Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction (review)

Nineteen ninety-nine saw the publication of a book little noticed, one guesses, by the average postcolonialist but of considerable significance to students of the Third World national liberation movements that Robert J. C. Young, in the work under review here, refers to as "tricontinentalism": Ernesto Che Guevara's account of his secret mission to the Congo in 1965.¹ In that year the Cuban government sent Guevara to the Congo, along with a select group of Cuban volunteers, to attempt to train a guerrilla force of mainly Congolese fighters that it was hoped would overthrow the Western-backed government—then under the dictatorial control of Mobuto Sese Seko, who had been installed after the Belgian and U.S.-ordered assassination of the Congo's first independent head of state, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. Entitled, like his widely read account of the Cuban guerrilla war of 1956–59, Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria, and presented as the sequel to that work, the book is Guevara's narrative account of the Congo expedition and his attempt to explain its disastrous failure. The factors adduced by Guevara are many: the difficulty of the terrain, the corruption, squabbling, and general unreliability of the Congolese guerrilla com-manders and political commissars (chief among them Laurent Kabila, who was eventually to succeed in overthrowing the Mobutu regime in 1997 and form his own "revolutionary" government, before being assassinated himself in 2001), and the decision, at a crucial moment, of the Organization of African Unity, under international pressure, to demand the withdrawal of the Cuban forces. But in the end Guevara emphasized one factor above all: the deeply rooted tribalism of rural Congolese society. Although easily recruited, the aspiring Congolese guerrilla fighters fled back to the safety of their villages at the first taste of actual armed combat. Local tribal and linguistic divisions ran deep and effectively produced endless in-fighting among the native commanders, who lorded over their troops like the tribal chieftains they in effect remained. Guevara, though never losing his sense of irony or his "Marxist-Leninist" readiness to engage in ruthless "self-criticism," complains bitterly of the superstitions of the Congolese guerrillas, particularly the belief in "dawa," a shamanistic charm believed by rank and file and officers alike to be sure protection against the bullets and bombs of the enemy. Tribalism was also invoked to explain the deeply xenophobic distrust of the Congolese for their Cuban "comrades," despite the fact that, by conscious decision of the Cuban regime, most of the latter were black themselves. In the end, what worked in the Sierra Maestra, where despite their extreme poverty and economic backwardness the Cuban peasantry could be recruited by dint of hard organizational work to support a national-revolutionary project, failed to work in the Congo, where the village-based organization of tribal life, together with the relative abundance of fertile, communally farmed land, stood as too great an obstacle to the forging of a revolutionary national consciousness. Without that, even the most dedicated and self-sacrificing efforts of the Cuban volunteers on the military and organizational levels were for nought.

The [Congolese] guerrillas are of peasant extraction, undeveloped, captivated by the idea of having a uniform, a weapon, sometimes even shoes, a certain local authority, corrupted by inaction and the habits of lording it over a peasantry saturated with fetishistic ideas about death and the enemy, without any organized political education, without any future outlook, without any other horizon but that traditionally encompassed by their tribal territory. Undisciplined, lazy, lacking the spirit of struggle and sacrifice, without confidence in their leaders (who only serve them as examples in the getting of women, pombe [a local corn liquor], or some bit of food. In short, the small privileges of office), without any of the sustained military exercises that would be needed, even if only to teach them to kill, without training of any sort . . . , the revolutionary Congolese soldier is the poorest example of a fighter that I have had the opportunity to encounter up to...