Rumba In Kinshasa - Politics and music in the Congo

Violence in/and the Great Lakes: The Thought of V.Y. Mudimbe and Beyond

7 to 9 August 2013

ELRC, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.

This colloquium is organised by the Thinking Africa project of the

Department of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University, in

collaboration with Grant Farred from Cornell University. The colloquium

reflects on the work of VY Mudimbe using these reflections to consider the

current situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Participants in

the colloquium include VY Mudimbe (Duke, USA), Grant Farred (Cornell, USA),

Gervais Désiré Yamb (Ottawa, Canada), Fabien Eboussi Boulaga (Yaoundé,

Cameroon) Olga Hel-Bongo (Laval, Québec), Justin K. Bisanswa (Laval, Québec)

and Kasereka Kavwahirehi (Ottawa, Canada).

Mbongi A NsiI: A New Possible Way Of Organizing Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo

MBONGI A NSI: A NEW POSSIBLE WAY OF ORGANIZING POLITICS IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO by TigersEye99

Grant Farred: Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of

Grant Farred: Not the Moment After, but the Moment Of by TigersEye99

Cocoa is blood and they are eating my flesh

Toby Green, London Review of Books

• Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa by Catherine Higgs
  Ohio, 230 pp, £24.95, June 2012, ISBN 978 0 8214 2006 5

For centuries, the region that now straddles northern Angola and the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo formed a political and cultural whole. South of what the BaKongo knew as the Zaire river lay the heartland of the Kingdom of Kongo, one of the most powerful states of West-Central Africa. Kongo sat at the crossroads of trade routes linking the forests of the interior with the arid coastal areas near Luanda, in Angola, and the savannahs of the plateau further north. These deep-rooted connections meant that slaving wars in one area influenced the political stability of the rest of the region. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, Kongo and Ndongo – the kingdom at the heart of what is now Angola – fractured into warring statelets whose main business was to bring slaves to the coast, thus helping Atlantic slavery to reach ever further into Central Africa. These countries remain interlocked, involved in geopolitical struggles for coltan, diamonds, oil and timber.

Lumumba’s death: Could we (Africans) have acted differently?

The great success of the enemies of Africa is to have corrupted the Africans themselves.  It is true that these Africans had vested interest in the murder of Lumumba.  Heads of puppet governments, in a fake independence, faced everyday by massive opposition from their peoples, it did not take long to convince themselves that the real independence of the Congo would put them personally at risk.  And there were other Africans, a little less puppet, but who get frightened when it comes to disengaging Africa from the West.  It seems as if these African Heads of State are still afraid to face Africa.  These, also, though less actively, but consciously, contributed to the deterioration of the situation in Congo.  Little by little, we were reaching the agreement in the West that there was a need to intervene in Congo, we could not let things evolve at this pace.

From Gaza to the Congo: Whose blood is more worthy of attention?

by Khadija Patel, The Daily Maverick

There has been a marked disparity in the coverage of conflict in Gaza and the Congo in recent days. A disparity that has led some to question whose blood is more worthy of mainstream media attention. It’s certainly not a competition, but the disparity and the continuance of these conflicts is an indictment of a lot more than a jaundiced media focus.

In August 2009, around the time I still believed myself to be sane, I interviewed Professor Norman Finkelstein while he visited South Africa on a speaking tour. I was buoyed by the curious combination of nervousness and confidence that only the young and stupid can attest to. Finkelstein had, just months before that, made headlines for losing tenure at the university where he taught owing to his views on Israel. As I spoke to Finkelstein, about Gandhi, colonialism and the legacy of the Holocaust in his own family, I also asked him how he responded to observations that conflict in Middle East was apportioned too much media coverage. What about the Congo, where more than 1,000 people were killed in December 2008 – around the same time as Israel’s Operation Cast Lead? Why does Gaza get more attention than the Congo?

Democratic Republic of Congo: From Destructive to Healing Politics - A Public lecture by Jacques Depelchin - 11 October 2012

Malcolm X on the Assasination of Lumumba in the Congo

Patrice Lumumba