The ongoing crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is reminiscent of the darkest periods of its post-colonial history, with the two great Congo wars (1996-1997 and 1998-2003) that led to devastating human losses. The current Rwandan-backed coalition of AFC/M23 that has taken the cities of Goma and Bukavu builds part of its revendications on the exclusion of Tutsi and Banyamulenge while this crisis has demonstrated in a dramatic fashion how dysfunctional the Congolese state can be.
Lumumba’s multiple legacies can help us better understand the current crisis in DRC, which exploded at the crossroads of debates on the origin of Banyamulenge (already mobilized by Mobutu to fight the Mulelist rebellion), the competition over access to land and other resources, and debates between proponents (like Lumumba at the time) of a unitarist or a federal state, all of these taking shape through political power struggles in a context of state failure.
In an effort to interpret this conflict from a longue durée perspective, the Great Lakes of Africa Centre organizes a conference with three key speakers along three different lines that link colonial past, struggles for independence and current DRC state of affairs:
- Filip Reyntjens (IOB, UAntwerp): The internal structural causes of State failure in DRC
- Gillian Matthys (UGent): The colonial origins of contested Congolese Rwandophones’ identity and what they teach us about the current crisis in eastern DRC
- Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka (UMons): How the dichotomy between federalism and unitarism that started in 1960 speaks to the DRC’s post-colonial history