Remembering the Past's Future: Anti-Imperialist Nostalgia and Some Versions of the Third World

ANTI-
IMPERIALISM:
NOW AND FOREVER

—graffiti, twelfth floor, Butler Library, Columbia University, spring 2002

It may be more appropriate to put ourselves on guard against whatever new scheme may grow up to replace the three worlds than to congratulate ourselves upon having seen through modernization theory and the three worlds.

—Carl E. Pletsch, "The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social ScientiWcLabor, circa 1950–1975"

If the Congo did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. Time and again, whatever natural resource became indispensable to European capitalist expansion and technological innovation was to be found in the Congo in vast stores, beginning with slave labor in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the Congo had ivory, which, as Adam Hochschild notes, was like an expensive "plastic," capable of being carved into numerous items (64). Then, in 1890, wild rubber, ready for harvesting to meet the booming demand for tires, hoses, and electrical and telegraph insulation. In an era of electrification and industrial manufacturing, copper for wires and cobalt for alloys. At the dawn of the nuclear age, the uranium the United States used in the bombs that marked the transition from World War to Cold War. In the age of globalization, driven in part by telecommunications technologies that create what Arjun Appadurai calls "flows" and "scapes" across the borders of nation-states, the Congo has coltan, or columbo-tantalite, a heat-resistant conductor used in the capacitors that power cell phones, pagers, and laptops. The continued fluidity of the borders of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo is evident in the Rwandan- and Ugandan-controlled mining of this mineral. Given this series of developments, I'm tempted to trope further on Voltaire and wonder whether modernity and postmodernity could have been "invented" (or, indeed, "conducted") without the resources of the Congo.¹

Two things remain unsaid in this chronology: first, beginning with the slave trade, this "march of progress" has been achieved through the displacement and death of millions of Congolese. An April 2001 report commissioned by the United Nations Security Council found that coltan and other mineral piracy sustained the war in the Congo that has resulted in the deaths of more than three million people since 1998 ("Report of the Panel of Experts"). Aijaz Ahmad has wondered "how the celebration of a postcolonial, transnational, electronically produced cultural hybridity is to be squared with th[e] systematic decay of countries and continents, and with decreasing chances for substantial proportions of the global population to obtain conditions of bare survival, let alone electronic literacy and gadgetry" ("Politics," 12–13). Coltan from the Congo powers that gadgetry; it is but the latest in a series of resources that links the seeming discrepancy between development for the few and despair for the many.² Because it is so difficult to dissolve in acid, tantalum was named for Tantalus, the king in Greek mythology whose eternal punishment was to stand in water amid trees laden with fruit, neither of which he could reach to drink or eat. This sense of being surrounded by a wealth of resources whose life-sustaining potential remains just out of reach captures well the situation of Congolese, who have suffered for, rather than benefited from, their country's natural endowments. The Congo thus offers a paradigmatic example of the tension between "men" and "materials" in European theories of economic development. From the late nineteenth century until the 1940s, development referred to material resources, as distinct from social welfare; these two aims together formed the "dual mandate" in British colonial theory as articulated by Lugard (Arndt, 463). This distinction between resource development and human welfare was elided in the wake of the Second World War, and, in 1954, Burmese economist Hla Myint urged restoring the distinction because "efficient development of natural resources does not necessarily reduce the backwardness...