City and Nation in an African Context

Abstract

Despite the manifest failings of the Congolese state since independence, its inability to deliver services or to promote the status or prestige of its population, the educated minority of citizens of the capital city, Kinshasa, continue to cling to a notion of the unified state as an ideal that is closely tied to their own sense of self in the world. At its peak, it was a city especially of display and consumption that nourished this sense. The city was the site of the creation of this class par excellence. The particular hold of the state as an ideal comes not out of some inherently African trait but in consequence of the conjuncture of class plus the particular way in which Kinshasa has evolved by contrast with other African capital cities and the DRC by contrast with other African countries.