To many South Africans, 1994 forever stands for Madiba’s ‘never again’ sentiment, which spawned the spirit of a new democracy.
To many South Africans, 1994 forever stands for Madiba’s ‘never again’ sentiment, which spawned the spirit of a new democracy.
At exactly the same time, a completely different sentiment was being etched into the consciousness of Rwandans, as ten thousands of refugees were fleeing across the border into North Kivu province in Zaïre (now Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC). The Great Lake crisis was in full swing – the beginning of a calamitous era that continues to this day.
Prof. Valentin Yves Mudimbe is no stranger to this ongoing tragedy. The 71-year old renowned author and philosopher was born in the southern city of Jadotville, in what was then Belgian Congo. He was the main speaker at the recent Think Africa colloquium, which this year theorised his work and the continuing violence in the eastern parts of the DRC.
Mudimbe’s first novel was Déchirures (Tears). Ten more would follow. His tales rarely allude to actual tribal conflicts, but are fictional representations of the human dramas and tragedies such conflicts create. In 1988 Mudimbe published his first English book, The Invention of Africa, a critically acclaimed work that has been compared to Edward Said’s ground-breaking Orientalism.
We meet him on an overcast day in Grahamstown. Behind cigarette smoke and intellectual chatter, lies a conflicted persona. His is a schizophrenic identity, which stems from what he calls an “impossible situation”: Born in Congo and raised in Rwanda, countries that weren’t exactly on good terms.
And then, to make matters even more complicated, he decided to become Benedictine monk, which meant that he would be the only African in a Belgian monastery in that same Rwanda. Tensions were already palpable at the time – the first systematic killings in Rwanda had taken place in 1959 and a civil war had started the next year in Congo.
This youth of triple identity explains why Mudimbe’s doesn’t lay blame in his books. It is more of a high road than the sitting on the fence. None of his responses resemble the common Congolese dislike for Rwanda, the country that is seen as the source of much of the current strife in the DRC after the invasion in 1996.
In 1968 while finishing up his studies, Mudimbe had to travel regularly between Kouilou in the south-eastern part of Zaïre and the capital Kinshasa. The country was still deeply divided. Villages were ransacked, often followed by politically motivated rape of women. It ended in a coup d’état that same year.
“I witnessed the beginning of these atrocities, difficulties people lived with because of the rebellions, especially women. It was a life I wouldn’t recommend to any human being,” says Mudimbe. “I could not negate or ignore the violence. I realised then I would have to account for it through my work.”
In 1970, after majoring in Economics and Philosophy, he became a professor and developed what would later be referred to as African Studies. Around the same time he began writing his fiction. “For my third novel (L’écart, translated as The Rift) I tried putting myself in the mind of a young African intellectual, doing African history, but all the texts he consults are written by Europeans. He has to find a way to reconcile the demands of science and the authenticity of his own experience.”
His next novel, Shaba deux, proved to hit closest to home and was by far the hardest to write. “After that I could not write”, he says. “I tried putting myself in the shoes of a nun. She had trained to be a teacher, but circumstance drove her to being a nurse – and of course she became the victim of horrific violence. Could I, a man, possibly understand what this woman went through? This was too challenging.”
He took a break from prose and focused more on academic writing. He calls his second academic offering, The Invention of Africa, an “accidental opportunity”. It was published in 1988 and intended as an essay on the history of colonialism, but he arrived at something else.
In this book he tries to explain tensions on the continent by locating their genesis. Viewed through African eyes, his account removes ‘outside’ political and sociological constructs. It imagines a view that does not rely on Western opinion or the representation of Africa it informs. Mudimbe interrogates written text and images and arrives at “what really happened” when Africa was invented.
Twenty-five years later came On African Faultlines, launched last week – a continuation of his previous work.
When asked about Rwanda’s role in the DRC’s never ending violence, he mentions the institutionalization of the Tutsi, the Hutu and the Batwa tribes into political parties and points out a piece of history that tends to be conveniently forgotten: The fact that Congolese militia were actually present and active in Rwanda (which didn't have a military under Belgian rule) in the early sixties. And that bred resentment among the Rwandese and set the tone for a volatile regional picture that got increasingly murky.
South Africa has recently deployed 1 345 troops in eastern Congo, who form part of the UN’s ‘intervention brigade’ which was initiated in 2000. They are stationed in the eastern city of Goma, near the border with Rwanda. Their job is to pacify the volatile region, which has had to deal with regular attacks from opaque rebel groups such as Mai Mai and M23.
Mudimbe calls such foreign deployment a ‘mediating occupation’ by outside troops. “Resented or accepted, the ‘job’ to keep peace always goes hand in hand with intrusion,” he said.
He noted that the persistence of rebel groups in the Congo is linked to two factors: the country’s size and its wealth in natural resources (diamonds, gold, coltan, uranium, tin, copper, cobalt and oil). Zimbabwe, Uganda and Malawi are among the countries that have sent ‘aiding’ troops. “It would be very naïve to assume that these countries do not have personal interests, either geo-political or exploitative, said Mudimbe.
