Back to the Congo

Lieve Joris

2 ideas

1. Article 15: fend for yourselves

   Zairians jokingly cited a fictitious 'Article 15' of the constitution, 'débrouillez-vous' (fend for yourselves), as the real operating rule of the Mobutu state. When salaries go unpaid and institutions exist only on paper, survival shifts to improvisation, side deals, petty levies and networks of obligation. The joke names a system in which informal hustle is not the exception to governance but its substitute.

2. A white visitor inherits the colonizer's role

   A European traveling in postcolonial Congo cannot arrive as a neutral observer. Locals read her as a 'mundele' (white person) and assign her the expectations left over from colonial and missionary patronage: requests for money, sponsorship and favors, along with suspicion and deference. Her intentions matter less than the historical role her presence automatically reactivates.

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