Kabila left his trace. Our Congo does not want just words. Leave something tangible behind just like he did. Look at the roads he built, look at the new Cinquantenaire hospital, look at the schools. People will remember him. He demonstrated to Congo what is possible. Congo has become Europe, and Europe has become Congo. He stimulated our young people to build the New Congo. Mirrors have a life too and that which gets caught in them continues existing there.
Reality is a version of the mirror image. Do mirrors have looking-glasses too, deeper layers, echoes perhaps incessantly sounding the fathomless? A new radical politics must revolve around the construction of great new fictions that create real possibilities for constructing different urban futures. To the extent that the current postpolitical condition, which combines dystopian urban visions with a hegemonic consensual neoliberal view of social ordering, constitutes one particular fiction one that in fact forecloses dissent, conflict, and the possibility of a different future , there is an urgent need for different stories and fictions that can be mobilized for realization.
This requires foregrounding and naming different urban futures, making the new and impossible enter the realm of politics and of democracy, and recognizing conflict, difference, and struggle over the naming and trajectories of these futures.
In her insightful chapter on "noir urbanisms," Jennifer Robinson outlines the longstanding tendency within urban studies to conceive of contemporary African cities in dystopic terms. This essay attempts to do the opposite; it examines if, where, and how the inhabitants of Kinshasa reclaim hope and invent alternative futures for their city beyond the widely shared and immediate desire for a "Western" house, a bourgeois living room, and the lifestyle that goes with it.
Indeed, the models that were defined by colonialist modernity have never ceased to exert a strong attraction. Even if these colonial notions and ideas about what constitutes quality housing and infrastructure, and therefore a high quality of life, are beyond the reach of the average Congolese, they certainly continue to inform and format local notions of what the good life is all about.
