Le marécage ou le Zaïre des années 1990

In 1985, in the previous special issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies on Congo-Kinshasa, the author analyzed the situation in Zaire in the early 1980s, which he saw as marked above all by economic crisis. Here, in attempting to show the structural causes of the absolute paralysis of economic and political life in Congo today, he underscores the instability of domestic political life: the dictator has built instability into a system, and that system has poisoned the entire society.     

Les Ninja,les Cobra et les Zoulou crèvent l’écran à Brazzaville: le rôle les médias et la construction des identités de violence politique

In his recently published studies, the author analyzed the development and use of militia groups in the political conflicts that shook Congo-Brazzaville in the 1990s. After briefly reviewing these events, he points up the change in recruiting militiamen that occurred in the last phase of these conflicts. His text is primarily concerned with the role of Western mass culture in shaping the bodies and identities of these militiamen and the militiamen’s sense of identity. From the late 1950s (here the author draws on the research of Georges Balandier) to the late 1990s, the young men of Brazzaville were inspired in constructing a modernity of their own bodies by certain Western action films. The graphic violence in these films, perpetrated by characters whom the young men adopted as their heroes, legitimated their own use of violence.