hors-piste, juste sous l’équateur: technical dreams in the Congo

Jonathan Luke Austin
HUD Principal Investigator
Professor, University of Copenhagen

Introductory Note

In April-May 2024, HUD Principal Investigator Jonathan Luke Austin began its fieldwork with a visit to Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In this preparatory phase, designed to set the groundwork for HUD’s extended fieldwork in 2025, Austin explored the humanitarian context in the DRC as it pertains to HUD’s core research agenda. Below, Austin reflects on the situation in the DRC through a historical lens, teasing out earlier understandings of humanitarian design, development, and the possibilities for political change in postcolonial contexts.

You can read more HUD research in our collective essay series.

The Western technicians to whom we make an urgent appeal will come to Africa not to dominate us but to serve and aid our countries.

– Patrice Lumumba

1. Technical Dreams

Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, was assassinated in January 1961 with the support of the Belgian, British, and American authorities. His story is legendary, and tragic. He remains a martyr for pan-Africanist independence struggles specifically, and liberation movements more generally, globally. But one centrepiece of Lumumba’s thought and the broader internationalist postcolonial moment is often forgotten in the romanticized imaginaries of revolutionary decolonial struggle: the mundane and banal technicalities of transforming the independent Congo into a ‘modern’ nation state. As Lumumba once said:

For a young state such as the Congo, the first concern should be to educate people. And that is why I believe that education should be the largest item in the budget. It is necessary to educate men, to train technicians, and therefore technical and professional schools are needed, because we do not have the men we need at present. The colonial regime was content merely to set up a few primary and intermediate schools, but there are no professional and technical schools, and these are indispensable. Intellectuals or bureaucrats cannot build a country…¹

In his collected speeches and writings, Lumumba makes many dozens of such references to the need for “technicians” or “technical specialists” – engineers, teachers, agronomists – and others to develop the Congolese state. Equally, he called for solidarity across the emerging postcolonial world, as well as for solidarity from ex-colonial technical specialists, and others far a field in achieving this task.

This is what I will call the ‘technical dream’ of postcolonialism.

A dream for design, development, and technological advancement achieved through global solidarity.

This technical dream is something echoed in the writings of internationalist figures across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Technical knowledge, tools, technology, designs for different futures: these would transform the postcolonies. As Che Guevara bluntly put it once, addressing the closing of the First International Meeting of Architecture Students in 1963:

Never forget that technology is a weapon. If you feel the world is not as perfect as it should be, then you must struggle to put the weapon of technology at the service of society.²

Technology is a weapon. Guevara’s own journey folded this insistence on engaging with the ‘technical’ aspects of developing nascent states into his revolutionary activities. After fighting from the mountains, leading Cuba to its revolution, Guevara became minister of industries – focusing on land reform, healthcare, literarcy, and other such activities. After all, Guevara studied medicine and, following his detour into the medicine of violence, returned to his technical roots.

A portrait of Patrice Lumumba painted on a wall in Kinshasa, with one missing tooth, a reference to a tooth being the only part of his body that remained after it was dissolved in acid following his assasination. Photograph: Jonathan Luke Austin

This principle that technology is a weapon for the transformation of society is – of course – not unique to the postcolonial world. It is the principle of modernity as that term is colloquially understood. More, the origins of this technical dream are closely linked to humanitarianism, albeit in an underappreciated way. Humanitarianism as a doctrine has its roots long before its emergence in what I would term the Swiss minimalism of Henry Dunant. That originally minimalist doctrine enshrined the emergence of an organized apparatus for expressing “compassion across boundaries.”³ This focus on boundaries, and particularly territorial boundaries, remains what is colloquially associated with humanitarianism as a field, practice, and ethical principle.

But in “the beginning humanitarianism included both international and domestic action.”⁴ And this is especially true when it comes to humanitarian design, meaning simply the production of technical objects or infrastructures that improve human well-being. Indeed, while humanitarian design is a relatively recent trend within the professionalized frame of compassion across boundaries, its origins can be located in the heart of the colonial metropole. Stohr, for instance, traces its emergence to a disasters such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake but, also, the broader social housing movement in Europe and North America.⁵

In this reading, humanitarian design finds its origins in efforts to materially transform the poverty-stricken neighbourhoods of Europe and North America. And in the solidarity, of sorts, of the technical specialists of those regions. For instance, Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino was in part inspired by the mass-destruction of the First World War and the need for rapid, modular, pre-fabricated housing solutions in Europe. This was, naturally, coupled with a desire to shore-up social stability domestically. In one sense, Lumumba’s technical dreams were an attempt to replicate those humanist efforts in the postcolonies: humanitarianism with socialist politics. And, arguably, it was also for this technical dream that he would be assassinated.⁶

*A grounded plane at N’djili airport, Kinshasa.* Photograph: Jonathan Luke Austin.

2. HORS-PISTE:
ON/OFF-GRID HUMANITARIAN DESIGN

Doesen’t the architect go straightaway to the end, affirming the building?

– Aimé Césaire, Une saison au Congo

A few weeks ago in Kinshasa, a cargo plane coming into land skidded off the runway of N’djili international airport, its engine seperating from the fuselage, damaging the runway. In the (50 USD entrance fee) lounges of the airport, business class customers were ushered away. Flights were grounded for several days, as the airport has only one runway and the few international airlines that fly to Kinshasa, in particular, were no doubt wary of the risk of their planes being stuck in Kinshasa.

The example of a cargo plane paralysing Kinshasa, isolating it from the outside world, albeit momentarily, reveals the abandonment of the technical dreams of Lumumba. As Perazzone writes:

Les villes congolaises en particulier offrent le spectacle saisissant de ces « absences » matérielles que sont les poteaux électriques endommagés, les débris d’anciennes routes goudronnées, les caniveaux débordant d’eau stagnante et de déchets, la vétusté des écoles publiques et des hôpitaux, les inondations récurrentes ou le manque d’abribus. En témoignent encore l’état très délabré des bâtiments administratifs, des postes de police, ou des bureaux des services des transports, de l’état civil, des chefs de quartier ou de l’urbanisme.⁷

From the crumbling infrastructure of the international airport, through the flooded streets, and to the dilapidated government buildings that dot the city, it is clear that Kinshasa has not developed as it was imagined. Rather, the sentiment is that the city has regressed. What has replaced technical dreams of liberation is a complex technocracy mediated either through intensely globalized and advanced technological infrastructures of extraction or an intensely localized structure of human intermediaries drawing on mundane, basic, and crumbling infrastructures to generate a «gigantesque désordre organisé».⁸

In the first instance, for example, one can note that a second airport does exist in Kinshasa. N’Dolo airport used to be the main airport in Kinshasa before it was replaced by N’djili. However, the airport still operates but largely to serve prviate jets for the elite of the country who would prefer to avoid the traffic trams that trail endlessly towards N’djili and circulate freely between Kinshasa, Brussels, Paris, and beyond.

In the second instance, Kinshasa is governed through a deeply complex system of mediation in which – for instance – civil servants seek to “re-formalize more informal, negotiated practices of governance” without being able to draw on “technical devices” given the material absences that mark the state and so, instead, rely on creatively teasing out what little potential for agency exists in the “voids, spaces, and material objects that punctuate everyday life.”⁹

*Street scenes in Kinshasa.* Photographs: Jonathan Luke Austin.

In short, the DRC’s vast resources remain exploited by many, and there are many designers, engineers, and practitioners in Kinshasa. But they are not part of Kinshasa, the Congo, or the postcolonies. There are many explanations for this including naturally, the legacy of Belgian colonial extractivism, as well as the post-Lumumba structure of the state, and late capitalism itself. But one more direct way to read the collapse of Lumumba’s technical dreams is through the work of Sylvestre Ilunga Ilunkamba. Ilunga was briefly Prime Minister of the DRC between 2019-2021 but – long before that – he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Kinshasa. In 1980 he published an article entitled Vers la demystification de la nouvelle magie blanche: le cas de l’industrie zaïroise du cuivre.¹⁰

In this article, Ilunga drew on the work of the Jamaican economist Norman Girvan. Girvan sought to foreground the “ideological role of technology” and – in particular – noted that when the “international economic order” of the 1960s and 1970s came “under heavier and heavier fire” from socialist, internationalist, and other movements, an attempt was made to:

Hold out a new form of white magic to the people of the third world: modern technology, it is said, is the key to rapid development; the developing countries should seek to secure as much of it as possible, and on the best possible terms.¹¹

Echoing debates in Science and Technology Studies, Ilunga described how these processes of technology transfer took the “form of a ‘black box.’ The buyer learns to use technology without understanding it…”

He presses the buttons, but fails to penetrate the secret of the process. As a mere operator, he must revert to the technology supplier for significant repairs, when the times comes, for replacement of the equipment and the technology.¹²

Ilunga identified a series of issues in the Congo that had seen Lumumba’s technical dreams replaced by the import of “white magic.” But paramount among them was the failure to couple the nationalization of industries in Zaire with control over and/or the production of “technical personnel” who typically remained expatriates.¹³ Indeed, to return to Lumumba, his many references to the need for technical knowledge were not disembodied. He addressed, for instance, “a fraternal appeal to the Belgian young people, to democratic young people, to come serve the Congolese state. You will find us to be a brotherly people who need other brothers.”¹⁴ The insistence was not for aid to be managed from a far, but for technical specialists to become part of the Congolese state itself: “not to dominate us but to serve and aid our countries.”¹⁵

This appeal has yet to be heeded.

Ilunga was writing about technological black boxes some time ago. Since then, the flow of capital, expatriate technical specialists, and their white magic has been revealed clearly as a form of predation, something known globally through the image of children digging for Cobalt in mines. But adjacent to that realization, humanitarianism has radically expanded and professionalized its operations including through the tight integration of humanitarian design into its operations in places like the DRC. To some degree, the emergence of such ‘technical humanitarianism’ has helped continue to obfuscate the domination of “Western technicians” that Lumumba sought to avoid. It might be said then that the emergence of humanitarian design in the colonies was an attempt to create a more neutral form of internationalist involvement in technical development, something self-evident in the rise of ‘X, Y, Z Without Borders’ organizations in places like Kinshasa.

*An ‘autonomous’ area in Kinshasa, hosting US-embassy linked facilities.* Photograph: Jonathan Luke Austin.

But humanitarian design is not internationalist, eschewing technical solidarity and instead embracing simply technical compassion (pity?) across borders. Indeed, the intensification of humanitarian presence has only further spatially/technically segregated Kinshasa. Many of the compounds, embassy buildings, logistical facilities, and so forth that dot the city are ‘autonomous’ from the infrastructures that everyday city-dwellers must rely on. Water supplies to humanitarian compounds can be made autonomous, electricity can be fed autonomously through generators, while shipping containers provide a steady flow of day-to-day necessities. Those who inhabit these spaces live autonomously, humanitarian design itself is off-grid.

One wonders indeed if it is not because humanitarian design is off-grid that many of its most famous innovations – flat pack refugee shelters, self-powered solar lanterns, self-contained water purifiers – are themselves designed to operate off-grid. Indeed, the logic of off-grid humanitarian design naturalizes distinctions in social, spatial, and global power structures. In this sense, it risks naturalizing ‘on-grid’ Kinshasa as a space of exceptionalism: of disorder, ungovernable space, and threat. Within such a framing, all that can be offered to such spaces of disorder and their “rag-humans” (those who inhabit both “the world of the dead and the world of the ‘not entirely living’”¹⁶) are temporary prosthetics for gaining a brief, fleeting, glimpse of modernity: grotesque disfigurations of the dream of technical liberation. Such a spatialization follows classical colonial-civilizational logics with, unsurprisingly, there existing many topological homologies between where off-grid humanitarians situate themselves in Kinshasa and the spaces that colonial authorities inhabited prior to its independence.

More than a temporal repetition of patterns of segregation – however – these logics are also spatially globalized. The humanitarian ecologies of Kinshasa – in which one jumps via climate-controlled and chauffeured vehicles from a (possibly ex-colonial) guarded home with generators and other amenities, to guarded and fortified workplaces, to guarded bars where one pays in dollars – are not territorially delimited to the borders of the DRC. Instead, one can map these ecologies back to Copenhagen, Geneva, New York, Brussels and the other ‘bases’ of humanitarianism that are, themselves, spatially segregated and fortified geographies. In one sense, the Nations neighbourhood of Geneva is more closely linked to certain parts of the Gombe neighbourhood of Kinshasa than Nations is linked to Paquis or Gombe is linked to Masina.

Ultimately, such off-grid humanitarianism represents an abandonment of humanitarian design’s original mission and its technical dreams. If design is about the active production of life itself, then this denial of the technical necessities that undergird design is the denial of life itself: its disproduction.

*A bar at night, largely unlit, street in the Masina neighbourhood of Kinshasa.* Photograph: Jonathan Luke Austin

3. FOR A MILITANT DESIGN

We have always said (and we know that we’re right): Dictatorship is not a revolutionary weapon but a means of oppression just like moral and physical torture’; because if dictatorship were revolutionary, as you often say, if discipline could replace education, as you often claim; if obedience is man’s highest virtue, you would be led to conclude that inhumanity is also liberal.

– Sony Labou Tansi¹⁷

If technology is a weapon, then humanitarian design is a weapon. But the question is to what use that weapon is put. And, sometimes, to find alternatives to that which we dislike in the present, it is best to look to the past. Lumumba’s technical dreams were militant dreams and, so, one possible future for humanitarian design is to cultivate a renewed ethos of militancy. To return to the internationalism, solidarity, and radical change of his technical dreams.

But if the figures who advocated such dreams are all long dead, what would such a militant humanitarian design mean nowadays?

At least three principles seem central.

The first is to resist – at all costs – provincialism. In contemporary debates, humanitarianism is provincial in two different (and opposed) ways. The first is captured in the desire to ‘go local’ in humanitarianism tout court. This localisation of humanitarianism was long purported to offer the promise of leveraging local agency or creativity and so to being sensitive to local contextual heterogeneity, shifting away from hegemonic ‘Western’ epistemologies and politics. In reality, such a localization agenda began a process of intensified fragmentation that misdirected attention not only from global power structures but also local (i.e. state) power structures in places like the DRC. To speak of the ‘local’ has – almost always – been to speak of romanticized visions of activists, civil society, and the impoverished who presumably, with a slight nudge, can better the spaces they inhabit. It has never been to speak of the impure reality of power, nor indeed to reflect on “les modes de production du pouvoir, sur les racines brutales, coloniales, de l’État moderne, ou sur les mystifications d’un néolibéralisme mondial de plus en plus contesté.”¹⁸

Instead, such a localisation agenda has generated a desire to “water-down” the technical dreams of figures like Lumumba. Much in vogue nowadays in humanitarian design is the principal, aforementioned, that ‘local’ conditions are so complex, so intractable, so distant from the metropole, that one must, to put it bluntly, be a little cheap in the designs imagined and developed. As Girvan put it long ago, at a point before the professionalization of humanitarian design yet when faith in technology as a spur to development was already fading, the discourse nowadays remains:

‘White magic’ can still be made to work for us – if it can be made cheaper, more accessible, and more appropriate to our own conditions. It is this kind of assumption, perhaps implicit and unconscious but nonetheless real and pervasive, which we now wish to critically evaluate in the light of our own Caribbean experience.¹⁹

In the simplest possible terms, such a localized vision for humanitarian design fails because dreams of technical liberation are dreams of connectivity, modernity, and – so – of the global. They are not dreams of compromise, of accepting the status quo, of going cheap. They are not provincial dreams.

*A street scene in Kinshasa.* Photograph: Jonathan Luke Austin

The second variant of this turn towards the local appears more nuanced, and – indeed – is a critique of the technocracy of local peacebuilding, humanitarianism, or development. It is found in what still remain largely theoretical descriptions of decolonial, pluriversal, or related possibilities for design and politics.²⁰ The debates around these topics are many but they paradoxically echo many of the talking-points of local humanitarianism itself. Much decolonial thinking can be too easily read as attempting to abstract away from the state, territory, or macro-spatial concepts by privileging instead provincial understandings of the cultural, the community, the traditional, and the indigenous. Romanticizing, again, the local.

Mbembe has critiqued this tendency in decolonial theory for being too insistent on calling for a gesture of “disconnection and separation” that “cuts off one cultural or historical entity from another.”²¹ In this, appeals to indigenous, autonomous, or natural forms of designing are sharply cut from modernity. The technical dreams of Lumumba are very much in line with Mbembe’s critique of such an understanding of decolonization. Writing about the Congo of tomorrow, Lumumba stated that “We have a culture all our own, unparalleled moral and artistic values, an art of living and patterns of life that are ours alone.”²² But he also repeatedely stressed that, “We will borrow from Western civilization what is good and beautiful” in particular because:

We do not want to cut ourselves off from the West, for we are quite aware that no people in the world can be self-sufficient.²³

This acute postcolonial awareness of global socio-material entanglement refuses both the technocracy of local humanitarian design and the provincialism of some decolonial thinking. Indeed, as Mbembe also described, if decolonization is “to be more than a slogan” then “now more than ever before, what we need is a new critique of technology, of the experience of technical life.”²⁴ At one level, this requires recognizing that a return to Lumumba’s technical dreams is necessarily impure in its militancy. A militant humanitarian design requires recognizing that a different kind of politics can emerge only by engaging what Glissant (2020, 108) once termed the Whole-World:

I call the Whole-World our universe as it changes and lives on through its exchanges and, at the same time, the ‘vision’ that we have of it. The world-totality in its physical diversity and in the representations that it inspires in us: so that we are no longer able to sing, speak or work based on our place alone, without plunging into the imagination of this totality.²⁵

This was also at the root of Lumumba’s appeal to many Belgian ex-colonists to stay in the DRC and to become loyal to it. And, for all their many faults, the few who did remain (with, if not loyalty, then at least a certain paternalist solidarity) have arguably contributed more to the humanitarian development of the DRC than any organization based in Brussels.

*A painting at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, part of the kolwezi exhibition*. Photograph: Jonathan Luke Austin.

A first step towards a militant humanitarian design is thus an internationalism that embraces connectivity and refuses the provincialism of the local. But a second element is perhaps more delicate, given it turns us back to the state and so appears to contradict the cosmopolitanism of the first principal. Lumumba’s project was a state-building project. Within an internationalist frame, yes, but still focused on the ‘Congo’ as a territorially-delimited entity to be liberated. The second principal of militant humanitarian design is thus ‘statism’ in the simple sense of seeking to focus on a particular political structure that exists in multiplicity with others internationally but which requires radical change. To go, to put it differently, specific (but not ‘local’).

Nonetheless, such a principle is also dangerous. One false lesson that has often been taken from its embrace, globally, is the idea that “dictatorship… [is] a revolutionary weapon” able to transform such political structures.²⁶ This was the error, to some degree, made by many Latin American states, including Cuba. To return to our Congolese economist – Ilunga – he compared Africa and Latin American countries such as Chile. From his perspective, “Latin America countries… [enjoyed] an important advantage… Chile had available the national technical personnel required to assure the smooth continuation of operations at all levels [in its copper industry].”²⁷ This indeed gifted a certain comparative advantage to Latin America vis-à-vis economic, and so humanitarian, development.

But if technology is a weapon, then the risk is that that weapon will be directed towards the population of a country. This is perhaps the fate of Cuba. For many radicals, Cuba remains a dream of resistance, of refusing hegemonic economic rationalities, of successful technical liberation. This is especially manifest in the fact that, despite its failures internally, Cuba has developed its own sustained international humanitarian program, especially vis-à-vis medical care, that exports its own technical personnel globally when humanitarian crisis hits.²⁸

In spite of this success, Cuba and other states have yet to embrace a militant form of humanitarian design vis-à-vis their own political structures. To revert the humanitarian gaze upon the state itself. The second principal of statism in a militant humanitarian design, is thus paradoxically decidedly liberal: to reform the self or – rather – the entity that still today represents every self, despite our hostility (the state). A militant humanitarian design is not the naïve principle that internationalism alone creates change, something Guevara himself experienced very directly in his failed attempt to export Cuba’s revolution to the Congo.²⁹

Let me return to Swiss minimalism. For all the flaws self-evident in the professionalization of humanitarianism today, the root notion of international humanitarian law (IHL) was militant. IHL does not focus on local conditions or agency, nor a romanticism about ‘humanity’ as a concept to be elevated. On the contrary, in its politics, the foundation of international humanitarian and human rights law is radical for its focus on restricting, reforming, and changing the state. The very notion that general restrictions can be placed on states remains intensely radical. But for humanitarian design it is an alien notion. Humanitarian design interventions are typically focused – in palatable language – on serving ‘beneficiaries’ by which it refers again to those “rag-humans” who inhabit both “the world of the dead and the world of the ‘not entirely living.’”³⁰ They are deciedely not focused on the technical dream of transforming state, and so power, structures materially-technologically.

But if technology today is used to control populations, and international law sought to invert sovereign power by deploying the self-same tool to restrict the sovereign, then a militant humanitarian design must also seek to deploy technology to reform the state as an entity.³¹ In the much quoted words of Lawrence Lessig, if ‘code [i.e. technology] is law’ the question is to whom that law applies, and why that directionality cannot be changed to apply the force of material-technological law upon states themselves.

A third and final – more nebulous, yet more important – principal for a militant humanitarian design is self-evident: solidarity. At its base, internationalist principles are never about the spectacle of compassion across borders but rather the pragmatics of solidarity. For Lumumba, thus, the “only watchword we give our militants — and we have the right to do so in connection with our political activities — is to mobilize in a spirit of solidarity.”³² Thus, for him, pan-Africanism was about demonstrating “a spirit of solidarity, concord, and fraternal collaboration in the pursuit of the common good of our peoples.”³³ It was also about demonstrating “our brotherhood to the world.”³⁴ Though he did also remark that:

African solidarity is something unbelievable, I assure you. I had no idea there was this sort of solidarity, including all the Asiatic countries. These events in the Congo have helped us enormously. The action of Belgium in the Congo has been of great benefit to us. [Applause, laughter.].³⁵

*Painted exterior walls of the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa.* Photograph: Jonathan Luke Austin.

5. KIN LA BELLE

Everyday we receive messages of affection and solidarity, from every corner of the globe, for the just cause we are fending. History never takes a step backward.

– Patrice Lumumba³⁶

While history may never take a step backward, it certainly pauses sometimes.

Lumumba’s technical dreams have not materialized, but their abstract vision remains preserved, fossilized, awaiting reanimation. At one level, you can observe this in the everyday politics of the DRC. Partisans of its current president, Félix Tshisekedi, refer to him as Fatshi (Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi) béton (Fatshi concrete), in partial reference to his – very many – promises to construct or reconstruct infrastructure across the country. His campaign videos thus prominently feature cranes, construction models, and other symbols of the oft-repeated refrain: modernity, modernity, modernity.

But brighter attempts to preserve Lumumba’s dream exist. The Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa was founded in 1943 by a Belgian Catholic missionary. It remains open, training Congolese students in a multitude of artistic fields. In one of its exhibition spaces, those students regularly display their work.

One installation that appeared a few months ago, depicts a series of pyrographic works – wooden tableaus with burn marks forming paintings, interspersed here and there with colour. One of the larger works in the series depicts a woman, a baby, and her family. Another to its right depicts a dead woman and child, overlooked by a raven. Above these scenes, the young artist – Eraste Muthangi – has installed a series of burnt portraits. One of those depicts Luc Nkulula, an activist and leader of the pro-democracy movement lutte pour le changement (LUCHA). La Lucha is based in Goma, eastern DRC, and was established by a group of students seeking to develop “un congo nouveau, ce congo nouveau que lumumba a rêvé.” Luc died in a fire at his home in 2018, in suspicious circumstances, and activists of la Lucha are regularly arrested and tortured today. Another depicts Mamadou Ndala, a former colonel in the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC), who is famous for fighting a series of key battles against the M23 movement, largely seen as sponsored by Rwanda, in the East of the country. Ndala died in an ambush in 2014.

Each of these portraits and the larger tableaus are connected by a series of tubes, filled with red paint, to a pedestal holding an acrylic box filled with red paint and a carved heart. They symbolize a struggle for maintaining relations between a fragile, but vibrant, body politic in the Congo: connecting the heart of a united and potentially liberated postcolonial state to the diverse figures who contribute to its survival. The installation is also a mixture. Of soldiers and non-violent activists, of anonymous figures and famous fighters. In this, it embraces the ambivalence of Congo’s contemporary aporia.

Art is a technical practice. Muthangi has developed his own mixed-media style to produce his work, mixing reclaimed wood, blowtorches, colour, and plastic tubing. What moves through that technicality is, however, a similar dream to that of Lumumba: for solidarity flowing through the blood of those who still struggle to construct a different future for the Congo. These are then still technical dreams. But they are technical dreams without the material/materiel to build beyond the studio, to develop beyond the imagination. Nonetheless, they are not speculative designs, they are operative designs. They prefigure the coming change in places like the Congo, however vague it may now seem. They prefigure a different kind of militancy. In his preface to Lumumba’s collective writings, Jean-Paul Satre (who rather adored speaking to revolutionaries, much to his confusion) wrote:

The Congo loses only one battle. Protected by the Congolese National Army, the Congolese bourgeoisie, that class of traitors and turncoats who have been bought off, will finish the job that it has started an set itself up as a class of exploiters. Capitalist concentration will slowly put an end to feudal enclaves and unify the exploited, and all the conditions for a Castroist movement will be present. But Cubans honor the memory of José Marti, who died at the end of the last century without seeing Cuba’s victory over Spain or the subjection of the island to United States imperialism. And a few years from now, if the Castro of the Congo wishes to teach his followers that unity must be fought for, he will remind them of its first martyr, Lumumba.³⁷

Congo still awaits its Castro.

But whatever one thinks of nostalgia for past revolutionaries, among the dreams that will certainly reappear when that Castro does emerge is a technical dream.

5. CODA

ZZZ

~~Mais Mes~~ Un jazz poitrinaires
Toussent toussent toussent
Et crachent
~~Des~~ Un air de regiment!

Je tousse pour cracher
La haine et l’oppression —
Quelqu’un chante des bêtises

Et ~~Qui~~ tombent en panne

Je tousse pour cracher la France —
Les jazz [xx]/crachent un air
De régiment — un vieil air militaire —
Je ~~crache le temps~~ Comme on crache l’opprobre

~~Et l’opprobre~~ Dans un cours d’histoire.
~~Et la foudre~~
~~Et les cours d’Histoire de France~~

Rue Franceville
Rue Zanaga
Rue Makoko
Voyons — Toutes ces rues que font-elles
Dans la boue à minuit —
« Que fais-tu dans la honte à minuit ? »

Rue Voltaire
Rue Lénine Rue Lumumba
~~Mais je ne suis pas de ceux qui s’arrêtent~~
~~Dans la vie –~~

Que pouvez-vous faire
À mon âme ~~d’huile~~ de vin
De palme ?
À ma tête de bombe
Nucléaire
À mon coeur de dynamite

– Extract from Le Poète en panne, Sony Labou Tansi.

*Mount Nyiragongo, near Goma, Eastern DRC.* Photograph: Jonathan Luke Austin.

NOTES

1
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 180.
2
Guevara, Estnesto Che. (2000). Che Guevara Talks to Young People, Cape Town: Kwela Books, 74.
3
Barnett, M. (2018). Empire of humanity: A history of humanitarianism. Cornell University Press, 19.
4
Barnett, M. (2018). Empire of humanity: A history of humanitarianism. Cornell University Press, 19.
5
Stohr, Kate. (2006). “100 Years of Humanitarian Design” In Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. New York: Thames and Hudson, 33-53.
6
As William Reno describes, the post-independence struggle that eventually led to Lumumba’s assinastion appeared ultimately “to be over the possibility of indigenous forces taking over the Western-dominated economy to redirect itsformidable local resources towards developing a truly national industrial base.” See Reno, W., 2013. “Congo: from state collapse to ‘absolutism’, to state failure.” In From Nation-Building to State-Building (pp. 39-52), London: Routledge, 47.
7
Perazzone, S. 2020. «L’ennuyeux» formalisme d’État. Distanciation-discipline et gouvernance urbaine en République démocratique du Congo. Politique africaine, 158(1), 231.
8
Libération. (2023). “RDC : la tension monte dans l’attente des résultats des élections,” 27 décembre.
9
Perazzone, S., 2019. “Neighborhood Chiefs in Urban DRC:‘ The State is Me, the State is You, the State is All of Us.’” in Negotiating Public Services in the Congo: State, Society and Governance, pp.51-73.
10
Ilunkamba, I., 1979. Vers la demystification de la nouvelle magie blanche: le cas de l’industrie zaïroise du cuivre. IFDA Dossier, (7), pp. 1-12.
11
Girvan, N. (1977). “Technology: A New White Magic for Africa?” Africa Development / Afrique et Développement, 2(2), 5.
12
Sachs, I. and Vinaver, K. (1976). “De l’effet de domination à la self-reliance: téchniques appropriées pour le dévelopement,” Mondes en Développement, 15, 483.
13
Ilunkamba, I., 1979. Vers la demystification de la nouvelle magie blanche: le cas de l’industrie zaïroise du cuivre. IFDA Dossier, (7), 149.
14
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 188.
15
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 73.
16
Labou Tansi, Sony. (2011). Life and a half. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 9.
17
Tansi, Sony Labou. (2011). Life and a half. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 95.
18
Perazzone, S. 2020. «L’ennuyeux» formalisme d’État. Distanciation-discipline et gouvernance urbaine en République démocratique du Congo. Politique africaine, 158(1), 254.
19
Girvan, N. (1978). White Magic: The Caribbean and Modern Technology. The Review of Black Political Economy, 8(2), 158.
20
For the most prominent example here see Escobar, A., 2018. Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
21
Mbembe, Achille. 2019. “Future Knowledges and Their Implications for the Decolonisation Project.” In Decolonisation in Universities: The Politics of Knowledge, edited by Jonathan Jansen, 239–54. Wits University Press, 242.
22
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 74.
23
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 72-73.
24
Mbembe, A., 2021. Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe. In Decolonising the Neoliberal University (pp. 122-136). Birkbeck Law Press.
25
Glissant, Édouard. 2020. Treatise on the Whole-World. Liverpool University Press Liverpool, 108.
26
Tansi, Sony Labou. (2011). Life and a half. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 95.
27
Ilunkamba, I., 1979. Vers la demystification de la nouvelle magie blanche: le cas de l’industrie zaïroise du cuivre. IFDA Dossier, (7), 150.
28
Marie Michèle Grenon. (2016). Cuban Internationalism and Contemporary Humanitarianism: History, Comparison and Perspectives. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 8(2), 200–216.
29
Guevara, E.C., 2015. Congo Diary: The Story of Che Guevara’s” Lost” Year in Africa. Ocean Press.
30
Labou Tansi, Sony. (2011). Life and a half. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 9.
31
See Austin, J.L., (2020). The Poetry of Moans and Sighs: Designs for and against Evil, Frame: Journal of Literary Studies 33 (2) and Austin, J.L., 2019. Towards an international political ergonomics. European Journal of International Relations, 25 (4).
32
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 120.
33
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 70.
34
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 75.
35
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 19.
36
Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 277.
37
Sartre, JP. in Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 52.