The Way to Modernity: Itineraries of Kinshasa

Abstract

Since the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) independence from Belgium in 1960, every leader of the country has been either assassinated, overthrown, or refused to step down from power, even when the constitution states otherwise. Violent transfers of power in today’s DRC date back to Belgian colonization, leading to precarious nation-state formation that translates into a seemingly-incomprehensible scale and scope of the built environment of Kinshasa, the country’s capital, the largest Francophone city in the world, and the third largest city in Africa.

This thesis explicates how architecture and infrastructure projects in Kinshasa mediate two seemingly-incongruous regimes of Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaïre (1965 – 1997) and Joseph Kabila’s Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (2001 – present) within the postcolonial realm, particularly in the way that these projects serve to make physical the rhetoric and discourse produced under both of them. Despite the fact that two civil wars leaving millions of refugees and internally displaced persons separate the two regimes, the relatively-permanent buildings and highways constructed or refurbished under both leaders serve as useful objects for analyzing and understanding the evolution of the (physical and rhetorical) construction of both the city of Kinshasa and the nation of Zaïre/DRC.