virt_6

Wim van Binsbergen, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa

6. The village in town (b): 'Villagisation' and ethical renewal in Kinshasa and Lusaka

6.1. René Devisch on Kinshasa, Zaire: The aftermath of unwhitening

My second case study takes us to present-day Kinshasa, the turbulent capital of Zaire. In a masterly recent paper which has created much debate, René Devisch - who has established himself internationally as one of the major anthropologists working on Zaire - describes in detail the rise and fall of sensualism and unwhitening in post-colonial Kinshasa, up to the popular orgies of material destruction in the early 1990s. At the end of his account he claims that a retreat towards what he calls 'villagisation', constitutes the major response among inhabitants in the mid-1990s.39 Devisch insists on applying the cosmology of the prototypical Zairian village (which to him is in the first place a Yaka village) to the new urban orientation. For the first time, he asserts, ethics have been introduced into an urban space which in preceding decades was seen, by its inhabitants, as mere place of individual hunting without ethics, where the bars of the 1970s have been transformed into maternities and churches of today, and where thieves can no longer trespass into the suburbs which are now publicly regarded as a secluded space set apart for mothers and their children.

6.2. The oneiric village

Attractive as this picture is, the suggested process of villagisation refers not to a real village but to a dream village. It seems yet another version of a process long ago recognised by students of symbolic transformations in twentieth-century Africa: the attempt to copy with ongoing social, political and economic change by formulating new blueprints for the ideal society, which invariably was to emulate the ideals of the village, in terms of kinship support, intimacy, cosmologically underpinned order, absence of sorcery. As I argued in Religious change in Zambia,40 many twentieth-century religious phenomena such as witchcraft eradication movements, prophetic movements, healing movements, and many independent churches, could be interpreted as trying to revert back to the dream of a viable rural society. For instance, the Lumpa church of the 1960s, the witchcraft eradication movements of the 1930s to 1950s, the immensely massive and widespread movement around the prophet Mupumani in 1914, all displayed similar traits in this respect. Essential in this dream is that it only seeks to emulate, not a historical village itself, but a loose selection of traits referring to the village yet transformed so as to match a non-village environment engaged in the capitalist mode of production and consumption. Against this background the notion of villagisation, when applied to one of the largest cities in Africa, may be somewhat misleading.

6.3. Urban cultural consensus?

There seems to be room for further criticism. When we speak of cities, in the context of contemporary Africa or otherwise, we refer to situations which in principle are not primarily closely-knit, based on a kinship idiom, face-to-face relationships etc. In addition to the demographic scale of the set of people involved and their concentration within a fairly limited area, we approach African towns with notions of fragmentation and heterogeneity, so that not the closely-knit corporate group, but the dyadic network becomes the most obvious model of urban social organisation. Plurality of cultural and class perspectives, of language, of meaning, appears to be axiomatic for any urban life. Therefore I am surprised that Devisch can discuss the socio-cultural situation in Kinshasa today in terms of a consensual convergence of the actors' interpretations and symbolism, as if we were not dealing with a complex, internally extremely fragmented and heterogeneous urban context, but with an African village of the type studied by classic anthropology. Is it Devisch, or is it the people whom he writes about, who fall in the trap of holistic, systemic locality? To the extent to which the city can never be a small-scale closely-knit social community, the tacit assumption of consensus, of a generally shared urban culture of Kinshasa, may presuppose far more locally-anchored, shared meaning in the urban situation than that situation warrants. The underlying assumption of convergence and consensus, without which it would not make sense to try and sketch 'the' contemporary culture of Kinshasa in terms of villagisation, needs to be argued in detail. How can we be convinced by Devisch that the views of the contemporary urban situation among, say, urban formal-sector workers, converges with that of squatters, of workers in the informal sector, etc.? In order to identify the plane at which his aggregate contemporary urban culture and its alleged tendency towards villagisation could at all exist, we need a more explicit discussion of the field-work methods used. Now the oneiric (dream-like) view which Devisch presents as representative for Kinshasans' experience and outlook today, - as a collective dream - is so aggregate and remains so much without identified locus with the complex urban scene, that it appears to be, in the first place, the ethnographer's construct arrived at by introspection. Whose dream or dreams are we talking about? And if it is really 'the dream' of Kinshasans today, what method can convince us that they are all dreaming the same dream, and what social process brought about that consensus?

This is not at all meant to dismiss Devisch's analysis - in fact, the length and profundity of his field-work both in Kinshasa and among the rural Yaka forces us to take what he has to say very seriously. However, this should not keep us from raising the epistemological problems involved in his view of the urban situation. How can the emerging ethical and reconstructive perspective which he claims to constitute the public culture of Kinshasa today, be so total, at what level of experience and action does it manifest itself, and how much of it is actually shared, or contested, by the many different social positions that exist within the city today? The question has to be confronted, precisely because Devisch's analysis in substance is very rich and convincing. I am not at all suggesting that there is no proper answer to my methodological questions; that would amount to denying the possibility of intersubjectivity (between researcher and the researched) through participant observation, as well as the possibility that, beyond or underlying the manifest heterogeneity of any urban situation, there may yet be a binding shared culture, which may largely remain implicit but is likely to emerge under crisis, such as the upheaval described.
But then again, the possibility must not be ruled out that the converging elements in public collective action under crisis are not straight-away revelations of whatever existed already in individual minds before the upheaval, but is actively - through the group dynamics ('contagion'?) of collective public action itself - constructed during, and merely for the purpose of, that collective action itself.

6.4. Urban ethical renewal and traditional ritual initiative: Kinshasa and Lusaka compared

Finally, I suggest that a comparison between Kinshasa and other major African cities can be illuminating. It is likely to show that Kinshasa, despite the special and tragic post-colonial experience of Zaire, is not entirely unique, not even in the sort of ethnic reconstruction which Devisch claims to have taken place recently (and of which I do not contest the existence - after all, he is about the only anthropologist left to do fieldwork in Kinshasa - , but the method and the theory by which it is claimed to be a fact). Urban Zambia under Kaunda, especially in the 1960 and 1970, had very much the same emphasis on sensualism and dandyism as described by Devisch for Kinshasa; and in fact Zaire represented a dominant cultural model at the time, eagerly emulated throughout Africa. In the last few years I have had occasion to sample the changes which have occurred in Lusaka as compared to the time when I did extensive anthropological field-work there, in 1972-74. Here the same shift from emphatic display of sexual prowess as a sign of power and prestige, to an almost puritanical public emphasis on sexual propriety and on church affiliation. And this is not just a façade: actual behaviour (to the extent to which I can gauge this from the action of the people I am close to in Zambia) has also changed, and promiscuity as well as sexual joking are far less the norm now than they were twenty years ago.
Much like in Kinshasa as described by Devisch, in urban Zambia people do not accept any longer that the town should be a place without order, and (in the face of impotence or unwillingness on the part of the state to create order) they go out of their way to create such order themselves.

An impressive example is the situation around Kamwala bus station, Lusaka's main bus terminal. The nature of the Zambian transport system is such that (not unlike many other similar places in the South) hundreds of people often have to spend the night here, or several nights, in the open, waiting for connecting transport. For decades, until recently, the bus station was a place of violence, theft, rape and general insecurity. In the early 1990s, the young men trying to squeeze out a living by showing people to their seats and carrying their luggage (monopolising the right to seats and to luggage services in the process) organised into vigilante groups, which much to the satisfaction and with the grateful support of the public, create an authoritarian but effective order around the bus station, not only handling (in a fair and efficient way) the allocation of seats, but also giving chase to, and physically punishing (to the point of severe injury, sometimes death), all evil-doers on the station's premises, including luggage thieves, people trying to travel without a valid ticket etc. But while now their action in focused, organised and publicly sanctioned, it also carries on the tradition which has existed for decades in urban Zambia, that of instant justice, where especially street thieves have been known to risk their lives since every year several of them were mobbed to death in every Zambian town.

Thus the city appears as a place where order is now being created and effectuated. At the same time we have reason to suspect that the present-day killing of thieves in Kinshasa may not be a totally new phenomenon only interpretable in a context of recent notions of 'villagisation', but may have been there for decades - albeit with a slightly different meaning. Another example shows that the concept of villagisation does not very much illuminate the situation of Zambian towns today, since the order created is here is no longer really dependent on the reality of a home village out there in the distant countryside.

In our first case study we have amply discussed girl's puberty rites in Zambian towns. Such ceremonies, whose basis outlines were conceived in terms of local historic cultures, have constituted a feature of Zambian towns ever since these towns were created as from the beginning of the 20th century.41 Until recently, their reference was explicitly to the village, where (to summarise the urban actors' views in anthropological terms) the kinship and conjugal structures and roles, the pattern of production and reproduction, the symbolism and cosmology, and the expertise about all this, were supposed to be preserved to a greater extent than in town, so that often some rural participation was an aspect of the urban rites. Current research by one of the members of the Dutch research programme on 'globalisation and the construction of communal identities', Thera Rasing, however suggests that this division of labour has become reversed. Not only is there an increase in urban female puberty rites, even in the context of established churches (yet remarkably faithful to historical models without much Christian input), but the urban scene is now totally independent from rural homes, which are hardly visited anymore, and where (at least in the Northern Zambian rural areas) such rites are far less observed today. The cosmology and gender identity conveyed through the rites are now confidently produced in town. They have become an urban phenomenon, aspects of the reconstruction of a new Zambian cultural identity which takes aboard selectively transformed historical culture, but whose locus is urban far more than rural.

Here, of course, I am relying on qualitative impressions very much of the same kind (but far less systematic and collected over a much shorter period) as invoked by Devisch for his picture of Kinshasa today In the Zambian situation I can discern two factors which help to explain the current symbolic and ethical transformation of urban life:

• the AIDS epidemic which has had a real impact on social and sexual relationship; and
• the hopes for social reconstruction though secular (including political) means, which from a mere dream in the distressful second half of the 1980s (latter days of the Kaunda administration) became a tangible possibility with the general democratisation wave sweeping across Africa after 1989, materialising in Zambia in the 1991 general elections and the coming to power of the Chiluba administration.

I submit that a further exploration of these two factors in the Kinshasa situation would add an interesting dimension to Devisch's inspiring analysis, and would also help us to explain why the upheaval and subsequent social reconstruction occurred when they did.
But let us now turn to Cameroon and Malawi for our next case study, or rather pair of case studies.