In and out of the state: Working the boundaries of power in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

Anthropology has often renewed itself by studying collective self-organization beyond the reach of the state. The idea that power usually flows top-down from a state monopoly is increasingly questioned in an era of networks fuelled by interactive decision-making processes that include non-state actors. Power theoretically understood as potentia – the elementary power through which human beings deploy their productive capacities and creative possibilities – is ontologically prior to power expressed as an obsession with order that is often repressive (potestas). Granting precedence to potentia over potestas inevitably leads us to question the conceptual centrality of the state. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has long stood – and stands today – as a symbol of the antithesis of social order, offers much material for reflection on this issue. While this paper considers how people negotiate the boundaries between state and non-state power in the contemporary DRC, its lasting contribution is to revive in a distinctly new way a tradition of anthropology to use the study of stateless societies to pose big critical questions about the institutions on which modern societies rest.

Keywords

Africa Butembo Democratic Republic of Congo global governmentality Nande NGO-oriented literature power Weberian model

Introduction

This paper is an anthropological interrogation of the idea that power usually flows top-down from a state monopoly. It contends that power could theoretically be understood as potentia – which Spinoza understands as the elementary power through which human beings deploy their productive capacities and creative possibilities. The study argues that ‘productive power’ is ontologically prior to power expressed as an obsession with order that is often repressive (potestas). Granting precedence to potentia over potestas inevitably leads us to question the conceptual centrality of the state. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has long stood – and stands today – as a symbol of the antithesis of social order, offers much material for reflection on this issue. While this paper considers how people negotiate the boundaries between state and non-state power in the contemporary DRC, its goal is to revive in a distinctly new way a tradition of anthropology to use the study of stateless societies to pose big critical questions about the institutions on which modern societies rest.

To reach its goal the paper first discusses the traditional ways state power has been conceptualized in Africa. It analyzes a body of academic literature on the state and its sovereign power that has generally been conceptualized as potestas. Second, in empirical support of this theoretical claim, it provides an ethnographic account which calls for a re-conceptualization of the state and the notion of power in central Africa. Finally, it discusses the implications of understanding power to be not only repressive, but also productive. This new understanding of power may help us better to grasp the dynamism of African state formation today.

The silence of the media

When asked to name the conflict that has claimed most lives in Africa during the last decade, most of my American students cite Darfur or Somalia. They are surprised when I show that the Congo conflict has accounted for four million deaths (IRC, 2008), while that in Darfur on a conservative estimate claimed at most 400,000 deaths (United Nations, 2008). Students of contemporary Africa are often surprised that the media have little to say about the Congo conflict.¹ Mahmood Mamdani (2004) believes that the reason for the media’s near silence on the DRC conflict is that two of the major protagonists there, namely, Rwanda and Uganda, are friends of the United States. It would be embarrassing for the Western media, which makes of Rwanda’s post-genocide president Kagame a new Moses, to accuse him of murdering so many Congolese people. Indeed, all attempts to make Kagame and Museveni accountable for the Congo conflict have met with resistance from the US and Britain in the United Nations.² But this line doesn’t really work, given that a number of scholars have begun to criticize Kagame’s recent handling of power in Rwanda (Reyntjens, 2004; Pottier, 2002).

The real cause of the media’s relative silence about the main African conflict today, which has claimed the most victims of any conflict since the Second World War, is that it goes far beyond the categories we usually use to define such conflicts (see Hollar, 2009). In the Congo there are no easily identifiable good guys and bad guys, no regular armies fighting against non-uniformed belligerents. Our usual categories do not work there. This partly explains why journalists, especially foreign journalists, who are used to constructing conflicts according to a binary logic, can’t understand one which involves a government army, a dozen Congolese rebel militias, a dozen foreign rebel groups and UN peace-keepers. The complexities of the Congo war defeat the normal categories of our understanding.

New NGO-oriented literature

In recent decades interest in the Congo has emerged among young Western scholars whose characteristics are that they entered the Congo as NGO workers or consultants and went on to do a PhD in political science on the Congo. As James Ferguson (1990) puts it in the Anti-Politics Machine, NGOs are focused on finding the solutions instead of formulating original problems (see also Mamdani, 2011; Zambakari, 2012). This model generally constructs the problem as being internal and the solution external. As Zambakari and Mandani pointed out, one cannot import solutions. For a solution to be durable it must be home grown.

In her book, The Trouble with the Congo (2010), Autesserre makes a very important remark: many of the conflicts have their roots in local competing legitimacies, and by neglecting these local levels of engagement in favor of national and regional agreements, the international community fails to adequately address the major causes of the conflicts. Autesserre comes to this conclusion after several years of observing and interviewing diplomats, UN personnel, and non-governmental organizations in different countries, including the Congo,³ Kosovo, Afghanistan, India and Nicaragua. The book is indeed the fruit of extensive field work in the DRC since 2001.

However, Autesserre’s The Trouble with the Congo is missing the narrative concerning Congolese efforts to address the conflict. The impression in the book is that Congolese are powerless to solve this conflict at the local as well as the national level. Outside intervention seems absolutely needed. This may be the first flaw of this book: an uncritical belief that Congolese fate is in the hands of outside players. For the author, these outside players are critical in bringing sustainable peace and democracy. This is simply wrong. Congolese are indeed actors from the beginning to the end of these violent processes of primitive accumulation where their history is taking them. Unless the outside world understands this and plays the role of an external actor without emasculating the internal players, they will only unduly prolong these processes, especially in their bloodiest African permutation phases which run deep. There is neither time nor space for the so-called international champions of peace-building and state-building who try to impose a rationalizing outsider’s dictate on this unruly continent. The author discusses demoralized Congolese who took pride in elections (2010: 233). Actually, many Congolese never took pride in the 2006 elections, given the violence before and after the voting process. These elections and their aftermath, characterized by pre-electoral conditions of violence, showed that Congolese were the major actors. For them, the 2006 elections were designed to satisfy the international community that needed to justify the billions spent in the Congo with an election. Major Congolese problems were not to be answered by elections but by a new social contract at the local as well as at the national level. This new deal would have eventually come about had they been left alone to entirely manage their processes of primitive accumulation.

Finally, I would like now to engage with the goal Autesserre sets at the beginning of her book: ‘This book is the first scholarly attempt to understand why all of the intense international peacebuilding efforts, including the largest peacekeeping mission in the world, have failed to build a sustainable peace in the Congo’ (2010: 5). This goal, and the whole enterprise of the book, contains a naivety and an idealism I would like to challenge. A sustainable peace in the Congo could only be built and sustained by the Congolese themselves. It is naïve to think that people who go from one social space to another across the globe without being subject in any sense to those same social spaces would be the key to building a sustainable peace. It is naïve to think that it is an outside people’s burden, especially the UN’s, to solve in a sustainable way the situation in the Congo.

Before coming to Kinshasa, many of the UN agents⁴ had language training and technical training, but not historical courses or any reading list where one could find the work of Mudimbe, Mbembe, Mbokolo, Mamdani, or AbdouMaliq Simone, etc. These critical discourses are not denied, but it is as if it was understood that such discourses were suspended in the interests of groundwork-type basic rights and amenities-type projects at hand. What is troubling is that this sort of brutish common-sense logic is so ridden with problematic assumptions, in particular the tacit sense of the necessity to defer historical complexities by ignoring genealogies of power, complexities of local discourse or histories, or urban habitus, etc.

We enter into a security-state mentality that permeates the types of order and discipline that operate out of Kinshasa, and they bring with them what Povinelli refers to as the ‘calling cards of colonizing capital’, representations such as ‘freedom’, and so on. Those who imagine themselves as purveyors of those necessary goods of modernity, such as ‘freedom’ and ‘security’ (not disagreeable concepts intrinsically, of course), make the crucial move imagining themselves as capable of moving across social spaces without being subject – in any sense – to those same social spaces. They are then a group of global actors engaged in the elaboration of what may very well be a new or incipient kind of global governmentality, for whom Congo and Congolese are purely objects – and never properly historical subjects – upon which various formulations combining ‘compassion’ and international and military policing must be directed in the presumably correct proportions in order to maintain or reinstitute law and order. What is disturbing about this sort of discourse is that it contains specific political content, but pretends to be only about reportage and universal ethics.

Scholars seem to present even the land issue as part of the local reasons why conflict cannot be understood adequately from outside. Unless it is one hundred percent commoditized, land remains in Africa at the level of intimacy and feeling that an outsider could hardly understand. I am not saying that there is no role for an outside actor at the local level. I am saying that the local arena is generally too complicated to understand unless one has spent an extensive period of time in the region – a substantial presence with the intention of understanding without superimposing any pre-formulated claim.⁵ Outside presence is indeed very important to the self-understanding of any local area.

The role of the outside player would be to assist internal players by extending their horizons. This could be done sometimes by remaining passive or by just being there, which is a very difficult request from international community members, ‘purveyors of modernity’ and their so-called ‘culture’. General Africanists limit their research with accurate descriptions and observations. The task for Africans is to incorporate these into a long-term transformative prospective. Quoting Trefon’s Congo Masquerade (2011), Autesserre States that the ‘Congolese State remains a predatory structure, as it has been during most of the Congo’s history’ (2006/2010: 18). This remark satisfies the Africanist, but leaves the African to wonder why the Congo has always been a predatory state. As an African, I want to know the root cause in order to transform this structure.

Even Raeymaekers (2007), whom I met while he was doing fieldwork in Butembo as a consultant of UNICEF/Italy and whom I befriended in the field because he does important research in the region, sees the state as focused on order and potestas. He correctly noticed the struggle by the Nande to keep order and exercise the de facto power of protection despite the absence of a state framework. For Raeymaekers, Nande traders are emerging powerbrokers of the new political order on the Congo–Uganda frontier. However, Raeymaekers couldn’t depart from the understanding of power as potestas, referenced as an ideal mode of organization.

no general code, no agreement on how to regulate society is possible unless it is backed by the establishment of a monopoly over the legitimate use of force; that’s the state (Raeymaekers 2007: 28 the emphasis is mine).

This is partly due to the discipline of political science for which the state is a given and never a questionable constructed entity. Raeymaekers remains faithful to a kind of crystallized notion of the state. He reserves sovereignty as an attribute of the state instead of viewing it as social relation for which the state is an objectivized form at a certain point in time. Following Abrams’ (1988 [1977]: 80) maxim that ‘the only plausible alternative … to taking the state for granted is to understand it as a historical construct’, and unlike Raeymaekers, I understand sovereignty to be that which is inalienable in the human species. As we will see, this way of apprehending sovereignty is much closer to the anthropological appreciation of power as potentia. State power has indeed alienated the sovereign productive power of human beings taken collectively. The above interpretation of sovereignty can be adapted to the Nande as a social formation assuming its destiny by deploying its productive economic and political imagination.

In this context of NGO-oriented literature that emasculates African knowledge production, the response of African elites is to find a theoretically-sophisticated, empirically-grounded, ethnographically and historically rich version of such an argument. We need to bring back the complexities and the deferred genealogies of power in order to carve our own ‘postcolonial’ worlds. This, indeed, is the ‘black man’s burden’ in these violent processes of primitive accumulation that countries like the DRC are going through.

Transnationalism

The anthropological literature on transnationalism focuses particularly on the related mobility of labor and capital, on the globalization of both. Leslie Sklair (1995) recognizes that the central feature of the idea of globalization current in the social sciences is that many contemporary problems cannot be adequately studied at the level of nation-states, in terms of national societies or international relations, but need to be theorized in terms of global (transnational) processes, beyond the level of the nation-state. Global system theory is based on the concept of transnational practices that cross state borders but do not necessarily originate with state agencies or actors.

The debate on transnationalism in anthropology has opposed those for whom the state has lost its raison d’être against those who think that the state is still important. Implicit in the work on transnationalism is the question of whether life across borders involves resistance to nation-states and allows previously marginalized groups to challenge the social hierarchy (Lewitt, 2001). Is the state still relevant in the age of globalization?

Scholars of transnationalism have argued that the exclusionary and the disciplinary power of states, far from fading, is actually growing, and the state may in some places play an active role in the economic and political use of transnational migrants’ organizations (Basch et al., 1994; Smith, 1998). De Genova’s treatment of the ‘illegality’ of undocumented migrations makes sense only within the framework of the nation-state which produces laws that legalize or illegalize migrations:

The character of illegality is produced by immigration laws, which are apprehensible only through the theory of state. Undocumented migrations are … preeminently labor migrations, originating in the uniquely restless creative capacity and productive power. The undocumented character of such movements draws our scrutiny to regimes of immigration laws and so demands an analytic account of the law as such, which is itself apprehensible through a theory of the state. (2002: 423)

Even the ‘transnational production of Mexico in Chicago’, to which De Genova alludes, is taking place in the framework of the US nation-state. Nevertheless, the source of life of transnational trade networks is precisely their capacity to ‘circulate’ across borders regulated by the state, taking advantage of economic differentials imposed by borders rather than being disabled by them. Indeed, the existence of the state is often the key to the organization of migrants’ transnationalism.

In her study of what she called ‘flexible positioning’ of Chinese diaspora subjects in the age of political and capitalist empires, Aihwa Ong (1999) argues that ‘whereas international managers and professionals may be adept at strategies of economic accumulation and maneuvering, they do not operate in free-flowing circumstances but in the environments that are controlled and shaped by nation-states and the capital market’ (1999: 112). The existence of the state, which has to be circumvented, is often the key to the organizations of migrants’ transnational space, as with globalization (Bauman, 1998). I think that transnationalism is more likely to stimulate a transformation of the nation-state as it is known rather than precipitate the disappearance of its function and existence. The Nande benefit from the borders of the DRC state to organize their cross-border trade. The success of this trade is attributed to the link of trust characterizing the networks.

The keenest disagreement between globalization theorists and their opponents, however, concerns the extent to which the nation-state is in decline. This entails disputes over the relevance of terms such as ‘informality’ and ‘illegality’ in the new context of transnationalism, given that in African countries, for example, people have developed informal strategies of survival or even prosperity in the absence of formal structures associated with the developmental state. To call these actions ‘illegal’ maintains the fantasy of the state in its real absence and ignores the point that ‘illegality’ is a constructed form of social relations which has limited historical scope and holds sway only when the conditions of its objectification persist. Why should citizens of the Congo pay taxes when the state that collects them provides no return in terms of public infrastructure? A sort of ‘natural’ resistance has risen from the local level, not so much as a weapon of the weak (Scott, 2000), but as resistance emerging from the inner capacity of human beings to pursue their aspirations through the best social arrangements they can produce. The potestas of the government does not exhaust our human creative capacity to organize power.

Contrary to how he is often read, Weber did not define the state by its monopoly on legitimate force but by its ability to back up its claim upon such a monopoly. ‘A compulsory political organization with continuous operations’, Weber wrote, ‘will be called a “state” insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in enforcement of its order’ (Weber, 1978: 54). As Christopher Krupa (2010) puts it, this little shift of emphasis induces a new understanding of the state, because now we should see even the most brutally material manifestations of state power – the means of force, taxes, bureaucracies, border patrols – not as examples of the state’s true power but as merely the evidence, or ‘symbolic capital’, upon which such claims aspire to legitimacy (Bourdieu, 1999). Philip Abrams (1988 [1977]: 77), echoing Weber, makes this point clearly: ‘Armies and prisons are the back-up instruments of the burden of legitimacy’, he argues. ‘The state for its part never emerges except as a claim to domination.’ Different historical conditions will necessarily determine the sorts of proof that must be marshaled to make any such claim believable (and the consequences suffered if not): here an army, there a property regime, each a claim made in material form. The point, however, is that the state-as-such cannot be found in any of the ‘things’ that appear to reify it, but rather in the ever-dynamic synaptic relays of claim and recognition that insinuate state power into the material relations of everyday life. It is by intervening into these relations and substituting themselves in the location of ‘state’ that emergent power blocs have been most able to justify their command over local populations – this is the groundwork of the production of another form of social formation.

The Weberian idea of the state as a monopoly of force is just one among others. It may or may not work for the West, but it remains a colonial anomaly for countries of the African continent. People often do not primarily identify with the state they live in; it is not for them the most significant ‘imagined community’, to use Benedict Anderson’s category. Identities derived from regional and local associations are usually more significant in people’s daily experience, especially in a world where globalization at one level and regional autonomy movements at the other challenges the nation-state’s raison d’être. Globalization may be defined as a process whereby the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and people become increasingly aware that they are receding (Waters, 1995: 3). As Appadurai puts it, ‘deterritorialization is one of the central forces of the modern world, since it brings laboring populations into the lower class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while sometimes creating an exaggerated and intensified sense of criticism attached to the politics of the home state’ (1996: 301). The social relations emerging from these contemporary developments are not confined within the borders of nation-states. Thus, they may be regarded as transnational, a term which indicates a relation over and beyond, rather than between or inside nation-states.

As a search for more creative ways of organizing the social contract, transnationalism is more likely to stimulate a transformation of the nation-state as it is, rather than to make its functions and existence disappear. MacGaffey has shown that Nande traders benefit from the borders of the DRC state when organizing their cross-border activities. Drawing inspiration from her, I spent more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in the Nande region of eastern DRC as a participant observer of how Nande people seized on a marginal economic advantage in the middle of chaos and built a relatively thriving micro-polity for themselves.

The Nande of North Kivu: An ethnographic account

I carried out ethnographic field research among Nande people for 14 months in Butembo in the north Kivu territory of Beni-Lubero. Briefly, in the past decade endemic conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has precipitated the collapse of public authority and the brutal disintegration of the formal state. The facts are well known: four million dead, entire zones of the country controlled by foreign armies, and the withdrawal of the state from an effective presence in several regions (IRC, 2006; UN, 2008; Coleman, 2005; ICG, 1998–2007). In the midst of this chaos, however, certain ethnic groups have been able to take advantage of the state’s absence to prosper and institute new forms of order and development.

In the next pages the paper will illustrate an empirical example of power understood as potentia it describes a Group of Congolese traders who took the destiny in their own hands in the midst if war. In the absence of effective state sovereignty and national government and in the presence of numerous armed contenders for power, Nande traders have managed to build and protect a self-sustaining, prosperous transnational economic enterprise in eastern Congo. But why them and what gave the Nande the capacity to extract their population from despotic and predatory rule, from the exercise of power as potestas?

North Kivu is predominantly inhabited by the Nande in northern Beni and Lubero, by the Banyarwanda (primarily Bahutu and some Tutsi) in Rutshuru and Masisi, and the Hunde in Walikale. There is no linguistic relation between these groups. The name Nande is of relatively recent origin. Elderly people in the region do not remember the term being used in their youth, and it is thought to have been introduced by the Belgians, or possibly by Arab slave and ivory traders who penetrated the northern Mitumba Mountains region at the end of the 19th century. The term ‘Yira’ was used to speak of the Kinande-speaking people in general, but this term took on derogatory connotations during the colonial period, when it was used to refer to backward, uncivilized persons. Yira sometimes refers to the lower social strata of the population (Bergmans, 1970: 8). Rather than adopting a cultural definition, anthropologists such as Bergmans and Remotti (1993) see the term Yira as a reflection of a triple opposition. First against the Hima pastoralist ruling class (this division is also present in other traditional interlacustrine kingdoms, such as Toro, Ankole, and Bunyoro); second, as agriculturalists in opposition to the land-owning aristocracy (in Nande traditional society); and finally as primitives in opposition to the civilized in the context of colonial society. This socio-economic status was also traditionally linked to the customary authorities’ tolerance of others engaging in private commerce. Such acceptance of private initiatives apparently stimulated a spirit of ‘constructive competition’, which allowed individuals to measure their success against that of others (Sarata, 2002: 40). This was in sharp contrast to surrounding communities where the customary chiefs had the tendency to strangle merchant initiatives. In the Hunde community from Bwiti and Bwisha in North Kivu, for example, a vassal was not allowed to be richer than the local chief (Mwami) (Kasay, 1988).

Nande entrepreneurs in Butembo in 2005

When I arrived in Butembo⁶ in August 2005, there was a ‘strange’ atmosphere of peace and security on the Lubero-Beni axis, in which Butembo is centrally located. To the north of this axis is the Ituri Region with its well-documented troubles and massacres.⁷ To the south are the remaining territories of the North Kivu province, including Masisi, Walikali and Rutsuru. These three territories are home to many armed groups. Dissident General Nkundabatware is based in Masisi with 2000 armed militiamen; Rutsuru is dominated by the presence of the Forces Démocratiques pour la Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR),⁸ and Walikali is still marred by ethnic tensions between Hunde and residents of Rwandan origin. At the geographic center of the troubled North Kivu region and neighboring Ituri, Butembo was truly a safe haven.

The impression of generalized security was reinforced by the apparent security of commodity trading. Butembo is a veritable warehouse where hundreds of tons of merchandise are stored. From interviews and observations, I concluded that through persistent enterprise and occasional communication with other (non-Nande) traders, the Nande have slowly developed business alliances and friendly relations that sometimes resemble an enduring sense of ‘family’. Regardless of peace or war, Nande traders have the financial capital and trust to borrow containers of goods from traders in Dubai, Hong Kong, or Taipei, sell them in the region, and return the initial investment as hard currency to the owners.⁹ This is indeed paradoxical as a political economy on the edge of the edge. Nande show stability, creativity, and innovation within a broad context of ungovernance. It unfolds in a way that is both transformative and reshapes the issues of political struggle between the DRC state, the UN, and the local entrepreneurs and elites. This creates tension not only for the conventional narrative of African political economy, but also for the expectations that the international community has about the state, its capacity, and what happens on the ground.

Nande traders are able to create such an extensive transnational environment of trust and partnership partly because of their homogeneous ethnicity and kinship. The homogeneity of the population and especially the trading community is striking in Butembo. Out of hundreds of small and big businessmen, I knew of only one who was not a Nande. This ethno-linguistic homogeneity has helped to insulate the entire Nande group from the civil war in the surrounding country. This homogeneity is demonstrated in a ‘vast network of tributes’ and a relationship which finds its contemporary expression in the Nande’s economic organization, as this study will show. Ultimately, the economic activities taking place in the current informal sphere are to be understood foremost as particular expressions of the social dynamic of the societies that develop them: economic agents mobilize and use resources for economic development as a function of their insertion into a plurality of social networks, primarily of family and kin, but also friends, neighbors and other members of the community.

It is important to note that the Yira never seem to have organized themselves into a centralized government. On the one hand, their community remained historically divided between the Nande and the Kondjo, two branches of the Yira community that live respectively in the DRC and Uganda today. On the other hand, the Nande community is also divided between several clans or sub-clans: the Nyisanza, Bashu, Baswagha, Batangi and Bamate. This political dispersion resulted in the maintenance of a certain degree of local autonomy, even though they were integrated into a single kingdom.

For Bergmans (1970), the Nande political system contains in itself the seeds of a fragmentation of power. The Nande political system also contained important centrifugal tendencies that were directed more towards expansion and conquest than territorial consolidation (Raeymaekers, 2007). This illustrates how the claim of ‘sovereignty’, rather than being an expression of a single ruler or actor, finds its expression in a system of codes and rules that govern a particular social domain. In the Nande community, ‘sovereignty’ was traditionally instituted in two figures: the Mwami, the chief, and the Mughula, a kind of anti-power figure who intervened in crucial phases of the Mwami’s life. Indeed, this ‘sovereignty’ is expressed specifically in the ‘vast network of tributes’ that made it possible to individuate particular links between different clans and persons (Remotti, 1933: 45).

Through their transnational trading activities, Nande people today have produced and organized themselves around a historically specific social arrangement based on a reconfiguration and mobilization of kinship, as well as ethnic ideologies and practices identified with ‘Nandeness’ (an ensemble of social relations in which human productive powers and creative capacities are paramount). Indeed, Nande people have managed to insulate themselves from the chaotic conditions around them and maintain a framework of public order centered on trading networks that reflect the structures and values of indigenous Nande society as well as the history of their incorporation into international networks and structures. The Nande’s capacity to exercise their potential today has its origins in the centrifugal tendencies in their traditional social organization.

I will explore here the origins, reproduction and conditions of possibility for the emergence of a network of transnational traders in Butembo, who have gradually captured the social and economic surplus within the Nande society. This group includes at the top of the commercial hierarchy in Butembo and its hinterland a dozen import-export traders who are millionaires. They import from East Africa, the Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia, and China containers of goods ranging from motorbikes, automobiles, and spare parts to textiles, medicine, and many other commodities. They export agricultural products including coffee, potatoes, beans, papaya, latex, and other vegetables, in addition to minerals such as gold, coltan, wolfram, and cassiterite. The group maintains a high level of internal cohesion and trust between its members.

If you stand on any hilltop of Butembo, you can observe the growing wealth of the city. New villas, constructed by traders, are rising up all over. In the central commune of Bulenghera (12 sq. km) these properties proliferate. A shopping center, ‘Gallery Tsongo Kasereka’, reportedly cost around US$3 million to build. The total value of new real estate in Butembo is roughly US$20 to 35 million. Prices have skyrocketed in recent years. A friend of mine, the son of a prominent Butembo trader who holds a bachelor’s degree from a school in Boston, is building a mansion that will cost US$400,000 when it is finished next year. All of the construction materials are imported from China. His swimming pool will be one of the biggest in the city.

Catholic University of Graben

This institution of higher education in Butembo was created 10 years ago by the Roman Catholic bishop of Butembo, Monsignor Kataliko, with the help of Nande traders. The Catholic University of Graben (UCG) is among the best institutions of higher education in the Congo. Despite the trouble which has characterized the Congo from 1996 to this day, UCG has continued to function with its four faculties of law, civil engineering, medicine, and political science. Most of the auditoria were built with the help of traders. To equip the university library, the bishop provided a list of 100 books to each trader to buy for the library. Each trader was proud to provide the 100 books asked for by the bishop. Many of the books come from the collaboration between UCG and the University of Grenoble in France. The university also contains a nutritional center and medical school student practice at the Matanda hospital run by the Catholic Church. Medicine for the nutritional center and Matanda hospital is imported by Nande traders. To solve the problem of personnel, the university flies in professors from all over the DRC, and many Nande professors who live in Europe come regularly back to Butembo to teach at UCG without compensation. The UCG has solved the problem of higher education in the region. Before the creation of the Catholic University, students had to travel to Kisangani in Oriental Province or to Kinshasa to pursue their higher education. The rector of the UCG, Abbe Malu-Malu, was selected to organize the 2006 general elections in the DRC, which has not had a democratic election in 40 years. The university is involved in the development of the city’s electrification, and traders are employing engineers from the UCG to that end.

The first question is: Where does the money come from? How do they accumulate so much? Before I try to answer that, I would argue that the emerging property market in Butembo comes from economic activity that is ‘embedded’ in the local community. Unlike the capital flight we see from some DRC politicians who are anxious to establish a stake abroad, in Butembo houses are built at home and only some abroad, while profits are invested in the same environment where they are being made.

Butembo commercial traditions predate the current era of globalization. Vwakyanakazi (1982: 2) noted, already in the 1970s, that 75 to 80 percent of households in Butembo were selling goods ranging from agricultural foodstuffs to small household necessities. Today, on every corner of Butembo, there are mini-shops, boutiques, and galleries offering cell phone cards at $1 or $5 a piece, high-quality computer equipment, motorbikes, etc. Market women usually sell foodstuffs like onions, beans, tomatoes, or araque (an alcoholic maize drink). These small trades usually reflect domestic needs for petty cash to cover a family’s immediate concerns or school fees. The retail trade in cars, computers, textile, or electric engines is no different from what is taking place in the globalized world, except for the level of bargaining involved. Everything in Butembo’s market, from the quality of the product to delivering the merchandise, is subject to endless bargaining between vendors and their clients.

The Nande trading association, a branch of the Federation of Congolese Entrepreneurs known by its French acronym FEC, regulates how traders tend to each 50 km of road they are in charge of. This involves running the tollgate and using the revenue to mend the road. This is the only part of the country which has good roads beside the minerals region of Katanga. When one of the sections of road is not functioning, the trader in charge has to answer to other users of the road. Local social control can be quite effective.

In brief, Butembo maintains a sort of social cohesion thanks to an alliance between traders, who are in charge of economic production, the Catholic Church¹⁰ in charge of the development sector, and the militia responsible for the exercise of coercive power. Militias are in fact junior partners to traders,¹¹ capitalists who ultimately have real production as their base of accumulation, while the only economic resource the militias have is the sheer piracy of their arms. Many of the militia are former choir members and altar boys, hence the strong respect they display towards the bishop and the Catholic Church hierarchy. In fact there seems to be a very clear social and political hegemony of the Nande ‘bourgeoisie’, legitimated through the Church officialdom premised upon not one but several relatively mobile formations of violence that supply the ultimate resources of coercion and thus social order.

When power as potestas is absent, we have been led (from Hobbes onwards) to assume that selfishness will reign; thus, a ‘failed state’ adversely affects the lives of all who continue to believe in its aegis, and its weakness ensures suffering for anyone who does not manage to circumvent the system. These circumventions are understood not only as corruption but as criminal acts from which only a few will benefit. The economy is inseparably linked to this model of the state. A strong state survives because it can regulate production, trade and profit (through taxation, etc.), thus sustaining itself (and the society as a whole). Accordingly, when a state is politically and economically unstable, weak, or absent, it is commonly supposed that all will suffer.

The informal economy is particularly irksome because its works outside state (and taxation) structures. As a symptom of the state’s ‘weakness’, therefore, a thriving informal economy is identified with the poor health of the society at large. Power as potestas is fetishized in our political theories and popular beliefs. The association of weak states with economic regression or poor economic performance is a recurrent theme in economic development literature. Besley and Persson recall the link between state capacity and weak states: ‘the absence of state capacities to raise revenue and to support markets is a key factor in explaining the persistence of weak state’ (2009: 1). Students of political science and political anthropology see in non-state social networks a danger to the formation of a Weberian state (Bayart et al., 1999; Collier, 2007; Duffield, 2001; Keen, 2008; Reno, 2006; Roitman, 2004). For example:

Pioneers of modern Africa, fraudsters, diamond diggers, the currency exchangers and immigrants, all find ways to escape from the law, boundaries and official exchanges … It is through these social practices of fraud, illegal immigration, and the drug trade that Africa is inserted in the international system. (Bayart et al., 1999: 260)

Non-state social networks, on this view, are characterized by a logic of poverty, predation and provincialism that block the real development of the country.

The Congolese state, as other African states, are top-down institutions created by colonial powers who considered them as economic spaces (extractive spaces) and never as political spaces where people have claims on their soil and below-ground resources. In other words, post-colonial states in Africa are essentially colonialist creations¹² under new management, and they conform to a Weberian ideal type.¹³ The Nande originality is to try to negotiate their way out at the margin of this predatory form of state.

Within the territories of Beni and Lubero, the state is surely very weak, even absent. Yet the Nande have thrived in this context. To call their actions ‘corrupt’ is to apply a one-dimensional view to a very complex picture with a complicated history. The alleged paradox of this situation is that the Nande traders are rich, yet the entire area prospers; they amass fortunes and they feed them back into the community. As a result, this is one of the few regions in the DRC with a flourishing economy, decent schools, and health care. They do not rely on the nation’s ports, but rather have strong ties that take them regularly to the Middle East and East Asia. The potentia begins with trade and is carried on within the region by social organization outside the framework of the state. Transgression of frontiers through this transnational move is fueled by a creative capacity to free oneself from the territorial impositions of despotic rulers, who exercise potestas.

A transnational network

Nande people do not identify primarily with the DRC state; it is not their most significant ‘imagined community’. Their identity derives from belonging to networks that are more significant in their daily experience. The transnational production of Nande community through ‘illegal’ or ‘informal’ cross-border trading activities shows that these are not only strategies for survival but also ‘spaces of resistance against the violence generated by the failure of a postcolonial mode of accumulation, the state’s dictatorship and its episteme of leadership’ (Mbembe, 1993: 3). Hence, even the concept of ‘illegality’ becomes questionable. Laws which make actions legal or illegal are indeed forms of social relations objectified or codified under certain conditions. If the conditions of the codification of the law disappear, the law loses its relevance. Legality and illegality are, in my view, ‘dependent variables’ whose value depends on the continuing existence of the conditions which led to social relations being codified as law.

The present paper has mobilized ethnography to illuminate the potentia of the Nande by showing what is remarkable, innovative, resilient, and creative about their networks and their transnational production of ‘local’ community. However, we shouldn’t relinquish the critical vantage of this relative social success.

The Nande’s construction of a peaceful trading community in the midst of war shows how their particular form of transnationalism and ‘ethnic’ insularity colludes with internecine (even genocidal) violence in its seemingly remote home on the distant borders of a ‘collapsed’ state. Horrendous civil wars like the Congo’s may provide opportunities for a cynical restructuring of global capital accumulation where effective access to valuable resources is what matters to capital and the lives and limbs of those who inhabit that particular corner of the planet are utterly expendable. Seen in this light, the Nande’s newly found desire to keep government at a distance while relying on governance through local leadership mechanisms could be said to articulate a kind of neoliberalism: one where a weak national state serves as a hollow shell, providing minimal security and stability for unhindered capital accumulation, and the so-called free market is entirely unencumbered; local communities and networks are free from the onerous regulations, interference, and impositions of a state that might otherwise, if only occasionally, be an impediment to plunder.

The Nande do not desire full autonomy or complete separation from the DRC state nor anything resembling a Nande ‘national’ self-determination; rather, they welcome attempts to stabilize the national state, but only in a relatively weak and unobtrusive form that would leave them uninvolved by intrusive state surveillance and excessive taxation of their transnational and cross-border trade. In short, they prefer an arrangement not very different from the situation that has persisted in various forms throughout recent decades (even back into the Mobutu era). The Nande capitalist class welcomes the same sort of frail neoliberal national state that appeals to the agenda of global corporations interested in the DRC’s resources. At the same time, a pernicious armed conflict in this region, the Kivus of East Congo, has claimed four million lives or more. The Nande case is ostensibly outside of or exempted from this horrific calamity, but it actually underlies and helps to explain its persistence.

What I have just said is true, but so too is the observation that, in all of the DRC’s troubles, Butembo offers a glimpse of a newly emerging African society. In more stable countries with prosperous cities like Dar es Salaam or Luanda, Accra or Dakar, a gradual transformation is taking place in the hands of an emergent ruling class where money-making is linked to state contacts at home and abroad; but the economic and political spheres are not so starkly demarcated, given continuities with a past from which there has been no violent break (Freund, 2009). This is an Africa that is slowly divesting itself of the neocolonial ties that dominated the years after independence. The Nande offer a sharper image of the direction in which Africa is really moving. The horrors of war in the eastern Congo may not just block what we wish to think of as ‘development’; they might also be speeding along those processes. With the economic cosmopolitanism¹⁴ of the Nande business class, I have demonstrated, the case of the Nande shows the ontological primacy of power as potentia – creativity and productivity – over power as repression or potestas. Because a colonially-imposed state did not take root in the African continent, many states, especially the DRC, have survived as predatory states for the last 50 years. The existence of the Nande order is indeed dependent on the surrounding conditions of chaos in the DRC. In that sense it is a symptom of larger problems of the inadequacy of the state as a form of social organization in Africa. However, by the same token, social and political order in the Nande region shows us that in the midst of a dire situation it is always possible to create a sense of order and prosperity. In this sense Nande political order is a solution to the larger conditions of predation and chaos.

There is an urgent need for new theorizations of power that can grasp a context where the state is neither the necessary core nor the only unit of analysis. The Nande case shows that the state is never the only and exclusive form of social relations; social relations are, rather, ‘always un-predetermined, agonistic, and unresolved’. These ‘relations of struggle’ entail a ‘full panoply of contests over the objectification and fetishization of human productive powers as alien forces of domination’ for which ‘the state tends … to be the hegemonic manifestation’ (De Genova, 2007: 442; see also Holloway, 1994). The Nande region is one of many places where the state is continually experienced and undone through the illegibility of its own practices, documents, and words. Unlike the rationalized world of Weberian abstractions, the DRC state, as seen from its margins, is inscrutable, incoherent, unpredictable, and unreliable. But to characterize these features as a ‘failure’ is merely to retain and recapitulate the illusion of inevitable state dominance.

I have tried in this paper to dissolve the state as a rigid category while seeking to understand the state as a social form, as a form of social relations (Holloway, 1994). By defining the state as a social phenomenon, as relations between people, I hope to recognize the creativity, fluidity, unpredictability and instability of this category. Indeed, these relations have been solidified as certain forms that have acquired their own autonomy, their own dynamic. The semblance of rigidity accorded the state in some classical conceptions and led to the appearance, that he is a given and positive fact. The notion that African states have failed or collapsed is part of the same drive to reify and fetishize the colonially-imposed model of statehood. The state in Africa is a colonial abnormality which needs to be rethought in the light of the local creative and productive capacities of Africans themselves in order to build de-centralized social arrangements from the bottom-up that are more suited to the realities of struggles on the ground.

The central question is then what kinds of international regime, government, and economic organization will help Africans overcome centuries of being at the bottom of a racialized world order. It seems that harping on about what was often less than a century of colonial rule might take us nowhere. In other words, what forms of public order are compatible with African economic development? This is related to the state, sovereignty, and the ultimate source of legitimacy – the people. As Jane Guyer has shown more effectively than anyone, especially in Marginal Gains (2004), most academic discourse on this topic has been a dialogue of the deaf between an exogenous economics, a political theory which ignores what actually happens on the ground and a parochial ethnography that cannot see the wood for the trees. Combining repeated fieldwork with a broad regional history, Guyer found synthetic understanding that avoided both traps.¹⁵ This paper goes further by showing what we can learn from some of the relatively successful stories on the ground – a lot of these owe very little to forms of national government.¹⁶

Understanding power as potentia

The potentia/potestas way of understanding power makes it evident that there was life before the colonial state and its epigones came to monopolize all political debate.¹⁷ The current situation in the Congo begs for the introduction of new categories in order to understand its situation and to break the silence around its predicament. In the absence of state sovereignty and the presence of numerous contenders for coercive power, Nande traders have managed to protect their self-sustaining and prosperous transnational enterprises in eastern Congo. Perhaps their example reflects the direction towards which 21st-century Africa is really moving. In order to understand this Africa, we need to abandon old theorizations of power and sovereignty. The Nande case shows us that, before being an attribute of the state, sovereignty is an ontological and inalienable quality of the human species. Power in this context is fundamentally an elementary aspect of human possibility and creative capacities. Resources are present to enhance the sovereignty of a population by allowing the latter to deploy its potential. Reified and rigid notions of state power and sovereignty confront and are contradicted by the flexibility of human relations and by the productive capacities inherent in human nature unleashed by a theorization of power as potentia.

Potentia might give us hope and new energy to find a way forward out of the current political impasse in much of Africa where state power is monopolized by a class whom Moeletse Mbeki (2009) described as ‘architects of poverty’, a corrupt and parasitic elite who derive rent from mediating the predation of the region by foreign powers. On the face of it, the DRC is the most egregious example of this tendency.

But historical change is often rapid (as China’s 20th-century experience shows), and this study seeks to combine local knowledge with a new conceptual apparatus and more progressive vision of the possibilities there. Since the ability of the Kinshasa government to rule eastern Congo is in shreds, Rwanda’s Tutsi generals and Uganda’s Museveni, along with major powers such as the US, Britain, and South Africa, have handed over the regime’s wealth to be distributed between transnational corporations, local warlords, and, as we see in this case study, African merchant networks (United Nations, 2008, 2012). The focus of this paper is on the character and the significance of one such commercial class. The merchants act as a genuine bourgeoisie, providing for the welfare of a town, Butembo, under the supervision of a Catholic bishop, and with its own university and relatively domesticated militias. The relatively prosperous outlook of the city is sustained by long-distance trade, especially in precious metals, and possibly with more compromising state support outside the DRC borders.

This empirical case study shows that in a chaotic situation or one of protracted, fragmented and proliferating violence, it is always possible to construct political and economic order, relying on agencies of governance other than the state. Indeed, new kinds of regulation and governance practice, which have emerged from the retreat of state power, are shaping the ongoing formation of a genuinely postcolonial state. In the 1980s and 1990s Janet MacGaffey (1991) showed a noticeable difference between the Nande entrepreneurial spirit and the parasitic state of Zaire. The field work I undertook in 2000 shows how the Nande adapted to incremental changes and to the implosion of the Zairian state and maintain to this day social order and relative prosperity. These are both examples of processes of bottom-up development that combine the authority of individual leaders with the more dispersed formations of trust-based social networks that control and mobilize vast sums of money. While these processes may involve the gradual ascendency of a new ‘middle class’ or bourgeois class formation, they also sustain much wider forms of local and regional development that can potentially transform national-scale politics and contribute to more peaceful and just societies. It is in this respect that the Nande as social formation differs from other more violent fragments of political formations that are fighting in the periphery of the Nande region (FDLR, ADF-NALU, etc.)

This is an Africa that is slowly divesting itself of the neocolonial links which seemed dominant in the years after independence. The horrors of war in the eastern Congo may block what we wish to think of as ‘development’, but they might also be speeding the process whereby power as ‘repression’ is giving way to power as ‘production’. Efforts by some scholars, such as Zartman (1995), to restore the ‘pre-failed arrangement’ only guarantee the failure of their own policy recommendations.

The current situation in the Congo can only be understood if the way we think of power refers back to individual creative and productive instincts. Since many scholars cannot go beyond the Westphalian categories of power and sovereignty (potestas), they see the Congo as nothing more than a desperate ‘failed state’. If this is so for many Western scholars, their journalists are running out of categories to define the Congo conflict. It is a conflict that blows up the division between good guys and bad guys (terrorists or enemy combatants) on which their traditional construction of conflict is based. In the Congo case, the local militias, government soldiers, Congolese rebels, Ugandan, Rwandan, or Burundian rebels, and the UN peace (or war) keepers all share a social space where mineral extraction remains the common denominator and women’s bodies constitute the frontline of the conflict. Imprisoned in their binary logics, the Western media are rendered speechless by a linguistic repertoire wholly inadequate to address the complexity of the DRC’s predicament.

The use of Spinoza’s conceptual pair ‘potestas/potentia’ provides a thought-provoking way of asserting once more that what matters first is human life, and a better knowledge of its sources is essential if we are to discover how to make the world a better place for us all to live in. The bottom line is that discussion of empirical questions has been driven by the political question: ‘Whither the African state?’ This is linked inevitably to the issue of which political forms are best suited to Africans’ search for a better life, a life they can see on television every day – in other words, for economic development.

As in the rest of the world, there are serious doubts about the adequacy of existing political forms to resolve a growing global crisis. But paradoxically, while North Atlantic societies and their offshoots like South Africa stagnate, the economies of many parts of Africa are expanding rapidly. The Nande case study shows one way forward towards economic independence. Nande success can be seen as a ‘model’ whose features can be replicated or adapted elsewhere in Africa in general, and in the DRC in particular. Nande social formations and networks could play a decisive role in the business of peace and nation-building in the chaotic and sometimes genocidal situation of the DRC. In the Nande case this process seems to work through the power and prestige of Catholic bishops as well as through the Protestant work ethic with its comparatively egalitarian values and its support for entrepreneurship. This study departs from the ubiquitously expanded and reified notion of the state as a greater or lesser monopoly of ‘legitimate’ coercive power exercised spatially over a limited territory. Instead, it asserts that the state is fundamentally a form of social relation codified at a certain point in history. It therefore begs for a reconceptualization of the state and its power – dissolving the state as a category and understanding it not as an entity in and of itself but as a form of social relations where potentia has precedence over potestas.

Footnotes

Notes

Patience Kabamba is a Congolese lecturer and author of Business of Civil War: New Form of Life from the Debris of the Congolese State. He has degrees in philosophy from Paris and Leuven, in economic development from the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, and in cultural anthropology from Columbia University. He has taught at the University of Johannesburg and Marymount Manhattan College. He was a UNDP consultant in Kinshasa on issues of proliferation of small arms and light weapons and worked as a counselor of prisoners and single mothers in Cameroon, DRC, Chad, Burkina Faso, and France. He is now a visiting professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg. He is also a consultant at the World Bank on issues of governance and accountability. He has intensive ethnographic experience of emergent social formations when states disintegrate in war-torn Africa: in DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. His theoretical interests include the dynamics of conflict, new state formations, transnational trade networks, ethnicity and global political and economic governance.

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