Following Edward Said's Orientalism, allow me the pedantry of coining
the word "Congolism" to describe the body of Othering knowledge on the
Congo being industrially produced these days by western postmodern
academic practioners of Central Africa.
As a body of knowledge, Congolism has all the combined infirmities
denounced in postmodern scholarship: theoretical expediency and
jingoism, fast-food packaging, dogmatism, rehashed received wisdom,
and, now, botched reporting.
There are, in Congolism, however, two supplementary methodological
infirmities: the "ecstatic" travelogue as academic genre, and the
abuse of multi-site ethnography.
These academics of the African boonies focus their energy and their
self-reflexive travelogues primarily on the Congo, the ever exciting
and tempting terra incognita where even the whackiest of "theories"
would get some foothold purchase.
Calling themselves "old Africa hands" or "Africa Watchers"--as Laura
Seay haughtily proclaimed herself to be, in an opinion piece published
in April in Foreign Policy magazine and pedantically entitled "How Not
To Write About Africa"--they are now training their theoretical big
guns on media reporters and correspondents on assignment in Africa.
For their ambition is to make the traditional genre of Africa
reporting exctinct altogether and to replace it with something that is
a cross between academic hogwash and advocacy--the latter purportedly
on behalf of hopeless Africans devoid of any agency and caught between
a "failed state" and the hard place of their miserable existence.
In a stinging rebuttal to Seay's embarrassing exercise in bloviation
titled "How do journalistes write about Africa?" that appeared one
month later, GlobalPost senior Africa correspondent Tristan McConnell
adds to my aforementioned list of infirmities of these academic
ecstatic travelogue writers.
They are fraudsters and con artists too, says McConnell, peddling
bloated, doctored and discrepant resumes--which means that they might
NOT know the first thing about what they're talking about.
Says McConnell:
"Another country listed as one of [Laura Seay's] 'areas of expertise'
is Somalia yet according to the CV posted on her website, she's never
been there."
McConnell also questions the two or three short stints Seay made in
eastern Congo as qualifications enough to produce meaningful knowledge
on the area.
Seay's response to these serious charges by McConnell is pathetic and
has a ring of an insult to serious scholars of the ilk of Johannes
Fabian who've carried out lengthy fieldwork in the Congo:
"Editors' note: Laura Seay has written to clarify this story, saying
that she has spent more time in Africa. 'I lived in Kenya in 1998, in
Cameroon in 2000, and was in DRC again in 2010, in addition to other
travel in 2003,' she writes."
Is this some kind of academic in-joke or what?
No, it isn't an in-joke, I am told, this is current vintage
multi-sited fieldwork in academia.
Oh my! then, fiedwork has gone to the dogs!
Incidentally, Foreign Policy magazine seems to be the watering hole or
the lair where these academic travelogue writers and postmodernist
rabid theorist wannabes congregate to bloviate.
After all, it's also in Foreign Policy that a few years back Jeffrey
Herbst and Greg Mills--two other multi-sited jingoistic experts on
"failed states"--published their torpid opinion piece entitled "There
is No Congo: Why the only way to help the Congo is to stop pretending
it exists."
(See my post of October 11, 2009, titled "Two Racist
Scholars-Mercenaries as Enemies of the Congolese People: JEFFREY
HERBST and GREG MILLS)
(Page Address: http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2009/10/two-racist-scholars-mercenaries-as.html)
Well, Tristan McConnell published his rebuttal on May 29, 2012. He
should have waited just a few days, till June 9, when Seay had her
sophomoric piece titled "A View From Goma" published in Warscapes.
If this piece is a template of post-journalism and post-reporting on
Africa, then God help us all!
Uncannily, Seay's op-ed contains all the infirmities she was
purporting to denounce in her article on journalism methodology and
ethics in Foreign Policy, where she castigated "stories that fall prey
to pernicious stereotypes and tropes that dehumanize Africans …
fraught with factual errors, incomplete analysis, and stereotyping."
One example would suffice here.
In "A View From Goma," Seay peremptorily states:
"Most Congolese harbor deep prejudices against Tutsis as well as
Hutus. Known as Rwandaphones [sic] (those who speak Kinyarwanda, the
Rwandan language), these groups are viewed by non-Rwandaphone [re-sic]
Congolese as interloping outsiders who are not truly citizens of the
DRC."
I'd like to know on what scientifically designed opinion survey Seay
based such an all-out essentialization of the more than 60 million
Congolese citizens.
This would amount to "peremptorily state" that just because there are
KKK members in the US, most white American citizens are racists and
white supremacists!
I'd bet one dollar that no serious reporters currently working in
eastern Congo would entertain such sweeping generalizations in their
pieces.
In point of fact, serious reporters and scholars could inform Seay
that there are no majority tribes in the more than 400 ethnic groups
making up the Congolese nation; that one Rwandophone was the country's
vice-president; that Rwandophones are over-represented in senior ranks
of the army and the police; that the current boss of the national
police is General Charles Bisengimana, a Rwandophone; and that many
among the Congolese troops now hounding Ntaganda and his bandits are
Congolese Rwandophones!
And yes, if there are indeed some Congolese harboring prejudices
against other tribes or ethnic groups, most Congolese live in peace
with their neighbors.
This kind of crap masquerading as scholarship brings to mind Johannes
Fabian's "Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of
Central Africa."
Fabian demonstrated that western scholars-travelers roaming Africa
during the heroic times of exploration in the 19th century were often
operating in an "ecstatic" frame of mind--what with the ecstasy
induced by "the effects of alcohol, drugs, illness, sex, brutality,
and terror, as well as the role of conviviality, friendship, play, and
performance" in the very process of Othering that the production of
subjects of knowledge then entailed.
Seay and her other fellow crackpots have thus rediscovered the
colonial travelogue genre of yore; turning themselves, when faced with
the lack hard facts and evidence, into omniscient intersubjective
narrators and ventriloquists!
I'm predicting that this insipid genre will soon die its natural death
when such extreme postmodernist essentialism vanishes from academia;
when production of academic scholarship will return to the
fundamentals of hard work and sleuthing.
***
PHOTO: Laura E. Seay
CREDITS: http://lauraseay.wordpress.com/
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