‘Heart of Darkness’

This article provides a critical overview of dominant images of Africa in general and of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in particular, in Western media as well as some scholarly literature. I then go on to show that these images are products of a very specific conception of the state and sovereignty. The study is primarily concerned with the nature of the African postcolonial state: is it failed or not? Is it absent or not? What role has it afforded new ethnic networks? Scholars of the state in Africa argue that it is ‘weak’ or has ‘failed’. When they do so they are drawing on the evidence of a real crisis prevalent in state structures in Africa today — however, as the study shows, they conflate the absence of government with the absence of governance. I argue that the state has not disappeared, but many of its traditional roles such as the provision of education, infrastructure, and security have been taken over by subordinate groups, mostly mobilized along ethnic lines.