Johnny Harris and the Congo Crisis

A well-meaning but sanitized narrative

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Ethnicity: Optional

Something went wrong early in Johnny Harris’ new video about the war in eastern DRC.

“It (the colonial government) created ethnic groups and tribal identities, and then played them off against each other. So that they could conquer them. But also in the process sowing the seeds for future conflict and division,”

…says Harris.

“That deep history really is important to understanding where we are today,” adds a guest, effectively ending the three minute segment on history and any further discussion of ethnicity.

Now, this kind of argument about African ethnic identity is not uncommon in Western news reporting on the crisis and there are several good reasons for this.

Firstly, like many foreign journalists, Harris is desperately trying to find ways to make a strange and complex war understandable to his audience. Once you begin throwing around words like Banyamulenge the whole thing spirals out of control into a much more detailed story and the audience may just zone out.

Additionally, if you enter the minefield of identity poltics then you are bound to step on someone's toes, even with the best intentions. So perhaps Johnny Harris’ decision to ignore ethnicity altogether was a wise choice.

Oops where did the politics go?

But something else is also driving his wilful neglect of African identity. In fact the problem gets worse as the video continues.

Johnny Harris looks earnestly at the camera and explains this conflict is different from the other civil wars we’ve talked about before:

‘This isn't as political’

…he states, pointing at the map of militias and rebel groups operating in eastern DRC.

This is quite an odd thing to say, but he goes on to clarify what he means: most of these rebel groups are not trying or even planning to topple the government in Kinshasa. They have their little territory which expands and contracts. They have their informal taxes and maybe get involved in mineral smuggling. What seems to define them are money and guns.

If you completely neglect ethnicity, perhaps all that remains are minerals and guns. You will not be able to access the logic many of these groups use to justify their behaviour. They will indeed seem a-political.

Now, part of the problem here is summarizing the status of over 100 armed groups. Some of the smaller village Mai-Mai still operate like rural community vigilantes. On the other hand ISIS DRC wants to create an Islamist State.

However, the rebel groups who have been most historically active often justify their actions along ethnic lines. FDLR are proudly Hutu and for many years have stated their goal is to topple the government in Rwanda. M23 in its various mutations has drawn on the support of Tutsi communities in the DRC who feel marginalized by the state and threatened by other ethnic militias.

Of course these groups are not always as ideologically rigid as they claim. While M23 has advanced over the past two years it has shifted its stated goals, now hinting it represents the interests of Swahili speakers in general.

The situation is complex and messy but it is also extremely political and the politics of ethnicity cannot be ignored.

A Bigger Problem

The unfortunate truth is the sanitized version of the conflict being espoused by Johnny Harris is part of a wider issue of how Africa is understood.

In the 1980s Western researchers began to reassess a long accepted consensus. That Africans were generally traditionalists, best suited to living in tribes with chiefs, as they had done since ‘the dawn of time’.

Researchers began to think critically about how colonial empires maintained control. The British historian Terence Ranger argued that because the European colonizers needed ‘middle men’ to rule, they created chiefdoms which didn’t exist and invested power in people who were previously minor authority figures.

This wasn’t all one sided. Someone might tell a colonial anthropologist his family had always been in charge of a village. Next thing the colonial administrators had given him a motorcar and invited him to a meeting for chiefs. Thus the traditions which sustained colonial rule were created.

This line of thinking was very exciting. Decades of European anthropology in Africa were suddenly thrown into question. Although colonizers claimed they were ruling through timeless local traditions, in many cases they had invented these traditions, or modified them, to protect their power.

‘Tribe’ became a dirty, primitive word associated with colonial thinking. When researchers did speak about Shona, Igbo, Maasai, they used a softer, more modern sounding word: ethnicity. And as the brutal reality of the Rwandan genocide became clear in the 1990s, analysing how colonial administrators had created ethnic divsions became a fast growing area of research. There were no eternal ethnic rivalries in pre-colonial Africa. Everything was fluid, changing, and open.

The Ugandan historian Mahmood Mamdani synthesized these ideas in his book Citizen and Subject, explaining how colonial empires treated Africans as ‘subjects’ who were divided and ruled along ethnic lines. Not as citizens.

Take it seriously

Unfortunately, these arguments are sometimes misunderstood and end up being exaggerated. The colonial state had a big impact on power and identity in Africa. But it rarely invented tribes out of thin air. And just because colonialism influenced ethnicity, it doesn’t stop these identities mattering today to people in eastern DRC: cassava farmers and teenage boys carrying battered kalashnikovs. They have inherited historic problems, but they have also made decisions about what identities to adopt, or had those identites imposed on them by other Africans. It would be a mischaracterization to say the colonial state simply ‘created’ them.

To really get to grips with the crisis in DRC it's necessary to get your hands dirty and talk about ethnicity a bit more seriously. Not because the conflict can be explained by ethnic divisions. But because the politics of ethnic identity is wrapped up with many other important factors: the failures of the government in Kinshasa, Rwanda’s self-justifications, the disagreements over who gets to live where and who benefits from what resources. In short: the politics of the war! The very politics Johnny Harris struggles to locate.

To learn a bit more about this aspect of the crisis in DRC you can check out our article: Why Congo is Trapped in a Forever War.