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Delinquent Fiction: Article 15 and the shégués Children in Marie-Louise Mumbu's Samantha à Kinshasa
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Delinquent Fiction: Article 15 and the shégués Children in Marie-Louise Mumbu's Samantha à Kinshasa
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Journal Article
Delinquent Fiction: Article 15 and the shégués Children in Marie-Louise Mumbu's Samantha à Kinshasa
2020
Overview
Article 15 is a popular phrase that represents the many tactics that urban occupants, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Kinshasa in particular, use to bypass apparent powerlessness in the face of hardship. In this article, I explore how Montreal- and Kinshasa-based journalist and writer Marie-Louise Mumbu's 2008 novel Samantha à Kinshasa transposes into fiction the urban delinquency, playfulness, and vibrancy of Article 15, so as to present a narrative version of it that is very much (un)structured like the everyday survival tactics it portrays. Some of the novel's most vibrant characters are the gangs of shégués, or street youth, whose resourcefulness involves navigating the line between legal and criminal activities in order to devise an inventive micro-economy of their own. Mumbu's novel shows the shégués as major characters worthy of space in the streets of Kinshasa and in her novel. Article 15 and the shégués have received scholarly attention as social phenomena; this article draws on this existing scholarship and a close reading of the characters of the shégués in Samantha à Kinshasa to rethink delinquency in its urban and narrative forms.
