Somatosphere Presents

a book forum on

A Nervous State
Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo
by
Nancy Rose Hunt

Contributions from
Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski
Richard Keller and Emer Lucey
Joe Trapido
Joshua Walker
Lys Alcayna-Stevens
with a reply by
Nancy Rose Hunt
edited by
Todd Meyers

Wayne State University

University of WisconsinMadison
School of Oriental and African Studies
Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
Laboratoire dAnthropologie Sociale, Collge de
France
University of Florida
New York University, Shanghai

Somatosphere Presents
A Book Forum on

A Nervous State:
Violence, Remedies, and Reverie
in Colonial Congo
by
Nancy Rose Hunt
Duke University Press
2016, 376 pages

Contributions from:
Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski
Wayne State University

Richard Keller and Emer Lucey

University of WisconsinMadison

Joe Trapido
School of Oriental and African Studies

Joshua Walker
Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER)

with a reply by

Nancy Rose Hunt

University of Florida
Edited by

Lys Alcayna-Stevens
Laboratoire dAnthropologie Sociale, Collge de France

Todd Meyers
New York University, Shanghai

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When Nancy Rose Hunt suggests that her book joins the ferment of colonial
aggressions and uncertainties while taking up harm and pleasure in a shrunken
colonial milieu and in postcolonial historiography too (4), an uninitiated reader might
mistake Hunts appraisal of her project as attempting the impossible labor of largeness of
scope and precision of subject. After spending time with A Nervous State:Violence, Remedies,
and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke University Press, 2016), it becomes obvious that Hunts
words verge on understatement. A Nervous State weaves the medical and administrative
anxieties of infertility through violences and joys of life (lives worn thin, lives rich and
dense) through songs and words, as a pursuit of futures. Hunts archive is immense, and she
places it on offer in writing both lyrical and complex. Its no wonder that the book was
awarded the 2016 Martin A. Klein Book Prize in African History from the American Historical
Association. The commentaries that follow give diverse readings of Hunt's remarkable book.
We hope you enjoy.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

Beyond Catastrophe:
The Pasts and Futures of Kinship in Colonial Congo
JESSICA ROBINS-RUSZKOWSKI
Assistant Professor, Institute of Gerontology, Anthropology, Wayne State University

COLONIAL CONGO became famous for its ghastly violence, but in this vibrant, dense, and
capacious history, Nancy Rose Hunt refuses this legendary violence as a single explanatory
frame. In A Nervous State, the reader encounters Kurtzs The horror! The horror! on the
first pagebut so too womens dance songs, whose lyrics of economic, emotional,
generational, and reproductive concern point to dimensions of life that both contain and
exceed these histories of violence (2016:1). It is these perceptions, moods, and capacities to
wonder and move (2016:1) which form the core of Hunts impressive, dazzling text. By
tracing these sensory experiences, atmospheres, and possibilities across what she identifies
as the states two modesthe biopolitical and the nervous (2016:8)Hunt provides multiple,
nuanced perspectives on life in colonial Congo. This work offers much for scholars who seek
to merge phenomenological and political-economic analysis, and who seek to illuminate the
textures of everyday life in ways that escape dominant narratives.
Violence remains central at both the empirical and analytic levels, but it is never
uniform or totalizing in Hunts narration. She explores how violence varied by place and
time, occurring alongside and followed by experiences and moods as diverse as silence,
laughter, healing, rumors, disappointment, reverie, and zest. In showing how bodies,
persons, and places cannot be reduced to violence alone, Hunt rejects the linear temporality
of event-aftermath in which violence can be followed only by ruin or resilience (2016:2-5). By
embracing openness, imagination, wonder, and monstrosity in the archives, Hunt creates a
history that goes beyond dichotomies of colonizer and colonized to show the dizzying range
of African and European persons who populated (and de-populated) the forested, riverine
landscape of the Belgian Congo in the first half of the twentieth century.
To ask questions, then, that escape the catastrophic mode: How was violence
experienced and understood, remembered and forgotten? Which forms of violence left
traces, upon whom, and how? Which other dimensions of life emerge in the archive, and
how can these forms of sociality be characterized? Hunt presents several theoretical frames
that shape her analysis: among others, Balandiers perspective on the pathological in the
colonial, Canguilhems shrunken milieu (2008:132, in Hunt 2016:18), Bachelards reverie as
poetic, material imagination (Hunt 2016:19), and Benjamins distraction and flnerie.
In addition to these, I would like to consider the category of kinship as another way of
thinking through these questions and materials. Recent work in kinship studies has called
Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

for attention to how politics, memory, and kinship become caught up in each other, as a
remedy to modernist perspectives (even within anthropology) that tend to isolate studies of
politics from studies of kinship (Carsten 2007; McKinnon and Cannell 2013). This perspective
suggests questions such as: How does kinship emerge in memories of violence? What does
focusing on kinship illuminate about state power, forms of sociality, and possibilities for life
in colonial Congo? How might highlighting kin relations amplify the perceptions, moods,
and capacities (Hunt 2016:1) of these places and times? In the rest of this commentary, I
aim to tease out the threads of kinship that run throughout Hunts account of the nervous,
biopolitical state.
In the memory accounts written by Congolese in the 1950s for an essay contest organized
by Father Edmond Boelaert, recalling the Leopoldian period some fifty years earlier (Hunt
2016:48-53), kinship emerges as fundamental to these texts production. These essays
authors learned of the Leopoldian times from their elders (Hunt 2016:49). Yet other elders
refused the task of remembering: essayists told of grandfathers who cried that the past was
too awful to commit to writing (Hunt 2016:243). The content of the memories too had to do
with kinship. The Ikakota charm, a potent charm used to resist colonial power that also
entailed sexual prohibitions (one of many vernacular registers that appear throughout the
text), came from ancestors (Hunt 2016:51). The terrible sexual violence wrought by colonial
powers sometimes operated through kinship, as kin were forced to violate each other,
fathers and daughters, mothers and sons having sex (Hunt 2016:52), and men raping sisters
and mothers (Hunt 2016:49). Kinship emerges here as a form of sociality that fostered both
remembering and forgetting, and offered possibilities of strength through Ikakota, but was
also vulnerable to the monstrous.
The urbanity that became a defining feature of colonial Congo (Hunt 2016:218-225)
hinged on ideals and practices of kinship. The fact of independent women who were
outside of marriage relations and engaged in the cloth trade (Hunt 2016:118-119), and the
category of friendship marriages, or sexual friendships (Hunt 2016:122), made possible the
sexual economies and hedonistic forms of distraction (Hunt 2016:225) that characterized
urbane life. At the same time, this gendered sociality intersected with anti-venereal disease
campaigns that sought to name the partners of people being screened, which some saw as
endangering marriages (Hunt 2016:224-225). Kinship thus enabled urbane distraction and
economies, while hindering state knowledge of bodies and relations.
In the intertwined modes of nervousness and biopolitics that characterized the colonial
state, kinship was central. The penal colony of Ekafera was meant to isolate rebels who
might try to stay in touch with neighbors and kin (Hunt 2016:176), housing people who
hailed from a distant region. Yet some degree of kinship continuity was permitted, as rebels
could move to Ekafera with wife and children (Hunt 2016:185). However, not all wives of
Kitawala rebels did move, preferring the allure of continuing urbane lives in a temperate
city rather than risking the unknowns of a grisly penal colony set down in remote, humid
jungle (Hunt 2016:187). Moreover, the fact of Ekafera being established on Boyela ancestral
Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

lands, where Boyela were still living, meant that it could never become the imagined ideal of
a no mans land (Hunt 2016:193). And because some of the Boyela were already Kitawala
that is, the same religious rebel group being relegated to Ekafera from distant landsrebel
sociality persisted despite colonial fantasies of isolation (Hunt 2016:193-195). In the penal
colony, kinship was a target of colonial intervention yet also escaped and thwarted its
control.
A central object of concern and intervention for the biopolitical state was infertility, in
which the very future of kinship itself seemed to be at stake. In nervous fears and fantasies
of race suicide and racial degeneration, Belgian doctors and scientists confronted and
tried to halt the end of kinship for some populations of Congolese facing infertility (Hunt
2016:141,146-147). Through forms of therapeutic belonging like Likili, a bote or charm,
Congolese worked to ensure the future of kinship (Hunt 2016:141-143). Likilis origin stories
were centered on kinship, along with movement and trees, focusing on reproduction and
continuity rather than fear of extinction (Hunt 2016:147-148). Yet infertility was also
experienced as a disappointment, marked by shame and sorrow, evident in oversized
fragile houses (Hunt 2016:120-125)1 and vibrant songs (Hunt 2016:128-130).
Infertility and childlessness seem to constitute the very limits of kinship, perhaps even
the end of sociality and life itself. And indeed, on a totalizing population-wide scale this
would be true. Yet the story of the journalist Charles Lonkama, who traveled with Hunt in
2007, offers another view. In a moralizing discussion in which his mother was seen as
sullied from being in a polygamous relation, Lonkama revealed that of his two mothers,
[t]he one who he had been taught to call Mother showered him with material attention but
had not given birth to him (Hunt 2016:240). Local practices and ideologies of relatedness
thus ensur[ed] belonging and inclusion (Hunt 2016:240) for the woman who could not bear
a child. Such a case, along with forms of belonging like Likili, suggests the capacious
possibilities for a reproductive, regenerative, and vital sociality that exceeds the limits of a
nervous, biopolitical state.

I am reminded here of the resurgence of interest in house kinship (e.g., Carsten and HughJones 1995).
Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

Work Cited
Canguilhem, G. (2008). The Living and Its Milieu. In Knowledge of Life. Translated by
Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. New York: Fordham University Press, Pp. 98120.
Carsten, J., ed. (2007). Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing.
Carsten, J., and S. Hugh-Jones, eds. (1995). About the House: Lvi-Strauss and Beyond.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McKinnon, S., and F. Cannell, eds. (2013). Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of
Kinship. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Gerontology and the Department
of Anthropology at Wayne State University. Her research interests are in aging, personhood, kinship,
care, memory, the body, and political economy, from comparative ethnographic and historical
perspectives. In her ethnographic book manuscript on aging in Poland, she draws on theories from
studies of kinship, postsocialism, and memory to show how contemporary desires for active aging in
Poland exceed standard postsocialist narratives and instead are rooted in particular national
understandings of the links between person and place.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

Tensions of Empire Redux?

RICHARD C. KELLER
Professor, Medical History and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

EMER LUCEY
Graduate Student, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

THIS IS A BOOK that is brimming with tensions: historiographical, epistemological, sensorial,

emotional. It is alive with them, both in the material that Nancy Rose Hunt uncovers and in
her manner of relaying her subject to the reader. While most will likely seize on the
nervousness Hunt exposes at the heart of the Belgian colonial projectan endeavor never as
sure as its pretenses, never as confident as its conductwe focus instead on the ways in
which the book exposes the tensions of the historians craft, the inherent violence,
nervousness, and reverie that yields the productive uncertainty of a brilliant historical
narrative.
Like A Colonial Lexicon before it, A Nervous State signals the imaginative capacities of the
possible. Within the shrunken milieu, per Georges Canguilhem, of Equateur, Congo, Hunt
finds latitude, expression, and motion in Congolese life constrained by the violence, sorrow,
and harm, ongoing and remembered, of the colonial project. Nowhere does Hunt claim to
give us the or even a full story of the Belgian Congo; instead, she seeks the aleatory, offering
many histories that draw us into a vortex of tensions. There are the emotional tensions,
when acts or memories of violence are punctuated by nervous laughter, an acoustic
register that belies the iconography that characterizes so many historical and
contemporary Congos. There are the tensions of practice, as administrators and policies
move between brutal repression and making live: the penal colony just 50 miles from a
fertility clinic, forced labor and coerced medical treatment, the disciplinary practice of a
rehabilitative punishment adjacent to an effort to reanimate a population in decline. And
there is a historiographical tension as Hunt zooms in and out of micro- and macro-histories
that exploit multiple archives to vacillate between horror and nearly comic incompetence as
hallmarks of Belgian colonial administration.
But these tensions cannot exist without one another. Although Hunt speaks of the
nervous state with its mobile security apparatus on the one hand and a biopolitical face
of a mission civilisatrice on the other, she also makes clear that these two thrusts disclose a
modernist, paranoid colonial state (168). A biopolitics in practice is never as seamless and
confident as one might pretend, so it is not by coincidence that the normative capacities of a
biopolitics of population coexist with shadow states of exception that suspend normality and
extend official sovereignties in ever-changing ways. The colonial context merely exacerbates
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this tension as public order collides with therapeutic insurgencies. These two modes of
colonial presencethe nervous and the biopoliticalintersect and interweave as processes
of securitizing and medicalizing provoke and react against vernacular therapeutics, motion,
and creativity.
This could be a book about colonial biopower. It has all the necessary ingredients: a penal
colony, a fertility clinic, administrative obsessions with both individual discipline and the
ordering of population. But it doesnt recapitulate David Arnold, Megan Vaughan, or (in its
depictions of resistance) Luise White so much as it builds on their work and drives it toward
new imaginings.1 It is less a history of colonial medical power than it is a historiographical
intervention on the possible frames of colonial and anticolonial violence, one that dares not
to romanticize the colonized even as it eviscerates the logics of colonial rule. Memory files
collected in the 1950s but detailing the period of the Free Statedepict paroxysms of
violence. Their sheer multiplicity creates a frenzied state, a repetition of accounts that
evolves into reverie, becoming a compulsive violence in the form of a sort of colonial death
drive, an entropic fantasy where Conrad meets Bataille.2 Hunt interrogates reverie as an
engagement between memory and past possible futures. The acts of wandering,
daydreaming, distraction, dancing, song, and fanfare evoke the embodiment and experience
of the rich interior life of the Congolese. But administrative bungling also populates the
narrative, chiefly through the narrative of Maria NKoi, or Maria the Leopard, a healer and
architect of therapeutic insurrection, and her elusive capacities of disruption.
These tensions inherent in the productive violence of colonial powera violence that
makes as it destroysare of course not unique to Congo. Every imperial project expresses its
nervousness in outbursts of frenzied violence and anxieties about pacification: the Sepoy
mutiny and its repression, the atrocities at My Lai, and the hcatombe of Stif are key
examples. But this history is one more evocative of Rushdie than of Adam Hochschild or
Alastair Horne, one in which the savagery of Amritsar might sit alongside a poor little pithhelmeted Orwell struggling to inhabit the role of the Great White Hunter as he raises his
rifle to appease a demanding and restive Burmese crowd. In stark contrast to the
pornographic atrocities of King Leopolds Ghost, violence here often punctuates the pathetic
impotence of Belgian rule and the banalities of colonial administration. Here the
dysfunctions of the colonial state are embodied in the dysfunctions of its practitioners: in
their alcoholism, their murderous tendencies, their unruly sexuality, their disordered
bookkeeping.

For example, David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African
Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in
Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
2
See Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss,
Formless: A Users Guide (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

Nearly twenty years ago, Ann Stoler and Frederick Coopers Tensions of Empire became
required reading for historians of colonialism. The books essays, by figures such as Luise
White, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Homi Bhabha, explore the uncertainties of colonial
expansion and in particular the ambivalences of bourgeois political culture in a world of
empire. But for all its importance, the volume left aside the raw violence of colonial rule and
resistance. A Nervous State makes no such omission, with such violence both figure and
ground in the project, serving both as an implicit backdrop for the actions, reactions, and
interactions of Belgians and Congolese, as well as the very focus of the project. And yet while
violence is the force that shrinks the Equateurien milieu, the book cannot be shrunk to a
representation of pure violence: for Hunt, colonial fear and horror produce reverie
alongside pleasure, sorrow, insurgency, and healing.

Richard C. Keller is Professor of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
where he is also Associate Dean in the International Division. He is the author of Fatal Isolation: The
Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (Chicago, 2015) and Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North
Africa (Chicago, 2007), and is the editor, with Warwick Anderson and Deborah Jenson, of Unconscious
Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Duke, 2011).
Emer Lucey is a graduate student in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are in disability history, history of the body,
and global medicine and public health. Her current work looks at the history of childhood
developmental disabilities, examining the construction of disability from medical and parent
perspectives.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

10

Music and Infertility in the Nervous State

JOE TRAPIDO
Lecturer, Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

A NERVOUS STATE (ANS) is an extraordinary book. Its empirical richness is obviousthe

number and variety of different sources that Hunt has drawn upon, and the attention that
she has paid to all these sources. Diaries and colonial archives, Lomongo language pamphlets
and school essays, photographs, epic poems and dancesall of them receive the same,
patient, highly sympathetic, but also questioning, persistent, and often quietly skeptical,
scrutiny. Versions of events are presented, and new vistas open up, yet this is also a
judicious book where the conclusions never push beyond what the evidence will support.
Highly attentive to daydreams and to music in her research, I found that the structure of
ANS also had affinities with music and with dreaming. Like a dream, ANS took out familiar
cultural items, and revealed a significance to them that is hidden from the waking brain.
Like most people who have spent a little time in Congo, I have been fascinated by many of
the phenomena that Hunt presents herebrass bands, sterility and wealth, Yebola and
Zebola, culturally sanctioned forms of madnessbut it was only on reading this book that I
begin to get a true sense of the extent to which these things are freighted with meaning and
history. Like music, ANS has a repetitive structure that reminds one of the fugue or, more
appropriately in this context, Yebolawhere complex musical figures are repeated with
minor variations, until the music has arrived at a different place from where it began.
Meetings on the river
As in a Colonial Lexicon, an important theme in ANS is about a conversation between two
very different social configurations. In this conversation the people involved sometimes
arrived at a shared lexicon. Without getting lost in terminology, we could call these
configurations colonial capitalist and Equatorial African composing respectively. Colonial
capitalism can be divided into a phase we might loosely term primitive accumulation and a
later phase of more capital intensive, but also disciplinary and bio-political development.
The idea of composing here relates to a variety of social strategies seen in west and central
Africa focussed on the gathering and redistribution of diverse wealth objects, and, above all,
people. These people could be clients, dependents, captives, children or wives.
Neither of these configurations was discrete or static. As Hunt describes, some of the
worst violence of the Free-State period came from the particular twist that colonialism, still
in its primitive accumulation phase, gave to local logics of composition local specialists in
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11

violence were encouraged and promoted via the rubber trade to acquire wives and
dependents, armed and supported by the heads of trading outposts, who could also be drawn
into local notions of wealth and honor. As Hunt reminds us, local notions of wealth and
clientelage, but also of acceptable thresholds of violence, had already been confused and
turbo-charged as they were drawn inexorably into the vortex of the expanding world
market. This configuration is beautifully illustrated in the story of the Abir agent Van
Calcken (46-47) who sulks like a syphilitic Achilles over the gift of a diseased woman from
chief Lopombo.
Music and fertility
Nervousness about fertility was one of the places where these two social modes found their
greatest shared interest, and music created many of the spaces where this shared interest
was thought about, negotiated and performed. Low fertility grievously affected the material
base of both these configurations, but it also struck at key parts of their legitimating
ideologies. For the welfarist/utilitarian claims of the bio-power state barren women and
dying villages posed a problem, but this was also true for the compositional claims of wealth
in people. The powerful individual in such a configuration was considered as a fruitful bough
bestowing wealth, carrying children or impregnating wives, and attracting followers (who
could also become classificatory children or kin). Such wealth was also the outward
manifestation of an empowering connection to the world of spirits and the dead. Music
opened channels of communication with these powerful dimensions. The forms of ecstatic
and cathartic madness brought on by dancing (states often somewhat reductively called joy
in late colonial spaces like the bar), invoked and realized these flows of power.
It is in spaces of music like the barthe natural habitat of intellectuals like Lumumba or
Bomboko, who makes an appearance in ANS,that the claims of the modern state, with their
bio-power like concerns about quantifying fertility and the producing goods and subjects,
became something more than a simple imposition. Ideologies were domesticated and
adapted by African elites. The paradox is that while the clientele of such bars was invariably
the salaried African elite, who drank beer and chased after glamorous women, the press
where this nascent male African intelligentsia expressed themselves was full of nervous and
censorious debate about these kinds of free women who met in bars and drank beer. The
women of Equateurmwasi mongo and the mwasi bangalawere considered the
embodiment of this troubling license: disparaged but also deeply desired and admired for
their swagger and their (often imagined) social and sexual freedom.
In what remains of this piece I am going to present three minor anecdotes that illustrate
how some of the characters and themes found in ANS resonate beyond the covers of the
book.

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Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

12

Some stories
Bowane.
The guitarist Bowane is one of the key protagonists of ANSs penultimate chapter. He
was the co-author of the song Marie-Louisa, the first smash hit record of Congolese
popular music. Local legend has it that the song was so popular that the dead rose
from their graves to dance to it. One sceptics version of the story has it that a group
of femmes libres had been drinking beer on the tab of some soldiers in a bar in
Kinshasas Kintambo district, which holds the main cemetery. Not wanting to repay
this largesse in the manner expected, they fled the bar and headed through the
cemetery, giving rise to the legend that the dead had been tempted from their graves
and into the bar by the strains of Marie-Luisa.
Bomboko.
Justin Bomboko appears in ANS as the Coquilhateville journalist. As Hunt alludes to,
he went on to become one of the major politicians of the post-independence state. He
became a member of the Binza group, a set of politicians, also including Mobutu, who
were all originally from the north west of Congo, and who were cultivated by the CIA
agent Larry Devlin. Both Devlin and the Binza group members and were key
protagonists in the destabilisation of Congos elected government and assassination
of Lumumba. Bomboko was a huge music fan, particularly associated with the
popular group OK Jazz. Not unrelated to this was the fact that he was also an
incredible womaniser, such that the story goes that when Mobutu was first presented
by his medical advisors with the evidence for a new sexually transmitted disease
called AIDS, he is reputed to have replied: I wont believe in it until Bomboko gets it.
In fact Bomboko died only recently, old, and rich and in his bed.
Pascal.
Pascal was the father of a good friend of mine. Born near Basankusu he was an
Ngombe, a group often seen as perpetrators of violence against the Mongo (though
all of these groups should be seen as relatively contingent and recent). An educated
man, arriving in Leopoldville from Coquilhateville during the Belgian colonies late
flourishing, he found a job in the local tax office. From there he rose through the
ranks. Bomboko, who knew Pascal from Coquilhateville, repeatedly tried to get him
to take a position in the government. Pascal was scared of politics, and though he

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Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

13

respected his Bombokos intelligence he also thought him a dangerous and

dishonorable man.
Pascal had been a great fan of the 1970s group Negro Success and I still associate
him with the bands biggest hit, Libanga na Libumu which he would play to himself
sitting in his wifes outside bar a portable tape player. Libanga na Libumu means
stone in the belly, and it is sung from the viewpoint of a woman who has spent her
time in bars and who cannot conceive.
For I have drunk bottles (of beer) and I cannot give birth,
Who will carry me to the doctor?
It is too late I will never give birth
Truly I have a stone in the belly.
From Negro Success, Libanga na Libumu, 1970 (my translation).

Joe Trapido currently teaches in the Anthropology and Sociology Department at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, with stints in Pretoria University and at Birkbeck College before that. His own
work has concerned themes such as music and cultural patronage in Kinshasa and in the Congolese
diaspora, delevopment and underdevelopment in the Congo, and local politics and political
performance in Kinshasa. His book Breaking Rocks: Music and Ideology between Kinshasa and
Paris will be published by Berghahn, as part of their dislocations series, in January of 2017. His work
has been published in numerous other places including Africa and the New Left Review.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt

14

Enclaves and States in (Post)colonial Congo: Spatial Logics

and Epidemiological Metaphors
JOSHUA WALKER
Postdoctoral Fellow, Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

IN THE INTRODUCTION to his book on postcolonial Congo1 The Dialectics of Oppression in

Zaire Michael Schatzberg (1988:1) describes a Janus-faced state: Zaire has two faces: one
smiles, the other snarls; one exudes paternal confidence and caring, the other is insecure
and oppressive. Nancy Rose Hunts (2016) magisterial A Nervous State offers a unique and
compelling account of the colonial precursor to Schatzbergs postcolonial state. Unlike
Schatzberg, however, Hunt (2016:8) understands the nervous and biopolitical states not as
normative categories but as guises, tracks, or modes of presence. This is a useful way of
seeing the state not solely as a set of institutions, but as an orientation rooted in a close
study of state actors, their worldviews, thoughts, and praxis (cf. Gupta 1995).
As an anthropologist of contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I am
interested in how Hunt's argument constitutes a historical prelude to the transformations
that would later occur in the postcolony. In DRC today, one is bombarded by local discourses
about the absence or resignation (dmission) of the state. Yet while the caring,
paternal (i.e. biopolitical) state has withered since independence, the snarling, insecure,
nervous state is still very much du jour. Hunts reading of the colonial state(s) through
southern Equateur thus provides an invaluable lens through which to understand
contemporary Congo. It helps us to reconsider the histories and residues of the colonial
state(s) and the postcolonial manifestations of another kind of nervous stateone that is
concerned not so much with demarcating and caring for populations it is with policing and
controlling them.
Yet Hunts use of Canguilhems concept of the shrunken milieu attunes us to the
particularities and variations of the ways in which the colonial and postcolonial states
emerged and changed in different parts of a huge country that is as large as Western Europe
in area. In short, a country that could easily engulf several countries simultaneously
something to which DRCs fraught history of secession movements and so-called civil wars
attests. Thus, Hunts shrunken milieu presents the scholar of Congo with a challenge: how to
pay attention to the specificities of the non-linear aftermath/s of the rubber trade and other
1

Here, I refer to Congo, although the country has had different names throughout its history: Congo Free
State, Belgian Congo, Republic of Congo, Zaire, and now, Democratic Republic of Congo.
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15

significant events in colonial history, and yet also understand the generalities of colonial
governmentality that emerged simultaneously, albeit unevenly, in the Congo colony. How
can we trace the effects of the biopolitical and nervous states across different regions of this
vast country?
The chapter entitled A Penal Colony, an Infertility Clinic brings together the two
strands of state that Hunt weaves throughout the book. I would like to home in on what I
consider the most interesting aspect of her argument here in order to amplify it. It pertains
not simply to the states double sidedness but to its two components emergence in
enclosed space (Hunt 2016:168). These were, I argue, two kinds of enclaveproduced,
aspirational spaces (Lefebvre 2000[1974]).
In my own work on DRC and the history of diamond mining in the Kasai region, I (Walker
2014) describe the slow development of these spaces of biopolitics and security-cumnervousness, beginning in roughly the same time period in which Hunt is working. I show
how by the 1950s, biopolitics and security were entirely spatially intertwined in industrial
mining centers like that of Bakwanga under the control of the Socit Internationale Forestire
et Minire du Congo (Forminire).2
The extraction of diamonds presents an acute case in which regimes of security often
resemble and indeed are derived from penal colonies, due to the stones small size and ease
of being hidden on or inside the body.3 At the same time as security regimes were ramped up
to prevent illegal mining and mineral theft, colonial parastatal mining companies like the
Union Minire du Haut Katanga (UMHK) and the Forminire became deeply concerned with the
health and well-being of their workers and their families. The latter, particularly since the
end of the Second World War, were located adjacent to the mining sites, in order to give
companies control over the biological and social reproduction of the workforce. Alongside
deeply invasive security measures (notably in diamond and gold mining sites) thus existed
an intensive, paternalistic program of care that included vaccinations, health care, and
schooling for mineworkers children.
In the different enclaves of the Belgian Congo, epidemiological metaphors of infection
were prevalent in discourses about space, and it is here that we begin to see the intertwining
of biopolitics and security and the ways in which they emerged in different parts of the
colony. Hunt (2016:175-176) writes that Befale territory was described, in 1943, as
contaminated, the epidemiological idiom calling not (at that moment) for sanitary agents
2

Hunt notes the regional variation and different rhythms through which the two states developed, signaling
that the extractive zones had perhaps advanced further in their securitization at an earlier date: So it was that
a group of eighty-three Kitawala arrived as Ekafera prisoners from Congos industrial core in 1944. Their
dossiers contained fingerprints, suggesting they hailed from a more hardened, sophisticated world of security
management (Hunt 2016:186-187).
3
It is instructive here to remember that De Beers own business, which inspired diamond-mining compounds
elsewhere in Africa, was transformed and heavily buttressed by the construction of a penal station in
Kimberley, South Africa. This enabled De Beers to use particularly invasive techniques on inmate-workers to
prevent diamond theft (see Turrell 1984).
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but for informants and spies. In my own work on Kasai, colonial agents used similar
metaphors. Consider the following passage, from a 1928 medical officers report on
indigenous labor:
The European areas (postes europens) and mining company workers camps (cits de
travailleurs des socits minires) constitute small islands of healthy terrain (lots de terre saine)
in the middle of a deeply infected region. We must never lose sight of the fact that we are
surrounded by a poisoned human atmosphere from whose contact we must protect
ourselves, and that we have nothing but contaminated labor, from which we can but extract
certain sorted elements (lments tris) as long as we have not disinfected all the masses
(cited in Walker 2014:62)
The medical officers words are instructive for the logics of enclaved space they reveal:
on the one hand, they refer to a small island of health. On the other, it is easy to see how the
poisoned human atmosphere surrounding the small islands of healthy terrain was an
idiom that evoked more than just the strictly biomedical, much in the way that metaphors of
health and unhealthy bodies stood in for colonial nervousness in Equateur. Yet it is the
doctors last phrase that is the most significant. He notes that they must simultaneously
protect themselves from dangers outside the enclave while nevertheless denoting an ideal of
expansion in order to eliminate those dangers to dispense with an outside to the enclave
in general: as long as we have not disinfected all the masses. Indeed, mining companies
like Forminire conducted vaccination campaigns well outside the territories over which they
had legal control. They also sought, at different points in time, to increase security and curb
illegal mining by soliciting an expansion of the legal borders of the mining zones.
The enclaveboth biopolitical and security-orientedis always fraught, however, which
is what makes it an aspirational space: the Ekafera penal colony became a porous hotbed
for all Tshuapas Kitawala, (Hunt 2016:195). Forminire also later decided to retract its
request to expand its zone of intervention, in order to concentrate its security and
biomedical interventions in a smaller area presumed to be more manageable after it realized
it was unable to prevent illegal informal mining within the wider region (Walker 2014:62).
The histories of these contractions and expansions, as well as the advent and
implementation of the techniques of enclaving that Hunt identifies in Equateur and that I
have witnessed in Kasai compel us to think about how the spatial logics of enclaving
encompass and complicate our understanding of the processes through which the
biopolitical and security states were constituted and transformed over time. In this way, we
can be attentive to the micro-histories of the Congos many regions while highlighting the
emergence of different guises of state and their reliance on sanitary and corporal metaphors
that appeared simultaneously in different parts of the colony.

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Works Cited
Gupta, A. (1995). Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics,
and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist 22(2):375-402.
Lefebvre, H. (2000[1974]). La production de l'espace. Paris: Anthropos.
Schatzberg, M. (1988). The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Turrell, R. (1984). Kimberleys Model Compounds. The Journal of African History 25(1):59-75.
Walker, J. Z. (2014). The Ends of Extraction: Diamonds, Value, and Reproduction in DR Congo.
University of Chicago.

Joshua Walker received his PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2014.
From 2014-2016, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Research (WiSER). He is currently working on a new research project entitled "'I Will Never Marry A
Luba Man': Gender, Marriage, and Ethnicity in Central Democratic Republic of Congo" as a
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.

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Scholarly Synaesthesia
LYS ALCAYNA-STEVENS
Post-doctoral Researcher, Laboratoire dAnthropologie Sociale and Institut Pasteur, Paris

NANCY ROSE HUNTS LATES book beats, breathes, quivers and unsettles. Her writing brims
with the curiosity and rigour that evidently fuels her meticulous tracing of neglected
archival materials. Also palpable are the insight and sensitivity that enable her to
encapsulate both the changing machinations of a biopolitical state, and the therapeutic
insurgencies of ordinary Congolese. However, it is Hunts attention to sensation and to
perception, what one might call her scholarly synaesthesia her ability to read the archives
with an attentive ear, to read dynamics of combat through acoustics of hushed silence and
sadistic laughter (23), for example that renders her work so compelling for an
anthropologist of Equateur and of the senses.

Young girl covered in red ngola paste dances bata with dozens of other women and girls following the death
and burial of a beloved young woman in this village. Tshuapa Province. Alcayna-Stevens 2013

Hunt carries the reader through histories, memories and reveries in southern Equateur, in
what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo (and the contemporary provinces of
Tshuapa, Mongala and Equateur). The reader is transported from the brutality of forced

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19

rubber extraction under the Congo Free State (from 1885), through to the distraction,
hedonism and motion that punctuated the end of colonial rule (until 1960). With each
chapter, the reader is swept, as if by an eddy, into events when state power and subaltern
wills clashed (23).
While the reader might find herself awaiting the familiar plotline of horror and
humanitarianism (3) associated with severed hands in the Congo Free State and sexual
violence in the ongoing Kivu conflict, Hunt makes clear that she eschews catastrophe logic,
crisis and haunting. Instead, the reader meanders along with her, through myriad afterlives
as opposed to any single aftermath. Hunts attention to mood (palpable in the stories, poems,
diaries, letters and songs she analyses) steers the reader beyond narratives of moral
indignation and resilience a platitudinous word [] born of neoliberal austerities (253)
into the undercurrents of insurgency and resistance: anger, excitation, regret, privation,
fright nervousness.
My own research traces the encounters between Tshuapan villagers and the same
energetic, environmental NGO (239) with which Hunt makes a canoe-trip up the Lomako in
2007. These relationships are plastic: they stretch and bunch, simmer and boil over. When
moods shift, tensions can suddenly erupt, as they did when the young people of the
territorial capital (a small town of around 3,000 people) stormed and ransacked the
compound of the environmental NGO in 2014, demanding jobs, repairs to local
infrastructure, and a football pitch. Later in 2014, a group of women in a village 90km from
the territorial capital felled a tree across the warpath (242) to block the arrival of the
NGO, accompanied as it was by the Congolese Wildlife Authority, deployed in order to secure
the newly-created forest reserve.
Flight, and concealment in what Hunt calls refuges, is also practiced in contemporary
Equateur. The nganda, or temporary forest encampments, kept alive despite colonial efforts,
continue to thrive as alternate spaces (116) in forested parts of DR Congo. So too does the
frustration of the post-colonial state (and that of the environmental NGO). Both lament the
number of people who live in the forest, or who periodically enter it for months at a time to
hunt, fish, or gather caterpillars(which are then transported to and sold in urban centres as
far away as Kisangani and Kinshasa). Both state and NGO continue to make plans to
peacefully evict such people.
I find Hunts work inspiring on several levels. Firstly, it encourages me to linger on the
visceral and vernacular memories that fuel edginess and volatility: the ways in which the
armed Wildlife Authority induces shudders and frowns, and conjures up recollections of
government soldiers abuses during the war of the late 1990s; or the ways in which people
recall the responsibilities fulfilled by plantation bosses in the 1970s (and now, as far as they
are concerned, neglected by NGOs). Secondly, her work motivates me to attend to the
reverie that springs from NGO promises of development, as well as from a nostalgia for
futures imagined in decades past. In their discussions and debates, people mingle this

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nostalgia with an eviction reverie reminiscent of Maria Nkoi, Likili and Kitawala (which
continues to flourish and grow in nearby forests to this day).
Thirdly, I am curious to trace the ways in which the pathologization (241) of nganda in
medical and territorial eyes, as unhealthy, mosquito-ridden, and leading to the neglect of
villages and fields, compares with the environmental concerns of contemporary NGOs
preoccupied with the bushmeat crisis in central Africa, and with the separation of people
and wildlife. Beyond these resonances, Hunts work also inspires me to attend to gestures,
glances, sighs, nods, restlessness and laughter, and the ways in which they allude to
simmering resentment, ambition, reverie or suspicion.
Hunts attentiveness to the senses renders her analysis both capacious and fine-grained.
I am touched particularly by her attention to womens stories and bodies, and the affective
and corporeal repercussions of violence in their lives. Contemporary Tshuapan women
intimate past violence at the hands of former European plantation bosses, of soldiers, rebel
armies or police, or ongoing violence at the hands of husbands. Often silent on the public
stage, they whisper these stories at the stream, in their fields, in their kitchens and at
womens church groups, and sometimes they join together and protest, as they did in 2014,
when the Wildlife Authority arrived.
In the stories of both men and women, it is often through sound (the forest suddenly
silent after an explosion during the war), smell (the earth as one presses against it to hide
when a patrol passes), or other senses (such as hunger in ones stomach, aching in ones
back, or a sudden loss of balance during grief) that poignant moments are recalled. Both
women and men also speak of aspirations, of seeking out the kind of independent, urbane
lives (246) Hunt and other scholars of Congo have attempted to trace and capture.
Todays researchers of Congo are part of a growing and vibrant research community, and
increasing numbers of excellent historical, sociological and anthropological works on Congo
and its diaspora have been published in recent years. But while much of this research
focusses on the countrys capital, Kinshasa, Hunts work provides an invigorating
engagement with Equateur which I hope will stimulate further research into the lives (and
afterlives) of the people and politics of this region, inspiring anthropologists and historians
of Congo and beyond to consider how writing can be used to make room for that which is
unsaid, but which is felt. I eagerly anticipate the ways in which such a scholarly synaesthesia
can be used to capture the nervousness, suspicion and reverie taking hold as thousands of
Congolese (as well as the international community) call for the end of Kabilas presidency.

Lys Alcayna-Stevens is a post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratoire dAnthropologie Sociale, and in

the Medical and Environmental Anthropology research group at the Institut Pasteur, both in Paris.
Her most recent publication, Habituating Scientists (2016) was published in the journal Social
Studies of Science.

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A few postscripts on A Nervous State, with much gratitude

NANCY ROSE HUNT
Professor, History & African Studies, University of Florida

SOME BOOK REVIEWS examine wholes. Others zero in on a strand or term that helps push
immediate work forward. Both kinds may invigorate, and I am very grateful to Todd Meyers,
everyone at Somatosphere, and these fine scholars for this spectrum of deep critical readings
and reactions to A Nervous State. Its multidimensional strands are not easily skimmed. Some
knots seem refractory or minutiae tough to discern, but I did not write the book for readers
seeking a quick, easy read. It may require a kind of patience many no longer muster in these
times of quick raiding across screens and sites.
A Nervous State rewrites Congo at the turn of the 20th century while it sidesteps iconic
photographs, reimports Conrad, and jettisons catastrophe narratives. It also suggests how
historians may reckon with complexity. Trauma or social catastrophe would have been easy
and predictable for this violated, hyperscripted location in imperial history. Instead, the
book veers into the unexpected: pleasure and latitude following stark, grisly violence.
These five reviews suggest A Nervous State disperses singular lines. I am grateful to Jessica
Robins-Ruszkowski for her subtle reading of the ways kinship bleeds into political matters
within the book. It also shows Congolese figuring their colonial masters with kin and antikin
idioms, and using ancestral imaging to reckon with the birth of healing charms. And these
technologies, critical to the books many therapeutic insurgencies, spread along fictive lines
of descent.
The reflections of three Congolese specialists offer a sense of where historical
ethnographies are heading in this field: not merely to music, enclaves, and environmental
NGOs, but theoretically, in time, and in relation to pressing politics and futures. Joseph
Trapido, whose wonderful Breaking Rocks: Music, Ideology and Economic Collapse, from Paris to
Kinshasa will be out in January, takes a long materialist view with vocabulary from some of
central Africas enduring best: economic anthropology. Lys Alcanya-Stevens moves
beautifully among ecologies, the senses, anger, and Equateurs environmental NGOs. And,
Joshua Walker offers a fascinating discussion of entwined security logics producing enclaves
in the past and present.
Flight and freedom
A Nervous State reads not for agency and resilience, and it avoids brittle images of spectacular
violence. Instead, it tracks motion and plasticity in a violated, shrunken milieu. Rather
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22

than a narrative of ruin or dire subfertility, I offer one of flight. Mass rape in the 1900s
chafed long after with troubling nightmares about incestuous violence and spirit rape.
Congolese strategies involved furtive, secondary homes; music, dance, ironic laughter,
healing spectacles, and reverie; underground communication networks; and terror tactics,
wielding charms that unnerved. Feisty independent women emerged alongside many
practices of freedom: refuge zones, dance, urbanity, and therapies. Lys Alcanya-Stevens and
Joseph Trapido beautifully underline the prominence of nganda spaces and urbane bars.
The lexical & Congolese studies
The biopolitical has become a predictable, tired category in much academic prose. My
reading of a knotted colonial double--health system plus security apparatusopposes
narrowly conceived governmentalities and colonial numeracy. The double entendres to
nervousness and nervous states interweave political and intimate dimensions. Joshua
Walker wonders about the same nervous epidemiological lexicon used in diagnosing security
risks in his region of Congo. Such repetitions in colonial framing and idioms across Congos
immense terrain fascinate, and they are worthy of canny research. Most Belgian officials
probably spoke and thought with the same words, while their language was surely mediated
by Congos diverse regional economies. Colonial speech deserves attention as poetics, and
such lexical analysis originated with Johannes Fabian (whose poetics of lexical borrowing
also fostered my A Colonial Lexicon).
Congolese studies has long been an astonishingly inventive field with scholars unafraid
of theory, ingeniously mining the visual and the textual, attending to wealth and
composition, as well as European and mtis presences, structures, chaos, imaginations, labor,
words, and dreams. It is arguable that Congo is Africas richest, most innovative
historiography. Interwoven with anthropology, it emerged in 1950s Belgian Congo and went
on to pioneer orality, immediate history, forms of historical ethnography, and the use of
visuality and paintings. The diversity of methods, archives, and theoretical orientations
challenges newcomers with an extraordinarily rich literature, from Mary Douglas to Luc de
Heusch, Johannes Fabian, and Filip De Boeck, or Jan Vansina to Benot Verhaegen, Jean-Luc
Vellut, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Yoka Lye, Johan Lagae, and Amandine Lauro. These two lines
were never separate, and the list can and does go on.
Scholars of Congo and other colonial terrains have much to learn from this library and
its methods. Perhaps more will grapple with the nervous, the paranoid, and bleeding
diagnostic and securitizing vocabularies, too.
The subjective and a slender footnote
Foucaults comment about history imprinting itself on bodies remains important. Yet
histories need more than bodies. They need minds, senses, persons, and practices, too. In
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intercutting bits of stories, A Nervous State enables moods. Disparate subjective experiences
surface, too. The book is often about observational and sensory capacity: who perceived
what, when, and via what senses or nerves. Congolese middle figures of dance halls and VD
inspections nervously feared losing prestige and honor. Most Europeans were nervous some
of the time, though unevenly so. Some of my strongest characters are white men who
wroteDhanis, Casement, Jadot, Schwers, and Graham Greene. Congolese women are less
sketched in as individuals; even Maria Nkoi is more figuration than a self. Yet inner, psychic
lives are suggested strongly through womens songs and their neurasthenic therapeutic
forms. Most Congolese seem to have known self-possession, rage, and flight more than
nervousness. Yet fraught women alternated, like trembling trees, between agitation and
calm within regional templates of healing.
This same human spectrum is what my many archives delivered. One message may be
about mining deeply and bending to what archives offer up. More than one reader has
pointed to my slender footnote suggesting historians would do well to stop ranking the
value of evidence by racial provenance. This proclivity has flattened histories of colonial
Africa, keeping them from engaging with and illuminating European texts, characters,
fantasies, and nightmares. My book also suggests that I have little interest in theory hailing
only from some intellectual concoction or another of a Global South, as if Mbembe should
count and Benjamin, Balandier, Fabian, or Quayson not. Theory moves and contaminates
and should be made to move and contaminate, and I am pleased to be part of motion that
challenges policing -- and disturbs.
Form and the how
My writing attends to form, and the how of writing has a politics to it. Helen Tilley suggested
the book reads like a museum display, though mine is hardly still. It meanders while telling
of metamorphosing phenomena at several levels. Working against easy binaries, it turns up
blind spots, collects, and curates. I rummaged through a multi-sited, multi-produced set of
archives and brought into being what some scholars now call an archive, their archive, a
freshly assembled set of sources (or bibliography). Benjamins techniques of nearness and
assemblage inspired. These traces are necessarily uneven, while the voids are important
evidence in their own right. The method is hermeneutic and diagnostic, while the writing
involves parsing, evoking, figuring, juxtaposing, and what I call suturing.1 Patterns came
from working with what I found or had on hand, letting accounts, legends, and repetitions
emerge from my archive of many dimensions and locations. In the end, emplotment
worked through ordering, disordering, authorial voice, foreshadowing, and a sense of
futurity. The arrangement of stories--some diminutive, others a chapter longworked to

Nancy Rose Hunt, Suturing New Medical Histories of Africa (Berlin and Zrich: LIT Verlag, 2013).

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shift away from dehumanization and horror, toward wonder, insurgency, freedom, and
sense-making.
Limits of textuality and the senses
I imagined multiple kinds of readers for this book: those laboring in Congolese studies, more
widely in the field of colonial studies, or more theoretically in relation to historical theory
and temporalities. The mode of presentation aims to open fresh thinking about possibility in
historical writing. Still, the challenges of composition remain unresolved. As the very
generous and profound words of Richard Keller with Emer Lucey suggest, the books
historical, methodological and historiographical tensions achieve a productive
uncertainty. In Cape Town, Ross Truscott brilliantly suggested that the books central
problemviolence and its reproduction (a problem glossed as a nervous state)is
condensed not in the photographic slice on the back cover (exposing a mutilated medical
worker in the 1920s), but in the same photograph pictured on the cover: a depiction of
nervously held and decomposing objects including a book in Congolese hands. This image
speaks to the limits of textuality, the difficulties of writing about violence and its
reproduction.2 The opening chapter tackles this challenge directly, reading for the senses
and assembling an acoustic register.
Lys Alcanya-Stevens strikingly interprets my attention to the senses and sensations as a
form of scholary synaesthesia. A Nervous State does mix in modalities of perception,
attending to one sense while kindling or disregarding another, achieving much through
coloration and subverting images with sound. Dispositions and social moods matter as do
depths, surfaces, and interruptions. I would only say that my point is not to let all fold into
the affective and the sensory. Ideas and analysis coexisted with the visceral, and the
rationalities to vernacular healing are exposed. I am not fond of the new term, affective
history, finding this new branding reductive, ablative. Rather, may that impossible
Annaliste aspiration, a total history, still inspire.
Writing and theory become inseparable in A Nervous State. The attention to form and the
senses buttresses the strong work in critique and explanation: the book is about practices of
freedom and flight in a colonial situation, and these practices resulted from infringement,
violation, and harm. They took on shapes in healing, insurgency, and pleasure-seeking,

Ross Trusscott, Discussion of A Nervous State, unpublished book launch manuscript, Clarkes Bookshop, Cape
Town, 16 September 2016. I am deeply grateful to Ross, Patricia Hayes, Premesh Lalu, UWCs Centre for
Humanities, and Clarkes for this splendid event, as well as many others who helped organize, prepared
comments for, or posed critical questions at several other exceptional critical occasions in 2016: notably, Mike
McGovern and Brandi Hughes in Ann Arbor; Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Eric Worby, and Joshua Walker at
WISER; Sean Hanretta and David Schoenbrun at Northwestern; and Florence Bernault, Andy Ivaska, Juan
Obarrio, and Abena Osseo-Asare at the African Studies meetings in DC. All made invaluable remarks that
assisted in this rethinking here.
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while igniting, fueling, and inflaming nervousness among many a colonial master and two
successive nervous colonial states, first King Leopolds and the Belgian Congo.
But please beware: the books many strands build density in an almost phantasmagoric,
kaleidoscopic manner whose effects may overwhelm those impatient, hurried multi-taskers
of the 21st century.

Nancy Rose Hunt is Professor of History & African Studies at the University of Florida.

Somatosphere | January 2017

Book Forum: A Nervous State by Nancy Rose Hunt