Bogumil Jewsiewicki

African Historical Studies: Academic Knowledge as 'Usable Past' and Radical Scholarship

In this paper, I am less interested in the differences between the main competing schools, than in their similarities. The differences were often artificially emphasized at the expense of basic common assumptions. All approaches we have used in African studies are deeply rooted in 19th-century epistemology since the neo-Marxist epistemological break never materialized (Jewsiewicki, 1987). Notwithstanding the fundamental importance of Marxist approaches to the transformation of academic knowledge about societies in Africa, there was no intellectual revolution. The modern world system approach that belongs to the radical paradigm partially accounts for this failure. As knowledge is socially produced and strongly related to the power relationships, one cannot expect a radical epistemological break to occur in a society that is a historical product of 19th-century economic and social systems. In radical paradigm terms, how can one expect a capitalist mode of production to produce an epistemology and a theory that would be a “Copernican revolution” (Sahli quoted in Jewsiewicki, 1986: 5) in knowledge? As Martha Gephart (1986: iii) stated recently, “An overview paper is a fortuitous marriage of an important topic and… individual.” Such is the case of this paper initially commissioned as an evaluation of Marxist African studies. The final result mediates my personal history as an African scholar and my perception of the growing difficulties of African studies with ‘Africa,’ their invented object. (Mudimbe, 1988) In many respects the ambitions of this paper are similar to the goals of Meier and Rudwick (1986: xi): We grew less interested in analyzing specific works than in understanding the interrelations between the trajectory of a scholarly specialty and developments in the changing social milieu and in the profession at large . … Thus, this volume is not a standard historiography, but an examination of several topics that illuminate the rise and the transformation of black history as a research field.

Le Colonat Agricole Européen au Congo-Belge, 1910–1960: Questions Politiques et Economiques

This article deals both with the political history and with the economy of European agricultural settlement in the Belgian Congo. It concludes that the role of settler farming in the life of the Congo was essentially political. The colonat was only marginal in a colonial economy long based on the extensive exploitation of African labour by industrial and commercial firms. European agriculture was able to compete neither with big business in labour recruiting, nor with African cultivators in price advantage. Settlers only survived with the benefit of government subsidies and a monopoly over some branches of production. White farming was maintained for political reasons both in peripheral regions of the colony, and on the fringes of the larger cities, but from i960 it was rapidly abandoned. In Rhodesia, under different ecological and historical circumstances, black industrial workers were fed by black agricultural workers. In the Belgian Congo it was the African peasant who fed the industrial worker, though for a mean return.

The Identity of Memory and the Memory of Identity in the Age of Commodification and Democratization

Abstract This article explores the relationship between secularization and commodification of culture on one hand, and national identity always represented as Christian mystery on the other. Focusing on three case studies, Poland, Quebec and Zaire, the author analyses the place of an ordinary object (commodity) as a vehicle of representation of peoples affirmation of belonging to a ‘nation’. He stresses the disposable nature of such an affirmation of belonging which allows everyone to alter or cast off the symbols of belonging while changing their social or political contexts.

Collective memory and its images: Popular urban painting in Zaire — a source of “present past”∗

Based on the example of Zaires popular urban painting, the author analyzes the relationship between the collective memory and the social imaginary. The pictorial dissertation on the past and the present of the population of a mining town — Lubumbashi — is an autonomous historical account mostly intended for the petite bourgeoisie. The analysis focusses on two levels of the discourse: (1) the images of the past, in relation to the present, which reflects the collective memory of the group, and (2) the discourse on the balance of power between the state and the civil society. The author compares this urban painting to urban song and to some life stories.

La diaspora et l'héritage culturel de l'impérialisme comme lieu de discours critique et de représentation du monde

We may thus consider imperialism as a process occuring as part of the metropolitan culture, which at times acknowledges, at other times obscures the sustained business of the empire itself ... how the national British, French, American cultures maintained hegemony over the peripheries. How with them was consent gained and continuously consolidated for the distant rule of native peoples and territories? (Said 1993, 51)

Denial and Challenge of Modernity: Suffering, Recognition, and Dignity in Photographs by Sammy Baloji

Working for wages, for a person or an institution which controls not only working conditions—particularly the time and space in which work takes place—but also the impact of the work on society, was for the great majority of colonized peoples the mandatory passage to modernity. In Belgian Congo until the end of the 1950s, salaried work was the sole means to accessing modernity because of the legislation barring “natives” from owning individual property. The dispossession of control over time and space while passing from agricultural or handicraft activities to salaried work, especially industrial work, is typical of the three historical phases of accumulation: primitive, capitalist, and soviet or colonial socialism. Each time, in the figurative sense for the majority, but in a literal sense for many, death (a “social” death in most cases) precedes the “birth” of the new man, a “modern” being and agent of a society shaped by its political actors that is radically different from the former society that nevertheless remains host to the new one. This transformation is violent in every way for people and for the society, becoming a source of deep suffering that traumatizes social memory, particularly during and at the end of socialist and colonialist transitions, because they are more abrupt than the capitalist transition.

L’année 1998 en République démocratique du Congo: Survie et pratique du politique dans le miroir du quotidien

AbstractThe four texts comprising this research note were written at the end of 1998 by Congolese scholars asked by B. Jewsiewicki to present people’s actions and local perception of the each region’s situation. Charles Djungu-Simba, a scholar and a writer, presents a fictionalized report of the August 1998 rebels’ intrusion into the city of Kinshasa. The second contributor (writing under a pseudonym) brings in interviews with two officers of the former Zairian army who were incorporated into Kabila’s armed forces. Justin Bisanswa analyses briefly the situation in Kivu with special attention to the local people’s attitudes toward the main militia groups. Jean-Pierre Nzunguba brings in a life story of a Bunia popular painter, an opportunity to present local perception of the life during the past forty years.

Songye: The Formidable Statuary of Central Africa (review)

Cette traduction de l’édition française originale de 2004 (La redoutable statuaire songye d’Afrique centrale) est un livre que tout amateur de l’art africain aimerait placer sur sa table basse afin que le visiteur puisse admirer les images dont la qualité photographique n’est comparable qu’avec la qualité esthétique des artefacts présentés. Statuettes et masques pour la plupart, ces œuvres ont été depuis plus d’un siècle récoltées au nord de la région actuelle du Kasai, le long du cours supérieur du fleuve Congo portant dans cette partie le nom de Lualaba. Suivant l’usage dans les galeries, les maisons de vente et chez les collectionneurs, François Neyt qualifie ces œuvres de songye, d’où le titre du livre1. L’adjectif est formé à partir du nom d’un groupe ethnique : « tribal people located in the Democratic Republic of Congo ». François Neyt se conforme aux us et coutumes du milieu auquel ce livre s’adresse en priorité2. Le feuillet publicitaire de la maison d’édition le cible ainsi : « This unique collection of rarely seen tribal art brings together nearly one thousand examples of powerful artefacts from the Songye tribe of Central Africa3). Pourtant, dès la première page, Neyt informe le lecteur du caractère artefactuel de la qualification « tribale ». Les informations historiques qu’il apporte dans un bref chapitre montrent que depuis plus de cent ans les gens nommés Songye ont été soumis à une chaîne de profonds et violents bouleversements, ont intégré de gré ou de force de très nombreux migrants. Les artefacts que les artisans/artistes ont continué à produire pour représenter le monde et pour y intervenir répondaient à leur effort de comprendre et de maîtriser ces changements. Cherchaient-ils à représenter ainsi leur identité collective « tribale » ? Ceux pour qui ces objets ont été produits et qui s’en servaient pour intervenir dans leur univers les recevaient-ils comme « songye » ? Peut-être, au contraire, les uns et les autres voulaient-ils pour ces objets une attraction et une pertinence plus vastes, voire universelles? François Neyt n’aborde pas ces questions, mais certains travaux de Jan Vansina permettent de suggérer des réponses par la comparaison avec une région voisine. Il y a plus de 40 ans, Vansina avait déjà montré que l’impératif de contrôle des forces supranaturelles (maladie, malheur, infertilité, accidents climatiques) auquel répondaient les « mouvement religieux », se traduisait dans

La quête contemporaine de reconnaissance: quelques remarques sur les pratiques africaines noires entre l’universel et le cosmopolite

Résumé La quête pour la reconnaissance de la subjectivité et la dignité est au coeur des mouvements sociaux actuels. Les Africains se battent pour obtenir la reconnaissance depuis l’époque où la traite des esclaves et plus tard la colonisation les ont dépouillés de leurs qualités humaines. Ces combats ont été essentiellement révélés par l’écriture et le monothéisme. L’article actuel suggère aux lecteurs de considérer la construction performative du moi où la subjectivité Africaine / Noire est représentée dans toute son autonomie. L’exemple empirique proposé est celui de l’Afrique centrale.

L’Afrique centrale francophone entre au XXIe siècle: Citoyens et États, nations, régions face au monde

AbstractThis special issue is the successor to Volume 18 Number 1 of the Canadian Journal of African Studies, published in 1984 under the title, “Etat independant du Congo, Congo belge, Republique democratique du Congo, Republique du Zaire?” The title of that special issue devoted to the political and social crisis in the Republic of Zaire ended with a question mark, implicitly asking: What next for Republic of Zaire? The present special issue offers a reply, one nobody expected fifteen years ago. At least symbolically, the country has recovered its identity as an independent contemporary polity, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many authors in this issue argue that forty years of independence were mainly a time of violence, destruction, and pillaging. Ilunga Kabongo suggests that the global crises was so deep in the mid-1990s that people would vote for anyone able to restore normal life, the return of coloniser included.Once a regional power, the Congo of today is a toy in hands of its neighbours, some ...