In a region marked by numerous different conflicts and wars since colonialism's ignoble advent and retreat – suffice to mention the Rwandan genocide, the Angolan civil war or ‘Africa's World War’ – a wealth of actors, trajectories and transversal dynamics remain deeply understudied, and thus underrepresented in scholarly literature. The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central Africa by Erik Kennes and Miles Larmer takes on one of the lesser known yet pivotal actors in these wars. This hitherto formidable fighting force has a unique history: it has been deeply embedded in and shaped by early Congolese nationalist and regionalist struggles since 1960. From that time onwards, it engaged in half a dozen different major conflicts in the region over half a century.

Drawing on two decades of intermittent research, the authors have compiled an extraordinary wealth of primary sources, ranging from personal memoirs and archival gems to individual interviews with bygone protagonists in numerous places in Angola, Congo, Portugal, Belgium and elsewhere. Kennes and Larmer's monumental analysis of the Gendarmes Katangais, otherwise known as Tigres, is a meticulous attempt to trace a key belligerent of subsequent though not consecutive wars. Rooted in a movement that was primarily ethno-nationalist in its struggle on behalf of an independent Katanga (both during its brief secession in the 1960 and in the later ‘Shaba Wars’), the Gendarmes have, however, found themselves in conflicts as diverse as the Angolan civil war between FNLA, MPLA and UNITA and the ‘Liberation War’ that removed Mobutu from power in Zaire. They have found themselves deployed by patrons ranging from Tshombé and Laurent-Désiré Kabila to colonial Portugal and the MPLA. Yet, and against all odds, the phenomenon, character and trajectory of the Gendarmes can barely be understood without taking into account their own agency and approach to navigating the shifting formations of power and politics in the region, as the authors masterfully carve out here.

The Katangese Gendarmes is divided chronologically. In the first introductory chapter, the authors dig into the foundational dynamics of the group – focusing on the determining element of (imagined) Katangan statehood and how it evolved from precolonial political realities and colonial experiences. The second and third chapters retrace the infamous Katangan secession and – perhaps the first of its kind, in light of later ones – the failed demobilization and reintegration of the Tigres. Chapters 4 and 5 take on their provisional exodus from Zaire, becoming subsequently an instrument of Portuguese colonial forces and then a key ally in Agostinho Neto's anti-colonial struggle. In Chapter 6, the authors illustrate how the Gendarmes – by then a fighting force sitting on the edge of Zaire and Angola in terms of its political stance and socialization – became involved again in their homelands during the two Shaba Wars of the 1970s. Finally, Chapters 7 and 8 analyse the Tigres’ slow decline, which resulted in many of them living through a short battlefield revival as the Rwandan-sponsored AFDL rebellion toppled Mobutu in 1997. In closing, the authors outline the disintegration of the Gendarmes, including their partial co-optation within Kabilist rule. The book closes by hinting at how their ideological, secessionist-nationalist foundations, as well as their cleft and heterogeneous collective identity, continue to inform Katangan politics, in particular the current north–south divide and recent secessionist armed mobilization.

The book is soberly written, clearly formulated and sports a fine-grained analysis of forgotten details brought back to light thanks to Kennes’ and Larmer's exhaustive investigations over their twenty years or so of research. Beyond its chapters, near to fifty pages of substantial endnotes speak to how thoroughly the authors have worked through the materials they have assembled over time and the impressive effort to locate the Gendarmes within the fundamentally different conflicts and wars in which they have been involved – all of which feature in entire books of their own. Perhaps, on the other hand, this is also the only weakness: without thorough prior knowledge, the reader is at risk of getting lost in the way in which more than fifty years of complex history and context are woven into one, actor-centred narrative stream.

In that sense, The Katangese Gendarmes is a welcome, timely and necessary addition to the body of studies dedicated to war and conflict in Central Africa and an exemplary effort in historical conflict studies underpinned by a rigorous conceptual background on statehood, nationalism and conflict in postcolonial Africa. Moreover, like Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and Philip Roessler and Harry Verhoeven's Why Comrades Go to War, Kennes and Larmer's book offers unparalleled testimony of key stakeholders in the entire region's recent political history. For anyone interested in such issues, and students of Angola and the Congo in particular, this book should have a prominent place in libraries and on syllabi and bookshelves.