An Archive of Possibilities considers the possibilities that residents of eastern DRC imagine and insist can be realized. It is also an archive of possible ways of grasping the realities of life there. The author, an anthropologist and surgeon, had seven stays in the region between 2010 and 2020, in several capacities and for varying lengths of time. She has written an account that sets together fragments of ethnography, experience and reflection. The pieces are five chapters on different dimensions of Kivu life and five interludes – short snippets of situations as the author experienced them. Together with an Introduction and a Conclusion, these parts make a whole that is thought-provoking, if not quite satisfying. But perhaps no book on this troubled and complicated region of the continent can be fully satisfying.
The setting is North Kivu, in Goma, and a nearby town Niehuus calls Kishabe. The M23 militia group was active in the area during the decade of her work, making the book seem particularly timely now that M23 has just captured Goma (and Bukavu). The chapters are about land, insecurity, a hospital, violence and alternative ways of imagining. Each of these topics is a means to consider broader issues of oppression, suffering, agency, recognition and witnessing.
The book appears in Duke’s series ‘Critical Global Health’, and it takes a broad view of health, rather than a narrow focus on disease and its treatment. The author’s medical professionalism is evident in her choice of ‘healing and repair’ as descriptors of Congolese efforts to bring about a ‘present otherwise’ opening onto a ‘future otherwise’. A wound always leaves a scar, she notes; but the prognosis is hopeful in her optic.
In the first piece of her puzzle, Niehuus writes about soil work – that is, both farming the surface and mining the underground. She touches on the alienation of land, increasing urbanization, solar power and growing environmental awareness. Engaging the land and the environment is salubrious, she writes: ‘[S]uggestions that the ecological might prove a register of repair, a form of public healing, are radical; they are also visionary’ (p. 43).
Healing and repair are not lasting; wounding continues. Niehuus proposes the concept of cohabitation – living with, rather than eradicating, a disease or insecurity – to understand everyday life in this risk-filled environment. Chapter 2 deftly illustrates the nuances and ambiguity of cohabitation with soldiers who become bandits and neighbours. Her interlocutors fear the marauding Congolese troops and they also sympathize with them as poor men, unpaid and needing hospitality. Living with war can literally mean accommodating the fighters who have looted your gardens.
In the same way, Chapter 3 on the hospital in Kishabe describes a venue where pain is socialized rather than alleviated. Patients must learn to live with it: ‘the witnessing, the teaching to bear, are themselves forms of healing’ (p. 93). The focus on the hospital as a space of sociality and individual patients’ treatments makes compelling ethnography. At the same time, the discussion of undocumented mortality and the small bundle of a dead baby occasions reflection on the recurring wounds that require repair and healing.
The fourth piece of Niehuus’s puzzle, the chapter on violence, is perhaps the most difficult. Beginning with the story of a child who refuses to eat and moving on to the activities of militant groups such as M23 and ADF, she considers whether violence can be therapeutic. As a surgeon who has done many amputations, she writes about how difficult it is to chop off a limb with a machete. Do those who have been subject to oppression kill to exert their agency and become subjects? This is a problematic discussion (pp. 114–18) and Niehuus poses questions and mulls over suggestions, rather than making assertions about violence as a form of healing and repair. One point she does not pursue is that the militants are killing people who are themselves oppressed. It is not the oppressors who are made to suffer.
The final chapter is a mosaic of hopeful and creative attempts to bring a better world into being. It describes a poetry slam in Goma, a social justice group, the Congolese space programme, young men’s adoption of Lumumba-style appearance, and the treasure of ambivalent love. This fragment of fragments brings together the most explicit examples of repair and healing, although all are somehow wistful, in the spirit of the woman who describes herself as a widow whose husband refuses to die. The metaphor of wounds that always leave scars is apt here.
The theoretical inspiration throughout the book is Black critical theory. The concept of anti-Blackness is invoked again and again. It is used liberally and generally, to comprehend other oppositions such as those of gender, generation, class, occupation, ethnicity, political grouping, economic interest and nationality. Some readers may find this approach too universalistic and abstract; others will appreciate it as a counter to Congolese exceptionalism.
Niehuus has written a book of possibilities that is personal and compelling. One can only hope that healing and repair are indeed the dominant theme she makes them out to be.
