Kinshasa, Dreams of Rememberance
Diasporic tales don’t just offer up stories of place. They also tell of montages from other times. These times aren’t always the same-hope, nostalgia, or even waiting...Waiting to find your people again, or to meet them for the first time. Waiting for a reunion with a familiar country-where other narrative storylines draw themselves. Waiting.
It’s difficult to admit to the waiting., because often, there isn’t a reason for it. We don’t know why we don’t make the journey: when you come from the southern hemisphere of the globe and you land in the northern hemisphere, taking the opposite path seems impossible. Not only for tragic reasons (wars, conflicts), nor even that of forgetting. Sometimes, simply, it’s out of habit. The habit of repeating that you will go back, one day. Ending up by believing in the solidity of this faraway day-all the more solid the more it constantly hides itself away.
For nearly 30 years I have heard the phrase: “We will go back to the DRC”-the country of my father’s ancestors. For nearly 30 years, waiting has constructed maps, put together an itinerary. It has invented lands, tied them to names, has tried to imagine the father as a child (can one really imagine the childhood of our parents?). A village in Kongo-central, Kinshasa-capital, of aunts, of grandparents.
Two years after the 2006 presidential elections the first trip to the DRC took place. My father-in political exile for 30 years-had rediscovered his country’s terrain once, in 1997 after the fall of the Mobutu regime. 2008: he went back to his country with me. How are cities constructed? How are the fantasies of desired places constructed, that time has made impossible? There is neither idealization nor rejection. Sometimes the imagination stays sluggish and doesn’t generate any sparks. Furthermore, you often need to fight against other perspectives so they don’t impose themselves. That of the colonial eye that has patrolled for a century, despite incessant voice-overs, the places it has been able to capture. Or, what’s more, that of nostalgia: the eye that, before anything else, detects in the present that of the past that isn’t there any longer. Nostalgia isn’t only an affect, it’s an architecture of ruins, landscapes in pieces - The architecture of the exile who knows what places, what monuments have been destroyed and have never been replaced.
I discovered Kinshasa like you discover the memory of a man who was 17 at the time of independence, the 30th of June, 1960. The city, not how it is but how it was. Kinshasa attached to the remembrance of exile. Not a morsel of place but a morsel of time. Not the avenues, the streets, the roads but ideas, aspirations, ghosts still alive. In contemporary social science the theme of “African cities”, of their supposed excesses, saturates anthropology journals and the new Africanist studies, Francophone or Anglophone. The city is effectively an object of knowing: how to live there? How to feed it? How are inequalities deployed and reinforced? An empirical object that is witness to the manner in which social positions are distributed, attached and localised. These knowledges, important, remain nonetheless stuck on what is and, in the end, the response they give to this question: “Who lives in the cities?” remains largely unclear. Cities are stories with holes. Not only the asphalt and activity. Spirits, memories, the geographies of those who have left or who still live there.
In diasporic existence, struck by the sorrow of exile, the fact of representing yourself as a place perhaps doesn’t make sense. It’s about, above all, not finding the right words, or believing in the strict suitability of discourse and what the eye sees, but to untangle time, the linking of memories.
I entered Kinshasa as if I travelled in remembrance. The rich memory of youth in the sixties, who experienced the violence of a collapse. That of a dream that has not only shaped the Congo but also a good part of the African continent: the powerful affirmation of independence.
In Les corps glorieux des mots et des êtres (The glorious bodies of words and beings) the philosopher Valentin Mudimbe shows that spatial cohesions are “ the expression of remembrance”. He analyses the way in which, in the Congo under the Belgian colonial administration, a civilising and evangelising mission converted public spaces in the villages, giving them the function of “a specific place”, “a special place”: “the geography of the village [ceases] to be itself in order to reflect a model of conversion” here a colonial model.
Without examining, here, the aggressive strategies of conversion as Mudimbe does, you can also see that spatial cohesion, when it doesn’t come about due to oppressive technologies, reveals dreams, projected desires, rooted in political struggle or the intimacy of the subject. The lived geography of a city like Kinshasa isn’t only a matter of infrastructure or the history of displacement, more or less easy, of its inhabitants. It’s a concatenation of memories. In this geography many narratives intertwine, among those, those of exile that describe one dimension, not all, of diasporic existence. If they bring about violence-tied to the constraints of departures-they also nourish themselves with joy and tenacious hope. The city of Kinshasa, that I travel in, is situated far away from the centre of the Gombe; it mingles with the familial neighbourhoods of Bumbu, Makala, Selembao. And what it is testament to is the multiplicity of lived remembrances. Among these, one of them supremely dominates the present: that of the persistence of adolescent dreams, despite complex histories, side tracked, of collapse.
words. Nadia Yala Kisukidi
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