Abstract
Southern and central Africa has experienced a series of interrelated military, political and social conflicts since the early 1960s. The limited authority of nation-states and the importance of transnational forces are recognized as important factors in studies of the Congo wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s; in contrast, earlier conflicts were commonly interpreted as wars of national liberation — disregarding the extent to which the ‘nations’ being liberated were themselves the recent and problematic creations of the colonialists against whom those wars were ostensibly being fought. Contested visions of the meaning of national independence contributed significantly to the continuation of conflict well after the achievement of formal self-rule.
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Notes
For the latter, see Peter Eichsteadt, Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in the World’s Deadliest Place (Chicago, IL, 2011).
See, for example, the characterization of Katangese officers in Conor Cruise O’Brien, To Katanga and Back: A UN Case History (New York, 1962), pp. 222–5.
Crawford Young, Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence, (Princeton, NJ, 1965), pp. 273–9.
René Lemarchand, Political Awakening in the Belgian Congo (Berkeley, CA, 1964), pp. 233–5.
Jules Gerard-Libois, Katanga Secession (Madison, WI: 1966), p. 63.
Catherine Hoskyns, The Congo Since Independence, January 1960 — December 1961 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 158–9.
Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London, 2001).
Frédéric Vandewalle, ‘A propos de la gendarmerie katangaise’, Bulletin trimestriel du CRAOCA, 1 (Brussels, 1987), pp. 65–92, p. 66.
Daniel Spikes, Angola and the Politics of Intervention (Jefferson, NC, 1963), pp. 45–6.
Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford, 2009), p. 404.
Quoted in John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York and London, 1978); cited in Spikes, pp. 203–4.
Thomas Odom, Shaba II: The French and Belgian Intervention in Zaire in 1978 (Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1993), p. 13.
A. Leao & M. Rupiya, ‘A Military History of the Angolan Armed Forces from the 1960s Onwards — As Told by Former Combatants’, in M. Rupiya (ed), Evolutions and Revolutions: A Contemporary History of Militaries in Southern Africa (Pretoria, 2005), pp. 7–41.
For a more detailed account of this operation, see Miles Larmer, Rethinking African Politics: A History of Opposition in Zambia (Farnham, 2011), pp. 173–82.
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© 2013 Miles Larmer
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Larmer, M. (2013). Of Local Identities and Transnational Conflict: The Katangese Gendarmes and Central-Southern Africa’s Forty-Years War, 1960–99. In: Arielli, N., Collins, B. (eds) Transnational Soldiers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296634_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296634_10
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