The Trouble with the Congo

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News programs don’t usually devote much coverage to The Democratic Republic of Congo. When they do the stories are usually about horrific violence, including mass rape, in the eastern part of the country. If you’ve ever wondered what that violence is all about, this episode of How We Got Here is for you. Political scientist Severine Autesserre walks us through the complexities of Congo’s recent (and extremely destructive) wars.

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In her new book The Trouble with the Congo Autesserre analyzes the failures of the international peacebuilding effort there. She argues diplomats and peacekeepers should pay more attention to local causes of violence.  Autesserre makes the case that a lot of violence in rural Congo is about basic matters of survival such as access to land and food. Those issues don’t go away just because leaders in a faraway city sign a peace deal.  Autesserre wants to see peacebuilders reapportion resources so that grassroots conflict resolution gets more attention. And she wants them to get over the idea that violence is somehow “normal”  in Congo.

What I heard a lot when I was doing the research were statements that are not obviously racist but that have an undertone that is really disturbing…I was in North Kivu in 2007, talking with a relatively high-level U.N. peacekeeper, a woman, very well-meaning, very nice. We were talking about the fact that there was massive violence and massive fighting picking up in rural areas and I asked her, “So what do you think it is?”  And she said, “Well I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the normal state of affairs for these provinces.”

Autesserre says that kind of rhetoric underscores for her a prevalent assumption among outsiders that a certain level of violence is normal for the Congo and much higher than what we would consider normal in Europe or America.   She traces the ideas back to a construct inherited from Belgian colonization. “Basically the Belgians in the 19th century constructed this image of the Congolese’s inherent savagery in order to facilitate colonization,”  Autesserre said. “The idea that the Congolese are inherently violent, they’re savages, so we the Belgians, the good guys, we’re going to go and civilize them.”  Autesserre says the idea was widespread in the 19th century and has persisted up until now.

In the public discourse,  in the media, there hasn’t been enough of challenging, of saying, “No, the Congo is not inherently violent; it’s not normal that people are fighting against one another.” And when you read media coverage of the Congo you still see a perpetuation of this discourse, you see a lot of references to Heart of Darkness; very often media analysis will use the word “barbarism.” They will focus on the really weird aspects of Mai-Mai militias, for example, the fact that they are fighting naked. All these things I think perpetuate this picture of the Congo as a place that is very different from our countries, from Europe and the United States, and that is so different that the violent things that happen there may be inherent to the place and we can’t judge the Congo by the standard that we judge other places. So one of the things  I try to do in the book is really to write against that and to deconstruct this image.  — Severine Autesserre

The podcast runs about 35 minutes. The music at the top is from the song Anata O from Congolese artist Lokua Kanza whom we featured in a Global Hit back in June.

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Severine Autesserre’s homepage
The Trouble with the Congo webpage
Congo Coverage on The World