Heart of darkness reinvented? A tale of ex‐soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate) |
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| Authors: | Sindre Bangstad Bjørn Enge Bertelsen |
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| Institution: | 1. Post‐doctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of the award‐winning Sekularismens ansikter [The faces of secularism] (Oslo, Universitetsforlaget, 2009).;2. University of Bergen, Norway. He is co‐editor with Bruce Kapferer of Crisis of the state: War and social upheaval (Berghahn Books, 2009). |
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| Abstract: | This article presents the contemporary case of two Norwegian ex‐soldiers sentenced to death for murder, espionage and mercenary activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It analyses the wider context of the historical roots of Norwegian engagement in the Congo (now DRC) as well as the mass‐mediated discourses centring around the tropes of a Conradian ‘Heart of darkness’. Further, using the insights of Johannes Fabian's seminal work on exploration, ethnography and representation (2000), it argues that contemporary Norwegian discourses on the Congo are steeped in the tradition of travelogues. Secondly, also drawing on Fabian, it argues that by representing the DRC as a topos ‐ a space without a place ‐ these discourses uncritically reproduce notions of decontextualised radical alterity. |
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