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“they all want to win, despite the fact that winning is no longer possible.”
Africa is being ravaged since the last decade by a string of conflicts that span from Caprivi Strip in Northern Namibia to Uganda and the Great Lakes Region. These conflicts also bridge with volatile Westafrica - through deals and smuggling, tricky and everchanging alliances, blunt exploitation of natural resources and massive displacement of populations. This first continental war is both original in its dimensions and in its nature. It is likely that its most relevant consequence - besides the already unbearable toll in human suffering and casualties - will be the informal and “de facto” reshaping of the political map of Africa.
All along the XXth century, the map of the African continent kept the same borders defined by European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884. But its clear today that Pandoras box is being opened for the first time, unofficially and amidst absolute chaos, in the heart of the former Belgian Congo and Westafrica.
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These conflicts go largely unreported in Western media. Even when we do get some images coming out from that huge territory, they fail to bring us the comprehensive analysis and insight needed to understand such a complex war. Those images lack words maybe because they seem too often coming out of a language of silent and comfortable contemplation. To put it plainly, there’s a lack of people, of first-hand and first-person accounts, of individuals with names and faces. Real persons as opposed to characters - even journalism is becoming a stage. They make a difference between a “story” and a narrative - narrative in the sense of information that mediates our relation with others by making otherness closer and part of our intimacy. What defines Africa today, with “Congo” as the best case-study, is this absence from our attention - as if a whole continent went underground. |
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A point of order which is also a point of reference: the end of the world is where humanity ends. „Ashes of men“, „the Horror“ (as summarised by Colonel Kurtz in both Conrad and Coppola) is the absence of place, but beyond this, the absence of a map of one’s own, and still further on, the unawareness that it ever existed. The map can also be reshaped by emptiness, by fading it beneath our feet. Every individual who disappears is the burning of an entire library. The end of humanity is a place, the epicentre of nothing, and the immobility of the human condition. To summarise: the individual ceases to be so in losing the threads of his life, when expelled from the network of his fellows or in never even getting near to belonging to one - not even at the very remote distance fomented by hope. |
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What defines an individual without connections? The definition comes from a daily reality continually occupied by the impossibility of travel and the successive fractures of love, by the utopia of reconstruction and cohabitation with horror, by the inexistence of the future, and the violation of citizenship, by the death of dreams and the corrosion of objects, by the exhaustion of hope and the dismantling of the group (family, clan or tribe), the fragmentation of the body, and the insularity of language. The persistence of war through bombs, mines, traumas, abandonment, isolation, pain, hatred, indigence, hunger, ignorance and fear makes it seem that the marrow of the human condition has been mortally wounded, and mankind has begun to reproduce a vacuum in their own genetic memory. God remains out there somewhere - perhaps with even greater strength given the impotence of his people in the abyss - but the lines of communication have also been cut, along with all the calendars and rites of communion. |
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On the soundtrack for “Underground – Once Upon a Time There was a Country ” - a brilliant war film which, rather like “Apocalypse Now” by Francis Ford Coppola, puts a whole itinerary of dehumanisation onto the screen, - it was no coincidence that, following the opening theme (Kalashnikov), Emir Kusturica used a song by the Cape Verdian singer Cesária Evora. It’s called “Ausência”, “Absence”. Absence is not a matter of being far away. It is about not-being, or the loss-of-being, not-belonging. Absence is more than, worse than, different than exile. Exile is the distance from a human place, a centre of trajectories, a womb of dreams. Absence is the lack of place, or even before that, life in a space that is not a place. Exile belongs to the world of melancholy and, in its way, touches on that of poetry. In contrast, absence is the ultimate solitude and is inscribed in the pages of the most acute despair ... when dreams die, that means when war survives humanity.
text by Pedro Rosa Mendes
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