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Abstract
The declining salience of the nation state has led to an interest in whether other socially constructed forms, such as the city, have replaced it as a source of accumulation, belief and identity. This article seeks to explore whether this is true in the case of the capital of one of Africa's least successful states, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A survey explored the views towards the city of Kinshasa on the past of a variety of middle-class professional people as potential leaders in different occupations resident in different quarters of the city with roots in different parts of the DRC. Despite their somewhat abject material condition and despite extensive contacts internationally, the old dream of the nation state remains relatively strong among them while feelings towards the city largely reflect its situation in that dream rather than any new kind of loyalty. Members this class have extensive national networks of professional contact that help define their identity. New kinds of urban identity with cultural or political meaning beyond this could not be discerned contrary to the perspective held out initially.
Acknowledgements
I have profited from contacts with DRC scholars, in particular Professor David Newbury of Amherst College, Dr Jules Kassay of the Université de Kinshasa, Dr Patience Kabamba, presently at the University of Johannesburg and Pedro A.G. Monaville, engaged currently in fieldwork in Kinshasa. Professor Selemani of the Sociology Department, Université de Kinshasa, was also of great help to us. In improving methodological interpretation, I am grateful for the assistance of Professor Owen Crankshaw of the University of Cape Town.
Notes
1. For figures showing the relative growth patterns of Congolese cities since independence, see Bruneau (Citation1995).
2. Omasombo (Citation2002) on Kisangani, once Stanleyville.
3. A far more substantial discussion of social forces in the DRC since colonial days can be found in a paper available on the Fragile States website (Freund 2009).
4. States and Cities Project, London School of Economics Crisis States Research Centre.
5. Currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Cape Town but previously in the Department Studies Department at the London School of Economics.
6. The city of Kinshasa is now divided into 24 communes, administrative units similar in theory to arrondissements and equivalent districts in European cities. Communes were introduced by the Belgians in 1957 originally.
7. This austere view of the pleasures of the city goes back to Patrice Lumumba himself, who had very little of a political base in Leopoldville as it was still known (Tshingi Citation1999).
8. In other words, find your own solution to your problem.
9. A reader of this paper suggested convincingly that the pronouncement of austere values is apt to be a declaration of moral (and cultural) superiority that can typify a class on the decline unable to demonstrate its status through signs of prosperity.
10. For a rare exception see Muketa (2008). Muketa is strongly implicated in the government in recent years.
11. The old Belgian residential area of Ngaliema contained the one small gated community that had been erected. Kinshasa has no modern shopping malls.
12. For a grim picture of private clinics selling drugs and medical equipment illegally and in an uncontrolled manner so that personnel can make ends meet, see Ndaywel è Nziem (Citation2002).
13. ‘Until the economic recession, the diploma constituted the key to happiness and for the access to power and the richness of the country’, (Tshingi Citation2007, 130, author translation). One could argue that educated Congolese take to heart the truths about class and education delineated famously by Pierre Bourdieu in his analysis of French higher education (Bourdieu and Passeron Citation1970). This system has changed in complex and contradictory ways, it can be argues, in Europe itself since Bourdieu wrote.
14. For a summary of the economy as it looked in the middle 1960s, see Young (Citation1965), 208–9), Williame (Citation1992), Peemans (Citation1986), for a later view.
15. Muketa (2008) captures some of this as though it were still the true image of the city today.
16. It should, however, be stressed that the Assembly and the parliament elected more recently consisted in good part of educated, professional Congolese. In the case of those who succeeded in entering the legislature, this clearly was potentially the road to fortune and a chance to rise far above the bulk of interviewees considered in this article. Here too participation in national politics has remained very desirable and significant in class terms.