Congo Masquerade: The political culture of aid inefficiency and reform failure

Abstract

In Congo Masquerade, Congo expert Theodore Trefon seeks to explain why a decade of internationally supported state-building efforts has brought very little progress in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As the title indicates, Trefon's narrative centres on the hypocrisy of the interactions between Congolese authorities and international partners, during which both sides ‘make a show of being what they are not’ and ‘pretend not to recognize who is behind the masks surrounding them’ (p. x). Congo Masquerade is compact and accessible, and therefore an ideal introduction for those less familiar with the DRC's predicament. Yet it will certainly also interest Congo experts and activists, because of its razor-sharp and provocative analysis of who is responsible for the country's lack of progress and why. The analysis, based on a political-anthropological approach, is presented in five concise and accessible chapters. The book starts relatively slowly, with the first two chapters respectively discussing more general questions regarding contemporary aid efficiency, and providing an introduction to the DRC's recent history. While useful for readers who are new to the extensive literature on the country, those who already have more extensive background knowledge may find fewer new insights in these chapters. This is, however, compensated for in the remaining three chapters, which effectively substantiate Trefon's central argument that reform in the DRC can best be understood as an intricate masquerade. The reader is first offered a detailed empirical discussion of four sectoral case studies: infrastructure, security, decentralization, and industrial logging. Trefon then focuses on two cross-cutting issues influencing reform in any sector: the complex position and practices of Congolese civil servants, and the political culture of secrecy, oppression, and corruption that prevails in the country.