A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo

2. A Conflict of Memories

50 2 · AConflictofMemories One cannot do good history, not even contemporary history, without regard for ideas, actions, and ontologies that are not and never were our own. Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think Storms’s account of Lusinga’s demise will be left here in order to turn to Tabwa narration of the same events. Such alternative histories can move our understanding of fraught political relations beyond nineteenth-century European “idiom[s] of doubt” that would deny agency to soon-to-be-colonized Africans. To the degree possible all these years later, we need to consider what Tabwa thoughtandthinkofthesesameeventsviatropesandhistoriologiesoftheirown making.“Concept[s]ofagencyasembeddedinnarrativepossibility”canresult, as Premesh Lalu notes of somewhat similar circumstances in nineteenth-century southern Africa. Indeed, an approach sensitive to metaphors and esoteric referencesembeddedinnarratives“mayyieldastoryunimaginedandunanticipatedbytheperpetrators ”ofproto-colonialviolencelikeBwanaBoma.1 While many people in and around Lubanda knew something of Storms’s epic confrontation with Lusinga when I discussed such matters with them in the mid-1970s, two elderly gentlemen offered far richer detail than anyone else I came to know. One was Louis Mulilo, a World War I veteran who wore remnants of his Belgian colonial army uniform on exceptional occasions in an almost talismanic manner.2 People at Lubanda always used first and last A Conflict of Memories · 51 names when referring to Louis Mulilo, almost as though the names were hyphenated. He was in his eighties when I knew him, yet he was remarkably youthful in mind and body. He fished by himself very early most mornings, paddling his heavy hardwood pirogue a kilometer or more “up onto” Lake Tanganyika, as people at Lubanda say, and he and his equally spry spouse maintained a very prim and proper home on the street in Lubanda where I also lived. Several afternoons a week, Louis Mulilo would climb the hill from his house to mine to drink tea and tell stories, fulfilling two of his—and my—greatestpassions.Sadly,LouisMulilodiedduringthecholeraepidemic of 1978, which was exacerbated by the “Shaba Wars” that brought collapse to what little was left of national health care in rural southeastern Zaïre.3 The other gentleman, Kizumina Kabulo, was reputed to be the oldest person in the area. He claimed that he was already “running around” as a toddler when Bwana Boma arrived in Lubanda in 1883, and he was surely well into his nineties when we met. He had long been blind and no longer left his home, whichstoodinsomedisrepaironanarrowcobblestonebeachofLakeTanganyika , beneath the rapid rise of Mount Nzawa. Because Kizumina’s village of Nkuba is more than a half day’s pirogue paddling from Lubanda, I was able to visit him only a half dozen times. On each of these occasions I was stunned by hisacumen,forasarecognized“manofmemory”Kizuminaknewmoredetails of important events and practices than anyone else in the region.4 I was informed in a letter that the old man perished in 1978 when a Zaïrian air force plane strafed and napalmed Nkuba, killing everyone as the soldiers sought “rebels” in the early phases of the wars that have plagued the “failed state” of Zaïre and the subsequent Democratic Republic of the Congo ever since.5 Whenever I conversed with Kizumina, a cluster of villagers would press tightlyaroundustohearhiscompellingtalesand,undoubtedly,toobserveme astheanomalyImostobviouslywasinsoremoteaplace.Inthecourseofalong conversation that led to Kizumina’s recounting the fateful encounter between Bwana Boma and Swift-of-Foot, a young man complained that a lasting sin of thecolonialperiodwasthatsuchknowledgewaslosttoallbutthisoneveryold manwhowouldsharesuchpreciousinformationwithanevidentoutsidermore readily than with his own family. As Lowell Lewis has reflected, such encounters may provide opportunities to—and even oblige—anthropologists and theirhosts“torediscoverthemselveswhiletheycreateanewdiscoursetobridge the gulf of strangeness. This discourse becomes known as ‘culture’ when it is reformulated for public consumption by the anthropologist upon [her or] his 52 · The “Emperor” Strikes Back return, but the hosts may well call it something else.”6 What else, we shall now consider. The conversation began with my asking Kizumina about an early entry I hadfoundintheWhiteFathers’MpalaMissiondiary.Thepriestshadordered that a huge old tree be cut down in the hamlet of Kapyapya near Lubanda because it was said to harbor amuzimu, or Earth spirit.7 Kizumina said he did not know of this spirit tree, but as he made this passing admission, the same young man snapped that this was typical of “you elders of the past. You liked to hide many things from us, and you would say, ‘If I show this to this child here’[pause],ah-ah,sotheoldoneshavetaken[suchinformation]away[with themindeath].Isn...