The Mulele “Rebellion,” Congolese Regimes, and the Politics of Forgetting

Abstract

Between 1963 and 1968, Pierre Mulele led a rebellion in Kwilu province against the Congolese government. The uprising ended in a heavy defeat for the rebel forces. Every political regime in Congo from the late 1960s up to the present has differently dealt with the memory of this rebellion. Through fragments of stories, this article looks deeply into this history in order to understand the ways in which the politics of forgetting has been constructed since the late 1960s. During the Mobutu regime, this politics was incredibly violent. The regime distinguished itself by its ability to configure a set of strategies to enforce silence and create a public forgetting about Mulele. The result of this new form of control and surveillance was that people were doomed to fall back on themselves as fragmented “bodies” and live piecemeal between the corporeal world (the body) and the incorporeal world (the world of memory). But this new form of discipline and control also proved to be “partially” a failure, given the fact that memories of Mulele merely became private (or secret) and that the potential (re)publicizing of these remained, in particular via a ghostly avatar. The advent of Laurent Désiré Kabila in 1997, as well as the inversion of the injunction to forget Mulele after he came to power, left Mulele's victims feeling equally and mentally “colonized” by the political memory-work of the new regime. © Cahiers d'Études africaines.