the Glory of Monsters" is in no way akin to, as someone said in
another context, the labors of hairsplitting "pedants who correct
grammatical errors in love letters."
This error evinces instead the characteristic underplot inscribed in
many analyses by some western observers (political and social
scientists and reporters alike) of the Congo: the alleged shallowness
or outright lack of historical memory of the Congolese people and its
politicians.
By contrast, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton--an "accidental
tourist" in the African Great Lakes region, if that--proved to be far
more perspicacious than those foreign "seasoned observers" of the
Congo. Indeed, during her landmark visit to the Congo, she made her
now infamous comment to a Kinshasa audience of university students to
the effect that Congolese need to forget the past and move on! Kudos
then to Secretary Clinton for at the very least her keen perception
and for reminding everyone of the ineffaceable and resilient
historical memory of the Congolese.
René Lemarchand rightly castigates what he sees as the common mistake
among "some Belgian historians, like Jean Stengers," in their claim
that "the absence of memories of the Congo Free State among Congolese
is sufficient proof of its negligible impact on present-day
developments."
But Lemarchand himself errs in assuming that there is such an
"absence" or hole in the collective memory of the Congolese and,
quoting out of context Michela Wrong's "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz"
(59, 60) to back his speculation, "that, indeed, amnesia--whether
individual or collective--could sometimes be the only way of dealing
with horror, that human behavior could be altered forever without the
cause being openly acknowledged" (Rene Lemarchand, "The Dynamics of
Violence in Central Africa," 303n3).
According to this piece of pernicious Freudian psychobabble that
rehearses the gist of the topos of Congo as the Heart of Darkness, the
Congolese psyche (both collective and individual) is at bottom
unhinged. A deranged country peopled by millions of psychotics with no
clue about their immediate time-space surroundings!
In other words: the Belgian colonists' cliche of the Congolese as
savages behaving like children has morphed into the postmodern cliche
of the Congolese as amnesiac psychos--the flip side of the same coin,
no matter how sophisticated the jargon in which this latter cliche is
couched.
First, this interpretative flub has since been contradicted by the
famous Congolese historian Elikia M'Bokolo who went with a documentary
film crew in remote villages of Equateur Province where some of the
most horrific incidents of the "Red Rubber" episode took place at the
turn of the 19th century.
Villagers and peasants had still vivid memories of the atrocities that
took place there more than a century ago. They even exactly
remembered the names of the tormentors of their ancestors, those of
the latter who were killed or maimed, as well as the names of western
missionaries who had denounced those crimes at the time.
Secondly, even prior to the documentary in which M'Bokolo was
featured, repeated and strident denounciations of King Leopold's
genocidal rule in the Congo Free State had been the cornerstone of
Mobutu's Afrocentrist ideology called "Authenticity," whose
underpinning was a systematic "deconstruction" of Leopoldian and
Belgian rule--that policy was accompanied by the dismantling of King
Leopold and Henry Morton Stanley's monuments countrywide.
And thirdly, the Congo Free State and its bloody extraction of "Red
Rubber" and other raw minerals feature prominently in the curriculum
of history of Congolese primary and high schools!
So much then for Lemarchand and Wrong's pernicious and wrong-headed
"amnesia" theory (no pun intended) ...
Now, pace Stearns, the claim of Congolese collective and individual
"amnesia" seems to have crept in, in another guise, in his
book--albeit not willingly, I surmise; and a mere (re)check of images
through Google search engine could have saved Stearns's book from this
glaring blunder.
Recounting the aftermath of the fall of Lubumbashi to AFDL and its
mainly Rwandan allied forces in 1997, Stearns states:
"The old flag of the Congo Free State, yellow stars set against a
peacock-blue background was resurrected and unfurled at government
buildings in town" ("Dancing in the Glory of Monsters," 125-126).
Was Mzee Kabila an idiot? Certainly not! The blood-stained flag of the
Congo Free State, the bane of the Congolese in postcolonial Congo?
Definitely not! The Congo Free State flag unfurled by none other than
Mzee Laurent Kabila, a history buff to boot? The very man described
elsewhere in the same book (on page 82 for instance) as a youth who
"could often be found in public libraries in Lubumbashi, [...] his
nose buried in books"? This tale of Mzee Kabila unfurling the hated
flag of the Congo Free State is most definitely a fictional tall tale!
Stearns needs to correct that sloppy mistake in the next edition of
his otherwise gripping book, which I just finished rereading.
Nevertheless, in this particular unfortunate instance involving the
flag, there's this jarring factual error in Stearns' book: the flag of
the Congo Free State consisted of a single big yellow star in its
middle against a dark blue background.
The flag Mzee Laurent Kabila had unfurled at the fall of Lubumbashi
was the flag of the DRC at independence in 1960: a column of 6 yellow
stars on the left corner and a bigger yellow stars in the middle;
representing, respectively, the country's then 6 provinces and one
capital city--against the backdrop of light blue. (This flag has since
been appropriated by PALU party.)
This independence flag was in turn changed when the new DRC
constitution reverted to the flag designed in 1963 and adopted by the
1964 constitution: a yellow star on the upper left, under which a
diagonal of red strip bordered on both sides by thinner yellow strips
runs down from the upper right corner down to the lower left
corner--against a sky-blue background.
It's my contention--tenuous, I must concede--that had Stearns not been
wearing the thick blinders of the Amnesia Theory, he'd have checked
the image of the flag of the Congo Free State on Wikipedia or on
Wikimedia Commons before concocting his outlandish fiction.
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