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The article examines narratives by and about former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a hitherto neglected corpus despite the topicality of child soldiering in African literatures after 2000. Critical readings of three testimonial texts that have been published in France are juxtaposed with the analysis of one testimonial narrative and one youth novel that have been published in Kinshasa. The editorial framing and narrative strategies that speak to different audiences located in different literary fields are identified. The popularity of testimonial narratives in the West relies on the depiction of violence and the iconic function of the child soldier in medial and human rights discourses. By contrast, narratives about the reconciliation and the reintegration of child soldiers prevail in the DRC. Thus, the different functions of global and local narratives on the sensitive issue of children at war are exposed.

Heart of Darkness is certainly the most important founding text for a literary tradition of representing the Congo. Yet at the historical moment, it was just one text in a much larger corpus of travel writing, reports, pamphlets and fiction that formed a discourse on the so-called Congo atrocities, a subject which provoked heated debate among colonial powers at the time. The larger discursive formation has political implications for Europe and the colonial politics of the day. This article explores the contribution of popular genres, including adventure and romance fiction, to the representation of the particular crimes committed in the Congo Free State. Focussing on Henri de Vere Stacpoole’s The Pools of Silence (1909) and Arnaldo Cipolla’s L’Airone: Romanzo dei fiumi equatoriali (1920), I argue that contemporary fiction served to construct the Congo as a space of terror and degeneration while simultaneously employing discursive patterns and images taken from contemporary political debates about the Free...

The construction of African male blackness is read against the backdrop of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, a text that informed the writings of Simon Njami as well as of authors such as Dambudzo Merechara, Dillibe Onyeama, and Daniel Biyaoula. Njami’s African Gigolo exposes the ‘pathological patterns’ of male behaviour and the mythical image of black male sexuality to be structurally rooted in (historically established) reciprocal assumptions about Euro-African gendered encounters.

This article explores the Congolese remembering of the experienced colonial violence through the medium of literature. Although criticism of colonialism is not a favourite topic of Congolese writers, there exists an important corpus of texts, especially when the literary production of Congo Kinshasa and Congo Brazzaville with their politically distinct though sometimes similar experiences is taken into account. Three main strategies of writing about the topic can be distinguished: a documentary mode, an allegorical mode and a fragmented mode, which often appear in combination. Intertextuality with the colonial archive as well as oral African narrations is a recurrent feature of these texts. The short stories of Lomami Tchibamba, of the first generation of Congolese authors writing in French, are analysed as examples for a dominantly allegorical narration. Mythical creatures taken from the context of oral literature become symbols for the process of alterity and power relations during colonialism, while the construction of a heroic figure of African resistance provides a counter-narrative to colonial texts of conquest. Thomas Mpoyi-Buatu's novel La reproduction (1986) provides an example of fragmented writing that reflects the traumatic experience of violence in both Congolese memory of colonialism and Congolese suffering of the present violent dictatorial regime. The body of the protagonist and narrator becomes the literal site of remembering. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Vol. 46 (1) 2009: pp.11-27