Taking Inventory

Abstract

Let us end where we came in. On the afternoon of January 16, 2001, while sitting in his office, Congolese President Laurent-Désiré Kabila was gunned down by a bodyguard. His assassination ended his short but tumultuous reign in the renamed Democratic Republic of Congo, a reign largely dominated by a protracted war that, at the time of his death, had claimed at least 100,000 lives (New York Times, 6 February 2000, 8). I have argued that to understand these recent events, one needs an examination of the Congo’s origins and the forces that have produced and defined them. Such a genealogical approach examines how specific relations of power have arisen, become dominant, and affected politics over the course of time. In order to do this, I have explored how the Congo has been imagined over time: how it has been defined, by whom, and to what ends.