The Entrenching of a New Luba Identity

This brings us to the nagging question of why this process strengthened ethnic consciousness and identity instead of resulting in their elimination in the face of a double-layered identity corresponding to class and nation. As paradoxical and as unjustified as the following affirmation may seem in an essay of this kind, it was, in fact, the growth of ethnic consciousness and identity, and not class identity, that was provoked by the last wave of colonial economic development in the 1950s. This phenomenon surprises me personally, especially when compared with the experience of western industrialization. Yet it may readily be explained on the macro-sociological level, provided that one forget any 'necessary' relation—be it derived from evolutionist or functionalist theory—between industrialization as an economic phenomenon and the socio-cultural change that has accompanied it in Western experience. Socio-cultural change, moreover, does not equal simple adaptation but rather a political effort, ever selective and contradictory, toward gaining control over material processes and individual adaptive reactions.

The specifically ethnic politicization of social change during the 1950s and its continuation afterwards may be explained, I think, by several factors: (1) the authoritarian nature of the colonial state and its absence from any local social involvement; (2) the fundamental racial division underlying colonial society and the existence in the Congo of a political culture of race; (3) the fundamentally uneven growth of the colonial economy which was intensified in the 1950s; (4) the internal necessity for the dominant groups within African society of containing the economic emancipation of women and youth^[35] that was based on the increasing monetization of society; and (5) a tentative and ambiguous convergence of the interests of the 'traditional' rural elite and 'modern' urban elites.^[36]

This last development is explained by the progressive transformation during the late 1940s and 1950s of the role of the 'traditional' chief in the community. As his position as executor of the decisions of the colonial administration regarding land and agriculture passed to agents specially trained as agricultural advisers, the chief acquired authority as a political representative of his people in dealings with the administration. This late renaissance of the political function of the chiefs under fundamentally new circumstances coincided with the creation of new political duties for the urban elites as well. The only available ground for collaboration in the colonial context was in the specific form of the political culture of ethnicity. We should remember that even as the dominant culture tried to rob it of its originality, popular discourse became a force in the world of the dominated as a means of achieving political mobilization which had as its goal the seizing of the colonial state from the white bureaucracy.^[37]

In the history of societies which have evolved within Belgian colonialism's space, the case of the Luba is unique without being unusual. In a situation which offers many analogies to the pattern of the regional group which remains beholden to the state while profiting from their association at the same time, the Lingala-speakers from Equateur Province are now playing out in contemporary Zaire a political scenario that recalls the drama enacted by the Luba.^[38] In both cases, allowing for the elapse of several years' time between the two and for the marked differences between the rhythms of their unfolding, one may observe a sort of double-barrelled achievement, the individual aspects of which are mutually reinforcing. First, there is the detaching of the group which eventually becomes

'Luba' or 'Lingala' from the continuities of pre-colonial life as embodied in village social practices. Second, there is the group's insertion in a tradition constructed out of a vision of the past which ignores the profound upheavals of the second half of the nineteenth century.^[39]

It should be noted here that the term 'Luba' did not initially denote a group of villagers whose historical traditions and/or spoken language were linked to the Luba model. The development of the model is concomitant with the formation of an 'association' of immigrants, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the colonial writings already made a distinction between Luba from new 'colonial' villages and others.^[40] In the colonial socio-economic reality, there was on the one hand the Luba of the proletarianized space of the city or workplace who approximated to the model as individuals, and on the other hand there were specific rural communities, organized in chiefdoms, and later in 'sectors' (secteurs ), which, although possessing their own historical tradition and language (which then became described as 'dialects') became 'Luba' on a collective basis. Tshundolela Epanya has demonstrated how the ethnic conflict between 'the Luba', immigrant workers who were Luba-speaking yet originated from other rural communities, and the Bakwa Anga, a Luba cultural group in the anthropological sense of the term, involved the very same mechanisms as those present in the unambiguously ethnically-articulated conflict between the Luba and the Luluwa in Luluabourg or between the Luba and the Lunda in Industrial Upper Katanga.^[41] This constant of ethnic consciousness in the industrializing world must be kept in mind as it is that which links ethnic formation to national formation.

Historical traditions, a model language, social norms, and standards of intellectual culture (folklore) comprise a synthetic creation by a professional group which manipulates diverse materials so as to elaborate an instrument for new processes of socialization.^[42] The group in its human reality takes form, then, through a double process. First, it breaks away from the rural community, which, on the ideological level, stands as one of the theoretical terms of the group's reality in its own collective imagination. Second, it has links with a new identity, the basis of which derives in reality more from association than from community even if ideological stress is placed upon the community. Thus it is this imposed identity which lies at the origin of the proletarianized ethnic community.

The anthropological 'tradition(s)' rationally constructed from outside the actual social practices of the group in question fits a model which ignores local political practices. It does refer, however, to the new power structure and is involved in the development of a class structure. This is what is known as the formation of a 'national identity' and national ideology, such as we understand it, for example, in the case of nineteenth century France, where this process was divorced from the politicization of the masses. For lack of a national bourgeoisie and its control over the state and the economy, building a national market that encompasses all factors of production has been accompanied in Zaire by the creation of areas of ethnic reference which are politically powerless because they are cut off from access to the state.

It is in this political context that the absurd takes on the aspect of reality. A European missionary is considered to have perfect command of the 'ethnic' language because it is he who is producer and judge of the linguistic norm he fixes in writing. In a similar way, an ethnological treatise—the work of a foreigner—establishes the ideal cultural model for the community itself. It is in this way that a mechanism is built into the ethnic framework which allows for the dichotomization of national social and cultural space into a situation of there

being oral forms of knowledge which are said to be unaware of their own existence and written forms of knowledge which set standards.^[43] Through ethnologists' holding a mirror up to him, the 'native' sees himself as The Other, and in so doing becomes an immigrant to his own 'culture', the inferiority of which he accepts.^[44]