in December 2022. This will include the federal government and local authorities. They, in turn, will have to take inspiration from the proposals, should they choose to do so.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186512/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne-Sophie Gijs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Belgium wants to frame its relationship with Congo, Rwanda and Burundi as one looking into the future – but the past weighs heavily.Anne-Sophie Gijs, Professor, Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1862412022-07-05T13:37:36Z2022-07-05T13:37:36ZPatrice Lumumba’s tooth represents plunder, resilience and reparation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472450/original/file-20220705-18-op8w4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A march following the return of Patrice Lumumba's tooth from Belgium – all that is left of the anti-colonialist icon murdered in 1961. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Patrice-Lumumba">Patrice Lumumba</a> is the hero of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s truncated bid for complete <a href="https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/congolese-win-independence-belgian-empire-1959-60">independence</a>. He was assassinated by local counter-revolutionary forces with the help of the CIA and Belgian authorities in 1961. Since then, all over the developing world, Lumumba’s name has come to stand for defiance against colonialism and imperialism.</p>
<p>The manner of his <a href="https://www.britannica.com/story/how-did-patrice-lumumba-die">death</a> was particularly distressing. He was humiliated and tortured before he was murdered. His body was then doused with acid to facilitate decomposition. A Belgian official reportedly kept his <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61993601">teeth</a> as mementos as if to add another grisly and macabre dimension to the entire sordid affair.</p>
<p>The return of Lumumba’s tooth after 61 years leaves many questions unanswered and threatens to open a can of worms. This inordinately belated gesture came without a formal apology for the damage caused by Belgian colonialism or a pledge of wide-ranging reparations.</p>
<h2>The ghost of Lumumba</h2>
<p>Ever since his death, it seems the ghost of Lumumba has plagued his aggrieved country, first with the tortuous and bizarre reign of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mobutu-Sese-Seko">Mobutu Sese Seko</a> and then with <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-mobutu-to-kabila-the-drc-is-paying-a-heavy-price-for-autocrats-at-its-helm-79455">Laurent Kabila</a>.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472468/original/file-20220705-20-euq9gz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A portrait of a young man in glasses, suit and tie, wearing a moustache and goatee, his hair in a side path." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472468/original/file-20220705-20-euq9gz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472468/original/file-20220705-20-euq9gz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472468/original/file-20220705-20-euq9gz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472468/original/file-20220705-20-euq9gz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472468/original/file-20220705-20-euq9gz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472468/original/file-20220705-20-euq9gz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472468/original/file-20220705-20-euq9gz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Patrice Lumumba.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>But it was under Belgian colonial rule that the plunder of the Congo began in earnest. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leopold-II-king-of-Belgium">King Leopold II</a>, bloated with colonial self-righteousness, instituted a reign of devastation that left an estimated 10 million people dead. Rubber plantations were transformed into a hell in which the enslaved who didn’t meet their production quotas had their limbs chopped off. Since then, the DRC has been gripped by a delirium of dense, impenetrable, equatorial traumas.</p>
<p>Indigenes of the DRC have always been used as disposable pawns in their externally foisted tragedies. And these tragedies have descended on them as thickly as their famed tropical forests.</p>
<p>What are we to make of the ordeal of <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/benga-ota-1883-1916/">Ota Benga</a>, for example, the Congolese teenager who, on account of his unusual teeth, was captured and relentlessly exhibited in the anthropological zoos of America? Treated like a performing monkey, he experienced the most heartless form of visual cannibalism, physical humiliation and psychological torture. Would his teeth be returned to the DRC as well?</p>
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<span class="caption">Ota Benga at Bronx Zoo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Indeed, the handing over of Lumumba’s tooth represents a gesture of reparation; the return of pilfered colonial goods to the rightful owners. But what about the tooth’s attendant torture? This much delayed political gesture broaches difficult issues surrounding the African quest for genuine reparations from erstwhile colonial overlords.</p>
<h2>The world’s richest country</h2>
<p>The current <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-mobutu-to-kabila-the-drc-is-paying-a-heavy-price-for-autocrats-at-its-helm-79455">plight</a> of the DRC – all but a failed state – makes us weep over its enduring state of abjection. A huge country blessed with innumerable natural resources, with some of the rarest and most important minerals of earth, it remains crippled by conflict and plunder of its vast natural resources.</p>
<p>It is certain that if Lumumba had been allowed to pursue his <a href="https://roape.net/2021/01/17/patrice-lumumba-revolution-freedom-and-the-congo-today/">bold project</a> of emancipation and development, the DRC story would have been vastly different.</p>
<p>It is almost impossible to understand why the potentially richest country in the world remains one of the poorest. </p>
<p>And yet the wealth of the DRC continues to shine through the accomplishments of its talented people. Out of depleted and crumbling infrastructure, governmental emasculation and chronic internecine strife, miraculously, creative excellence continues to emerge.</p>
<p>How can one ever forget the timeless music of guitarist <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/franco-luambo-makiadi-mn0001615589">Franco Luamabo</a>, vocalists <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/tabu-ley-rochereau-mn0000015762/biography">Tabu Ley</a> and <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/mbilia-bel-mn0000337593/biography">M’bilia Bel</a>, singer-songwriter <a href="https://www.okayafrica.com/fally-ipupa-tokooos-interview/">Fally Ipupa</a> and so many other Congolese musical geniuses?</p>
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<span class="caption">M'bilia Bel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images</span></span>
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<p>Or the accomplishments of phenomenal scholars such as Congolese philosopher <a href="https://scholars.duke.edu/person/vmudimbe">V.Y. Mudimbe</a>, whose work singularly redefined the manner in which the west came to understand Africa? Mudimbe reconfigures your mind every time you encounter him. Yet the inhospitability of the DRC keeps him secluded in the US. The rest of the world continues to benefit from Congolese talents and minerals while the country itself regresses.</p>
<p>The eclectic and boisterous urban culture that produced the Congolese rumba and soukous out of the potholed streets of Kinshasa also birthed visual artists such as <a href="https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/23091/lot/22/?category=list">Monsengwo Kejwamfi “Moke”</a>, <a href="https://www.contemporary-african-art.com/cheri-cherin.html">Cheri Cherin</a>, <a href="http://www.cherisamba.net">Chéri Samba</a>, <a href="https://www.thedreamafrica.com/5-congolese-artists-you-need-to-know-patrick-mutombo/">Patrick Mutombo, Marthe Ngandu</a> and many others. </p>
<p>Collectively, their works capture and reflect the life and energy to be found in the DRC’s frenetic and teeming postcolonial metropolises. But there is a snag. These largely self-taught artists were cut off from their precolonial artistic heritage due to the violence of the colonial encounter.</p>
<h2>The tooth</h2>
<p>As in many other parts of Africa, over 2,000 works of art stolen from what is now the DRC remain in the museums of Europe. These works are not merely aesthetic and symbolic. They are also central to the continuation of integrated cultural evolution. In addition, they encompass swathes of history and tradition spanning millennia. The return of those stolen pieces of cultural heritage and an awareness of what they truly represent would be a starting point for meaningful reparations for the past.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-patrice-lumumbas-assassination-drove-student-activism-shaping-the-congos-future-185170">How Patrice Lumumba's assassination drove student activism, shaping the Congo's future</a>
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<p>Ultimately, beyond its cosmetic or even symbolic value, the gesture of returning Lumumba’s violated tooth ought to lead to a considerable degree of healing the DRC so desperately needs, in organic, broadly and deeply conceived ways. This means acts of reparations must not only be loaded in meaning but must also be essentially transformative in nature. In other words, they must include socioeconomic and cultural deliverables.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186241/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sanya Osha does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>All that remains of the political icon is a tooth, but it represents much more than just a human trophy.Sanya Osha, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1836492022-06-16T13:51:07Z2022-06-16T13:51:07ZWhat the 100-year-old Makerere University in Uganda reveals about culture<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468792/original/file-20220614-14-bt1kez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A student protest outside Makerere University’s Lumumba Hall in October, 2019, keeping true to a long-running tradition.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Luke Dray/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Makerere University, which marks its centenary <a href="https://100.mak.ac.ug/">this year</a>, is well-known as the oldest university in East Africa and as a cradle of political elites. Its <a href="https://www.thefamouspeople.com/makerere-university.php">alumni</a> include presidents and prime ministers – among them Joseph Kabila (Democratic Republic of Congo), Julius Nyerere and Benjamin Mkapa (Tanzania), Mwai Kibaki (Kenya), and Milton Obote and Ruhakana Rugunda (Uganda). </p>
<p>Writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya and David Rubadiri from Malawi, scholars and political activists such as Stella Nyanzi and Bobi Wine are also Makerere alumni. </p>
<p>Less well-known, however, is that some of its halls of residence have long nurtured <a href="https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/lifestyle/reviews-profiles/the-stories-behind-makerere-university-halls-of-residence-1566130">different cultures</a> and traditions. Culture is a central but elusive concept in the social sciences, and so are its effects. </p>
<p>A broad consensus at the university characterises certain halls as sociable and activist, and others as academically minded and respectful.</p>
<p>Lumumba Hall, opened in 1971 and named after the DRC’s first prime minister Patrice Lumumba, has a tradition of social and political activism. It is widely seen as a prosocial hall, one that engages in activities that benefit others.</p>
<p>Livingstone Hall, opened in 1959 and named after British missionary David Livingstone, is known as a “hall of gentlemen”. It has a reputation of little involvement in social and campus affairs that are contentious, such as tuition hikes. </p>
<p>Given these reputations, one may be surprised to learn that assignment of students to halls has been random since 1970. The combination of these two facts (cultural differences between halls and random assignment to halls) presents a randomised natural experiment. It allowed my co-author Betsy Paluck and I <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3568261">to explore</a> the influence of culture on the values and behaviours of the young elites attending Makerere. </p>
<p>Culture has long been a central topic in the social sciences, but this natural experiment presented an opportunity to study cultural influence in a rigorous way.</p>
<h2>How culture influences young adults</h2>
<p>We conducted our research with the help and expertise of a team mostly composed of recent Makerere alumni. The team interviewed over 3,000 Makerere students in 2015 who were then living in the halls as well as over 1,000 alumni who attended Makerere between 1970 and 2000. </p>
<p>In our <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3568261">article</a>, we advance that hall cultural influence is stronger for interpersonal outcomes (such as trust and activism) than for individual outcomes (such as academic grades and personality traits). This is arguably because integration into a culture is an inherently social process. Thus, outcomes to do with relationships are the kind most influenced by social forces. </p>
<p>Second, cultural influence is likely to be higher for outcomes or life domains that are part of the hall’s <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/democracy-in-ghana/20E72D3CCE54A8636AC900430C9F2C47">“daily life”</a>. For example, life in the hall involves issues of trust and identity daily. But academic issues that gravitate around the department and political activism are not a daily occurrence.</p>
<p>This framework is useful to understand why we find that grades do not differ across halls. It also helps us understand why Lumumba Hall residents are more generous and trust each other more than Livingstone Hall residents do.</p>
<h2>Cultural evolution and transmission</h2>
<p>How stable are these findings over time, though? The advantage of interviewing alumni that graduated between 1970 and 2000 is that we can learn whether they change over time. We found that hall cultural influence seems to wane over time. Cultural influence was smaller among alumni, likely because they left Makerere a few decades ago. We also learned from alumni that, for a variety of reasons that we discuss in our article, the importance of halls and their cultures was stronger in the 20th century, when they were students, than today. </p>
<p>For example, Lumumba alumni were more activist on campus and have remained more activist after leaving campus than Livingstone alumni, consistent with the cultures of the respective halls. But that seems to no longer be the case among students who attended Makerere in the mid-2010s.</p>
<p>How does a first-year student become influenced by their hall’s culture? Interviews and survey evidence point consistently to hall leaders (third and fourth-year students) as the ones who pass on their hall’s culture to the next generation. (This does not mean all students gladly embrace the culture of their randomly assigned hall: a <a href="https://www.observer.ug/component/content/article?id=9638:the-value-of-orientation-week">minority</a> try to resist it.)</p>
<h2>Beyond Makerere</h2>
<p>The broader question of cultural influence is ever-present across Africa and beyond. It extends to any university, to political organisations such as political parties, and to professional organisations, including labour unions and business associations. </p>
<p>The University of Ghana, for example, provides a comparable setting of young elite socialisation. “Legon Hall was my first choice,” explained former Ghanaian <a href="https://books.google.com.gh/books/about/My_First_Coup_D_Etat.html?id=GdyApfaFA9QC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">president John Mahama</a>, “because I was told it was peaceful and quiet, a hall of gentlemen.” He was nonetheless assigned to Commonwealth Hall, where “a lot of the political ferment, activism, and rebellion that took place on campus was usually hatched.” </p>
<p>The parallels are striking except for one important fact. According to Mahama, administrators at the University of Ghana purposely assigned rowdy students to Legon and calm students to Commonwealth to reduce these cultural differences between halls.</p>
<p>On balance, what do we conclude from our findings at Makerere regarding cultural influence? We know that most life outcomes, such as educational achievement and income, are primarily explained by a combination of <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/261661">individual</a> <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.2218526">characteristics</a> and of primary socialisation, notably <a href="https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/122/1/119/1924717">family environment</a>. </p>
<p>In spite of this, our study shows that secondary socialisation into a new culture can still affect young adults in domains as diverse as interpersonal relations (trust, generosity), individual identity, and social activism.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/183649/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joan Ricart-Huguet received funding for this research from Princeton University and Yale University. </span></em></p>Lumumba Hall residents are more generous and trust each other more than Livingstone Hall residents do.Joan Ricart-Huguet, Assistant Professor, Loyola University Maryland and Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer, Yale UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1765972022-02-09T14:02:18Z2022-02-09T14:02:18ZWhite Malice: how the CIA strangled African independence at birth<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445362/original/file-20220209-13-1t2q9l4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Patrice Lumumba, left, first Prime Minister of independent Congo in 1960. The CIA celebrated his death. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Historian <a href="https://research.sas.ac.uk/search/fellow/185/dr-susan-williams/">Susan Williams</a> grew up in Zambia. Like other scholars of her generation raised in former settler societies of southern Africa, she empathises with the continent’s people.</p>
<p>Williams’ widely acknowledged new book, <a href="https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/white-malice/">White Malice – The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa</a>, adds to her track record, testifying to this engagement. Almost a forensic account, its more than 500 pages (supported by close to 150 pages of sources, references and index) are as readable as a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-le-Carre">John le Carré</a> novel. </p>
<p>But make no mistake: Williams ruthlessly reveals through factual evidence the unsavoury machinations of the American <a href="https://www.cia.gov/">Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)</a> in Africa during the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War">Cold War</a> until the late 1960s. While scholarly analyses of this era have increased, the literature mainly focuses on how geostrategic aspects had an impact on international policy. In contrast, this is the first detailed account disclosing a Western dirty war through detailed quotes from original documents and by those involved.</p>
<p>Published in 2011, her investigative research titled <a href="https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/who-killed-hammarskjold-2/">Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa</a> made history. The evidence strengthened suspicions that the plane crash that killed the United Nations Secretary General and 15 others on 17/18 September 1961 near Ndola, in then <a href="https://www.history.com/news/dag-hammarskjold-death-plane-crash">Northern Rhodesia</a>, was no accident. As continuously updated by the Westminster branch of the <a href="http://www.hammarskjoldinquiry.info/">United Nations Association</a>, the disclosures triggered <a href="https://theconversation.com/speaking-truth-to-power-the-killing-of-dag-hammarskjold-and-the-cover-up-65534">new investigations</a> by the UN.</p>
<p>In 2016 Williams published <a href="https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/spies-in-the-congo-2/#:%7E:text=Spies%20in%20the%20Congo%20is,to%20build%20its%20atomic%20bomb">Spies in the Congo: The Race for the Ore that Built the Atomic Bomb</a>. The focus was on <a href="https://www.mindat.org/loc-4328.html">Shinkolobwe</a>, the world’s biggest uranium mine, in the Congolese Katanga province. Of crucial geostrategic importance, in the 1940s it supplied the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/the-manhattan-project">Manhattan Project</a>, which produced the first atomic bombs, which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shinkolobwe remained the main resource in the American nuclear arming of the 1950s.</p>
<h2>White Malice</h2>
<p>Williams’ new book seems like the third in a trilogy. Its title, White Malice, captures the racist arrogance of power, unscrupulously destabilising and (re-)gaining control over sovereign states as a form of colonialism by other means. </p>
<p>Not by coincidence, the book revisits the circumstances of Hammarskjöld’s death and the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Katanga-province-Democratic-Republic-of-the-Congo">relevance of Katanga</a>. More room is devoted to a step-by-step account leading to the <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/L/bo20598433.html">elimination of Patrice Lumumba</a>, the first prime minister of an independent Congo.</p>
<p>Another major focus is on Ghana since independence <a href="https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/was-the-gold-coast-decolonised-or-did-ghana-win-its-independence">in 1957</a>. Documenting the continental role of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kwame-Nkrumah">President Kwame Nkrumah</a>, it explains why and how he was removed from office. His role in promoting <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313574089_Kwame_Nkrumah_and_the_panafrican_vision_Between_acceptance_and_rebuttal">pan-Africanism</a> was equated with an anti-Western attitude. </p>
<p>All this is tied together by the interventions by the CIA and its predecessor, the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Office-of-Strategic-Services">Office for Strategic Services</a>, often in cahoots with the <a href="https://www.sis.gov.uk/">British MI6</a>. The detailed accounts offer insights into the secret operations then. The display of mindsets and their consequences do not require theory or analytical comment. The facts speak for themselves. </p>
<p>Both agencies shared access to the encrypted messages used in confidential communication by Hammarskjöld and other high-ranking UN officials. As quoted by Williams (p. 290), the CIA celebrated this as “the intelligence coup of the century”.</p>
<p>The UK and the USA have still not disclosed insider knowledge concerning the deaths of Hammarskjöld and his entourage. Their secret agents were also involved in deliberations to kill Lumumba. Though they weren’t directly participating in his abduction, torture and execution in Katanga, it suited their agenda.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Book cover shows a map of Africa with its western parts in a sniper's sights." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445364/original/file-20220209-21-hhrw56.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445364/original/file-20220209-21-hhrw56.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445364/original/file-20220209-21-hhrw56.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445364/original/file-20220209-21-hhrw56.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445364/original/file-20220209-21-hhrw56.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1035&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445364/original/file-20220209-21-hhrw56.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1035&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445364/original/file-20220209-21-hhrw56.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1035&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nkrumah was luckier. A state visit to Beijing saved his life, when in his absence the <a href="https://www.eaumf.org/ejm-blog/2018/2/23/february-24-1966-dr-kwame-nkrumah-overthrown-as-president-of-the-republic-of-ghana">military coup took place</a>. Nelson Mandela was also “spared” by being imprisoned for most of the next 30 years. His <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/trials-and-prison-chronology">arrest in South Africa in 1962</a> under the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/suppression-communism-act-no-44-1950-approved-parliament">Suppression of Communism Act</a> was based on information provided by the CIA (p. 474). </p>
<h2>Western mindset</h2>
<p>Williams quotes (p. 77) a high-ranking CIA agent to illustrate the overall Western mindset. He declared in 1957:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Africa has become the real battleground and the next field of the big test of strength – not only for the free world and the communist world but for our own country and our Allies who are colonialist powers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The strategy included replacing independent nationalist leaders with <a href="https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/anthos/vol2/iss1/5/">“big men”</a> – autocrats who based their power on Western support, such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mobutu-Sese-Seko">Mobutu Sese Seko</a>. A track record in or commitment to democracy and human rights was not a prerequisite.</p>
<p>In contrast, leaders like Guinea’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sekou-Toure">Sékou Touré</a> were considered enemies. Arguing for a referendum rejecting continued dependency from France, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/28/obituaries/ahmed-sekou-toure-a-radical-hero.html">declared in 1958</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Guinea prefers poverty in freedom to riches in slavery (p. 74).</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Cultural operations</h2>
<p>CIA operations were not confined to plots ending in brute force. Some were cultural programmes, unbeknown to many artists and scholars who received CIA sponsorship.</p>
<p>This included stipends to South African writers in exile, such as <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/eskia-mphahlele">Es'kia Mphahlele</a> and <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-01902011000100004">Nat Nakasa</a>, as well as the sponsoring of cultural festivals and conferences in Africa. Williams (p. 64) quotes the future Nobel laureate <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/biographical/">Wole Soyinka</a>, who after discovering that he had unknowingly received CIA funds <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/biographical/">declared</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation, the Devil himself, romping in our post-colonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a spectacular disclosure (pp. 324-331) Williams presents details of CIA-funded concerts by <a href="https://npg.si.edu/exh/armstrong/">Louis Armstrong</a>, touring 27 African cities in 11 weeks during late 1960. This included a concert in Elisabethville, the Katanga breakaway province of Congo, at a time when Lumumba’s end was near. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/sep/12/louis-armstrong-and-the-spy-how-the-cia-used-him-as-a-trojan-horse-in-congo">According to Williams</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Armstrong was basically a Trojan horse for the CIA … He would have been horrified.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Facts, not fiction</h2>
<p>The US’s <a href="https://www.ushistory.org/us/53a.asp">obsessive anti-communism</a>, which escalated in the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, at times took lethal forms when governments or leaders were considered to be obstructing Western interests. </p>
<p>A sense of guilt or remorse remains absent. Mike Pompeo says it all. Then CIA director from January 2017 to April 2018 and Donald Trump’s <a href="https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/pompeo-michael-r">Secretary of State</a>, “celebrated immorality”, as Williams drily comments (p. 515). “I was the CIA director,” Pompeo boosted in a quoted speech in 2019:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The story, unlike John le Carré’s, is definitely not fiction. CIA operations, at times in collaboration with other Western intelligence agencies, were pursuing a hegemonic agenda with lasting impact.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176597/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henning Melber does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Detailed accounts from original documents offer insights into the secret operations of the CIA in Africa.Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1081032019-09-06T05:39:36Z2019-09-06T05:39:36ZRobert Mugabe: as divisive in death as he was in life<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291235/original/file-20190906-175663-u64qs1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Robert Mugabe during his swearing-in ceremony in Harare, 2008. The former Zimbabwean president has died aged 95.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Robert Mugabe, the former president of Zimbabwe, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/09/06/377714687/robert-mugabe-veteran-president-of-zimbabwe-dead-at-95">has died</a>. Mugabe was 95, and had been struggling with ill health for some time. The country’s current President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced Mugabe’s death on Twitter on September 6:</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1169839308406054912"}"></div></p>
<p>The responses to Mnangagwa’s announcement were immediate and widely varied. Some hailed Mugabe as a liberation hero. Others dismissed him as a “monster”. This suggests that Mugabe will be as divisive a figure in death as he was in life.</p>
<p>The official mantra of the Zimbabwe government and its Zimbabwe African National Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) will emphasise his leadership of the struggle to overthrow <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ian-Smith">Ian Smith’s</a> racist settler regime in what was then Rhodesia. It will also extol his subsequent championing of the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00358530500082916">seizure of white-owned farms</a> and the return of land into African hands.</p>
<p>In contrast, critics will highlight how – after initially <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hd4n.7?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">preaching racial reconciliation</a> after the liberation war in <a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Rhodesian_Bush_War">December 1979 </a> – Mugabe threw away the promise of the early independence years. He did this in several ways, among them a <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=zi-tWekXbD8C&pg=PA19&lpg=PA19&dq=%22the+early+rain+which+washes+away+the+chaff+before+the+spring+rains%22&source=bl&ots=dWX2SIUj7r&sig=0aDLpmmQfN93e_RNJuKcBmGGEYI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwioi-joj6LWAhWE7hoKHRF_C7wQ6AEIOTAD#v=onepage&q=%22the%20early%20rain%20which%20washes%20away%20the%20chaff%20before%20the%20spring%20rains%22&f=false">brutal clampdown</a> on political opposition in <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=zi-tWekXbD8C&pg=PA19&lpg=PA19&dq=%22the+early+rain+which+washes+away+the+chaff+before+the+spring+rains%22&source=bl&ots=dWX2SIUj7r&sig=0aDLpmmQfN93e_RNJuKcBmGGEYI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwioi-joj6LWAhWE7hoKHRF_C7wQ6AEIOTAD#v=onepage&q=%22the%20early%20rain%20which%20washes%20away%20the%20chaff%20before%20the%20spring%20rains%22&f=false">Matabeleland in the 1980s</a>, and Zanu-PF’s systematic <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-are-elections-really-rigged-mr-trump-consult-robert-mugabe-68440">rigging of elections</a> to keep he and his cronies in power. </p>
<p>They’ll also mention the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321704136_The_Curse_Of_Corruption_In_Zimbabwe">massive corruption</a> over which he presided, and the <a href="https://www.cgdev.org/publication/costs-and-causes-zimbabwes-crisis">economy’s disastrous downward plunge</a> during his presidency.</p>
<p>Inevitably, the focus will primarily be on his domestic record. Yet many of those who will sing his praises as a <a href="https://allafrica.com/stories/201709220815.html">hero of African nationalism</a> will be from elsewhere on the continent. So where should we place Mugabe among the pantheon of African nationalists who led their countries to independence?</p>
<h2>Slide into despotism</h2>
<p>Most African countries have been independent of colonial rule for <a href="https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/august-2010/weighing-half-century-independence">half a century or more</a>.</p>
<p>The early African nationalist leaders were often regarded as gods at independence. Yet they very quickly came to be perceived as having feet of very heavy clay.</p>
<p>Nationalist leaders symbolised African freedom and liberation. But few were to prove genuinely tolerant of democracy and diversity. One party rule, nominally in the name of “the people”, became widespread. In some cases, it was linked to interesting experiments in one-party democracy, as seen in Tanzania under Julius Nyerere and Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda. </p>
<p>Even in these cases, intolerance and authoritarianism <a href="https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/doorenspleet/opd/">eventually encroached</a>.
Often, party rule was <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/159875?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">succeeded by military coups</a>.</p>
<p>In Zimbabwe’s case, Mugabe proved unable to shift the country, as he had wished, to one-partyism. However, this did not prevent Zanu-PF becoming increasingly intolerant over the years in response to both economic crisis and rising opposition. Successive elections were shamelessly perverted. </p>
<p>When, despite this, <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2012-08-10-00-zim-2008-election-taken-by-a-gun-not-a-pen">Zanu-PF lost control of parliament</a> in 2008, it responded by rigging the presidential election in a campaign of unforgivable brutality. Under Mugabe, the potential for democracy was snuffed out by a brutal despotism.</p>
<h2>A wasted inheritance</h2>
<p>Whether the economic policies they pursued were ostensibly capitalist or socialist, the early African nationalist leaders presided over <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/poldev/78">rapid economic decline</a>, following an initial period of relative prosperity after independence. </p>
<p>In retrospect, it’s widely recognised that the challenges they faced were immense. Most post-colonial economies were underdeveloped and depended upon the export of a small number of agricultural or mineral commodities. From the 1970s, growth was crowded out by the International Monetary Fund demanding that mounting debts be surmounted through the pursuit of <a href="https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/structural-adjustment/">structural adjustment programmes</a>. This hindered spending on infrastructure as well as <a href="http://www.globalissues.org/article/3/structural-adjustment-a-major-cause-of-poverty">social services and education</a> and swelled political discontent.</p>
<p>In contrast, Mugabe inherited a viable, relatively broad-based economy that included substantial industrial and prosperous commercial agricultural sectors. Even though these were largely white controlled, there was far greater potential for development than in most other post-colonial African countries. </p>
<p>But, through massive corruption and mismanagement, his government threw that potential away. He also presided over a disastrous downward spiral of the economy, which saw both industry and <a href="https://www.news24.com/Africa/Zimbabwe/a-seized-zimbabwe-farm-is-returned-but-uncertainty-reigns-20180301">commercial agriculture collapse</a>. The economy has never recovered and remains in a state of acute and persistent crisis today.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/zimbabwes-economy-is-collapsing-why-mnangagwa-doesnt-have-the-answers-104960">Zimbabwe's economy is collapsing: why Mnangagwa doesn't have the answers</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Reputation</h2>
<p>On the political front, the rule of some leaders – like <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/milton-obotes-lasting-legacy-to-uganda/a-19191275">Milton Obote in Uganda</a> and <a href="https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2015/08/07/somalia-fall-of-siad-barre-civil-war/">Siad Barre in Somalia</a> – created so much conflict that coups and crises drove their countries into civil war. Zimbabwe under Mugabe was spared this fate – but perhaps only because the political opposition in Matabeleland in the 1980s was so brutalised after up to <a href="https://theconversation.com/british-policy-towards-zimbabwe-during-matabeleland-massacre-licence-to-kill-81574">30 000 people were killed</a>, that they shrank from more conflict. Peace, then, was merely the absence of outright war.</p>
<p>Some leaders, notably Ghana’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kwame-Nkrumah">Kwame Nkrumah</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/former-tanzanian-president-julius-nyerere-dies">Julius Nyerere</a> in Tanzania, are still revered for their commitments to national independence and African unity. This is despite the fact that, domestically, their records were marked by failure. By 1966, when Nkrumah was <a href="https://www.eaumf.org/ejm-blog/2018/2/23/february-24-1966-dr-kwame-nkrumah-overthrown-as-president-of-the-republic-of-ghana">displaced by a military coup</a>, his one-party rule had become politically corrupt and repressive. </p>
<p>Despite this, Nyerere always retained his reputation for personal integrity and commitment to African development. Both Nkrumah’s and Nyerere’s ideas continue to inspire younger generations of political activists, while other post-independence leaders’ names are largely forgotten.</p>
<p>Will Mugabe be similarly feted by later generations? Will the enormous flaws of his rule be forgotten amid celebrations of his unique role in the liberation of southern Africa as a whole? </p>
<h2>A Greek tragedy</h2>
<p>The problem for pan-Africanist historians who rush to praise Mugabe is that they will need to repudiate the contrary view of the millions of Zimbabweans who have suffered under his rule or have fled the country to escape it. He contributed no political ideas that have lasted. He inherited the benefits as well as the costs of settler rule but reduced his country to penury. He destroyed the best of its institutional inheritance, notably an efficient civil service, which could have been put to good use for all.</p>
<p>The cynics would say that the reputation of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/patrice-emery-lumumba">Patrice Lumumba</a>, as an African revolutionary and fighter for Congolese unity has lasted because he was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination">assassinated in 1961</a>. In other words, he had the historical good fortune to die young, without the burden of having made major and grievous mistakes.</p>
<p>In contrast, there are many who would say that Mugabe simply lived too long, and his life was one of Greek tragedy: his early promise and virtue marked him out as popular hero, but he died a monster whom history will condemn.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108103/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roger Southall receives funding from the National Research Foundation </span></em></p>Where should we place Mugabe among the pantheon of African nationalists who led their countries to independence?Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1124252019-02-25T13:59:16Z2019-02-25T13:59:16ZDorothy Masuku: Africa has lost a singer, composer and a hero of the struggle<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260698/original/file-20190225-26152-1bbnpac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dorothy Masuku composed and recorded close to 30 singles, several of which achieved major hit status.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Madelene Cronje/ Mail & Guardian</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dorothy-masuka">Dorothy Masuku</a> (Masuka was her stage name) has <a href="https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/south-africa/2019-02-23-veteran-musician-dorothy-masuka-has-died/">died</a> at the <a href="https://www.okayafrica.com/dorothy-masuka-dead-at-83/">age of 83</a>. She was an African musician of note, but also much more.</p>
<p>I was once shown the script for a biopic purporting to tell the early story of the late singer. It was highly professional, but a shallow, deeply patriarchal thing in which Masuku’s pioneering work as a composer, her acute and precocious political consciousness and proud pan-Africanism were sidelined in favour of a narrative of affairs and flirtations. </p>
<p>The sidelining continued. Masuku was not simply the “jazz singer” many newscasts have labelled her, although she certainly was that too. And she certainly had a life worthy of a serious biopic.</p>
<p>Yes, Masuku was a singer. But she was so much more: a composer, a hero of the struggle, and an architect of the discourse of popular African liberation music.</p>
<h2>Her early years</h2>
<p>Masuku was born in Bulawayo in then Rhodesia in 1935. Her father was a chef, originally from Zambia, but her mother, Liza Mafuyani, was a Zulu-speaking South African whose family originated from the province of KwaZulu-Natal, and whose sister lived in Soweto. </p>
<p>Her maternal grandmother had been a sangoma. Masuku spoke later of the spiritual sources of inspiration for her songs. They often came to her in dreams, and she would immediately sing them to somebody else in the house, so that elusive memory was captured.</p>
<p>The young Dorothy moved to live with her aunt in South Africa in 1947, aged 12, when, on health grounds – she had asthma – she was enrolled at St Thomas Convent School in Johannesburg. There, she joined the school choir and her talent was immediately spotted.</p>
<p>She was signed to the Troubadour record label in her early teens after impressive performances at her school concerts. She worked with the greatest bands of the period. </p>
<p>Historical narratives of jazz in that era focus on the solidarity among male musicians. But when Masuku spoke of those days at a recent panel discussion, she revealed a different story. There were links and solidarities among women musicians, from her tuition in Yiddish lyrics with actress <a href="http://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Sarah_Sylvia">Sarah Sylvia</a> to the protection from male predation that she, as one of the youngest performers, was given by the older women on those tours.</p>
<h2>Major hit status</h2>
<p>During her teens, Masuku composed and recorded close to 30 singles, several of which achieved major hit status. In the mid 1950s, <em>Zonk</em> music magazine opined that the only artist who was outselling Masuku in South Africa was American crooner Bing Crosby. She later wryly noted that the rewards were never commensurate. She’d be bought a dress, or given “spending money” for her work, never a contract, wage or royalties.</p>
<p>Masuku wrote and recorded in Zimbabwe, and also in multiple other African languages in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia. Her work was also performed by other South African artists in exile, notably <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-makeba">Miriam Makeba</a>. Because of the fragmented, semi-formal nature of the African recording industry in the 20th Century, no complete discography of all her credits exists, but it is likely the total of her compositions in all African languages exceeds 100.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A Masuku liberation song – ‘Bazuka’.</span></figcaption>
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<p>It was the radical spirit of Masuku’s songwriting that led to her long years of exile. Under apartheid black South Africans were notoriously <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-1994">forced</a> to carry a range of documents on their person. Masuku’s song from 1957, <em>Zono Zam</em>, was recorded during the anti-pass campaign: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s so hard in this world: Lord, help us to be free. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Two of her other songs, <em><a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/daniel-francois-malan">Dr Malan</a></em> (“…has difficult laws”), named after Prime Minister, DF Malan, who lead the National Party with its policy of apartheid, to power in 1948, and <em>Lumumba</em> (speculating about who murdered the Congolese anti-colonial leader, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/patrice-lumumba">Patrice Lumumba</a> so infuriated the South African police’s notorious Special Branch that they seized and destroyed the master tapes. No copies can now be found. </p>
<p><em>Dr Malan</em> was the first South African song by any artist – let alone a young woman not long out of school, and not yet 20 – to call out an apartheid minister by name.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Dorothy Masuku celebrating African leaders with her song ‘Ghana’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Masuku clearly and explicitly identified herself with African nationalist liberation struggles. After travelling across Africa, she was moved by the ANC to London. She performed at the London Palladium, for BBC-TV, and in various shows with musicians Sir John <a href="http://www.quarternotes.com/john.htm">Dankworth</a> and <a href="http://www.quarternotes.com/Cleo.htm">Cleo Laine</a>. </p>
<p>Later, she spent a brief period back in then Rhodesia, fleeing again to Zambia ahead of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith’s Special Branch. She spent 16 years in Zambia, performing and earning a living as an air hostess – pioneering that career as an elegant, intelligent independent woman with one of the earliest independent African airlines.</p>
<h2>Persona non grata</h2>
<p>During her 31 years of exile, she was repeatedly refused entry to South Africa by the apartheid authorities, having been declared persona non grata.</p>
<p>She returned only in 1992 and immediately began performing and composing new material, something she continued to do to the end of her life. She recorded four further original albums, as well as releasing a collection of much of her historic material, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/za/album/hamba-nontsokolo/1216341590"><em>Hamba Nontsokolo</em></a>.</p>
<p>Masuku featured in all South Africa’s major jazz festivals. Two years ago, she starred in the New York Town Hall concert commemorating the Jazz Epistles alongside Abdullah Ibrahim and Ekaya.</p>
<p>She was always a compelling performer, and never failed to draw standing ovations. I once stood behind her in a bank queue on a sweltering day. Joining the rest of us in loudly complaining about the intolerable temperatures, she ended her contribution to the chat with a short, mesmerising single chorus of <em>It’s Too Darn Hot</em>.</p>
<h2>Music was her life</h2>
<p>The last time I met her, last year, she was animatedly discussing buying a new home. She wanted trees and birdsong around her to create a peaceful space for yet more composition.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">In conversation with Kaya FM’s Nicky Blumenfield.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Music, she told South Africa’s public broadcaster, was like breathing for her: it was her life. A stroke late last year took her out of public life, and she died on 23 February 2019. </p>
<p><em>Hamba Kahle</em>: may her great spirit rest in peace.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112425/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gwen Ansell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Songstress Dorothy Masuku once told South Africa’s public broadcaster that music was like breathing for her.Gwen Ansell, Associate of the Gordon Institute for Business Science, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1110032019-02-18T14:20:47Z2019-02-18T14:20:47ZAfrica’s student movements: history sheds light on modern activism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259279/original/file-20190215-56243-e5ssa1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">African students at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1964 protesting against being called "savages" in parliament.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rhodesian Herald</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On 9 March 2015, a student hurled faeces at a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. This act led to <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2015-04-09-rhodes-statue-to-be-removed-after-uct-council-decision">the statue’s removal</a>. It also inspired <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-african-students-are-protesting-again-why-it-neednt-be-this-way-109964">the most significant period of student protest</a> in post-apartheid South Africa’s history. </p>
<p>Student protesters called for the decolonisation of universities and public life. They spurred similar actions by student activists in <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37430324">the Global North</a>. Students in other African countries like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/14/racist-gandhi-statue-removed-from-university-of-ghana">Ghana</a> and <a href="https://africanarguments.org/2016/08/01/decolonising-makerere-on-mamdanis-failed-experiment/">Uganda</a> also got involved. But the debate about what the decolonisation agenda means and who has the authority to lead it is still wide open – and often acrimonious. </p>
<p>The lessons from older, non-South African experiences of student protests in post-colonial African politics are often missing from those debates. </p>
<p>After independence, generations of university students in countries like Uganda, Kenya, Angola and Zimbabwe mobilised for change. They wanted politics and education to be decolonised, transformed and Africanised. These cases, and others, are explored in <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/issue/450ED9F309972E6B034AEB155590EA9A">a special edition</a> of the journal <em>Africa</em>.</p>
<p>Today’s student activism and that which came before it share two common traits. One is student protestors’ belief in their own political agency. The other is the fear state authorities have that these groups may, in the words of Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, act as a “<a href="https://idl-bnc-idrc.dspacedirect.org/handle/10625/13489">catalytic force</a>”. They have the power to spur other groups into action.</p>
<p>By looking back, scholars can understand the potential that such activism has for emancipating people from the legacies of colonialism. It’s also a useful way to identify the limits that student decolonisation projects can hold for both broader politics and society, as well as for the activists themselves. </p>
<h2>Looking back</h2>
<p>In <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/article/introduction-student-activism-in-an-era-of-decolonization/05CE1FD0D1C81EC17EA829DBC5F3095E">our introduction</a> to the journal, we point out that African students in the 1960s and 1970s believed themselves to be emergent political elites and intellectuals. </p>
<p>They questioned political leaders’ assumed role as the agents of decolonisation. They agitated for radical alternative projects of political change. These projects commonly incorporated socialist or pan-African ideological frameworks.</p>
<p>African universities were key actors in developing post-colonial and decolonised societies. They trained an entire new class of doctors, economists, lawyers, and other professionals. </p>
<p>This was happening in countries with low levels of formal schooling. And so, university students’ education was seen to give them the knowledge and skills to both understand and challenge state authority in a way that few other social groups could. These challenges led to frequent clashes between university students and the states that funded their education.</p>
<h2>Historical protests</h2>
<p>There was no single decolonisation project during this era. Students’ challenges to state authority looked very different in different countries. The <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/article/shama-will-not-dance-university-of-khartoum-politics-196469/B00518BA4D475318B38013962A77FC92">fatal contests</a> between radical Islamist and secular Leftist students at the University of Khartoum in Sudan in the late 1960s offer one example. </p>
<p>These two factions debated and violently fought over whether a decolonised Sudan should be secular and socialist, or bound by Islamic customs and values. Women’s public performances of their femininity became a lightning rod for these tensions. This boiled over into tragedy after <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/article/shama-will-not-dance-university-of-khartoum-politics-196469/B00518BA4D475318B38013962A77FC92">the <em>Adjako</em> women’s dance</a> was controversially performed in front of a campus crowd of men and women. The Islamic movement denounced this. Riots ensued, and a student was trampled to death. </p>
<p>Another <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/article/political-life-of-the-dead-lumumba-cold-war-histories-and-the-congolese-student-left/5CAB511BE7B085E0E9D138D93B350BB8#fndtn-metrics">example</a> was how the 1961 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination">assassination</a> of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba influenced students in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His death pushed young educated Congolese to revisit the meaning of decolonisation. They turned ideologically to the Left. This shaped the ideas and practices of a generation who challenged President Mobutu Sese Seko’s authoritarian rule.</p>
<h2>New understandings</h2>
<p>Scholars of African student activism have typically devoted more time to analysing earlier historical periods. These include the early anti-colonial activism of nationalist leaders such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=7d3qBgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=mark+matera+london+africa&ots=CY_XVWWIzX&sig=xvPJHSwbxuRR6P9-xurnpD9C4u8#v=onepage&q=mark%20matera%20london%20africa&f=false">London</a>, or Senegal’s Leopold Senghor in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=LNMmCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=goebel+paris+book+anti-colonial&ots=AeCaUKHRip&sig=kjvg-lUyWyYPaPyCTBrA_cDVZHU#v=onepage&q=goebel%20paris%20book%20anti-colonial&f=false">Paris</a>. </p>
<p>By focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, the research that appears in the special edition opens up new ways of thinking about the significance of African student activism. Some students took their political ideas and behaviour into subsequent careers as opposition political leaders in Kenya, Niger and Uganda. In Zimbabwe and Angola, on the other hand, student activism opened the way into high-status careers as state leaders. These former protesters’ uncomfortable association with authoritarian governance forced them to defend the meaning of their past activism. </p>
<p>The articles show how decolonisation in this period shaped a generation of university students’ aspirations to challenge post-colonial forms of governance.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111003/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>African universities were key actors in developing post-colonial and decolonised societies.Dan Hodgkinson, Departmental Lecturer in African History and Politics, University of OxfordLuke Melchiorre, Assistant Professor, Political Science, Universidad de los Andes Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1101222019-01-28T13:33:56Z2019-01-28T13:33:56ZDRC musicians, patronage networks and the possibility of change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255105/original/file-20190123-135148-glbkmy.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Lexxus Legal is a hip-hop artist and at the forefront of the activist movement in the DRC.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.facebook.com/lexxuslegal/photos/a.10152059106112445/10156225003507445/?type=3&theater">Facebook</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Popular musicians in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), like many of their compatriots, have often been forced to depend on political patronage networks for their livelihoods. It dates back to colonial times, but has lived on through the country’s nearly six decades of independence.</p>
<p>The nature of the networks may not change after <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/felix-tshisekedi-is-sworn-in-as-congolese-president-11548356987">the inauguration</a> of Félix Tshisekedi as president. That question depends largely on whether or not Tshisekedi is able to take control of the most strategic appointments in the federal bureaucracy and security services. If he does – and it’s a big if – musicians will be faced with a rare moment in their history: a substantial change in the shape of the DRC’s patronage networks. </p>
<p>There have only been three such changes. The first, from the colonial era under the Belgians to the short period of instability after independence in 1960 marked by the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination">assassination</a> of Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Next was to the long period of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00ll2z5">Mobutu Sese Seko’s</a> dictatorship from 1965 to 1997. This was followed by the establishment of new networks of patronage by the Kabila family until today.</p>
<p>These latest networks may yet endure if the Kabila family remains in <a href="https://africanarguments.org/2019/01/10/drc-election-results-analysis-implausible/">effective control</a> through a cohabitation arrangement with a Tshisekedi presidency. Either way Congolese musicians are likely to be faced with the same invidious choice: accept the patronage of the powers that be, or face the consequences. </p>
<p>Under the Belgians and Mobutu the choice was stark: toe the line if you want to make a living as a professional musician. Conformity determined access to government controlled media and public space. As Congolese soukous musician <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kanda-bongo-man-mn0000303409/biography">Kanda Bongo Man</a> told me, in Nigeria <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/fela-kuti-mn0000138833">Fela Kuti</a> might openly protest and survive, but under Mobutu he and his family would be tortured, murdered and thrown from a helicopter into the Congo river. </p>
<p>That control has loosened under the Kabilas. But it has by <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/africa/2018-12-10-anti-govt-rapper-abducted-as-dr-congo-vote-tensions-rise/">no means disappeared</a>.</p>
<h2>The colonial period</h2>
<p>After the Second World War Greek and Jewish entrepreneurs, who were outsiders to the Belgium political establishment, were the first to invest in music. They imported rudimentary recording facilities, public address systems, guitars, drums and brass instruments. </p>
<p>They also used their family networks of shops across Africa to sell records elsewhere on the continent. This partly explains how the beautiful and popular music of Leopoldville (the capital of the Belgian colony of Congo, before it was renamed Kinshasa in 1966) and Brazzaville across the Congo River, spread through the colony as well as the continent.</p>
<p>Tanzanian musician <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/remmy-ongala-mn0000190008">Remmy Ongala</a>, who has been part of the Congolese soukous scene since the 1980s, told me in a 2002 interview that he first heard the popular music of the Congolese capital performed in the third largest city Kisangani during colonial times. </p>
<p>It was the Belgian government that paid the transport and provided the public space for the Greek owned company Ngoma to promote their young stars Wendo and Bowane.</p>
<h2>Mobutu’s way of doing things</h2>
<p>Mobutu introduced the cultural policy of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10464883.2014.937235?mobileUi=0"><em>authenticité</em></a>, which was aimed at combating a colonial mentality denigrating African culture and language and casting it as inferior to Europes. In practice, however, it was harnessed to building Mobutu’s personality cult.</p>
<p>The dominance in cultural life of the <em>Mouvement Populaire de La Révolution</em> the political party <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Democratic-Republic-of-the-Congo/Political-process#ref467764">he founded</a>, was implemented in ways that mimicked the kind of imposition formerly associated with the colonial authorities.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/congolese-musicians-rarely-provide-a-critique-but-continue-to-provide-solace-80201">Congolese musicians rarely provide a critique, but continue to provide solace</a>
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<p>His favoured bands, especially <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/tpok-jazz-mn0000955002">TPOK Jazz</a>, benefited the most, and were given both direct patronage and control of the nationalised record plant as part of “Zaireanisation”. The band’s leader Franco Luambo Makiadi was a member of Mobutu’s party. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Franco’s song ‘Tailleur’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8300170.stm">King of Rumba</a>, as Franco was known, is also famous for composing metaphorically ambiguous songs. One of the most celebrated is <em>Tailleur</em> that’s about an unnamed tailor and an unnamed owner of his needle that captures the nature of patronage networks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How is the tailor going to operate if the owner of the needle takes it away?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>During the Mobutu era Congolese musicians created a musical genre that came to known as Rumba. Very little, if any, “resistance” Rumba was composed. As part of <em>authenticité</em>, Mobutu demanded that popular music turn to indigenous influences and languages for inspiration. </p>
<p>Franco responded enthusiastically deepening his relationship with those sources and composing songs in KiKongo. But Lingala, the language of the capital and of the <em>force publique</em> under the Belgians remained the national language of power, government and the army under Mobutu. Despite the “authenticity” policy Lingala remained the predominant language of popular song even for Franco. </p>
<p>This may help explain why the most outspoken musical critics of the corruption and violence in Congolese politics has still not come from the Lingala speaking capital , with some <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/28/political-soundtrack-drc-uneasy-mix-of-music-and-power-elections-congo">notable exceptions</a> such as Lexxus Legal, but from the east of the vast country, and is expressed in Swahili rather than Lingala.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/what-drcs-flawed-election-means-for-emerging-democratic-culture-in-africa-109410">DRC protest music</a> , is mainly expressed in East African <a href="http://afropop.org/audio-programs/congo-goma-music-conflict-and-ngos">versions</a> hip-hop, particularly from Goma. Musically it is more derivative than Rumba, being heavily indebted to US hip-hop. The protest is not against the power of the US culture industries but against violence, and the lies that foster violence.</p>
<h2>Dependent musicians</h2>
<p>The 1990s was a decade of change. Late in the decade there was a general weakening of state institutions in the post-Mobutu era with no sign of a return to secure government sponsorship for musicians or of regular salaries for public servants.</p>
<p>Another dramatic shift was that musicians became more dependent on live performance and transient commercial and political sponsorship with the advent of cheap cassette tapes and even cheaper digital recording technology.</p>
<p>This intertwining of the market, state and society has continued to see itself expressed through music in the DRC. A well-loved dance of 2005, <em>Kisanola</em>, (literally meaning a comb) is associated with the moment when one of the country’s best-known stars, Werrason, shifted commercial allegiance from one beer brand, Skol, to its popular rival Primus, with lucrative consequences for Werrason. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-SJ1kUNx9iE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Werrason’s dancers doing the ‘Kisanola’ dance.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255404/original/file-20190124-135154-ly7too.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255404/original/file-20190124-135154-ly7too.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255404/original/file-20190124-135154-ly7too.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255404/original/file-20190124-135154-ly7too.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255404/original/file-20190124-135154-ly7too.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255404/original/file-20190124-135154-ly7too.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255404/original/file-20190124-135154-ly7too.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Werrason’s election poster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the <em>Kisanola</em> dance, also involves a movement representing the shaving of one’s hair to the bone – a metaphor for how people in the DRC have had everything taken from them. </p>
<p>In the past commercial imperatives and political censoring have not entirely prevented challenging songs slipping through the net. Remmy Ongala told me how even Wendo in the 1950s, under the patronage of the Belgian colonists, sang songs he and his Congolese audience understood as a call for independence and as a challenge to the colonial regime:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>one fine day this country will change, you will see it yourselves. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a call that remains tragically resonant today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110122/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thomas Salter received funding from the ESRC for his PhD on the spread of Congolese popular music in Africa</span></em></p>The intertwining of the market, state and society has continued to see itself expressed through music in the DRC.Thomas Salter, Musician, Academic, Consultant, The University of EdinburghLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1094102019-01-07T08:04:54Z2019-01-07T08:04:54ZWhat DRC’s flawed election means for emerging democratic culture in Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/252573/original/file-20190106-32121-t0q79n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Some in the DRC identify opposition leader Martin Fayulu as the winner but official results have yet to be released.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/ STEFAN KLEINOWITZ</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On December 30, 2018, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/drc-election-polls-open-long-delayed-vote-181230055430093.html">46 million citizens cast their votes</a> in a historic election in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There hasn’t been a <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/12/deal-finalised-peaceful-political-transition-drc-161231182050153.html">peaceful transition of power</a> in this country since the end of Belgian rule in 1960. If this election produces a result that’s widely viewed as credible, it will cement a new era of representative government in Africa. </p>
<p>The deferral of representative government in the DRC has a long history. After the Berlin Conference (1884-85), Belgium acquired the Congo as a colonial territory and, from Léopold II to King Baudoin I, Belgian administrators oversaw one of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/21/arts/belgium-confronts-its-heart-darkness-unsavory-colonial-behavior-congo-will-be.html">most brutal regimes</a> on the continent. In 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the first prime minister, sharing power with Joseph Kasa-Vubu as president. A confluence of internal and external factors unleashed a crisis that led to <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/792-the-assassination-of-lumumba">Lumumba’s assassination</a> in 1961 and Mobutu Sese Seko’s rise to power in 1965. With the support of Western nations, Mobutu <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/legacy-of-corrupt-and-ruthless-dictator-who-built-versailles-in-the-jungle-1259907.html">presided over the looting</a> of his country’s natural wealth as one of the most tenacious gatekeeping dictators of the 20th century. He clung to power for more than 30 years.</p>
<p>In 1997, Laurent-Désiré Kabila <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Laurent-Kabila">took over as president</a> in the midst of conflict that spilled over from the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Assassinated by his bodyguard in 2001, Kabila was succeeded by his son Joseph who has been in office ever since. Violent protests followed rigged elections in 2006 and 2011.</p>
<p>The quiet work of pro-democracy activism has been ongoing in the Congo since 2012 and the process of cultivating a demanding citizenry is visibly yielding results. A recent example was when <a href="https://www.politico.cd/encontinu/2019/01/04/rdc-21-organisations-appellent-la-population-a-se-tenir-pret-a-defendre-sa-victoire.html?fbclid=IwAR3zEWDfhiX-rUzuwE8td2WZpy6IukVSJ7jxnRyc9bmjjJDyIMAtOsc1YwE">21 civic organisations mobilised</a>, vowing to use non-violent protest to defend the outcome of the election. </p>
<p>There can be little doubt that a paradigm shift of historic importance is underway.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/05/dr-congo-voter-suppression-violence">Widespread irregularities have been documented</a> in the recent election despite the presence of 40,000 observers. Nonetheless, preliminary reports by the powerful Catholic church with direct knowledge of the process, claim that one presidential candidate has clearly won. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/world/africa/fayulu-congo-presidential-vote-catholic.html">Diplomatic sources</a> identify the winner as Martin Fayulu.</p>
<p>Once results started to come in on December 31, confirming Fayulu’s overwhelming victory, the government <a href="https://www.enca.com/news/drc-state-says-it-cut-internet-avoid-uprising-after-vote">shut down</a> the Internet, Radio France Internationale’s FM broadcasting signal, and cell phone service across the country. Many believe Kabila’s attempt to fix the election in favour of his handpicked successor, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, didn’t work. They interpret the information blackout as stalling and censorship, rather than a means of avoiding false news as alleged.</p>
<p>As the world waits amid growing international pressure for the national electoral commission to make official the results, it’s already possible to see that significant change has come to the Congo.</p>
<p>Massive voter turnout under very difficult circumstances is compelling evidence of the people’s commitment to a democratic transition, even though the process was far from perfect. </p>
<h2>Wave of progressive political change</h2>
<p>Recent civic engagement in the DRC has emerged as part of a pan-African trend. In 2012, students in Goma founded La <a href="https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/lucha-youth-movement-congo-demands-social-justice">LUCHA, shorthand for “struggle for change.”</a> La LUCHA is a non-partisan citizen movement with as many as 3,000 activists who engage in non-violent campaigns to raise awareness of human rights and cultivate a demanding citizenry.</p>
<p>Another citizen’s movement is <a href="https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/statement-report/democratic-republic-congo-heavy-repression-pro-democracy-youth-civil-society">Filimbi</a>, which means “blow of the whistle” in Swahili.</p>
<p>In 2011, <a href="https://www.unric.org/en/right-to-participation/28099-the-movement-yen-a-marre-weve-had-enough">rappers and journalists in Senegal founded Y’en a marre (“We are fed up”)</a>. They protested against unreliable electricity and corruption, registered young voters and <a href="https://theconversation.com/senegals-rappers-continue-to-cry-from-the-heart-for-a-more-just-society-91263">ousted Abdoulaye Wade</a>. In 2013, hip-hop artist, Smockey Bambara, and reggae artist, Sams’K le Jah, joined forces in Burkina Faso to create <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2014/10/the-citizens-of-burkina-faso/">Balai Citoyen (“Citizen’s Broom”)</a>. They led an uprising that evicted Blaise Compaoré after 27 years and then swept the streets as a symbolic gesture of civic engagement <a href="http://forums.ssrc.org/african-futures/2014/12/09/citizens-revolt-in-burkina-faso/">inspired by Thomas Sankara</a>.</p>
<p>In 2015 and 2016, massive mobilisation in the DRC, supported by activists from Senegal and Burkina Faso, put pressure on Kabila, <a href="https://africanarguments.org/2017/05/31/lucha-continua-the-youth-movement-striking-fear-into-congos-elite/">who ultimately decided not to cling to power</a>. A coalition in the DRC formed the <a href="http://www.rfi.fr/afrique/20151220-rdc-front-citoyen-2016-barrer-route-kabila-mandat-constitution">“2016 Citizen’s Front,”</a> including Filimbi, la LUCHA, Katumbi, Fayulu calling for Kabila to respect the Constitution.</p>
<p>In 2016, la LUCHA <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2016/05/musician-angelique-kidjo-and-african-youth-activists-honoured-with-amnesty-international-award/">shared</a> Amnesty International’s Ambassadors of Conscience Award with Angelique Kidjio, Y’en a marre and Balai Citoyen.</p>
<h2>Breaking a cycle of violence</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/drc-opposition-picks-martin-fayulu-presidential-candidate-181111173349147.html">Fayulu</a> is an anti-corruption reform candidate. He ran on a platform promising to restore dignity, to invest in education and to enforce the rule of law. Educated in France and the US, he was an executive at Exxon Mobile before being elected to Parliament in 2006.</p>
<p>Fayulu has said he’ll create jobs in agriculture, tourism and develop local expertise to add value to the Congo’s natural resources. He was backed by an opposition coalition and supported by two powerful figures: Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former warlord, and Moïse Katumbi, a wealthy businessman from Katanga.</p>
<p>If Fayulu becomes president, the cycles of violence that brought dictators to power will have finally come to an end. There’s no disputing that Kabila’s regime did use violence to intimidate citizens during the election process. But it doesn’t appear to have completely undermined the process.</p>
<p>To be sure, some observers will dismiss the election as late, flawed and a chaotic mess. Doubtless more remains to be done to guarantee the integrity of future elections. And whoever wins will have much to do to recover from decades of corrosive violence and autocratic rule.</p>
<p>Yet it’s also possible to look at this election as evidence of the people’s commitment to democracy, even when the process is messy. The fact is that this election – and its promise for the future – adds to a wave of progressive political change across Africa led by students, musicians, journalists and activist citizens.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/109410/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Phyllis Taoua was a Tucson Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project. She is the author of African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence (Cambridge University Press, 2018).</span></em></p>The recent poll in the DRC was messy. Nevertheless, it showed that significant change is underway in the country.Phyllis Taoua, Professor of Francophone Studies (Africa, Caribbean), Faculty Affiliate with Africana Studies, World Literature Program and Human Rights Pracice, University of ArizonaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1063702018-11-05T15:33:32Z2018-11-05T15:33:32ZWilliam Kentridge: the barbarity of the ‘Great War’ told through an African lens<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243908/original/file-20181105-83648-amc811.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">William Kentridge</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodman Gallery</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Produced towards the end of the four-year celebrations of the centenary of the <a href="http://www.greatwar.co.uk/">“Great War”</a> of 1914-18, the dramatic art performance of South African-born artist <a href="https://zeitzmocaa.museum/artists/william-kentridge/">William Kentridge</a> – <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/performance/head-load">“The Head & the Load”</a> –explodes the traditional understanding of this conflict as a “World War”. </p>
<p>Congolese independence leader <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/patrice-lumumba">Patrice Lumumba</a> had famously mocked European <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/08/25.htm">pretensions</a> ennobling what he called their tribal conflicts into World War status. Kentridge attacks the idea from a different point of view. His project focuses on the impact this “European War” had on the colonies of the principals. It’s an impact that was ignored at the time and subsequently written out of history. </p>
<p>The British, French and German armies employed hundreds of thousands of African support troops for their war in Africa. The Africans were not allowed to carry arms for fear they might turn against them. Many died from sickness or privation in the course of the war. </p>
<p>As an instance, “The Head & the Load” tells the story of how, when the railway and other forms of regular transport from Cape Town to Lake Tanganika gave out, a ship was dismembered and carried to its destination on the heads of African porters. </p>
<p>The original production of “The Head & the Load” was staged in the massive Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern Museum in London <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/performance/head-load">in July this year</a>. It paraded mechanised sculptures and actors. Some bore loads on their head and cast giant shadows before a constantly changing backdrop of animated drawings. </p>
<p>An exhibition of a reduced version is on display at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. <a href="http://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/950">“Kaboom!”</a> entails an exhibition of drawings that were used in the original production, with drawings from Kentridge’s staging of both Austrian composer <a href="http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Berg-Alban.htm">Alban Berg</a>’s opera <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/arts/music/review-william-kentridge-wozzeck-salzburg-met-opera.html">“Wozzeck”</a> and German artist <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/kurt-schwitters">Kurt Schwitters</a>’ <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/410042/william-kentridge-incants-kurt-schwitterss-dada-sound-poem-performa/">sound poem</a> <a href="https://dangerousminds.net/comments/flipping_ursonate_the_greatest_sound_poem_of_the_20th_century_the_bird">“Ursonate”</a>. </p>
<p>The collection signals the artist’s deep opposition to the barbarity of war. It also shows his attachment to the language of Dada that evolved at the time to critique it. Walking a ship through Africa is patently absurd. </p>
<p>Kentridge underlines the lunacy of the project in every part of the production – from ruined landscapes to caricatural imagery to ironic captions and <a href="https://www.philipmiller.info/">composer Philip Miller’s</a> fairground-inspired accompaniment. One drawing of a destroyed landscape is dominated by a version of one of the heads in French painter <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/artist-gericault-theodore.htm">Théodore Géricault’s</a> work <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/artist-gericault-theodore-artworks.htm">“Guillotined heads”</a>. It bears the annotation “This is a Fair Idea of Progress”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243903/original/file-20181105-83638-w25sce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243903/original/file-20181105-83638-w25sce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243903/original/file-20181105-83638-w25sce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243903/original/file-20181105-83638-w25sce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243903/original/file-20181105-83638-w25sce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243903/original/file-20181105-83638-w25sce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243903/original/file-20181105-83638-w25sce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">From William Kentridge’s ‘Kaboom!’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodman Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Processions</h2>
<p>Tellingly, Kentridge interprets the line of porters moving across the landscape as a procession. It’s a motif that he has used often in his work. Processions of the urban poor feature prominently in his early animated <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043389.2014.11877205">“Drawings for Projection”</a> but they take on an absurdist note in works such as the arc drawing <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kentridge-arc-procession-develop-catch-up-even-surpass-t07668">“Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass”</a> (1990, Tate Modern) – as <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/haile-selassie-i">Haile Selassie’s</a> government exhorted the Ethiopian people in 1974 to compete with the industrialised economies of the First World shortly before the Emperor was finally deposed. </p>
<p>The <em><a href="https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/charivari">charivari</a></em> (a noisy mock serenade performed by a group of people to celebrate a marriage or mock an unpopular person), or <em>Danse Macabre</em> element of the procession is developed into dramatic form in <a href="https://zeitzmocaa.museum/art/sweetly-play-dance/">“More Sweetly Play the Dance”</a>. It is a 2015 video installation currently showing at Zeitz Mocaa in Cape Town. </p>
<p>It’s also been evolved in monumental scale, in <a href="https://www.domusweb.it/en/art/2016/06/10/william_kentridge_triumphs_and_laments.html">“Triumphs and Laments”</a>, Kentridge’s stencilled dirt drawing on the banks of the Tiber in Rome (2016). In its ephemeral dirt medium, its placement - between the city’s Jewish ghetto and St Peter’s Basilica - and its elaborate iconography, “Triumphs and Laments” seeks to replace a unitary, invariably heroic, account of Roman history by a less glamorous version of the city’s past. In the process, it makes clear that all history is inevitably fragmentary, provisional and partisan. </p>
<h2>How history is written</h2>
<p>Like the Roman mural, “The Head & the Load” shows that history is written to serve specific interests and that there are always victims of this endeavour. </p>
<p>Correcting the absolutist version of history involves both the deconstruction of the heroic ideal – the demonstration of its fallibility and its dark side – and the bringing to light whole aspects of the past that have been ignored or suppressed. </p>
<p>For Kentridge the Dada procession effects both purposes in appropriately iconoclastic fashion.</p>
<p>The fragmentary and provisional that Kentridge understands as the true nature of history is replicated in his drawing style. It comes to the fore in several parts of the current “Kaboom!” exhibition. In fact, it dates back from the beginning of his career. Kentridge draws quickly in charcoal, refusing the naturalistic tendency of colour and indicating forms and spaces quite summarily. </p>
<p>His “Drawings for Projection” are similarly open and incomplete in terms of both physical definition and narrative sense. Kentridge makes his movies by filming a drawing, altering it slightly, and filming it again to produce the idea of movement until the sequence is finished. He describes this method as <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/1561390/stone-age-animation-digital-world-william-kentridge-moma">“stone-age film-making”</a> whose very “indeterminacy” is a means to refuse definitive reading of any given form, action or narrative. </p>
<p>For Kentridge, this searching and erasure serves a model for understanding our place in the world. It has a profound moral dimension over and above any overt moral in the subject of his drawing or the narrative of his film. </p>
<p>Needless to say, the same indeterminacy that allows the artist to search for the appropriate response to his subject provides an opening, a point of entry for his viewer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106370/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Godby does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For William Kentridge, searching and erasure serves as a model for understanding our place in the world.Michael Godby, Emeritus Professor, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/802012017-06-29T10:41:16Z2017-06-29T10:41:16ZCongolese musicians rarely provide a critique, but continue to provide solace<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176182/original/file-20170629-16061-1fk4of0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Authenticité survives in the present generation of Congolese musicians like Fally Ipupa (with the red vest).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4KNVT2w0mU">From YouTube</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The “Indépendance Cha-Cha” is one of the best-known songs in the Congolese cannon. It was composed and first performed by the father of modern popular Congolese music, <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/joseph-kabasele-mn0001901870">Joseph Kabasele</a>, and his band African Jazz in Brussels in January 1960 during the negotiations for Congolese independence. It proved a huge hit all over Africa in the years to come and is performed to this day.</p>
<p>The song was done in anticipation of June 30 1960 when the Belgian Congo became the independent Republic of the Congo.</p>
<p>“Indépendance cha-cha” is firmly part of a tradition in which a list of names of important parties and people are included in the song (it’s a tradition that nowadays involves substantial payment for the honour).</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Indépendance cha-cha’ by Joseph Kabesele and his band African Jazz.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the “Indépendance cha-cha” the list was of pro-independence parties and the main actors in the drama unfurling in Brussels including <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/patrice-lumumba">Patrice Lumumba</a> and <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/gah/tshombe-moise-kapenda-1919-1969">Moise Tshombe</a>.</p>
<p>The early dreams of independence gradually disappeared as the years passed and this beloved song became ripe for a reworking. In 2010 the rap artist <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/baloji-mn0000555019/biography">Baloji</a> produced a wonderful video of the song renamed “Le jour d'après”. In the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/dec/04/baloji-rapper-congo-sorcerer-interview">video</a> he tells the ironic story of life since independence.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Congolese-Belgian rapper Baloyi with a modern update on ‘Indépendance Cha Cha’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Old gentlemen musicians, who could still remember the heady days leading to independence, play and dance beside the younger generation. They’re all attired with the dapper dandy <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/09/world/africa/congo-sapeur-fashion/index.html">style</a> for which the Congolese are rightfully famous. </p>
<h2>The era of mass rallies</h2>
<p>After independence, throwing off the formal shackles of political colonialism proved far easier than removing the bonds of economic imperialism. The covert involvement of the former Belgian colonists and the CIA in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination">assassination of Lumumba</a> in 1961 was followed by years of turmoil as the independence movement fractured. </p>
<p>Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu assumed the presidency after seizing power in a coup in 1965. In 1971 he renamed the country Zaire.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176076/original/file-20170628-31318-1sdtmrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176076/original/file-20170628-31318-1sdtmrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176076/original/file-20170628-31318-1sdtmrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176076/original/file-20170628-31318-1sdtmrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176076/original/file-20170628-31318-1sdtmrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176076/original/file-20170628-31318-1sdtmrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176076/original/file-20170628-31318-1sdtmrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mobutu Sese Seko in Kinshasa, back in September 1960.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His programme to nationalise Congolese industries, dubbed <a href="http://dictionary.education/english/dictionary/Zaireanization">Zaireanization</a>, followed visits to China and Korea in the early 1970s. Industries were taken over and assigned to his clients, often without the skills to manage the businesses, or the motivation to reinvest any profits Mobutu didn’t take for himself. Taxes weren’t invested in education and health or maintaining the energy, road and rail networks necessary for the long-term health of the economy.</p>
<p>But the visits to China had another influence on Mobutu. They provided him with a model for mass performances for party and nation. These included mass gatherings during which huge numbers of party members performed choreographed songs and dances in praise of the president and his party. </p>
<p>The gatherings were clearly performances of nationhood. But they were also linked to Mobutu’s policies of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10464883.2014.937235?mobileUi=0">authenticité</a> – an idea borrowed from the president of Guinea, Sékou Touré. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/21495">idea</a> was first mooted in the Manifesto of N'Sele in 1967, alongside <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=R5pJxgosjIIC&pg=PA216&lpg=PA216&dq=Mobutism&source=bl&ots=t48MVCgraP&sig=FZWciwMLKOb_S6jmNWyuq2AVL0s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjjuLreouDUAhVjAcAKHbyxCscQ6AEIYTAN#v=onepage&q=Mobutism&f=false">Mobutism</a> and nationalism, and presented as a rejection of both capitalism and communism. It was foremost a cultural policy aimed at combating a colonial mentality denigrating African culture and language as inferior to that of Europe.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176186/original/file-20170629-16061-1i79r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176186/original/file-20170629-16061-1i79r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176186/original/file-20170629-16061-1i79r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176186/original/file-20170629-16061-1i79r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176186/original/file-20170629-16061-1i79r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176186/original/file-20170629-16061-1i79r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176186/original/file-20170629-16061-1i79r32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Mobutu on a Zairean banknote.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In practice it was harnessed to building Mobutu’s personality cult. He ordered the building of one of the first state run television studios and broadcasting facilities in Africa. Named the Cité de la Voix de la Peuple it had 18 radio and six television studios. Television broadcasting began in 1966 and the broadcasting centre was completed in 1970. The building is now a sad and dilapidated testament to Mobutu’s glory days. </p>
<p>The dominance in cultural life of the Mouvement Populaire de La Révolution (MPR) was implemented in ways that mimicked the kind of imposition formerly associated with the colonial authorities. </p>
<p>For the sartorially expressive Kinois this was not something to be accepted without a challenge. In time it led to the rise of the rebellious movement of satorial dandies, the <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2013/05/07/181704510/the-surprising-sartorial-culture-of-congolese-sapeurs">Sapeurs</a>. </p>
<p>Authenticité also involved the changing of colonial Christian names to African ones. Mobutu <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1997/sep/08/news/mn-30058">changed</a> his own name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga. </p>
<p>And like Nyerere in Tanzania, Mobutu demanded that popular music should be exclusively in a national language – which in practice meant primarily Lingala – the language of the capital.</p>
<h2>Personality cult</h2>
<p>For many of the musicians I interviewed, whether or not they had any sympathy for Mobutu, the idea of authenticité was almost universally seen as a positive one at a certain level. This was despite the fact that Mobutu abused Congo culture to build his own personality cult.</p>
<p>Independence may not have led to genuine political and economic autonomy for the former Belgian Congo. But at least in areas of life that were not a source a mineral wealth and not an obvious political threat to the president, a new kind of freedom of cultural expression and self confidence in the worth of Congo’s cultural heritage could bloom. It found expression in a glorious period of musical creativity.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176188/original/file-20170629-11766-wuzgmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176188/original/file-20170629-11766-wuzgmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176188/original/file-20170629-11766-wuzgmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176188/original/file-20170629-11766-wuzgmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176188/original/file-20170629-11766-wuzgmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176188/original/file-20170629-11766-wuzgmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176188/original/file-20170629-11766-wuzgmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sleeve of Franco and Sam Mangwana’s collaborative album, Coopération.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This included adopting modernity into Congolese music. For some, like <a href="http://likembe.blogspot.co.za/2011/05/congo-memories-with-bumba-massa.html">Bumba Massa</a> and <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sam-mangwana-mn0000287320/biography">Sam Mangwana</a>, it took the form of modernity from diverse diaspora influences from across the Atlantic, especially Latin America. For others, like <a href="http://africanmusic.org/artists/kanda.html">Kanda Bongo Man</a>, it was in the mastering and use of modern technology to express Congolese culture. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/20407211.2011.10530761">Malcot Lowiso</a>, a Congolese musician working in South Africa, made it clear that authenticité was not about a return to the past:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is possible to modernise with authenticity. We have modernised our authenticity without copying others, without copying the French or the Belgians.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Love of a huge fan base</h2>
<p>The man most closely identified with the cultural movement of authenticité was the leader of the giant band TPOK Jazz, the Congo colossus <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/franco-luambo-makiadi-mn0001615589">Luambo Franco Makiadi</a>. Franco was inspired to create wonderful music by integrating the Congolese musical heritage with African and European influences and the world of the diaspora. He benefited both from Mobutu’s patronage and the love of a huge fan base all over the continent. Franco embraced the principle of authenticité, and sang songs in praise both of the principle and the party espousing it.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Franco wholeheartedly embraced the principle of authenticité in his music.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Maybe the idea of authenticité survives as part of the dream of a meaningful cultural independence in the present generation of Congolese musicians, in the work of singers such as <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/455a23c4-ec18-4e87-893d-db79514eb50b">Fally Ipupa</a> and <a href="http://www.musiques-afrique.com/frames/art_ferre-gola.html">Ferré Gola</a>, who continue to create a distinctively Congolese sound.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Congolese singers like Fally Ipupa keep it authentically Congolese.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Unfortunately politically things look far less hopeful. President <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/people/joseph-kabila.html">Joseph Kabila</a> is looking increasingly like the inheritor of the political tradition of his father Laurent’s former enemy, Mobutu, and the dictatorial colonists who preceded him. </p>
<p>Scheduled elections slip into an indeterminate future, accompanied by worsening <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-39587896">human rights abuses</a> in the Kasai region and attempts to divide and weaken the opposition. </p>
<p>As has been the case for so much of the DRC’s history since independence, musicians rarely provide a critique, but continue to provide solace.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80201/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thomas Salter works as an independent consultant in the Great Lakes Region. </span></em></p>For many of contemporary Congolese musicians the idea of authenticité was seen as a positive one at a certain level, even though Mobutu abused Congo culture to build his own personality cult.Thomas Salter, Musician, Academic, Consultant, The University of EdinburghLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/647612016-09-01T16:03:25Z2016-09-01T16:03:25ZHow a rich uranium mine thrust the Congo into the centre of the Cold War<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136273/original/image-20160901-1043-1ahjf5t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, which dropped the first atomic bomb in history. The bomb was made from Congolese ore.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>During World War II the US sought to secure all the uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo for its atomic bomb project. The ore was the richest in the world. The US, determined to prevent any of it reaching Nazi Germany or later falling into the hands of the Soviet Union, took every precaution – including dispatching spies – to secure the supply of uranium. The story of this race for the ore is told in a newly published book, <a href="http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/spies-in-the-congo/"><em>Spies in the Congo</em></a>. This edited extract is taken from the book’s concluding chapter.</em></p>
<p>In late 1949 the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb, to the profound shock of the US and Britain. Neither of the two had any idea that the Soviet atomic weapons programme was so well advanced. The US had beaten Germany in the first atomic arms race. And for four years, it had enjoyed an absolute monopoly on atomic weapons. But now, a second atomic arms race was under way – and the Cold War heated up dramatically.</p>
<p>The Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga had been reopened in March 1945. It was fully in operation, supplying America with fresh stocks of high grade uranium ore. As a result, observes Congolese historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, the Congo was</p>
<blockquote>
<p>an important element of Washington’s geopolitical strategy in the context of the Cold War. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite strenuous efforts by the US to find alternative sources of rich ore, Shinkolobwe remained its greatest single source in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1947, according to figures from the US Atomic Energy Commission, the US obtained 1,440 tons of uranium concentrates from the Belgian Congo. It obtained none from its own territory and only 137 tons from Canada. </p>
<p>The complex process of importing the ore from the Congo was conducted in absolute secrecy. By 1951, the total quantity of uranium obtained by the US was 3,686 tons, of which the largest amount still came from the Congo – 2,792 tons. A huge amount of money was pumped into building a processing plant near Shinkolobwe and the World Bank extended $70 million in loans to Belgium for the improvement of the Congolese transportation infrastructure to facilitate the export of the ore.</p>
<h2>Political embarrassment for the US</h2>
<p>The US was vigorously seeking new sources of uranium. In 1950, with Britain, it came to an agreement with the white minority government of South Africa — which by now had introduced the system of apartheid — for the exclusive purchase of South African ore. In so doing, comments Thomas Borstelmann in <em><a href="https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=0Hbe80DN2b0C&redir_esc=y">Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle</a></em>, America compromised its principle of support for the self-determination of all peoples, which had been enshrined in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. </p>
<p>By the end of the Truman administration in January 1953, observes Borstelmann, these dealings with South Africa had become a political embarrassment to the US in the “now vociferous Cold War”.</p>
<p>A serious worry, as during World War II, was the possibility that the enemy might get hold of Congolese ore. This had been anticipated in 1946 by Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary. According to an entry in the diary of Hugh Dalton, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Bevin wanted to build a road</p>
<blockquote>
<p>right across Africa, passing through the top of French Equatorial Africa and enabling us, if need be, to protect the deposits in the Belgian Congo. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Concern about the mine escalated sharply in Washington after the start of the Korean War in 1950. According to Borstelmann, drawing on official documents, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff began making contingency plans for the “seizure of critical areas in the Congo by force”, in case of a Soviet occupation of Western Europe, including Belgium.</p>
<p>The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the shipment of $7 million-worth of American military equipment for additional Belgian troops being sent to Katanga, and the CIA planted a “controlled source” in the area to provide early warning of any problems. It also initiated “plans and preparations for covert counter-sabotage”.</p>
<p>In 1953, the US acquired 500 tons from South Africa, which was considerably less than it had hoped for. It was increasingly obtaining uranium from its domestic sources; it also obtained 100 tons from a new source – Portugal. But the Belgian Congo continued to provide the largest amount of ore: 1,600 tons.</p>
<h2>Heightened security around the mine</h2>
<p>The American atomic project was ambitious: it would require 9,150 tons of uranium concentrates per year when in full operation. The 1953 receipts, therefore, were less than half the required amount. Consequently, the procurement of ore was a source of persistent and acute concern for the US. Meanwhile, the protection and defence of Shinkolobwe was expanded substantially. </p>
<p>“Today,” wrote an Italian journalist in 1954, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it is impossible for a white man to move about unobserved in Shinkolobwe … and for someone to gate-crash the mining zone without the police’s knowledge immediately puts the Union Minière [the huge Belgian company which owned the Shinkolobwe mine] in a state of alarm.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many voices, he added, were raised about Communist espionage, with the result that the barrier was </p>
<blockquote>
<p>moved another mile from the mine and every road, which for one reason or another passed the zone, was sealed off. In addition, a strict check-up was made on all foreigners who came to Jadotville, the town that had to be passed on the way to Shinkolobwe.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another visitor in 1954 was astonished when he looked at the local paper to see that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Elisabethville’s newspapers … had startling, inch-high headlines. A Government decree, freshly signed, authorised the shooting on sight of any persons found within the boundaries of the Shinkolobwe uranium mine, who had no right to be there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Reasons for the official action included the discovery of American journalists lurking behind the bushes near the entrance to the mine, and the alleged uncovering of a Communist plot whereby “red agents” were said to be smuggling away samples of uranium handed over to them by African workers. </p>
<p>A vast military Belgian and NATO air base was built at Kamina in western Katanga, “for the defence of Central Africa against international Communism”. </p>
<h2>The Cold War and decolonisation</h2>
<p>Towards the end of the 1950s the picture regarding Congolese uranium changed. America no longer needed to be worried about supplies of ore, despite its earlier fears. There were two important reasons for this: first, uranium ore had been found in many other parts of the world; and second, new methods of enriching lower grade uranium, to make it fissionable, had been developed. As a result, the US was no longer so dependent on Shinkolobwe, although it continued to be worried about the risk of the Soviets obtaining Congolese ore.</p>
<p>In the same period, the wind of decolonisation was blowing vigorously through the African continent and the people of the Congo demanded independence from Belgium. This became a reality on 30 June 1960. Patrice Lumumba became the Republic of the Congo’s prime minister in the nation’s first democratic elections.</p>
<p>The year before, Lumumba had been asked by some businessmen in New York whether the Americans would still have access to uranium, as they had when the Belgians ran the country. Lumumba’s response was unequivocal. “Belgium doesn’t produce any uranium,” he pointed out, adding that “it would be to the advantage of both our countries if the Congo and the US worked out their own agreements in the future.” But Union Minière took matters into its own hands: by the time of independence, the Shinkolobwe mine had been sealed with concrete.</p>
<p>Kwame Nkrumah, the president of newly independent Ghana, hoped that Africa could remain above the conflict between the West and the Communist nations. “My policy,” he said in 1960, “has always been that at all costs Africa must not be involved in the Cold War.” </p>
<p>But it was unavoidable: the Congo’s resources, including its uranium, had already put the newly independent nation at the very heart of Cold War concerns.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64761/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susan Williams has published widely on Africa, decolonisation and the global power shifts of the twentieth century, receiving widespread acclaim for Colour Bar (Penguin, 2006), her book on the founding president of Botswana, which will become a major motion picture entitled 'A United Kingdom' in late 2016. Who Killed Hammarskjöld? (2011) triggered a fresh UN inquiry into the death of the secretary general. </span></em></p>The Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb in 1949, to the profound shock of the US. This heated up the Cold War dramatically and thrust the Congo to the centre of American geopolitical strategySusan Williams, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.