Afrika-seminar: Katanga, 1960-1963: Alternative Imaginings of the African Nation-State

TIME: Thursday 27 October, 15:15-17:00

VENUE: Auditorium 12, Centre of African Studies, Købmagergade 46 4th floor, Copenhagen K

Discussant: Amanda Hammar, MSO Professor of African Studies, Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen University

TIME: Thursday 27 October, 15:15-17:00

VENUE: Auditorium 12, Centre of African Studies, Købmagergade 46 4th floor, Copenhagen K

Discussant: Amanda Hammar, MSO Professor of African Studies, Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen University

The Katangese secession is commonly viewed as externally driven, imposed by Belgian colonists, military officers and multi-national mining capital, to undermine the radical Congolese government of Patrice Lumumba.

Without denying the importance of external actors, this paper explores Katanga’s indigenous roots, in the Conakat political party and its ethno-regional support base.

It is argued that Conakat’s imagining of Katanga as an independent nation-state resembled parallel imaginings across Africa in the early 1960s, as nationalist leaders artificially constructed new nationstates on unstable and ambiguous foundations.

The paper analyses changing relations between the Katangese state and its Belgian sponsors.

Following the assassination of Lumumba in 1961, Belgium sought the re-insertion of Katanga into a federal Congo. The Katangese political leadership’s refusal of this indicates the limits of Belgian ‘puppetry’.

Conakat leaders displayed considerable agency in defending Katangese independence against the United Nations and the ‘international community’, which ended the secession in 1963.

The paper explores how Katanga was both imagined and constructed, suggesting that these were of as great salience to its subjects as the central Congolese state project.

Central to this were the Weberian principles of the nation-state: monopolistic control over taxation revenue, and over armed force, in the form of the Katangese gendarmerie.

The latter was central both to defending the secession and to maintaining its memory during subsequent exile. Analysing how the former gendarmes have maintained the memory of ‘Katanga’ aids our understanding of how competing ‘imagined communities’ continue to influence the politics of African nation-states.

Dr Miles Larmer is Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He has published extensively on the political history of post-colonial Zambia, on the history and politics of minerals and on labour and social movements in central and southern Africa.

His most recent book is “Rethinking African Politics: A History of Opposition in Zambia”, published by Ashgate in September 2011.