Stephen Donovan

Introduction: Europe Made in Africa

Conventionally understood as an act of mastery by one (state) actor over a less powerful other, colonialism is defined primarily by its effects. These include, usually in combination, military conquest, resettlement, forced migration, land expropriation, the exploiting of human labour and natural resources, infrastructural reorganization, and the instituting of various kinds of authority (legal, linguistic, religious, medical). The profound and long-lasting nature of these effects accounts in part for the emergence and theoretical impact of the term postcolonial, as a means of denoting not merely a legal status or affiliation that nominally begins with national self-determination but a relational legacy that is only partly visible. In the case of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the postcolonial effects of the colonial experience have been uniquely pervasive and destructive. As successive generations of writers have reminded us, the policies implemented during the colonial period comprised by the Congo Free State (18851908) (henceforth CFS) and the Belgian Congo (1908–1960) established relations of investment, ownership, and control that to a large degree continued to shape the country’s post-independence development, particularly during the dictatorial reign of Mobutu Sese Seko as President of Zaire (1965–1997) (see Hochschild; Wrong; Van Reybrouck). One aspect of the earliest phase of colonization in the Congo that holds particular interest for scholars today is its singular importance as a cultural encounter. There can be few other comparable territorial or political entities whose international perception has been so consistently shaped by colonial cultural representations, if not, indeed, by one cultural text in particular. It is a relationship that was spectacularly visualized in 2004 in a sponsored supplement of the New York Times which was distributed together with its metropolitan print copy on a number of occasions. Squarely aimed at international financiers and manufacturers, this glossy fourpage advertisement took the form of a faux newspaper report on the lucrative investment opportunities available in Katanga, a mineral-rich province of the DRC. The first paragraph of the commercial pullout began: ‘The Congo today is no longer the Heart of Darkness described by Joseph Conrad a hundred years ago... ’. It is an extraordinary statement, an explicit admission that lobbyists for a multi-billion-dollar commodities consortium still deemed it necessary to distance their clients from a work of short fiction written by a British novelist who had spent three months in the CFS in 1890.

Shockwaves : The Interrupted Sea-Journeys of Rudyard Kipling and Morgan Robertson

This essay takes Nikola Teslas proposal to weaponize the sea itself as the starting-point for an examination of changing perceptions of the ocean wave at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on a trio of maritime tales by Rudyard Kipling and Morgan Robertson, it argues that the routinization of sea travel, coupled with historic developments in communications and technology, prompted these writers to explore the multiple significances of sea-journeys interrupted by monstrous waves.