Fatal misconceptions: colonial durabilities, violence and epistemicide in Africa’s Great Lakes Region

Abstract

The contributions of this special issue explore the concept of colonial durabilities in a bid to unearth both the concrete and invisible sites through which coloniality continues to circulate and materialise in the African Great Lakes Region (GLR). Colonial durabilities, we argue, are non-linear dynamic processes that suffuse the realities and structures of international and national politics, as well as the conduct of daily life. These become particularly evident in the knowledge economy of the GLR, in endeavours as broad as state building and everyday practices, within international development and peacebuilding interventions, and in academic theorising, methodologies and writing formats. We introduce the papers in this special issue that urge us to address an important question: Can we truly decolonise if we do not fully understand the coloniality of the present and its effects? We argue a careful investigation of the structural conditions that enable coloniality to actively form and re-form is essential to accurately understand real-world ramifications of asymmetrical power relations, a crucial aspect of the process of decolonisation. Lastly, we reflect on avenues for re-thinking the effects of colonial durabilities and to work towards generating anti-/de-colonial knowledges to perhaps achieve ‘epistemic freedom’.

Keywords:

• decolonization
• Great Lakes Region
• coloniality
• epistemic violence

Bloody statues and colonial durabilities: the politics of ‘the rot that remains’¹

La colonisation […] vit avec nous.

Elle est tout à la fois morte et non morte.

‘Les morts ne sont pas morts,

ils sont dans l’arbre qui gémit, dans le vent qui souffle … ’

(Dibwe dia Mwembu 2005)

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, protestors defaced and pulled down statues of former colonizers and slave owners in Bristol, Nashville, London, Pretoria, Washing DC, and other places. In Belgium, statues of King Leopold II were burnt and tainted with red ‘bloody’ paint. Leopold II once privately owned, what was then the Congo Free State (CFS) from 1885 until 1908, when the colony was then passed to the Belgian state.² While he never actually set foot in the CFS, Leopold II’s regime caused the deaths of millions of Congolese people (Vangroenweghe 1986; Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002; Etambala 2020).³ Leopold II’s effigies have been ‘blood’ smeared before, but it is the first time that the defacing and unbolting of statues of former colonizers and slave owners has occurred simultaneously in so many parts of the world and gained extensive international media attention. Importantly, the events that took place in Belgium sparked the establishment of the Belgian Parliament of a Special Commission to investigate Belgium’s colonial past in the CFS, Congo Belge, Rwanda and Burundi (Kamer van Volksvertegenwoordigers 2021).⁴

The 2015 #RhodesMustFall movement in South-Africa already emphasized that popular uprisings against public displays of imperial figures and memorabilia are a pressing political issue and the cause of much debate among diaspora communities, African citizens and all those in solidarity (see Getachew 2019; Tamale 2020). Long before that, citizens and leaders of the African Great Lakes Region (in Uganda, Burundi, DRC and Rwanda) – the focus of this special issue – had removed most colonial relics from their city streets and squares. Under Mobutu’s rule, one of Leopold II’s statues was removed a few years after the country’s independence (in 1960). While there was a short-lived attempt at reinstating the statue in 2005, public outcry was so strong that it was unbolted once again and put to rest in a colonial monuments park at the Institute of National Museums in Kinshasa where access is limited and the number of visitors scarce. Today, the politics of dealing with the few remaining statues,⁵ outdated colonial laws and even street names continue to make national news, ingrain public discourse, and, at times, provoke popular outrage (Kwibuka 2019; Angopa 2020).

Copyright 2020 Yves Herman/Reuters, 7 June 2020

Copyright ATV (permission obtained) – Statue of King Leopold II after it was burnt and severely damaged being removed from the marketplace in Ekeren, Belgium, June 2020.

Political grievances like these indicate that our shared colonial history is not the mere captive of a distant past carrying fixed colonial ‘legacies’ or ‘vestiges’ into present-day politics. As Ann Laura Stoler (2008, 196) pointedly charged, ‘[s]uch terms [legacies, vestiges] do little to account for the contemporary force of imperial remains, what people count as remains, and as importantly what they do with them’. In other words, contemporary reactions to the enduring oppression of Black people and people of colour express just one of the various ways colonial structures continue to animate the present and to populate both mental and physical representations of power.⁶

Situated in this broader political context and echoing these global concerns, the contributions to this special issue seek to unpack the content and violent effects of, what we term colonial durabilities in the African Great Lakes Region (GLR). This special issue is inscribed in a long tradition of post- and decolonial studies that respond to the inability and unwillingness of Western-centric thinking to deal with current global challenges (institutional racism, armed conflict, climate change, financial crisis etc) through the persistent oppression and injustices caused by colonialism, capitalism, racism, patriarchy etc (Maldonado-Torres 2007; De Sousa Santos 2016; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019; Tamale 2020). Despite disciplinary and geographical differences, post- and decolonial theory has ceaselessly worked towards unsettling the Eurocentric nature of knowledge production and its harmful effects as well as colonialism’s enduring violence.⁷

Along with scholars such as Mudimbe, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Tamale and many others, we thus posit that coloniality consists of a dynamic set of ideological constructs and socio-material practices that proves exceedingly resistant to the passage of time. Similar to the term ‘global coloniality’, colonial durabilities can be conceptualized as ‘the transhistoric expansion of colonial domination and the perpetuation of its effects in contemporary times’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019, 202). Although formal independence was achieved across Central Africa and direct European domination has been defeated, colonial structures of power that (re)produce patterns of global injustice, violence and racial hierarchies subsist.⁸ These ‘remains’ are what this special issue refers to as colonial durabilities. By embracing a dynamic, non-linear and relational perspective on time, the notion of colonial durabilities works as a critical conceptual tool and an evocative device that seeks to unveil the concrete manifestations of coloniality at the intersection of global politics and daily life, and the many invisibilized sites where structural violence is employed and reproduced.

With both these empirical and theoretical concerns in mind, our special issue asks: What are the sites and manifestations of colonial durabilities in the GLR, where brutal forms of imperialism unfolded from the 19th to the 21st century?⁹ How do these colonial durabilities intertwine with and inform contemporary politics at the national, regional, or international levels? And more broadly speaking, how can our investigation into colonial durabilities in the GLR assist current efforts at achieving greater epistemic freedom for all living in, and working in/on/with Africa (and beyond)? The contributors to this special issue answer these questions by pursuing three interrelated goals: 1) in empirical terms, the articles seek to uncover and analyse the concrete sites and manifestations of colonial durabilities in four GLR countries; 2) they further offer some conceptual insights on the various ways colonial durabilities affect contemporary politics in the GLR and finally, 3) they aim to redress ongoing instances of epistemic violence that still prevail across policy and academic works dealing with the GLR specifically, and the African continent more generally.

Overall, this special issue examines the various and insidious ways colonial structures, imaginaries, and politics are (re)mobilized and re-enacted in the conduct of international and national politics, the production and dissemination of knowledge and the construction of political subjectivities in the region. In doing so, this collection contributes to recent debates on the impact of colonialism on everyday politics, development, conflict, and peace in Africa (Parashar and Schulz 2021; Mwambari 2021) and the importance of decolonizing academia, and African Studies in particular (see the special issue in this journal for instance: Kessi, Marks, and Ramugondo 2020; Bisoka et al. 2020). The papers presented here reassert the proposition that colonial and present-day violence are neither distinct nor merely causally intertwined but interact in a dynamic and non-linear fashion that suffuse and contaminate collective meaning-making, international affairs, and knowledge production everywhere. Contemporary instances of political violence, armed conflict and political instability unfolding across the GLR have far-reaching implications at both the micro and macro levels of politics and analysis and can only be addressed by tackling colonial mindsets and structures that continue to shape world politics.

This introductory article first provides a brief overview of the linkages between knowledge-production in the GLR, the notion of ‘colonial durabilities’ and the broader issue of epistemic violence, which Spivak (1988) describes as a forcible silencing, delegitimating and othering of (post)colonial or subaltern groups. We then turn our focus to examining how colonial durabilities inform the very real violence found within contemporary state formation processes, international development assistance and peacebuilding interventions. Finally, the last section opens avenues for re-thinking the effects of colonial durabilities and proposes working towards generating anti-/de-colonial knowledges to, perhaps, achieve higher levels of epistemic freedom.

Colonial durabilities, epistemic violence and the Great Lakes Region

Our notion of colonial durabilities draws on Stoler’s (2016) concept of ‘duress’. Simply put, duress and durabilities are notions that speak against flawed conceptualizetions of colonialism as confined to a distant past. Nearly three decades ago, Anne McClintock noted that ‘the almost ritualistic ubiquity of ‘post” words in current culture’ – including in the word postcolonialism – ‘signals . . . a widespread, epochal crisis in the idea of linear, historical progress’ (1995, 10). The historical rupture the prefix suggests wrongly situates colonialism in the past, thereby obscuring its potential continuities and discontinuities into present-day politics. Similarly, we conceptualize colonial durabilities not through linear notions of time but as made manifest through their presence in the present as durable, as persistent. As Stoler (2016) further suggests, such a framework is not about settling scores of the past, that is, it does not attempt to causally attribute the present violence to its colonial roots. Rather, it means to be attentive to what lingers, what persists, what is revitalized, reassembled, appropriated or made anew and what remains hidden in contemporary formations of colonialism.

Colonial durabilities hold very concrete ramifications for the politics, experiences and practices of everyday life of people everywhere (Schiller and Fouron 2001; Ganguly 2001; Purdekova and Mwambari 2021 this issue) and continue to inform development/military/post-conflict interventions throughout the world (Mbembe 1992, 2001; Paris 2002; Escobar 2004; Eriksson Baaz 2005; as well as in this special issue, see the contributions by Jamar 2022; Hopwood 2021 or Lewis 2021).¹⁰ In adition, colonial durabilities infuse how knowledge on African societies is produced and solidified into our collective imaginaries, into expert accounts and policy-making. With his concept of ‘colonial library’, Mudimbe sees the organization and transformation of ‘non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs’ (1988, 1) as key aspects of an epistemology that sees Africa as the ultimate symbol of Otherness. Drawing on this, coloniality is understood as a field of (epistemic) violence, a political process by which colonial ideational constructs erase and absorb local knowledge, cultures and histories into a Western structure.¹¹ Rarely have there been more emblematic instances of these processes than across the GLR. As a site of multiple and profoundly violent imperial encounters, the region is generally perceived (in academic, media, and policy circles alike) as the antithesis to Western norms of ‘good governance’, socio-economic development and political organization (Niang 2018). This image is circulated and cemented globally through academic production, ‘expert’ narratives and media accounts that focus primarily on violence, armed conflict, war and other negative, or otherwise sensationalistic accounts of social, political, and economic life in the region (Autesserre 2012; Sarr 2020).

Considering the violent historical trajectory of the GLR and the immense suffering of its people, it should not come as a surprise that much scholarship has focused on issues of security, peace, armed violence, and state building; all pressing concerns to the many communities affected by armed conflict, state violence, and economic hardship (Khadiagala 2017). Yet, a strong academic and policy focus on the contemporary causes, dynamics and political economy of armed conflict, instability, and ‘bad governance’ may obscure the much deeper colonial formations that still structure the discursive and political practices of international, national, and local actors who shape the region’s political and social landscape. Importantly, and whilst each country comes with its own specificities, histories, cultural qualities, and knowledges, the logics of empire connect the region through a shared experience of colonial oppression, struggle, resistance, and exclusion.

This has found renewed contemporary expressions in the discursive practices of the humanitarian-development-industry complex that uses liberal state and peacebuilding (Rutazibwa 2019), crisis and emergency (Mertens and Pardy 2017) and ‘emerging African countries’ (Péclard, Kernen, and Khan-Mohammad 2020), silencing alternative modes of living and knowing. The current political dynamics of Uganda, Burundi, DRC, and Rwanda are, moreover, deeply entangled with the unfolding and long-term consequences of what has been termed ‘Africa’s world war’ (Prunier 2008). In-depth studies of the genocide in Rwanda (Kimonyo 2008; Mamdani 2001; McDoom 2020), Burundi’s ‘forgotten genocide’ (Daley 2008; Lemarchand 2011), the protracted conflict in eastern Congo (James 2021; Stearns 2021) and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency in northern Uganda (Nhema and Zeleza 2008; Titeca and Vlassenroot 2012; Omeje and Hepner 2013)¹² are significant contributions to grasping the sheer violence underlying the region’s geopolitical struggles. Yet the work we do across academia also forms part of scientific and policy accounts that generate an incomplete image of the GLR. Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi are often reduced to a string of ‘violent’ tropes (Hunt 2016) – war, genocide, rape, rebels, minerals etc – while much of the writing still features ‘history being used as a backdrop in the introduction, rather than an analysis of how historical processes continue to have an impact today’ (Mathys 2017, 466). In other words, and as Chérie Ndaliko (2016) pointed out, the GLR is also the site of a war over history: the question of which histories and knowledges come to be known and accepted as truth is deeply implicated in colonial processes.

Tendencies to confine African societies and politics – however diverse – to primitivist accounts that strongly draw ‘upon racist and technocratic modes of thinking . . . (re)produce regimes of representation that have homogenizing and objectifying effects and that transform ‘the underdeveloped” into non-subjects, stripped of (rational) agency’ (Verweijen 2015, 244). These narratives, unsurprisingly, echo those deployed historically across the western world to justify slavery, colonization and other forms of present-day exploitation and oppression (Rutazibwa 2014). Simplified narratives, indeed, obscure persistent forms of structural violence and most importantly, expunge ‘insight into the multivalent layers of daily experiences . . . the details that make up the connecting tissue between newsworthy events’ (Ndaliko 2016, 3). This is not to say that all knowledge struggles are colonial in character, nor do we imply that coloniality is the only or most accurate way of capturing internal power dynamics. For example, power struggles over knowledges between rural and urban regions in the GLR are not necessarily colonial in nature (even though the understanding of these spaces as dichotomies is colonial). However, the eurocentricism that continues to shape knowledge production on Africa is a form of epistemic violence that requires urgent addressing and is at the heart of decolonization (Okech 2020).

In addition, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) explicitly shows that the world of (colonial) politics stretches far beyond the confines of formal policy. It touches upon the mind and informs societal practices and interactions both in the realms of everyday life and knowledge production. Addressing the ‘epistemicidal’ characteristics and invisibilized endurance of what Mbembe termed the ‘postcolony’ (1992), Frantz Fanon (1963, 210) wrote that ‘colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it’. It becomes clear that while ‘the physical presence of the colonizer could be removed’, colonialism’s ‘mental presence was much harder to dislodge’ (Ahluwalia 2017, ix). Achieving both political and epistemic freedom enabling the creation ‘of a new set of possibilities, not just for the colonized, but through their struggle, for all mankind’ (Idem, xi), also means interrogating fixed definitions of time, leaving behind academia’s quest for intellectual neatness, and imagining alternative chronologies of structural violence.

This requires we account for the mental, physical, non-linear, and intergenerational reach of colonialism. In his critical take on the 1960s’ Mulele rebellion in the Congo, Kalema (2018, 281) convincingly shows that the ‘scars that people bear on their bodies can produce or reproduce suffering in the longue durée, as long as those who bear them live.’ As much as scars imprint the flesh and tear the fabric of the skin, they also mark the mind and evoke memories of an attack on both body and psyche, sometimes in faded ways, and sometimes in vivid images of trauma. Violence then, colonial or otherwise, does not evolve on a progressive time continuum that is easily grasped, and, therefore, readily interrupted. Violence in this sense, causes ‘psychic suffering, which not only exceed[s] the physical, but also extend[s] across time’ (Kalema 2018, 281) and its dealing with requires insight and hard labour. By interrogating and then refusing the (presumed) linearity of time, the concept of colonial durabilities speaks against relegating violent historical events to an enclosed and distant past, and captures the insidious – and at times, invisibilized – ways coloniality manifests within daily life, discursive practices, academic production, or systemic forces.

From the processes of ruination and decay to the real-world implications of their ‘afterlives’ and the various hauntings they might generate, the notion of colonial durabilities forces us to engage with ‘alternate chronologies’ and ‘different tempos’ (Salem 2020, 24–207) in understanding the contours of structural and immediate forms of violence. Colonial durabilities are, thus, both ‘localised’ within the lived realities of policy-makers, state officials or ordinary citizens, and structurally situated in the workings of globalized markets, state domination, diplomacy, war-making or economic exploitation, and as such, require active work. They are not just remnants or traces of the past but contemporary (re)productions that, like the civilizing mission, mask the deep intergenerational, mental and material reach of colonialism through presumably ‘benign’ or benevolent politics that retain imperial logics of exploitation and Othering (e.g. humanitarianism, securitizing makeovers, military interventions, etc). It is to these themes we now turn.

Haunting statehood, shaping international interventions

Olivia Rutazibwa (2020) recently argued that ‘contemporary hegemonic solidarity thinking and practices – e.g. aid and development, humanitarianism, state building and democracy promotion – are seen as technologies that reproduce coloniality and Whiteness and therefore in need of decolonial rethinking’. As mentioned above, international actors and institutions have long influenced domestic public policies in the form of direct international intervention aimed at maintaining the political and economic interests of its most influential donor states (Abrahamsen 2005).¹³ Western imperial conquest and domination have indeed affected millions, both across the ‘global South’ and ‘global North’, and are still located at the heart of processes of state formation.¹⁴

Colonialism in the Great Lakes Region (and elsewhere in Africa) gave rise to external oppression and domination through the creation of a colonial administration that exploited Black labour, racialized state-society relations, co-opted local elites, and worked to efface pre-colonial cultural, political, and religious organization (Mamdani 1996). It is on these bases that the formal independences of the 1950s and 1960s propelled dozens of (presumably) sovereign states to the international scene, which, as a result, were maintained as the battle grounds for domination and autonomy, both on the part of the main Cold War protagonists (and former colonial powers) and national political leaders. Following a brief period during which many predicted, perhaps a little hastily, the demise of the sovereign state in the face of regional integration and the rise of supranational organizations (Aretxaga 2003), recent years have seen the return of a strong nationalist and Pan African rhetoric, and, the COVID-19 pandemic bearing witness to this, increased popular calls for more robust state action (Mwambari 2020). Additionally, the ‘modern state’ has deep colonial roots and its imperial origins have continued to shape the unequal making of citizens via the reproduction of, inter alia, racialized subjects, exploitative capitalist schemes, and political violence (Bhambra 2020; Mamdani 2020; Nyabola 2020). It is no surprise, then, that to this day, the changing nature, practices, imaginaries, and historical trajectories of statehood are still at the centre of both African and global politics.

Purdekova and Mwambari’s article in this issue is entrenched in this broader political context and engages with these scholarly debates. Harnessing both political theory and original data from Rwanda, they examine the complex linkages between Belgian colonial identity politics in solidifying the Hutu/Tutsi distinction and current instances of government sanctioned ‘de-ethnicisation’ efforts within popular culture and everyday interactions in the reconstruction and transformation of Rwandan statehood following the 1994 genocide. In so doing, the authors locate colonial durabilities in post-genocide policies that seek ‘to reject that very [colonial] past’ while simultaneously borrowing from and reviving colonial power instruments and governing techniques along semantic lines, through the search for ‘traditional’ practices, or via references to ethnicity among citizens and state officials. Lending solid empirical grounds to the exploratory and evocative conceptual understanding that time and histories can ‘fold back on themselves’ (Stoler 2016, 27), the article further situates colonial durabilities in the lingering of racialized distinctions in popular culture through a case-study of the 2019 Rwandan beauty pageant and in the rise of new social and political divisions.

This paper resonates with a host of scholarly works within African studies (Lund 2016; Hagmann and Péclard 2010; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014; De Herdt and de Sardan 2015; De Herdt and Titeca 2019; Perazzone 2019a) that provide empirical and theoretical critiques of conventional Eurocentric state theory, and have sought to re-conceptualize statehood – and governance – as an unfinished, on-going, historical process, that is always negotiated through and by many individuals, semantic repertoires, ordinary politics and state institutions. In doing so, Purdekova and Mwambari push further against a tradition of building an ‘epistemology of absences’ (Perazzone 2019b) that measures African statehood and societies against the main tenets of the western ‘modern state’. Their work here enables us to picture, in concrete and ideational terms, the plasticity of time and to capture the invisibilized moments of colonial hauntings that punctuate state-society relations at both societal and institutional levels.

Relatedly, interventions in the form of peacekeeping, peacebuilding, state building, humanitarianism and development assistance – predominantly in response to wars, famines and violence – have fallen under increased scrutiny for retaining an imperial character that reinvents the colonial ‘civilising mission’ and negates the agentic autonomy of subaltern voices (Paris 2002; Rutazibwa 2018). In her book Decolonising Intervention, Sabaratnam (2017) argues a ‘coloniality of power’ is at the basis of the operational and political structure of interventions and their repeated failures. Extensive scholarship on the African Great Lakes Region, which has been the site of foreign political meddling for decades, explores the multiple factors that have long contributed to the failure of exogeneous intervention schemes to (re)establish sustainable peace, national reconciliation, or strong state institutions (Autesserre 2010; Sweet 2020). Mobilizing ‘good governance’ and ‘save and rescue’ rhetoric, a number of these interventions have normalized the usage and imposition of Western normative constructs that ironically negate the know-how, skills and experiences of the ‘recipient’ communities or ‘owners’ they seek to assist (Anderson and Fisher 2016; Perazzone 2017; Vogel, Musamba, and Radley 2018; Laudati and Mertens 2019; Mertens and Myrttinen 2019; Olonisakin 2020). In response to this, scholarly works within African, Development, International Relations or Peace and Conflict studies have developed research agendas that seek to recover the ‘local’ in a bid to achieve greater success in international development, peacebuilding and post conflict reconstruction programming.

These efforts – which can be summarized through what Mac Ginty and Richmond (2013) termed ‘the local turn in peace building’ – have come under increased scrutiny. Randazzo (2016, 1354), for instance, critically reflects on the narrow articulations of ‘the local’ as separate from social life and politics and as opposite to ‘the international’, thus, reinstating a sense that ordinary actors, everyday practices, and local institutions are inherently traditional, non-liberal, and non-mainstream (see also Sabaratnam 2017, 28–29). Although the local turn aims to engage communities without necessarily (over)empowering the hegemonic central state, which had often abused and repressed them as a conflict actor, conflating the term ‘local’ with ‘non-western’ dismisses the political agency and socio-historical interconnectedness of non-western and/or non-elitist communities and practices. Sabaratnam (2017, 29) pointedly summarizes this issue: ‘Local or everyday agency is seen to be best expressed to the extent that it reclaims the ‘customary’ and is not co-opted by internationals’. Denying the global and historical significance of social and political experiences of societies across ‘the non-West’ (Bilgin 2008) acutely reconveys the sense that colonial hierarchies continue to disseminate the tropes of Western distinctiveness and domination at the international level (Mbiatem and Mahmoud 2021).

Correctly understanding and conveying the meaning of local languages is also at stake. The use of language as a tool of oppression and domination, and the many misunderstandings ensuing from co-opting or mistranslating indigenous terms into English are a crucial but mostly overseen element in the scholarship on interventions and international relations.¹⁵ Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986, 4) made this very clear when he wrote ‘The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe’. To illustrate this, African feminist scholars Amadiume (1987) and Oyewumi (1997) highlight the coloniality of gender and explain how many African languages do not distinguish between male and female pronouns as gender is a much more fluid concept in many African societies than the distinct binary it represents in Western thinking (see also Lugones 2010). Hopwood’s contribution to this special issue offers an in-depth ethnographic study of land, family and daily life in post-LRA conflict Acholiland in Northern Uganda and exposes the distinctly colonial nature of contemporary interventions and policies on land reform, driven by international development actors. Drawing on Okot p’ Bitek’s prose and poetry, Hopwood outlines the hermeneutical mistranslations of Acholi thought and social ordering in relation to land, and problematizes international actors’ misuse of the terms ‘land conflict’ and ‘customary land’ whereby western conceptualisations of land as private property have disrupted Acholi ways of life for over a century. Here, Hopwood shows how ‘distortions of meaning and failures of translation can function as mechanisms of colonial hegemony’ which has excluded the voices and the language of Acholi and prevented more accurate analysis of the real problems they face, notably people struggling to survive on scarce land resources in the absence of alternative and more diversified economic activities. With little understanding of land governance, social structures and family ties among Acholi communities, international interventions on land reform have largely failed to alleviate landlessness and poverty. Worse, these policies have contributed to excluding and marginalizing Acholi families and communities further from existing economic and land resources in Uganda.

Colonialism similarly pervades military interventions in the DRC, host to MONUSCO (the United Nations’ largest and most expensive peacekeeping operation) and to numerous humanitarian organizations active in the eastern provinces. Much scholarship has critiqued long-standing representations of the Congo as a place of horrific and endemic sexual violence (Chiwengo 2008; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013; Mertens and Pardy 2017). International media and political and academic focus on sensationalistic accounts of brutal sexual violence feed into colonial constructions of Congo and its people as timelessly located, indigenized, racialized, and sexualized ‘savage’ subjects. Yet, what remains unexplored is an analysis of how knowledge on sexual violence is produced. The question of how we know what we know about sexual violence in Congo is located at the heart of epistemic violence. Taking up this important task, Chloé Lewis critically explores knowledge production on sexual violence by looking at the politics of statistics. She contributes to the already extensive scholarship on conflict-related sexual violence by providing a much-needed deconstruction of statistical production, their presumed objectivity and easy acceptance and dissemination by media and humanitarian actors. She shows how the production of sexual violence statistics have led to both under-counting and over-counting sexual violence. Despite these limitations, statistics are presented as factual and objective, and have been accepted as truth in media, policy, and scholarly circles because they conform to enduring colonial imaginaries of sexual savagery and excess. Nevertheless, and despite this critique, the author importantly points out that efforts to complicate singular or dominant narratives, including highlighting colonial echoes, should not disavow or minimize the material realities and lived experiences of those affected by sexual violence.

Focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) launched in Burundi in 2014, Jamar’s article argues the transitional justice agenda is characterized by a hegemonic normative framework that excludes alternative approaches to accounting for violence. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, she illustrates how the various ideological and programmatic dimensions of transitional justice are dominated by expatriate and Burundian elite experts; how the resulting ‘politics of expertise’ remobilise distinct colonial tropes; and how these experts also grant epistemic supremacy to Western legalism while depoliticizing the public discourse around concepts of truth and reconciliation. Interestingly, however, while the TRC was originally created to investigate human rights abuses committed from independence in 1962 to the end of the civil war in, the TRC mandate was extended to probe into older colonial crimes as well (post-2008 crimes are not being investigated). In this vein, Jamar examines how the Burundian regime, in a sort of reverse logic, instrumentalizes the TRC procedures to further politicize the critique towards former colonial regimes in a bid to legitimate its own political agenda while using state violence to repress political opposition. Jamar’s contribution shows how coloniality is never just the work of white actors but extends through reappropriations of Audre Lorde’s ‘master’s tools’ by national and regional political elites in their quest for legitimation.

Combined, these four papers expose ideological and political constructs that are distinctly colonial: the misinterpretation of the language of Acholi and the suppression of Acholi knowledges by international actors in Uganda; the creation of a public health bureaucracy on sexual violence through the development of statistics in the DRC; and the hegemonic normative framework of a transitional justice agenda in Burundi. These papers, thus, tackle the coloniality of interventions and importantly, tell the other side of the stories on human rights, resilience, sexual violence, land reform, and transitional justice. Moreover, the papers show the shape-shifting quality of colonial durabilities, which often come with the promise of positive, peace-enhancing or ‘new’ transformations or interventions while their colonial nature remains hidden.

Towards anti-colonial knowledges

How can we read, understand, and engage with African contexts through conceptual structures that move away from defining African societies, cultures and politics as inherently ‘Other’, as ‘lacking’, and as ‘non-modern’? Can we decolonize using academic methods and formats of writing that have been used for centuries precisely to deny Africans’ humanity? The special issue’s last paper engages with these questions in interrogating the sources and implications of knowledge production in Uganda, taking the notion of epistemic freedom one step further into other possible futures.

As Okot Bitek states in this special issue ‘knowledge production [is] steeped in a colonial history’. Committed to finding new ways to navigate the ‘treacherous’ and murky waters of coloniality, the author boldly offers to rethink academic text through decolonizing writing styles and aesthetics as a necessary step towards resisting current usage of tools that maintain the master’s house. In the footsteps of bell hooks and other Black feminist writers such as Dionne Brand and Toni Morrison, Okot Bitek does this through a poem and essay that present a rupture from conventional formats of academic prose. Engaging with the ‘colonial spectre’ that remains ‘a jinn in the present’, she uses poetry to articulate the memories of Captain K, her main respondent and a veteran of the Liberation War in Uganda. Importantly, the author steps away from the academic imperative to provide and impose scientific value and explanation and encourages the reader to engage in his/her/their own process of learning and meaning-making. In this sense, Okot Bitek’s poem is a reckoning with both the epistemic violence inherent to academic writing/knowledge production as well as with colonialism itself. Inspired by Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s use of the word ‘resurgence’, she returns to the Acholi poetic practice of wer, a song, or a poem from the Luo speaking Acholi people in Uganda. Through her poem she carves out alternative spaces of solidarity and aims to sidestep ‘colonial ways of thinking and doing research’. Her contribution is an example of how research can be done differently, it is a search for epistemic freedom – to be free from the shackles of colonialism – and finding alternative ways of expressing the historical struggles of Black people against the duress of the colonial past.

As a whole, this special issue hopes to contribute to the long journey towards ‘epistemic freedom’, which Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, 2) described as ‘restor[ing] to African people a central position within human history as independent actors’. In this collective endeavour, we use decolonial and intersectional perspectives to bring together a range of scholars who speak against the harmful effects of colonial durabilities on knowledge production dealing with the GLR. In this sense, we agree with Paul Zeleza’s (2019, 4) analysis that ‘our intellectual proclivities often reflect our times, prevailing ideologies and struggles, dominant intellectual traditions, and institutional contexts . . . much of our individual scholarship is enmeshed in specific historical geographies, current political economies, and generational aspirations and anxieties’. This is also reflected in the authors’ different positionalities (see Gesa 1999; Mwambari 2019). Indeed, this special issue gathers scholars of various social, geographical, and academic backgrounds, serving the specific purpose of interrogating, engaging, and resisting epistemic violence. This matters because the large body of literature on the GLR has mostly been written by white middle-class men (ignoring oral sources). The few women who contributed to these debates were hardly read or cited due to academia’s patriarchal context and the politics of knowledge production that have ‘manufactured African Studies’ (Veney and Zeleza 2001, vi; for an exception see the important work of Oyewumi 1997 and Amadiume 1987). In the politics of knowledge production on the GLR, and as shown in this special issue, epistemicide is indeed a lived reality (Mkandawire 2005; Mama 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018, 2; Bisoka et al. 2020; Bâ 2022).

Concluding remarks

We started this article with scenes of ordinary people tearing down statues of historical figures that inhabit our public spaces as symbols of oppression and brutality. These events not only emphasize the importance of addressing the thorny issues of memory, national histories, and colonial rule, but they also urge us to address an important question: Can we truly decolonize if we do not fully understand the coloniality of the present and its effects? Indeed, imperial practices do not merely gnaw at a variety of national contexts within global politics. The ‘less dramatic durabilities’ and ‘more protracted forms’ of ‘imperial formations’ come to ‘saturate the subsoil of people’s lives’ (Stoler 2008, 192), our collective imaginaries and the intellectual constructs that shape the contours of the ‘spectacularly unequal global society’ we live in (Ferguson 2002, 565). Whilst current events speak to the enduring force of colonialism today, they further bring to light people’s desire to live differently and devise alternate ‘potential histories’ (Azoulay 2019). The GLR indeed, ‘has its own intimate nuances of place and history that cumulatively make home, its own daily interactions and negotiations that define collective identity for its communities’ (Ndaliko 2016, 2).

The collection of articles in this special issue reflects on how to study colonial durabilities in their most concrete forms and seeks to offer a glimpse into what such potential histories and alternate knowledges might look like. By developing a critical and dynamic approach to the endurance of colonialism – through a careful investigation of the hidden manifestations and broader ramifications of colonial durabilities within the discursive, material and political violence at work in the GLR – this special issue presents a multi-layered perspective on the structural conditions that enable coloniality to actively form and re-form within the fabric of everyday life, the workings of (global) politics and the sedimentation of dominant narratives. While we urge scholars, practitioners, and policymakers around the globe to engage and reckon with colonial durabilities of our time (despite pleas of wanting to ‘move on’), we also acknowledge we are all operating within, and are dependent on, the colonial power matrix. As Edward Saïd once pointed out (1989, 216–217), ‘there is no vantage outside the actuality of relationships between cultures, between unequal imperial and nonimperial powers, between different Others’. The complexity and embeddedness of this colonial machinery within academia but also within the media, policy circles etc require from us constant vigilance, care, and reflection. In the wake of power abuses and increasing backlash against postcolonial, decolonial, gender, and critical race theory across the (western) world, academia continues to face the crucial task of engaging with visions of and from the African continent that enable a deepening of our understanding of the world, and to develop a ‘vision for the future’ necessary to comprehend the ‘painful era’ in which we live (Césaire 1941, 39). As Suzanne Césaire (1941) once declared, ‘it is now urgent to dare to know oneself, to dare to confess to oneself what one is, to dare to ask oneself what one wants to be’ (Ibid.).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editors of Critical African Studies, particularly Hazel Gray, for their generous and engaged readings of earlier versions of this article. We want to thank Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka and Eirini Sephton whose participation in this project has helped clarify and improve this Special Issue. We also thank our contributors for their insightful papers and the smooth collaboration. The usual disclaimers apply and all remaining gaps and weaknesses remain the sole responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 (Stoler 2013).

2 Eager to emulate the Dutch colonial model in Java in the hopes of gaining material wealth and broader international recognition (Stengers 1989), the King also wanted to give Belgium a colony to consolidate both his power and national identity (Viaene 2008).

3 In his renowned book King Leopold’s Ghost, Hochschild (1998) claims that ten million people may have died in what he calls a ‘forgotten holocaust’. The most recent calculations estimate his regime caused the deaths of one to five million Congolese people (see https://www.demorgen.be/meningen/gebruik-historici-niet-als-excuus-in-de-discussie-over-excuses-aan-congo~ba839572/).

4 This is not the first commission dedicated to Belgium’s colonial past. Several commissions have been established to reckon with Belgium’s colonial history.

5 Statues in Kinshasa, for instance, have long been at the heart of ambivalent public sentiment and inconsistent politics from Mobutu’s to Kabila’s to Tshisekedi’s rule (see also Lagae 2013). For a contemporary look and visual work on these issues, see Sinzo Aanza at https://popularimages.org/en/blog/im-not-a-congolese-artist/?noredirect=en-US.

6 We generally use the term ‘colonialism’ to refer to the thinking, practices and policies developed before and during colonization that were designed to dominate and control other people and their lands. Coloniality is related to colonialism but refers to ‘the long-standing patterns of power that resulted from European colonialism, including knowledge production and the establishment of social orders’ (Tamale 2020, xiii). We use the term ‘imperialism’ in a broader sense not specific to the period of colonization but to denote the ideologies of white supremacy that drive empire.

7 For a good overview on the differences between postcolonial and decolonial thought, see Bhambra 2014. See also the special issue released early 2021 on Colonial Legacies and the Undoing of Africa (Parashar and Schulz 2021).

8 Back in 1965, Kwame Nkrumah warned that ‘the neo-colonialism of today represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage’ by way of economic, political and sometimes, military ‘trappings of international sovereignty; (1965, ix; see also Rodney 1972 who makes a similar claim). This was further evidenced during the Cold War, via the activities of the Bretton Woods institutions throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in the form of proxy-wars, development policies, military incursions, and structural adjustment plans.

9 The British invaded Uganda until 1962, the Germans occupied Ruanda-Urundi until 1924, and Belgium colonized Ruanda-Urundi until 1962 and the DRC until 1960.

10 Postcolonial, subaltern and decolonial theory, in particular, explore and conceptualize both the structural and micro-processes through which the tropes of imperialism and colonialism endure into present-day politics. See, among others, the works of Spivak (1988); Saïd (1989); McClintock (1995); Cooper (2002); Gregory (2004).

11 Similarly, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 22) outlines four descriptors of European imperialism since the 15th century: (1) economic expansion (2) the oppression of ‘others’ (3) an idea or spirit, and (4) a discursive field of knowledge.

12 See also the excellent yearbook on L’Afrique des Grands Lacs published since 1997 that merged with Conjonctures de l’Afrique Centrale since 2018.

13 This includes non-western donors like China and Russia, and other ‘non-western’ emerging powers.

14 As De Sousa Santos (2016) reminds us, the ‘South’ is a metaphor for the violence caused by patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism, but the ‘South’ also exists in the Global North in that it affects marginalized communities, immigrant populations etc.

15 For an excellent exception, see Musamba and Vogel (2016) who, in their ethno-linguistic analysis of the terms used by artisanal miners and other local stakeholders in eastern DRC, show that researchers, policymakers and organizations that debate or engage in reforming the artisanal and small-scale mining sector are often unaware of local terminologies, resulting in ill-designed policies based on inaccurate interpretations.