Local Identities and Transnational Conflict: the Katangese Gendarmes and Central-Southern Africa's Forty-years war, 1960-1999

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Central Africa has experienced virtually continuous military conflict for the last forty years. Analysts and policy-makers seeking to resolve these conflicts have applied territorial and ideological frames of analysis which do not address the underlying causes of the conflict, from the perspective of the forces and movements involved. Although these conflicts had their roots in decolonisation, a number of factors (including the artificial nature of post-colonial states, unresolved questions of ethnic identity and uneven development within national borders) led to continued conflict after the achievement of independence. Ideological (left-right) frameworks of analysis ascribed to movements in a Cold War context is a limited guide to their causes. Similarly, attempts to understand and resolve these conflicts through national and inter-national frameworks overlook both the transnational nature of the movements concerned, and the local identities which inform them. Conflicts are interpreted as either civil wars within states, or conventional wars between states, without taking into account the mutable but powerful cross-border identities and communities (ethnic, social and economic) which have formed the basis of military and political movements. Analysing such factors enables new historically informed understandings of movements and conflicts which are simultaneously local, national and trans-national. This project will therefore examine how the participants in a number of the interrelated conflicts that have affected Central Africa since the 1960s have understood their role in those conflicts. Improved comprehension of the recent history of such conflicts and movements will enable those seeking to resolve contemporary conflicts in Central Africa to better comprehend the motivations of combatants. This research explores these questions through a case study of the Katangese gendarmes, one of the most important but least studied military and political movements in post-colonial Africa, which has been neglected by researchers because it acted and defined itself against conventional frameworks: across ideological Cold War boundaries; the fragile borders of post-colonial states; and conventional definitions of 'war'. The gendarmes were seen in the 1960s as 'neo-colonial' tools of mining capital in the secession of Katanga from the newly independent Congo (DRC). They later crossed the porous border into Portuguese-ruled Angola, where their ethnic Lunda cousins resided; there, they fought with Portuguese colonialists against Angolan nationalists. With Angolan independence in 1975, the gendarmes, now politically constituted as the National Front for the Liberation of Congo (FNLC), allied with the Marxist government against Congolese-backed rebels. In 1977-78, the gendarmes launched two (unsuccessful) invasions of Zaire, perceived by western observers as the actions of Marxist rebels. In 1980, gendarmes participated in a coup attempt in Zambia. Seventeen years later, they were part of the forces of Laurent Kabila which ousted President Mobutu. Investigating the gendarmes' understanding of their apparently contradictory actions requires an interrogation of the meaning of the post-colonial Congolese state and the ideological basis of nationalism and state formation in Africa. We also need to understand the salience of 'Lunda' as an ethno-linguistic category and its capacity to transgress the post-colonial borders of Angola, Zambia and the DRC. This research builds on work carried out by Dr Larmer since 2008, supported by a British Academy Small Grant in 2007-08. It argues that the gendarmes' identification with 'Katanga' as a place remains central, notwithstanding its non-existence as a state since 1963. Indeed, the extinguishing of that identity strengthened aspiration to a statehood that was powerful because it was denied. For these reasons, 'Katanga' was and remains a malleable but potent local-transnational identity.