A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo by Nancy Rose Hunt (review)

In A Nervous State, Hunt argues that the violent history of the southern Equateur area, part of the former notorious Congo Free State, has contributed to a “catastrophic logic” (1)—elsewhere often described as Afropessimism, exemplified by the uniformly dire news reported from Africa. As a way of complicating this negative perspective, which is reflected in historical accounts of the Congo Free State (1885–1908) and later the Belgian Congo (1908–1960), she considers various forms of what she calls latitude—“sizing up, navigating, manipulating the milieu” (253). In her introduction, she lays out her main arguments about both the nervousness of colonial rulers, who used medical and demographic oversight as a way of maintaining control over their colonial subjects, and of the ingenuity of Congolese women and men—evidenced by their movement, imagination, and creativity, their “bantering, jesting, deriding, daydreaming,” and their “biting song” (249)—in the face of these constraints.

In the following chapters, Hunt examines different aspects of these intersecting dynamics of biopolitical repression and creative resistance, using an inventive range of historical evidence and disciplinary methods. In Chapter 1, she employs literary and archival sources to examine the Congo Free State. In addition to consulting a range of social criticism— for example, Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (Boston, 1905), Edward D. Morel’s King Leopold’s Rule in Africa (London, 1904), Joseph Conrad’s, The Heart of Darkness (New York, 1999), and Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (Boston, 1998)—she also documents memory essays written by Congolese students, such as François Bompuku, for a school contest in 1953/54. Furthermore, she draws upon large archival collections of photographs, such as those taken by Alice Harris, who documented the atrocities associated with the Congo Free State rubber trade. Although some anthropologists question the legitimacy of photographs as ethnographic evidence on the grounds that they reflect colonial interests, Hunt uses the shock value of these images to her advantage, as exemplified by the book’s cover.¹ She also seeks to emphasize acoustic evidence, arguing that “the field of sound” and “the nearness of listening” merit close attention (31). Citing a report by Roger Casement, she notes his attention to noises—including voices, weeping, and gunshots—associated with rubber-trade technology.

In Chapter 2, Hunt relies upon a concatenation of evidence—oral history, government reports, house paintings, photographs, and songs— to document the spiritual and anticolonial actions of Maria N’Koi, a charismatic Congolese woman, whose increasing following led to her arrest and exile. In Chapter 3, she considers the interactions of Congolese subjects and Belgian colonial officials, using journalistic accounts of Congolese dance as well as colonial administrators’ assessments of religious movements, which came under the increasing scrutiny of nervous officials. In this chapter, Hunt refers to the medical reports of colonial doctors to depict the intersection of medical and political control. She considers this connection further in Chapters 4 and 5, which focus on colonial concerns with infertility, based on censuses, research reports, and documentation about the Congolese healing movement Likili by Ekonyo, a Congolese schoolteacher.²

In Chapter 6, the final chapter, she shifts to a discussion of motion, epitomized by the stylish flaneur, “strolling the equatorial milieu” (208), and a look at the social lives of Congolese men and women as glimpsed through song and dance, nightlife and cinema, and books and advertisements, as recorded by Graham Greene in In Search of a Character (New York, 1962). As in her previous work, Hunt demonstrates how her use of interdisciplinary methods—archival, oral historical, literary, and ethnographic—and unconventional materials provides provocative insights into the colonial history of the Congo.