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How religion, gender, and urban sociality are expressed in and mediated via television drama in Kinshasa is the focus of this ethnographic study. Influenced by Nigerian films and intimately related to the emergence of a charismatic Christian scene, these teleserials integrate melodrama, conversion narratives, Christian songs, sermons, testimonies, and deliverance rituals to produce commentaries on what it means to be an inhabitant of Kinshasa.

This article considers the uptake of Achille Mbembe’s article ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ (1992), the book De la Postcolonie: essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporain (2000) and its translated version, On the Postcolony (2001), in Congo studies. ‘Congo’ here is a shorthand for the current Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire. The article is concerned with the ways in which these two English-language texts (and their original French versions) figure in the social sciences and the humanities, specifically in the field of study relating to Zairian/Congolese society and culture. It becomes clear that the theme of mutual entanglements of commandement (power) and citizens not only influences political studies but also structures Congo scholarship on economy and governance, popular culture and erotics. The article ends with some reflections on academic writing about Congo, the limited uptake of ‘Provisional notes’ and On the Postcolony in religious studies, questions about ethics and scientific writing about political postcolonial cultures, and especially the necessity to historicize the postcolony.

The expression 'talking like a Motorola' (koloba lokola Motorola) was long used during the reign of President Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo/Zaïre to indicate the undesired disclosure of information. It manifests the perception of many Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) that the Motorola handset was only deployed by Mobutu's secret service agents in order to detect and report critics of the regime. Today, mobile phones are no longer the preserve of political agents. Nearly everybody can have one. The idiom is thus outdated. Yet other lines between 'what can be said [over the phone]' and 'what cannot be said' are being drawn in Kinshasa's political society. Indeed, transformations in practices of secrecy, concealment, and, their counterpart, the divulging of information – all three significant axes of the production of power and contestation of authority – are key, both in state actions and in strategies of civil society. In this article, I attempt to locate the mobile phone within Kinshasa's political society, and analyse how relations to the Congolese state are articulated through the politics of cell phone technology and uses of the handset. L'expression « parler comme un Motorola » (koloba lokola Motorola) a longtemps été utilisée dans la République démocratique du Congo du Président Mobutu, l'ancien Zaïre, pour décrire la divulgation intempestive d'informations. Elle exprime la perception de nombreux Kinois (les habitants de Kinshasa) que le téléphone Motorola n'était utilisé que par les agents des services secrets de Mobutu, pour détecter et dénoncer les opposants au régime. Aujourd'hui, les téléphones mobiles ne sont plus l'apanage de la police politique. Tout le monde peut en avoir un et l'expression est donc désuète. Pourtant, les milieux politiques de Kinshasa sont en train de tracer de nouvelles limites entre « ce qu'on peut dire [au téléphone] » et « ce qu'on ne peut pas dire ». De fait, les transformations des pratiques du secret, de la dissimulation et, à l'inverse, de la divulgation d'informations, formant trois axes importants de la production de pouvoir et de la contestation de l'autorité, sont cruciales à la fois dans les actions de l'État et dans les stratégies de la société civile. Dans cet article, l'auteure tente de situer le téléphone mobile dans la société politique kinoise et elle analyse la manière dont les relations avec l'État congolais s'articulent par le biais de la technologie du téléphone cellulaire et les utilisations de l'appareil.

In the 2016 Abiola Lecture, Mbembe argued that “the plasticity of digital forms speaks powerfully to the plasticity of African precolonial cultures and to ancient ways of working with representation and mediation, of folding reality.” In her commentary, Pype tries to understand what “speaking powerfully to” can mean. She first situates the Abiola Lecture within a wide range of exciting and ongoing scholarship that attempts to understand social transformations on the continent since the ubiquitous uptake of the mobile phone, and its most recent incarnation, the smartphone. She then analyzes the aesthetics of artistic projects by Alexandre Kyungu, Yves Sambu, and Hilaire Kuyangiko Balu, where wooden doors, tattoos, beads, saliva, and nails correlate with the Internet, pixels, and keys of keyboards and remote controls. Finally, Pype asks to whom the congruence between the aesthetics of a “precolonial” Congo and the digital speaks. In a society where “the past” is quickly demonized, though expats and the commercial and political elite pay thousands of dollars for the discussed art works, Pype argues that this congruence might be one more manifestation of capitalism’s cannibalization of a stereotypical image of “Africa.”

Mbembe thus points the direction for an academic Afrofuturism, a pre-posthuman “Theory from the South” (Comaroff & Comaroff 2012) that draws upon our historical knowledge of African knowledges to formulate a new planetary “animism” that can guide our relationship to the digital capitalocene (Haraway 2016). Because the Abiola lecture has not been published as a written text (although there is a video of the lecture on the ASR’s YouTube channel), we provide a brief description of it here. [...]Mbembe’s argument allows us to see that African societies have always been “posthuman,” in that humans, objects, spirits, animals, and plants are and were conceptualized as so many overlapping assemblages. [...]we prefer to employ the word extrahuman—outside the human—to refer to the webs of cognition, agency, animacy, and relatedness that extend into the actual and virtual realms of the social. [...]one direction the following commentaries pursue is to draw upon African cosmological concepts to rethink the new extrahuman tendencies currently affecting the globe. The virtual and its intersection with reality is often framed as the product of digital technology and as such is wrapped up in the North Atlantic’s self-representation as an ideal type of the modern.