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The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central Africa by Erik Kennes and Miles Larmer Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press , 2016. Pp. 318. $35 (pbk).
Reviews
Erik Kennes and Miles Larmer have written an important and extraordinarily well-researched book. Future historians studying Katangese separatism will find this book sitting alongside Jules Gerard-Libois' Katanga Secession (1966) as the two vital touchstones that all students of this topic must know well. As the title indicates, their story follows the twisting history of the Katangese gendarmes as they moved through time and space, from being the purported 'national' army of the secessionist state from 1960-63, to their many decades in exile in Angola, to being a largely mythical force in the Congo today, along the way passing through shifting, counterintuitive alliances, adopting various and contradictory ideological styles, and taking on seemingly innumerable names and acronyms. But what is remarkable about this book is that from this single, tangled strand the authors are able to tell a much broader African story that escapes from the narrow borders of the Congo, laying out in a profound way the transnational and multi-layered nature of Central African history.
This book performs two simultaneous actions on Katangese history: it frees Katanga's history from the confines of Congolese national history, while also repatriating the Katangese experience as being properly within African history. One of the more fascinating themes of this book is its destabilisation of the terms autochthonous and foreign in African history, which have been more often been used rhetorically or pejoratively than analytically. Kennes and Larmer convincingly argue that the Katangese secession, and later the Katangese gendarmes in exile, had aims and goals that were allied with, but independent from those of their various foreign supporters, whether they were Belgian, Portuguese, Angolan or Cuban. In so doing,...