Why are you watching? (A photo essay)

Jonathan Luke Austin
Professor
The University of Copenhagen

Introductory Note

In this photo essay, one of HUD’s Principal Investigators, Jonathan Luke Austin, reflects on contemporary humanitarian and development conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He does so through a visual foray into the problems facing public transport, lighting, and humanitarian missions in the DRC. The essay draws on photographs taken during fieldwork in November and December 2024 as part of HUD’s core research and is a follow-up to an earlier essay published here titled hors-piste, juste sous l’équateur: technical dreams in Kinshasa.

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

La biére des mensonges chromosomes mise en bouteille,
À Génève À New-York – à l’ONU –
Notre pain quotidien crucifié
Dans les archives des Nations-Unies
Vous n’avez pas vu
La greffe de personnalité
Le Prix Nobel de la mendicité
Les poubelles où pissent
Vos gratte-ciel
Vos métros
Vos citadelles
Vos marchés pommés
Vous n’avez pas vu
La nausée fleurie
La fleur rouge de servage
Nos drapeaux criant aux nefs
De votre moral vos drapeaux

– Sony Labou Tansi¹

Pedestrians walk along the pavement on the Poids-Lourds highway in Kinshasa, during heavy traffic in 2024.

1. Prendre la ligne 11

At one point in his 1976 novel The Antipeople, Sony Labou Tansi’s protagonist Dadou muses as follows:

He felt like smiling, but the smile aborted. What had happened to his wretched driver? One had got into the habit, in that town, of being prepared for anything. As a teacher-training college principal, you did not always have bus-money on you. So you took a ‘number eleven’ for a journey of several kilometres. That is what we call a man’s own two feet: a number eleven, or the oldest means of locomotion. Dadou decided to walk home — a number eleven for you, old man.²

Almost fifty years later, citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are still taking line “number eleven” to get to work, to meet friends, to return home. The two lines in the digit 11 signify the two legs of a human body which, in a context lacking any true form of public transportation, become infrastructurally critical.³ For the country to function, human legs must move to the point of exhaustion. This transplanting of bodies-as-infrastructure, this cold neglect of the right to mobility, represents an extreme example of ‘transport poverty’ and its predations.⁴ While numerous forms of transportation – buses, moto-taxis, etc. – do exist in the DRC, their cost is often still prohibitive, their use unsafe, and their reliability stymied. As such, taking Line 11 remains very common, one of life’s necessities.

Mobility beyond this “oldest means of locomotion” has long been recognised as vital to human emancipation.⁵ It allows the impoverished to gain employment, women to escape the home, and minorities to flee the ghettoes. But as is equally historically clear, the design of systems of mobility is also thus a means to restrict freedom.⁶ This is especially true in places like the DRC where concerns over social unrest are ever-present.⁷ Yet, even in such contexts, authorities are obligated to make gestures towards improving the mobility of their citizens. In Kinshasa, plans to construct a metro system connecting the districts of the city are the latest nod in that direction. Indeed, the as of now non-existent ‘MetroKin’ advertises its future promises with the slogan: Bientôt la libération des emprises.⁸

Will such a metro ever emerge? The project involves not only the Congolese government but also partnerships with the French transport manufacturer, Alstom, and the Africa Finance Corporation, a pan-African finance and development institution. Still, doubts remain among observers and Congolese citizens. A map circulating on social media that purports to show the planned route of the metro turns out to be a copy of the Washington D.C. metro map, with station names simply swapped for neighbourhoods in Kinshasa. The front-page of the (at the time of writing) offline MetroKin project website was a photoshopped image of the Texas metro system. And while all that could be attributed to overzealous social media managers, it is well known that past Congolese governments have established para-state transport entities so as to facilitate money laundering activities, especially to hide embezzled funds.⁹

Above, a ‘map’ of the yet-to-be-constructed ‘MetroKin’ transport system, copied from the Washington D.C. transport system. Below, a photoshopped image of the Houston, Texas metro system, purporting to show Kinshasa’s future metro.

In any case, if a metro ever emerges (or, in a rather more baroque possibility, a mooted cable car/téléphérique hoped to one day float over the city streets, despite the lack of electricity¹⁰), it will not be any time soon. Line 11 will continue to exist for many decades to come. For some, this is not a problem. The extremities of neoliberal subjectification in the Congo are amply clear just a few metres from Line 11, on the road proper, where imported and climate controlled SUVs are driven over potholes and flooded streets. Somewhat ironically, these vehicles are very often stationary, inching forward only slowly in the crisis of traffic jams that engulf the city. It is not necessarily quicker to take an SUV, walking can be more efficient. But as André Gorz once wrote:

The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking.¹¹

The automobile retains its ideological status, globally, as a sign of modernity, power, and individual liberty. Despite the “myth” of it offering freedom being most abundantly clear in places like the Congo. One would still prefer to sit in traffic than walk the streets. Still, in a final fitting twist, most of the vehicles in the Congo are ‘out of place’ quite literally. For logistical reasons, vehicles in the DRC are often imported from Japan, or Japanese factories in South Africa, via Tanzania.¹² These vehicles are designed to be driven on the left, as is customary in Japan and South Africa. But the Congo drives on the right. Even these symbols of luxury, of having obtained wealth and power in a context where that is primordial, find their ideological value subverted by the reality of the state’s degradation. The development of roads, like the skies, operates ‘off-piste‘ in the Congo, and one is always – however subtly – forced to observe from the wrong direction, relying more on wing mirrors than one would like, failing to see clearly.

‘Just as one sometimes lowers one’s head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night. All around people are asleep. It’s just play acting, an innocent self-deception, that they sleep in houses, in safe beds, under a safe roof, stretched out or curled up on mattresses, in sheets, under blankets; in reality they have flocked together as they had once upon a time and again later in a deserted region, a camp in the open, a countless number of men, an army, a people, under a cold sky on cold earth, collapsed where once they had stood, forehead pressed on the arm, face to the ground, breathing quietly.’

– Franz Kafka¹³

Night scenes in Kinshasa, DRC, on the route from Limete to Gombe.

2. A camp in the open

The question of light preoccupies engineers, urban planners, architects, and designers. A balance must be struck between the creation of environments illuminated to open the night as a space of potential, and the constraining effects of how those illuminations restrict, pre-plan, or deny our movement. Indeed, a common complaint in Europe and North America relates to the over-lighting of urban space, something that produces not only light pollution but also a slow smothering of the potential freedom of darkness itself. For some, we have become “prisoners of artificial light who cannot stray outside its perimeter.”¹⁴

But what occurs in places where there is such little light, at night, that the question and politics of ‘over-lighting’ is almost entirely irrelevant?

To return to Sony Labou Tansi’s Dadou, at one point in the novel he muses further as follows:

Bands of mist hung in the headlights. What a bloody awful country, Dadou thought. A man could not even bring himself to hate it. They were below Devil’s Island now. Down where the bloody town met the country and tiny fishing villages grew up like dreams in the scrub, huts grouped in twos and threes, their walls cluttered with curious contraptions that man had spent years inventing and with which he hunted fish. Canoes could already be seen tracing silvery wakes over the khaki expanse of the river. Dadou took out a letter. There was not enough light. He put it back into his pocket. Birds were flitting from grass-stem to grass-stem, from bush to bush. Then they were on sand, in the world of fish and fishing. The smell of the river. The bitter smell of fresh blood and the ceaseless khaki flow beneath the acquatic plants. The Datsun would go no farther. Damned Japanese cars!¹⁵

In the scene painted by Tansi, nature suffocates the night or, rather, human desires for the night. Flitting birds. Acquatic smells. Mist. Enveloped by all that, one cannot read. Whether letters, or other materials. There is no light, and so every gesturing towards ‘civilization’ is suffocated, quite deliberately, by a politics of denying the Congo the capacity to light up its nights. A politics that continues to divide and rule, to dictate who can be ‘civilized’ or not. In that politics, the night is designed as a space of suspension, and the struggle to counter-design sources of light consumes society. With Cédrick Nzolo:

In the street, we follow small moments of light:

Students travel miles to cluster under a lone halogen or neon lamp.

An incandescent bulb lights pieces of a wall; someone’s got power!
If it’s an LED, no one leaves ’til it turns off.

The occasional bar has an awning lit with colored microbulbs;
no reading here—
just beer, but at least you can see what you’re drinking.

Car headlights give a fizz-fast view of the way.

A flashlight is handy, but too often the choice is between batteries
and food.

If you have one and you’ve been near a functional outlet
in the last few days,
try your cell phone: turn it on and off fast for a brief look
at the road ahead.

Fire up a match, a candle, a cigarette lighter;
see what you can see with the cigarette alone.

If you have several matches, the means, and the space, try a whole fire
(wood for flames, coal for embers).

A petrol lamp is good, but the price of gas is high these days. Learn to make the local variety. You’ll need an empty can (tomato sauce tins are good) or a glass jar (the ones they sell mayo in work well), a long wick, and a sliver of sheet metal to make a small stand for the wick; if you want to get fancy, add a bottle top to hold the stand in place.

Wait for a full moon.

Consider fireflies.

I write these words by the light of one candle. My translator sits
thousands of kilometers away,
in a house blazing with lights she has forgotten to turn off.

Vie ezo leka pamba kaka boye.
Life is so damn short and the ways forward so few.

I wed faith with rage and push through to the next dawn.
In my other life.¹⁶

Robert Williams writes that “night spaces are neither uniform nor homogenous. Rather they are constituted by social struggles about what should and should not happen in certain places during the dark of the night…”¹⁷ In the Congo, this logic is clear. The poorest in society are enveloped in darkness at home. The richest in society illuminate their fortified homes with generators, albeit still meekly. The odd bank surrounded by armed guards hangs Christmas lights. Solar street lights exist, but largely illuminate ‘strategically important’ highways. And where light can be found publicly, it is usually somewhere where one can drink: “the occasional bar has an awning lit with colored microbulbs; no reading here—just beer, but at least you can see what you’re drinking.”¹⁸ Drinking is another good way to smother the world.

A street scene in the popular Matongé neighbourhood of Kinshasa.

A man sits in the darkness of night outside a clothing store in Kinshasa, DRC.

Kinshasa N’Dolo military prison, with a sign indicating times for family visits illuminated at night.

The headquarters of Rawbank, the largest financial institution in the DRC, illuminated for the winter holidays.

A group of men and street vendors sit on the street at night, waiting for morning in Kinshasa, DRC.

A fire lit for warmth at night near N’djili, Kinshasa, by the road leading to the international airport.

A closed nightclub at dusk in the city of Goma, DRC.

The door to a ‘new’ night club, illuminated in pink in the Bon-Marché district of Kinshasa.

The heavily fortified diplomatic quarter of Kinshasa, at night.

We have launched an appeal to the UN, and the UN has looked at our appeal favourably. Tomorrow, the Secretary General of the United Nations Organization, Mr Hammarskjold, whose impartiality and probity are appreciated in the Third World, will be among us, in Leopoldville. We have confidence in him! The UN will speak the law and justice will be done to us! I do not doubt it! In the face of the world! Justice full and whole!

– Aimé Césaire¹⁹

One of the football pitches at Collège Alfajiri, Bukavu, DRC.

3. The men WITH dark glasses

In the middle of the Eastern Congolese city of Bukavu there is an old school, the Collège Alfajiri, a jesuit teaching institution founded in 1938. In 1994, thousands of refugees fleeing the Rwandan genocide occurring just across the border were hosted on its football pitches and in the schoolyards. Eventually, they were resettled by the United Nations refugee agency in camps all across the city. Later those pitches occasionally became home to helicopters from the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) who would land, sometimes dropping wounded men to be cared for. This created much suspicion. Who were those men exactly? Displaced persons? Civilians? Soldiers? And if soldiers, which soldiers? In the ever-tense environment generated by the armed conflicts that have have raged in the region for decades, misinformation spreads quickly, and fear over the motivations of the United Nations remain strong.

Piloted by UN staff or not, helicopters do not so much circulate above the world as generate another world. In his acclaimed novel Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, Koli Jean Bofane describes a scene in which a helicopter installs a telecommunications tower in a village. The helicopter was “made in Russia” and “couldn’t be purchased without the Ukrainian pilot who came with it.”²⁰ A “cable was attached to it, at the end of which hung a reproduction of what Isookanga knew to be the Eiffel Tower, only larger. The telecommunications tower the elders had been talking about for some time was balancing gently in the air.”²¹ The protagonist, Isookanga, describes how he had “no complaints” about the “hellish racket” of the helicopter though the “monkeys²² did have a few, but he was thrilled that the trees that thought they ruled over everything and everyone were finally having their tresses tousled by something stronger than they.”²³

Reflecting later, Isookanga muses:

“See what life should look like!” Isookanga cried out, pointing to a calendar of the Ekanga Kutu Enterprises showing a night time view of the Boulevard du 30-Juin in Kinshasa. “Look at all those cars. And yet it’s not even what they call a traffic jam; you should see that—it’s fabulous. There would be far more red lights than what you see here, and far brighter! I can’t stand the darkness or the dogmatism here anymore. Did you notice the power of that helicopter the other day? And that man with the dark hair and creased eyes, did you see how expertly he put that metal tower down? That’s the sort of world I want to advance in, speaking the language of the technicians, approaching the vernaculars of tomorrow.²⁴

Here, the injustice of the denial of ‘development’ in the Congo is articulated. The wedding of “faith with rage” of Nzolo at the denial of the technical dreams of postcolonial states. The reasons that Gorz’s ideology of the automobile retains its power, the fact that the “traffic jam” can be “fabulous” as a move away from “darkness” or “dogmatism.”

Yet, that story is tainted by its audience. As the helicopter swoops down to install its telecommunications tower, the scene is crowded by “important figures” – a delegation of officials from the government, a “white woman researcher and her laptop” and a more nebulous group of “men with dark glasses” who as the helicopter approached, “all raised their head at the same time, as if they’d noticed a signal coming from their own world.”²⁵

Helicopters, then, along with planes and four-wheel drive vehicles, are a means to access a different world. The resentment that pervades sentiments towards humanitarians in places like the Congo stem from that duality of worlds. A resentment at the men and women with dark glasses who flit from ‘mission’ to ‘mission’ in guarded convoys, sometimes buying model trinkets (see below) before they return to that other world. A resentment, perhaps, at what the Egyptian economist and political scientist Samir Amin called the replacement of internationalism with humanitarianism.²⁶

An armoured United Nations vehicle stuck in traffic in Kinshasa, DRC.

A United Nations transport plane taxing for take-off at Goma International Airport, DRC.

A man in the city of Bukavu urinates on ‘donated’ United Nations containers, left behind after the departure of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) from South Kivu, DRC.

The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) base in Goma, DRC).

United Nations helicopters at Goma International Airport, DRC.

Two hand-crafted models of transport mediums in Goma, DRC: an ICRC 4×4 vehicle ubiquitous in the city (top right), and a model of a ‘Chukudu’ handmade two-wheeled vehicle commonly used for transporting cargo in the East of the DRC. Most commonly, these objects are purchased by international humanitarian workers themselves, and the Chukudu model branded with the Médecins Sans Frontières logo was specifically commissioned by humanitarians as a keep-sake to bring home. A memory of their time in “the world of the dead and the world of the ‘not entirely living.’”

And you are watching, are one of the watchmen, you find the next one by brandishing a burning stick from the brushwood pile beside you.