“Shouldn't You Be Teaching Me?” State Mimicry in the Congo

Abstract

Drawing from alternative views on (African) statehood via the notion of mimicry in [post]colonial settings, this article investigates the transformational dynamics of routinized micro-interactions between street-level bureaucrats and ordinary citizens in Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, and Goma. It is argued that while conventional analyses of weakness may construe the Congolese state as needing better imitation of the western registers of modernity, ethnographic and historical explorations of state-society interactions in the Congo reveal a different story. In particular, it will be shown that the various forms of state-mimicry at work in the Congo result in fact-via the effect-in a local hyperreality of the Congolese state in which copy and model entertain an ambivalent but constitutive relationship.