general elections may have been squandered. Brushing off the combined
and overlapping criticisms of the Carter Center and the EU observation
missions now becomes a perilously tenuous and untenable rational
stance. Something fishy did happen at the centers of votes aggregation
("centres de compilation") of Lubumbashi in the Katanga Province and
Kinshasa. The most astonishing thing about the alleged systematic
rigging and opposition disenfranchisement is that it was unnecessary
and outright dumb: Kabila could have carried Katanga without the
aggravation of this wrong-headed excess of zeal.
Be that as it might, the fact remains that the electoral process was
tempered with--and in a massive way.
As a consequence, Kabila's win is tainted and those citizens from
eastern provinces who had massively voted for him could feel cheated
and... disenfranchised!
By the way, who did Congolese voters vote for? Not for some grand
ideal of the country's reconstruction or any of the Western
traditional ideological grand narratives. Which reminds me of a
witticism of Comaroff & Comaroff: the end of Ideologies ushers in the
era of "ID-logies." In the DRC, political theorists have to mobilize
new concepts (with the help of anthropologists) to describe what
passes as politics and political discourse.
Thus, UDPS belongs to the Socialist International, and yet Tshisekedi
based his campaign on xenophobic and anti-Rwandan sentiments. In
Kindu, for instance, the capital of a Swahili-speaking province,
Tshisekedi said at a rally that a person claiming to be Congolese but
who couldn't speak Lingala isn't a bona fide Congolese and hence a
Rwandan! This resulted in the surreal scene of some of Tshisekedi's
own supporters pelting him and his Kinshasa entourage. (For more on
the corrosive effects of this "castration complex" vis-à-vis Rwanda
and the Rwandans, see below.)
Those of us who support Kabila aren't doing so based on ideological
affinities but for some primeval regional or linguistic motives. If
politics is the realm of the irrational, as Norbert Elias has it, in
the Congo, politics has receded to the level of blind gregarious
instinct.
This gregarious instinct is one of the defining Congolese cultural
traits. Consider the TV series "Falling Skies." We, Congolese, are
like those skitters and kids with implanted biotech harnesses. And the
surrounding specific culture is the controling will behind those
Congolese arachnoids and harnessed kids. Thus, it'd be intolerable for
an individual Swahili speaker to vote for Tshisekedi or, adversely,
for a Luba to vote for Kabila. The Kinois and other Lingala speakers
follow about the same pattern, and the controling will here is easily
identifiable: erstwhile Mobutu's top henchman Honoré Ngbanda aka
Terminator aka Prophétator (as he now doubles as an evangecical
pastor) and his Paris-based APARECO ( Association des Patriotes
Résistants du Congo). Ngbanda single-handedly crafted the myth of a
Rwandan couple producing a golem for Mzee Laurent Kabila in the person
of Joseph Kabila--for Kagame to rule Congo by proxy! A
seeminglyvfantasy Tshisekedi callously incorporated into his campaign
discourse--with success in those parts of the country peopled by
receptive skitters and harnessed individuals.
Now, the Congolese skitters operating abroad are the products of
Ngbanda (and now Tshisekedi) and all those who don't blindly follow
the commands of the overarching will are Rwandan stooges, traitors,
and mercenaries to be killed and maimed.
But make no mistake. Not one of those skitters is willing to die for
an empty concept as a nation. Having given magical powers to the
Rwandan nemesis, they're mostly cowards hiding behind the crowd of
other skitters to prey on harness-free individual Congolese in the
streets of Paris, London, or Brussels.
Congo has in fact ceased to be a nation under Rwandan occupation...
Well, I was thinking aloud, as it were, and to come to the sickening
realization that the country, the nation of my childhood is now
irretrievable lost is depressing--to say the least. I'm left with
broken debris of a once cohesive national narrative broken into
stammers of "un-nation-ness." They might have been right, those who'd
intimated that Congo doesn't exist...
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