Jason Stearns
April 2010, Washington, DC
Photo: Alex Engwete
Jason Stearns, author of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, published today a very poignant post on his blog "Congo Siasa" titled "Responding to a critique of my book." Stearns was reacting to a review of his book by Harry Verhoeven (see here).
I wrote the following comment to the post, but it couldn't be saved or posted as there is either a problem with my browsers or there's a glitch in the comment widget of the blog.
Anyway, here's my comment to Stearns' post:
"Jason :
Being engaged by critics isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The more flak a book obtains, the more people would want to check it out for themselves—which insures that the book would go viral, so to speak. This being your first globally-released book (not counting your academic essays and the fantastic job you did in what I call “The Jason Stearns UN Report by a Panel of Experts”), you are lucky enough to have critics such as Harry Verhoeven help you grow thick skin. As the old sexist saying has it, this will make a man outta you!
Besides, you’re one of the few Western observers of the Congo who aren’t impaired by a “denial of coevaleness” to the Congolese you deal with. Even Gérard Prunier, in the opening of his book, falls into the usual romantic pitfall of non-coaveleness when he gives a condensed history of the region, using the “we” for Western Europe and blaming the colonizers for having gone into the area to wrest people from their peaceable way of life (my recollection). Well, some of us would argue that for all its evils, colonization at least tapped colonies into actual world time; and that it’d been better to live under Belgian rule than under, say, a bloody dictator like Chaka Zulu…
I was particularly impressed by your perfect mastery of Lingala and Swahili (on top of French) when I met you last year at your Johns Hopkins-SAIS talk in DC. And, by the way, at that talk, you unpacked an impressive theory of the Congo conflict that was by no means “impressionist,” as Verhoeven castigates your analysis of events in your book. Incidentally, I like impressionistic takes on irreducible events like the ones that unfolded in the Congo as there can’t possibly be metanarratives that would do them justice. In fact, novels or fiction in general might even be a better conduit for them than cold analytical exposes.
This being said, I take this opportunity to point out the following:
1) I have to agree with Verhoeven’s criticism of your relying too much for your “evidence” upon a few historical agents involved in the conflict. I think this is a “methodological” drawback that could be addressed in your subsequent books (not this one, as you eloquently state). This is mainly due to a lack of methodological interchange between European and American historiographers. The Belgian social scientist and historian Benoît Verhaegen, for example, wrote almost definitive histories of the Congo 1964 rebellions using the method of “histoire immediate” (immediate history)—a method also used by Spanish scholars to write histories from the WWII to the current time (it is telling that the Wikipedia page on “Histoire immediate” has only a Spanish Language equivalent page: “Historia del mundo actual” or “historia immediate”). But immediate history is expensive, painstaking, and involves hundreds (if not thousands) of informants and documents.
2) You also claim that you “found little evidence for American military involvement in support of any parties during the wars.” I think that this claim is naïve. Prunier cites one or several sources (I don’t quite remember and I can’t check this out at the moment, having left my copy of his book in my library in Kinshasa) that establish that the rush for the Congo Coltan originated at the desk of the trade liaison at the American embassy in Kigali. What’s more, I think you don’t factor in the military aid Rwanda was (and is) receiving from the US and its allies while it was engaged in a military campaign of pillage in the Congo--even now that the Kigali regime is murdering, jailing, and stifling opposition politicians). And the US didn’t make a mystery of its support for Rwanda and Uganda, insisting that what was happening in eastern Congo was a domestic rebellion. Anecdotally I had personally an irate email exchange with a State Department official in the early days of Laurent Kabila regime. The man wanted to enlist me in the policy that was developing for turning the DRC into an English-speaking country! When I showed him the madness of the project, he characterized my reaction as a “typical visceral reaction from a member of the French-speaking Congolese elite”—though I had already established to him that I wasn’t by any stretch of imagination part of the Congo elite.
3) More importantly, Congolese in general are angry when people have their histories so irretrievably “pirated” by events in Rwanda. Congolese have enough existential angst of their own to contend with to be needlessly bombarded by Rwandan narratives. It’s about time people start offering narratives about the Congolese and what befell them from Rwandan and Ugandan military plunderous entrepreneurs. For example, the city of Kisangani was almost erased from the map by Rwandan and Ugandan armies. We still want to read about the “histoire immediate” narratives of those bloody events.
Sorry for the rant, Jason. But rest assured that I’ll always admire your engagement for the Congo, as well as your scholarly work and advocacy commitment—including this, your invaluable blog."
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