By Théodore Trefon. Paris and Brussels: L'Harmattan and Musée Royal d'Afrique Centrale (Cahiers Africains #74), 2007; pp. 154. 15€ (pb). ISBN 9782296 036864. Reviewed by Pierre Englebert, Pomona College, California. ©Pierre Englebert, 2008.
Théodore Trefon, who directs the ‘Contemporary History’ section of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels, has written a fascinating, rich, lively and overall superb book on the resilience of the Congolese administrative apparatus in a time of state failure. The book is based on in-depth case studies of the interactions between individuals in different social universes and administrative branches of the state in the town of Lubumbashi, Congo's second largest city with about 1.5m people, in the province of Katanga. It details the daily routines and state-induced vexations of a charcoal transporter, a baker, a construction material salesman, a taxi driver, a retired civil servant, a paralegal restaurant owner, a widow housewife and mother of 11, a preacher, a street foreign exchange broker, and a cyber-café manager.
In addition to the unique empirical material of the book, one of Trefon's main contributions is the theoretical introduction, which provides analytical context and conceptual structure to the case studies. To the question of ‘why the administration persists’ (p.13) despite its deliquescence in providing the Congolese with the services it was intended for, Trefon offers a triply layered answer. The Congolese administration persists because it is instrumentalised by political elites for their own advantage (particularly as a source of revenue); because it is privatised by public officials as part of their own strategies of personal survival; and because individual citizens still need the administration, even when they largely substitute themselves to it in providing services. This latter point is particularly interesting. For example, parents pool their resources to pay the salaries of public teachers, largely abandoned by the state, and thereby facilitate the reproduction of the public education system. They do so, rather than starting new alternative private schools, because they value the state diploma which they see as giving their children access to formal employment.
Although the introduction alone provides a thorough and rigorous contribution to the topic and is worthy of publication on its own, it is the empirical material in the subsequent case studies, or individual vignettes, which is most stunning, informative and original. It also often makes for captivating reading. Most striking are the innumerable layers of administration and control enforced upon the Congolese and the equally numerous taxes and levies which administrative agencies impose. Starting with ministers, the administration expands downwards through secretaries-general, directors, division chiefs, bureau chiefs, chiefs of provincial divisions, provincial bureau chiefs, section chiefs, cell chiefs, chiefs of urban services, chiefs of sub-sections and sub-cells, mayors, burgomasters, chiefs of neighborhood and street chiefs (pp. 143–147), illustrating in the process the universality and decentralization of ‘Big Man’ politics. As for taxes, the city and communes of Lubumbashi alone inflicts no less than 26 taxes on its residents (p. 149). And state agents invent many more.
The resulting totalitarianism (my word, not Trefon's) of the weak state makes peoples’ lives miserable. The story of the retired railroad worker hanging on to his official documents for dear life (pp. 8593) is poignant, as is the vulnerability of the charcoal trader in the face of public harassment (pp. 47–54) and that of the widow struggling to secure water and electricity for her household of 11 children (pp.101–112).
The book's methodology also deserves mention. Trefon has collaborated with Bathazar Ngoy of the University of Lubumbashi and with the latter's students in political science who were trained in questionnaire administration and managed the surveys in the Lubumbashi neighborhoods, which produced the case studies. Trefon's book is politique par le bas at its best. The Congolese state repeatedly comes to life for the reader in all its daily Kafkaesque arbitrariness at the grassroots. The resulting picture is one where there seems to be no greater impediment to life than the state itself. Yet, people have learned to live with it. In fact, the resilience of citizens in the face of a relentlessly exploitative administration is probably as remarkable as the resilience of the state itself. Moreover, the book clearly illustrates how the very actions of citizens, driven by necessity, often help reproduce the administration.
If Trefon's book is to have a weakness (at least for the Anglophone reader), it will be that is written in French (although there is an excellent English summary of the main argument at the beginning). Its contribution to the study of the African state in general and Congo in particular is so significant that an English version cannot come too soon.