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

A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo revisits the history of the southern Equateur region in Leopoldian and Belgian Congo from 1885 to 1960. Combing through a vast array of primary source material—from Lomongo memory essays, colonial records, photography, songs, and her own ethnographic encounters—Nancy Rose Hunt argues that the nervousness at the core of the two colonial states, the Congo Free State (1885–1908) and the Belgian Congo (1908–1960), stimulated oscillating regimes bringing the state, its actors, and the local Congolese into collision. One tension was "biopolitical." Its hyper-focus on declining fertility resulted in increasing experimentation to heal and control Congolese bodies. The other was "securitizing." Failing attempts to survey the population and quell insurrection motivated colonial agents to immobilize and violate Congolese men and women. Interspersed among the fumbling colonial state, Congolese innovated vernacular therapies to mend their own nerves and resist colonial subjugation. Therapeutic efforts harnessed parallel logics of healing and harming to inspire calm and increase mobility. The remedies rooted out pollution, induced dreams of a liberated Congo, and quieted "troubled, unwell women" (5).

The structure of this history is as much thematic as it is chronological. It traces "jittery states," juggling the carceral, biopolitical, and vernacular (5). At times putting chronological or geographically distinct events together in order to capture the "afterlives" of historical events, Hunt demonstrates a deft hand at tracing the emotive and sensorial links that culminate into a shifting, nervous state (3). The introduction and conclusion that frame this text outline Hunt's deep engagement with theory. Hunt constructs the tools that offer her the analytical perception to reexamine and deepen the readers understanding of Congolese history. Chapter 1 revisits the violence of Leopoldian Congo and follows its traces through the actors and actions of Belgian Congo. The middle four chapters explore moments in which African therapeutics and the efforts of the state collided. Chapter 6 explores mobility in a variety of forms from the relocation of Congolese dissidents to fluctuating capacities to dream.

Hunt's text demonstrates that colonial Congo's history can be read as an epidemiological treatise of nervousness. Hunt identifies those infected, records symptoms, and traces the effects left on this body of history. As a diagnostician, Hunt displays remarkable creativity and attunement to her sources. The symptoms of nervousness take hold in the colonial state, its actors, and the Congolese of Équateur. She finds traces of the contagion in moods, bodies, minds, imaginations, songs, and actions. Hunt uses her theoretical edge to peel open the history of the Équateur region and in its belly recover the "ground and senses of everyday lives" (28). Nervous laughter, dancing bodies, charismatic healers, shifting infertility, colonial doctors, the whisper of trees, aloof territorials, and daydreams form these reticulated threads (4).

A Nervous State contributes novel advances into historiographies of colonial medicine, colonialism, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hunt's attunement to the harmful aspects of Congolese therapeutics, and the nervous responses of the colonial state, offers a stimulating way to rethink colonial medical histories and move beyond predictable comparisons of the vernacular and biomedical. Drawing on Georges Balandier's analysis of the colonial state as "pathological and experimental" alongside Georges Canguilhem's notion of a "shrunken milieu," Hunt is able to draw forth the moods, thoughts, and capacities of "everyday lives" of individuals acting within the state (17). These two heuristics allow Hunt to reexamine the colonial state as "nervous places, productive of nervousness, a kind of energy, taut, and excitable" (5). For Congolese history, A Nervous State acts as a remedy. Hunt moves beyond the pervasive images in the popular imagination of Congolese history as a series of atrocities. The antidote is not an erasure of violence and debility. These are facts and realities for much of Congo's history, but not its totality. Her revised treatment requires attention to the plasticity of human behavior, thought, and wonder even within the...