Since August this year at least 250,000 people have been left homeless in Eastern Congo in the latest outbreak of a civil war described here as between government troups and a rebel group claiming to protect ethnic Tutsis. At least 2 million people are refugees from that war which dates back to 1996.
Trying to get good analyses of that conflict in American newspapers or from US television news, is a useless exercise. There’s a better debate in British papers as to what’s at stake in that war and also how we look at it.
Two opinion pieces are now circulating widely: one by the prominent British journalists, Michela Wrong, a former BBC and Reuters Africa correspondent, and the other by Johann Hari of The Independent.
Writing in The Guardian, Michela Wrong suggests:
“.. The spell the word ‘Congo’ continues to cast over Western audiences should prompt some self-examination. Behind every well-meaning ‘isn’t it dreadful?’ reaction lies a host of unstated and unappetising assumptions about Africans.”
Hari, who has reported on the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa for The Independent, writes:
“… When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a ‘tribal conflict’ in ‘the Heart of Darkness.’ It isn’t. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by ‘armies of business’ to seize the metals that make our 21st-century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.”
I asked a friend Ingrid Samset, a political science graduate student from the University of Bergen in Norway on a Fubright at Columbia University who does research in the Congo and Angola, what she thought:
Ingrid thinks Michela Wrong is right:
“… This is exactly my point of view as well. Congo has become “our” ultimate other. The media coverage of the Congo again and again repeats, almost on auto-pilot it seems, this myth about the heart of darkness. As I said in an op-ed I wrote about this last year (in Norwegian), “Africa’s darkness is not about Africa. The heart of darkness is not about the Congo. It’s about us.” It’s about how “we”, the dominant discourse, choose to represent Africa and its “heart”. One reason why I have trouble reading the Western (and even African!) press coverage of the Congo is that this myth about the Congo as the heart of darkness so permeates it. The idea affects our ability to see the Congo as it is, in all its variety. And as is often the case in coverage of Africa they also often don’t bother to ask the Congolese what they think. One myth within the myth is that, as The Economist says in its current issue’s editorial, “There is a scant sense of nationhood in the Congo“. That’s simply not true, there is a strong national identity among most Congolese. The Economist also informs us that the Congo “is a hideous mess and always has been”. How helpful.
So when Western politicians go to the Congo today they tend to portray it as the white man’s burden. One may ask though who’s shouldering the heaviest burden. If the so-called international community could simply start treating Congo not as the ultimate other but as a country just like any other country, with a troublesome history to be sure, but a history that can be fully understood and where internal and external actors all contributed both problems and solutions, then this international community would do the Congo a much greater favor than by continuing to portray the country they want to help as helpless, hopeless and dark.”
And her view on Johann Hari:
“… My main reaction is that you cannot dichotomize the debate into two poles and call the one pole a set of lies and the other pole all truth. The conflicts are not only about natural resources. Appetite for those resources can be a driving force, but what I found in my own research investigating the links between resources and conflict in the Congo and Angola was that the resources are more important in explaining why wars continue and last as long as they do than why they break out. It’s important to get this right because this economic reductionism has been very fashionable in both research and journalism over the last ten years. Yet though a lot of the ensuing policy recommendations have been tailored to respond to those economic aspects – e.g. conflict diamonds, Kimberley Process (a joint governments, industry and civil society initiative to stem the flow of conflict diamonds ), the Extractive Industry Transparency Ininitiative (which sets a global standard for companies to publish what they pay and for governments to disclose what they receive), etcetera. – the conflicts continue in eastern Congo. Just to take one example, Hari is wrong when he says that Rwandan forces did not go after Hutu refugees when they first invaded the Congo in 1996. Those atrocities are documented. I think his chief mistake though is failing to acknowledge two things: how the character of any armed conflict changes over time, i.e. how resources can explain different things and be more or less important in explaining conflict at different stages of the conflict. Secondly he ignores how resources would not have been a part of the explanation had it not been for a whole bunch of other issues in the Congo case, related to the Rwanda genocide, to unresolved issues regarding land and citizenship, to the general absence of state authority in eastern Congo, to gender roles, and to generalized, deep poverty. Though it’s catchy in an op-ed, it simply doesn’t hold to say that the conflict is all about us and the insatiable demand of the global rich. It’s part of it but that explanation does not explain why there is not the same level and types of violence in other resource-rich areas of the world. It doesn’t explain the timing of the different incidents and periods of violence, and also it doesn’t explain why some resource-rich areas within the Congo are far more violence-prone than other, similarly resource-rich but more peaceful areas.”
Filed under: politics , Africa and the West, Africa and Western Media, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Laurent Kabila, politics
I’m not sure I agree with Ingrid or Michela.
I don’t think that Hari is saying it’s all about “us”, as in the West (or the whites, is, perhaps, what he really means). But he’s writing a piece for a paper that rarely covers Africa, to an audience that rarely reads or thinks about Africa (beyond Bob ‘n’ Bono notions of dumb – i.e. without voice – starving victims) – and there are some things that you need to ram home a bit. It’s important to get it into the thick heads of the British, for example, that we DO have a link to the Congo, whether we
wish to believe it or not. It’s not just a place ‘out there’. And I don’t think that Hari is saying that the Congolese have no agency in this: he is however, providing a corrective to a lot of very bad British (almost non-)coverage.
I also think that there is a bit of an irony here. Michela’s book on Congo (which I admire a great deal) was named after Conrad’s, in so many words. I don’t think her book dispels the image of Congo as the ‘heart of darkness’: if anything it pushes that image a little further. The book, as I remember, doesn’t cover what you might call ‘ordinary’ Congolese: it looks at Mobutu and the sapeurs (which some might argue, is to exoticise the place). But her book also, and quite rightly, covers the role of the West (the USA, as I remember) and business in the Congo. Nothing wrong with that.
But ultimately, I’m not sure there is such a dichotomy between Hari and Wrong anyway! I think it’s a mistake to view their writing in that way. Yes, Wrong has much more experience ‘in’ (larger areas of) Africa than Hari, whose opinions are based on one (or two?) heart-rending trips into the ‘darkness’. Wrong ‘knows’ more. But knowing more, as we know (don’t we?), doesn’t always translate into better writing or a better opinion, or indeed a better perspective. (There are plenty of British people writing about the UK who write utter crap.)
I think what sometimes happens (and I am as guilty of this as anyone, I say with shame), is that Africanists get a little territorial about who they think should or should not be able to write about Africa. Michela’s Guardian/Observer piece alludes to this: the idea that there is a ‘we’ who ‘knows’ about ‘Africa’ more than the Tom, Dick or Hari who just drops in from time to time. In many ways, she has a point. But I think we should all be prepared to recognise the tiers of which we are all a part. And I think these notions of ‘Africa’ are, anyway, a farce. I know quite a lot about Angola, but I don’t know about Africa… though I’ve lived in many countries there. I don’t know Africa any more than I know Europe.
Let’s all exercise some humility here.
[...] are serious in the Congo… They are bad, very bad. As Sean Jacobs states: “Since August this year at least 250,000 people have been left homeless in Eastern [...]
Thanks Lara for thoughtful comments. Let me respond to a few of them.
1. I agree that media coverage should be tailored to the level of knowledge of the target audience. But you’re doing your readers a disfavor if you say the conflict is all about one thing.
I don’t contest the fact that the exploitation of eastern Congo’s resources can give armed groups a vested interest in resisting disarmament. (See e.g. a recent Christian Science Monitor article for insights into this, http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1104/p01s03-woaf.html.) Resource exploitation is a crucial aspect that must be addressed to achieve lasting peace. I’m just not so sure that giving consumers a bad conscience about buying a new cell phone will help that much. For the conflict is not all about economics, it’s also, importantly, about regional politics. If Rwanda and Uganda won’t put their own houses in order and pursue talks with their respective armed groups in exile in the Congo – FDLR in the Kivus, LRA in Orientale – so that all the (non-Congolese) members of these groups ultimately will go home, it won’t matter much if we stop buying Congolese commodities. What’s more, a boycott of Congolese minerals risks making the situation worse for local Congolese. Though their working conditions may be horrible, they may have few other ways of surviving than in the extraction and trade of these resources. Other commodity boycotts have shown that middlemen and warlords tend to be so well connected that they cope quite well anyway. But in combination with a political solution, economic measures such as e.g. investigations into possible breaches of international law of corporations who have traded in resources extracted by armed groups in the Congo might be a powerful deterrent to prevent such actions in the future. Yet again, the economic and political solutions are interdependent.
2. I haven’t read Wrong’s book yet, I was just reacting to her Guardian piece. It strikes me though how the “Congo-conflict-as-all-economic” narrative also can be seen as a reinvention of the Heart of Darkness story. In this heart of Africa it’s all lawlessness, brutality and greed. In the classic version of this story (Conrad) and its various reproductions it’s the Africans who are lawless, brutal and greedy and therefore require “our” civilizing intervention. In the Hari’s and other Western liberals’ version by contrast, it’s “us”, consumers/whites/outsiders, who perpetuate the lawlessness and brutality since we are so greedy to get the goods in there. Still it’s Africa’s heart that teases out “our” darkness. A revised version, perhaps, but resting on the same premise of reducing a complex situation into a simple story which is deeply normative, and therefore provokes responses that are more emotional than rational. That might be helpful to a certain point, beyond which it becomes potentially harmful.
3. Just to clarify, I didn’t mean to say there was a dichotomy between Hari and Wrong. My opening comment on Hari’s piece was responding to his dichotomization of the Congo conflict as being about either about ethnicity or economics, and his view that it was all about the latter. My point was that this was a false dichotomy and we should understand how the two are linked.
While I would agree that the Congo situation is a toxic mix of entrenched tribal animosity and economic resource exploitation, the fact remains that western mining and resources interests are deeply seated within the exploitation infrastructure that has been embedded in the region since the first Congo war that saw US-backed regimes from Uganda and Rwanda invade and establish a semi-permanent occupation of eastern Congo.
“It doesn’t explain the timing of the different incidents and periods of violence…”
Actually, resource exploitation and defense of entrenched interests very much explain many periods of escalated violence in the region. Notably, when commodity prices plunge in ‘02-03, violence ebbed and Rwanda made a symbolic gesture of withdrawing some troops. They left many more in place, of course, but with prices in the basement, the squabbling similarly faded.
So, too, today. In fact, Nkunda’s latest advance began in August, mere weeks after the Chinese and Congolese governments began to sign contracts that were signaled a year earlier with the announcement of their $9 billion agreement. AFRICOM suddenly popped into existence, Bush’s only visit to Africa saw him drop in on Rwanda and hand off millions of dollars more in military aid and “training” to the Kagame regime. Kagame himself is practically a US military asset in central Africa.
What becomes key for these operations is that the ground troops believe something else. This is vital because few people would see a need to fight for western mining interests. So, Hutu-Tutsi ethnic tension serves the adequate purpose of providing a cover of irrational tribal hatred. Crucially, people on the ground really do harbor tribal animosities, which is probably a mixture of constant propaganda that they should hate each other and shared memory of same. Just as with US troops invading Iraq, who really do believe on some level that they are there doing God’s work or bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East, it is vital that the troops doing the fighting in Congo similarly believe in some higher purpose than grubbing the dirt and serving to enrich the western business interests reaping big profits.
Though I suspect Ms. Samset is familiar with the UN Security Council Expert Panel reports on Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources in the DRC, she might consider refreshing her memory with a re-read of just what kind of racket western business have set up in the Congo.