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The story of a tragedy: how people in Haut-Katanga interpret the post-colonial history of Congo*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2009

Benjamin Rubbers
Benjamin Rubbers*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle, Université de Liège, 7 boulevard du rectorat, 4000 Liège, and Laboratoire d'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 44 avenue Jeanne, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
*
Email: brubbers@ulg.ac.be
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Abstract

In order to give an account of the Congolese tragedy since independence, the inhabitants of Haut-Katanga often resort to four different narratives: the abandonment by Belgium; the biblical curse on Africans; the conspiracy of Western capitalism; or the alienation of life powers by Whites. Though these four stories offer different scenarios, they are all constructed with two types of actors – Whites and Congolese people. This article suggests that this racial/national frame finds its origins in colonial and national ideologies, which have left their mark on Haut-Katanga, and that it continues today to structure the narratives through which people remember their post-colonial history. Collective memory and racial/national identity are reciprocally constituted in these stories, but in different terms. They offer, accordingly, different ways of influencing the present.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 267 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

This article was written at the University of Oxford while I was a recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fondation Wiener-Anspach. Fieldwork in Haut-Katanga was carried out thanks to a research fellowship from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Fondation Bernheim, Belgium. The ideas contained in this article benefited from discussions during two seminars in 2006 at the University of Lubumbashi. Participants illustrated my analysis with new anecdotes, and pushed me to clarify some crucial points about the history and the social distribution of the four narratives. I am also grateful to David Pratten, Pierre Petit and Joël Noret for their critical reading of early drafts. Lastly, I would like to thank Christopher Clapham and the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Modern African Studies. The final version owes much to their insightful comments. All are of course exonerated from any association with the views expressed in this article.

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