A Nervous State: violence, remedies, and reverie in colonial Congo by Nancy Rose Hunt (review)

A Nervous State has been eagerly anticipated for a long time by those studying Congolese history. In this book, Nancy Rose Hunt reprises her interest in medical history but in a rather different setting to that upon which she based her prize-winning A Colonial Lexicon (1999). Instead of looking at Yakusu, a town near to present-day Kisangani, we are instantly plunged into the violent and frequently disturbing world of turn-of-the-century Equatoria. Thereafter, the reader is given a thoroughgoing tour of the region from the bloody days of the infamous Congo Free State through to decolonization and, in her conclusion at least, beyond.

The intellectual canvas here is broad, but, somewhat echoing similar work done by scholars working elsewhere, it centres on the concept of nervousness: an idea that was rapidly becoming incorporated into the clinical psychological lexicon by the mid-twentieth century. Nervousness – note: not anxiety – did a number of things in colonial Congo. First, it led to the state oppressing a number of therapeutic insurgencies that caused it alarm, notably Kimbanguism and Kitawala, and subsequently to it finding nefarious means of disciplining subjects suspected of involvement in them. Secondly, it led to state agents reframing the violence that they authored, particularly in the context of the Free State, using a narrative of catastrophe. In other words, the state depicted the African suffering it caused as a result of its exploitative and brutal violence as a function of the 'shock of civilization'. It hardly bears repeating that this is not a narrative to which Hunt subscribes. Rather, it is one she directly challenges. In A Nervous State, the picture painted is one of horrendous state violence and its long-lasting legacies. The afterlives of Free State brutality are dramatically brought home among other things, by the cover photograph, which features some nurses with amputated arms. Normally one expects photographs of Africans with amputated limbs to be contained within the Free State period (1885–1908), but here we see the afterlives of that violence echoing well into the colonial era (1908–60), as the photo was taken in 1924. The nurses themselves were all staff at a hospital built on a site on which a good deal of Free State violence was conducted, and this is no coincidence. A Nervous State aims to link the nervous violence of the Free State with that which drove colonial development projects through chronicling these two interrelated histories.

To examine the afterlives of Free State violence, Hunt innovatively employs Georges Canguilhem's notion of the 'shrunken milieu', in which the lives of those affected by disease are severely constricted by its symptoms and legacy. In the case of this book, though, the definition of disease is considerably broadened to include violence and its effects as well as disease. Congolese people had a variety of responses to the shrunken milieu in Equatoria, with one of the most important, at least in A Nervous State, being reverie, a concept Hunt borrows from Gaston Bachelard. The reverie on show here is that of the daydreams some Congolese people had of a swift Belgian exit from Central Africa, at the hands of either the Germans before the First World War or the United States after it. However, during and after the Second World War, some Africans explored different cultural avenues of escape from this shrunken milieu, be it in bars, in music or in both. Note, though, that Hunt is keen to distance her discussion of African escapism from what she characterizes as the tired concept of 'leisure'. Instead, she uses Walter Benjamin's notion of the flâneur, meaning that she borrows the eyes of detached city strollers sashaying through landscapes of urban sprawl who faintly observed their surroundings as they went. My primary aim in undertaking this survey of Hunt's intellectual...