“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.

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.

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.