Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

by Jason K. Stearns

Congolese rebel politics since the 1960s has been either an elite or an ethnic affair, or—most often—a mixture of both. There has rarely been a successful experiment in building an insurgency from the ground up without outside help. Almost every single Congolese rebel group was helped on its way by an outside patron: Rwanda, Uganda, DR Congo, Angola, and Zimbabwe. The semi-exceptions are the various ethnic self-defense forces, usually called Mai-Mai, that operate in the eastern Congo and that sprang up in response to outside aggression. Many of these groups, while initially autonomous, only became powerful when they were co-opted by Kinshasa to wage a proxy war against Rwanda and Uganda. And almost all remained confined by the limits of their ethnicity. As Che Guevara himself had concluded at the end of his sojourn in the country in 1965, the rebels were “devoid of coherent political education . . . revolutionary awareness or any forward-looking perspective beyond the traditional horizon of their tribal territory.”