Between 1963 and 1968, as the promises of Congolese independence unraveled in the shadow of early postcolonial fractures, Kwilu, a region in southwestern Congo, entered an unstable period marked by flight, silence, and wounded flesh. There, Pierre Mulele, the former minister of education in Patrice Lumumba’s government, led a revolt against the US-backed Congolese state. Together, the Mulele rebellion and the government’s far more devastating counterinsurgency campaign redefined the thresholds of the livable and the thinkable, inflicting suffering on the living, the dead, and the land. In Violence and Memory, Emery Kalema confronts the suffering born of this historical moment and its long afterlife in postcolonial Congo. Drawing on archives of the events and oral histories of survivors of the conflict, he examines the entanglement of suffering, memory, and power, revealing how each continually reconfigures the others and how, together, they reshape what it means to live after violence in Congo.

Emery Kalema is Assistant Professor of History at The Africa Institute at Global Studies University. He is coeditor of Textures of Power: Central Africa in the Long Twentieth Century.