They claimed the land, then found valuable resources beneath it, and seized those as well. They extracted rubber, ivory, copper, gold, diamonds, uranium, cobalt, and coltan. They replaced local names with easier ones for European officials. Borders were drawn, and powers were installed, removed, financed, sanctioned, or explained—usually claiming it was all for teaching us the tough skill of self-governance. History has a peculiar sense of humour, though it often leans towards dark comedy.
After everything has been taken, one thing remains: the body. I believe this is why we are drawn to jewellery and accessories—perhaps as a form of affection. The shiny shoes, the flawless suit, the oversized sunglasses capable of negotiating at the United Nations, the watch that seems to need its own security, the shirt that arrives three minutes before its wearer—these are expressions of presence and control. Sometimes, people wonder why Congolese elegance garners questions like: Why focus on appearance when chaos prevails? But that’s the very point. When your economy is not truly yours, when politics ignore you, when minerals under your land travel first class, and you wait in line for a visa, despite being told your country is rich and its people poor—the body becomes the final domain of sovereignty. You can seize the mine. You can seize the bank. You can seize the road. But these shoes—these shoes are mine. And I will polish them.
The Body as the Last Territory
Eloquence is deeply political. In Congo, La Sape—an elaborate style of dressing well—emerged amid scarcity, colonial influence, and political restrictions. During Mobutu’s regime, Western suits and ties were officially frowned upon and replaced by the abacost (“Abat le Costume”: lit. ‘down with the suit’) as the national attire in the campaign of “authenticité”. Nonetheless, fashion persisted as a form of resistance. Scholars view La Sape as an aesthetic challenge to enforced political uniformity. Picture the irony: a government dictates what a Congolese man should wear to be truly African, yet he responds by travelling to Paris and buying a more expensive suit. This isn’t a traditional revolution—no palace is overthrown, no army switches allegiance, no manifesto is announced. Instead, the body rebels. Maybe that’s where true freedom starts.
The attached conversation makes a brutally simple observation: when the economy fails, politics fails, and war surrounds people, sometimes “all that remains” is the body. So people dress it, protect it, display it, and make it elegant. Even when the body itself is attacked, the spirit proves harder to eliminate. This is not merely Congolese history. It is human history. The oppressed have always decorated themselves. Enslaved people sang. Prisoners wrote poetry. Refugees carried photographs. People in bombed cities still married. Women in refugee camps still braided one another’s hair. Children still played football between ruins. Human beings possess this extraordinary and slightly ridiculous refusal to behave as the tragedy assigned to them dictates. We dance at funerals. We joke during dictatorships. We fall in love during wars. And sometimes we wear Gucci while owing somebody money. There is resistance even in contradiction.
A Country Discussed Within a Room
In November 1884, representatives of the great powers gathered in Berlin to discuss Africa. Consider the elegance of that sentence: Europeans gathered in Europe to decide what should happen to Africans in Africa. No African ruler, chief, intellectual or representative sat at the table to speak for the people whose lands, rivers and futures were being discussed. Africa was present, certainly—on the maps, but still a Terra Nullius.
The host was Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the newly unified German Empire. Bismarck was not originally the most enthusiastic apostle of colonial adventure. He was a hard-headed European strategist, suspicious of expensive imperial fantasies and more interested in the balance of power on the European continent. But by 1884, the colonial scramble was becoming rather disorderly. Britain wanted this, France wanted that, Portugal produced old claims, King Leopold II of Belgium had developed a particularly passionate humanitarian interest in a territory approximately eighty times the size of his own kingdom, and everyone suddenly seemed deeply concerned about bringing civilisation to places where, by extraordinary coincidence, there happened to be ivory, rubber, minerals, land and commercial routes.
So Bismarck performed one of history’s darker ironies: he tried to impose order on the disorder of conquest. If Europe was going to scramble for Africa, perhaps the scramble required rules. Colonialism was becoming chaotic; Germany, naturally, proposed a conference.
The diplomatic vocabulary was magnificent. They spoke of civilisation, humanitarianism, commerce, navigation and free trade. One searches the documents in vain for the less diplomatic phrase: Who gets what? Yet that was the question hovering politely above the table. The Berlin Conference did not simply take a ruler and carve Africa into neat colonial slices in one afternoon, as popular memory sometimes suggests. The territorial scramble was already underway and would accelerate afterwards. What Berlin helped establish were rules by which European powers could recognise claims, navigate strategic waterways and avoid turning their competition for Africa into a European war too quickly. Colonial conquest was not abolished; it was given etiquette.
Congo held a unique position in this arrangement. The Congo Basin was not simply destined to be another colonial territory sealed off behind an imperial boundary. The conference created a large free-trade zone within the Congo Basin and confirmed freedom of commerce and navigation on the Congo and Niger rivers. Essentially, although Leopold’s International Association was internationally recognized as the authority over what would become the Congo Free State, the economic access to the Congo Basin was intentionally kept open to merchants and interests from participating nations. The country could have one sovereign, but its resources were to remain globally accessible.
It was an ingenious arrangement. Leopold could have the house. The great powers would retain access to the kitchen. And the Congolese, apparently, were expected to be grateful that everyone had remembered to discuss free trade.
This is what makes Congo’s subsequent history so painfully familiar. From the beginning of the modern colonial state, the territory was imagined not primarily as a political community belonging to its inhabitants but as an enormous economic space: a valley, a river system, a trade corridor, a reservoir of resources. The international language surrounding it was already obsessed with access. Access to the river. Access to commerce. Access to markets. Access to resources. Everybody’s access was discussed except, inconveniently, the Congolese people’s access to sovereignty over what was beneath their own feet.
There’s a disturbingly modern feel to the entire scene. While people themselves were absent, the investors, maps, commercial calculations, diplomatic officials, and rivers—at least in documentation—were all present. Resources existed vividly in everyone’s minds. The only missing element was the landowners. One might interpret this as colonialism, but today we’d probably see it as a high-level multilateral stakeholder meeting—perhaps even with lanyards.
There would certainly be a communiqué. And somebody would announce afterwards that the discussions had been “constructive.” The Berlin Conference therefore deserves to be remembered not merely as a meeting about borders, but as an early masterpiece of organised contradiction: sovereignty without the sovereign people, free trade without freedom, humanitarian language accompanying conquest, and international cooperation organised around a continent that had not been invited to cooperate.
The vocabulary has changed magnificently since 1884. Human beings are very good at improving nouns when they are reluctant to improve behaviour. Conquest became administration. Empire became influence. Exploitation became investment. Occupation becomes security. Bombing becomes intervention. Civilian deaths become collateral damage. A country rich in minerals but unable to determine the terms on which those minerals leave becomes an “emerging market.” Poverty produced by economic structures becomes “underdevelopment.” Cutting hospitals and schools to satisfy creditors becomes “fiscal discipline.” And when an entire population is asked to sacrifice its future so that somebody else’s balance sheet remains healthy, economists can always be found to call it reform. Vocabulary improves faster than behaviour. That may be one of power’s oldest survival techniques: when an injustice becomes too embarrassing to defend, do not necessarily stop doing it. First, rename it.
And Congo remains the cruel joke inside that history. Rubber gave way to copper, copper to uranium, diamonds, cobalt and coltan; technologies changed, empires changed their clothes, corporations replaced some colonial administrators, and diplomatic language became infinitely more sophisticated. Yet the old question of Berlin continues to whisper beneath the new vocabulary: Who will have access to the riches of the Congo?
Perhaps the genuinely revolutionary question—the one that somehow failed to make the agenda in Bismarck’s conference room—is simpler:
Everyone has had access to the Congo. When will the Congo finally belong to the Congolese?
The Tooth
But history sometimes reduces itself to something so small that no vocabulary can hide it. A tooth. Patrice Lumumba became the first prime minister of independent Congo in 1960. Months later, he was killed. His body did not receive an ordinary burial. It was destroyed. For decades, there was no grave where his children could simply stand and mourn their father. And then there was the tooth. One of the few physical remains connected to Lumumba stayed in Belgium for decades. On 20 June 2022, Belgium formally returned his remains to his family in a ceremony at the Egmont Palace. The Belgian prime minister described it as the moment when Lumumba’s children and grandchildren could finally receive the remains of their father and grandfather. Think about the geography of that tooth. The man belonged to Congo. The mineral wealth belonged to Congo. The struggle belonged to Congo. The grief belonged to Congo. But the tooth was in Europe. You could hardly invent a more disturbing metaphor for colonial history. Even the remains travelled north.
But there is another part of the story that matters more. They destroyed the body. They did not destroy the man. More than sixty years later, people still say Lumumba. Children born decades after his death know his name. Streets bear it. Squares bear it. Songs carry it. Speeches resurrect it. The attempt to erase the body succeeded biologically and failed historically. The world failed to kill the memory. That should tell us something about power. Power constantly overestimates what violence can accomplish.
The Invoice for Freedom
Consider Haiti. In 1804, formerly enslaved people did something that terrified the colonial world: they defeated slavery and declared an independent Black republic. One might imagine that this would be the end of the story. Freedom achieved. Congratulations. Champagne. Not quite. In 1825, France finally recognised Haitian independence—but demanded 150 million francs as compensation for former French colonial property owners. French warships were nearby. According to the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s historical account, an approaching squadron carried some 500 cannon when President Jean-Pierre Boyer accepted the conditions. Haiti then had to borrow money from French financial markets to begin paying France. The original indemnity was equivalent to at least ten times Haiti’s annual state revenue.
Pause here. Enslaved people liberated themselves. And then the descendants of those who had enslaved them demanded compensation for losing them. Humanity deserves an award for administrative creativity. Imagine escaping from a thief and then receiving an invoice from the thief for the inconvenience caused by your escape. Dear Haiti, Congratulations on your freedom. Please find attached the bill. That debt burden lasted for generations. France’s own major academic institutions now describe the arrangement as having been imposed by force and as a colossal financial burden on the young republic. Freedom arrived carrying a mortgage.
And that old mechanism should sound strangely familiar. Today nations may possess flags, presidents, national anthems, parliaments and excellent websites explaining their sovereignty. But ask another question. Who owns the debt? Who owns the mines? Who owns the telecommunications infrastructure? Who determines the currency? Who controls the patents? Who controls the payment system? Who owns the data? The flag may belong to the people, while the economy belongs elsewhere. Colonialism learned accounting.
Welcome to the Club
For generations, Africans were told that our instability was uniquely African. Coups? African problem. Corruption? African problem. Political violence? African problem. Ethnic tension? Definitely African. Propaganda? Africans again. Meanwhile, the stable world continued bombing countries, manipulating elections, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators when convenient and lecturing everybody about democratic values before dinner. Now something interesting is happening. The centre is beginning to experience the anxiety previously reserved for the periphery. Europe worries about war. Americans worry about democracy. Governments worry about disinformation. Citizens worry about surveillance. Young people worry that they will be poorer than their parents. Public services shrink. Housing becomes unaffordable. Military budgets grow. The political centre becomes nervous. Welcome. Please take a chair. Some of us have been waiting here for a very long time.
This is not cause for celebration. Another person’s suffering does not repair ours. But perhaps there is a historical lesson. The mechanisms perfected far away eventually come home (Chicken comes home to roots). The attached conversation makes precisely this uncomfortable observation: experiences long familiar in places subjected to colonialism and neocolonialism are becoming recognisable elsewhere, even as younger generations in Africa become increasingly unwilling to accept inherited forms of domination. The laboratory was never somewhere else. We were all inside it. Some simply received the experiment earlier.
Polite ways in which freedom fades away.
Freedom is rarely stolen in one dramatic night. It disappears administratively. Nobody announces: “Ladies and gentlemen, democracy will close permanently at 5 p.m.” No. Freedom disappears for your protection. Temporarily. Because of the emergency. Because of terrorism. Because of misinformation. Because of the war. Because markets are nervous. Because national security requires it. Because an algorithm has reviewed your appeal and, unfortunately, cannot provide additional information at this time. The policeman has become digital. The border has become biometric. The censor has become an algorithm. And bureaucracy has finally achieved immortality by moving to the cloud.
Meanwhile we have been offered consumption as a substitute for freedom. We can choose between forty-seven varieties of shampoo. Wonderful. But can we choose whether our country goes to war? Can we choose who owns our natural resources? Can we decide whether our neighbourhood becomes affordable? Can we determine whether our children’s schools improve? Can citizens stop their governments from doing something once an election is over? Apparently modern democracy sometimes means choosing the waiter while somebody else owns the restaurant. We gained choice but lost agency. We gained connectivity and lost community. We gained followers and lost neighbours. We gained information and became uncertain about what was true. We possess GPS capable of locating us within metres and political systems that have absolutely no idea where they are going. Progress.
Nostalgia for a Future
And here I confess to nostalgia. Not nostalgia for colonialism. Not nostalgia for dictators. Not nostalgia for the good old days, because anybody who studies history carefully discovers that the good old days were often excellent only for the people writing the history. I am nostalgic for something else. I am nostalgic for the time when people believed history could be changed. I miss independence speeches delivered as though tomorrow were actually arriving. I miss workers who believed solidarity meant more than a logo printed on a conference bag. I miss students who believed university was somewhere to disturb society rather than somewhere to perfect a LinkedIn profile. I miss politicians who could speak for forty minutes without using the word branding. I miss the dangerous idea that ordinary people could stop a war.
During the Vietnam War, millions demonstrated around the world. American campuses erupted. Veterans themselves protested. Young men burned draft cards. Muhammad Ali refused induction into the U.S. Army and paid heavily for it professionally. Eventually, political pressure at home became part of the environment in which American involvement could no longer be sustained. There was once a belief that the street mattered. Perhaps I romanticise it. Nostalgia is a dishonest archivist. It keeps the music and misplaces the suffering. But something important existed inside that belief: history was unfinished. Today we increasingly behave as though history has become a subscription service. The future will be delivered to us. Artificial intelligence will deliver it. Technology will deliver it. The market will deliver it. A billionaire will deliver it. Perhaps by drone. We have outsourced imagination. And that may be the greatest theft of all. Because the people who cannot imagine another future will eventually accept almost any present.
The Body Still Remains
And still the body remains. The body crossing the Mediterranean. The body standing at the border. The body under rubble. The body working two jobs. The body waiting at the immigration office. The body demonstrating in the street. The body carrying a child. The body dancing at a wedding three streets away from a funeral. The body refusing humiliation. The body wearing an outrageous yellow suit on Tuesday afternoon because history has already been depressing enough. There is philosophy in that suit. It says: You will not turn me into your tragedy. The body has always known something politicians forget. Human dignity does not begin with permission.
This is also why speaking matters. The attached conversation contains a striking childhood memory: a family facing mortal danger survives after the mother finally speaks and confronts the situation. From that experience comes a simple lesson—sometimes speaking is not commentary on survival; speaking is survival itself. First the body remains. Then the voice returns. And once the voice returns, power has a problem.
The Future Must Be Reclaimed
This is where my nostalgia ends. Because I do not want the past back. I want the future back. There is a difference. I do not want Africa to return to some imaginary untouched paradise. Every civilisation has contradictions, injustices and unfinished business. What I want recovered is the right to imagine. To say that this cannot possibly be the final version of humanity. A civilisation capable of photographing galaxies cannot seriously claim that feeding children is economically complicated. A world capable of transferring billions of dollars across continents in seconds cannot explain poverty as a technical difficulty. Governments capable of locating one particular telephone anywhere on Earth should perhaps be capable of locating drinking water for a village. We are not suffering from a shortage of intelligence. We are suffering from priorities.
That is why I remain hopeful. Not optimistic. Optimism is champagne. Hope is stronger alcohol. Hope has scars. Hope knows exactly what happened and gets dressed anyway. Hope attended the funeral and planted the tree the next morning. Hope remembers the betrayal and still teaches the child. Hope knows about Berlin. Hope knows about Haiti. Hope knows about the tooth. Hope knows about the mines. Hope knows about the boats in the Mediterranean. Hope knows what was stolen. And hope still says: No. The story is not finished.
Something is changing. Younger generations are less impressed by traditional centres of power. They are questioning inherited histories. They are recovering languages, memories and names. They are asking uncomfortable questions about museums, minerals, borders, money and sovereignty. They are discovering that independence is not an event that happened in 1960. Independence is a verb. You have to keep doing it. Freedom is the same. Freedom is not inherited like furniture. Every generation has to manufacture some of it. And perhaps that is the future we are longing for—not a return to yesterday, but the recovery of our ability to make tomorrow.
Because they took almost everything. They took land. They took minerals. They took labour. They took names. They took objects. They took memory and placed parts of it in museums. They took freedom and sometimes returned it with an invoice attached. But something remained. The body. So we dressed it. We polished the shoes. We straightened the jacket. We danced. We remembered. Then the body found its voice. The voice recovered memory. Memory recovered courage. Courage recovered imagination. And imagination began asking the question every empire fears: Why must the world remainrr like this? Perhaps that is where freedom begins again. Not with the flag. Not with the anthem. Not with the presidential motorcade. With the body standing upright. Beautifully dressed, naturally. After everything history has put us through, we might as well look magnificent while taking the future back.
source:rboneza