EVERYTHING GROWS IN THE CONGO
In writing this thesis, I am conscious of the expectations that exist within academia and the modernist criteria which may be used implicitly or explicitly to assess it, many of which I directly challenge. These include the expectations of linear progression, of clear systemic maps for the chapters, of explicit argumentation, of definitions that arrive early, and of strict distinctions between the literary and the analytical, between data, context, and position, and between disciplinary borders.
These expectations, though still dominant, have a long history of problematisation from a decolonial perspective. The claim that methods cannot be separated from social arrangements, geopolitics, ontology, and epistemology has become a cornerstone of critical theory.
Similarly, the plurality of African and Indigenous philosophical assumptions, more than offering counterpoints to Eurocentric scholarship, is capable of giving birth to profound shifts in how we relate to the world, to time itself and to each other as humans (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999; Mbembe, 2015; Wynter, 2003).
My methodological and epistemic justifications will be elaborated upon in various parts of the thesis, but most significantly in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, where I delve into the path to Afroanalytics and the Afroanalytic method. However, to help orient the reader at the outset, I am adding this note.
This chapter departs from conventional expectations regarding how a PhD chapter should read, sound, and what serious knowledge production should look like. I have intentionally aimed to write and structure it in a manner that is fundamentally consistent with Afroanalytics and its core tenets.
These include:
1. That the present, as we form it, whether we know it or not, is already inhabited not only by what has been, but also by what is to come, evoking the spatiotemporal reframing of the Afroanalytic methodology.
2. That storytelling, beyond being a mundane mode of communication, is crucial to community survival, theory-building and to knowledge transmission in line with African orality and spirituality (Oluwole, 2014).
3. That the most effective stories, those which survive, touch the heart; hence musicality, poetics, and affect are inseparable from the conceptual, as we will see in the chapter that follows and constitute epistemic tools which facilitate access to deep knowledge and its transmission across time and space (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1986).
4. Finally, that the hegemonic imposition of linearity constrains storytelling and meaning-making, particularly for those bodies and voices that have been fragmented by traumatic violence and whose experiences may be distorted or silenced by arbitrary sequentiality (Ndlovu, 2024).
This linear expectation further fosters forms of ‘respectability politics’ when it comes to scholarly presentation and expression. In doing so, it devalues the role of aesthetics and rhythm in African knowledge production, reproduces Western dualism, by splitting art from science and head from heart — contributing to the extraction of the scholar from their shared humanity and vulnerability (Behar, 1996).
As a result, arguments in the thesis are not always presented linearly, theory is not always bounded to particular spaces or announced as such, and indeed it may not even ‘look’ like theory.
Instead, it is embodied, illustrated through what lingers in memory, what is felt viscerally and expressed through the raw reflections, and uncurated associations that often accompany the most evocative autoethnography, following in the tradition of Black and African feminism (Lorde, 1984; Hurston, 1935; Oyěwùmí, 1997).
What I add to this legacy is the significance of resonance — often in the bones; and particularly the claim that interconnection between the affective, the intellectual, and the embodied builds evidence. It becomes an evaluative criterion as I will argue methodologically.
Most critically, the thesis problematises the notion of ‘white time’ and colonial chronologies. It asks that the project’s start be reconsidered; it asks: when did I know what I came to understand as knowledge? This, I argue, forces us to rethink the temporality of this empirical exercise, an act too of epistemic resistance.
Indeed, if colonialism has imposed epistemological hierarchies, archival erasure, and associated structures of silencing, then each story is an act of epistemic resistance.
‘It is a form of struggle and survival, an epistemic and existence-based response and practice – most especially by colonised and rationalised subject – against the colonial matrix of power in all its dimension, and for the possibilities of an otherwise’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018, p17).
In each chapter, I am the dissident storyteller even when I am the witness to others’ stories.
The griot.
The thesis is therefore also a collection of counter stories and disruptive reflections that demand to be passed on. It is an act of (re) memorialisation and survival; the very epistemic foundations, I propose, of Afroanalytics.
It comes in the morning to haunt us
It comes in the morning haunting us with the beams […]
Everything grows in the Congo,
Everything grows.
Ooh, can you come when I call again?
— Frank Ocean (2016)
I first embarked on this PhD in 2022. We were one year post the Black Lives Matter global protests. Chauvin had not yet been convicted of the videoed murder of George Floyd. A murder that occurred against a backdrop of rising white nationalism, racism, and xenophobia around the globe (Valluvan & Kalra, 2019; Whitehead, Perry, & Baker, 2018). One that both triggered significant distress among people of colour and which gave global visibility to the matter of racial trauma (Harper, 2020; Roberts, Rizzo, & Mendez, 2021).
As a nation, the UK seemed to be reckoning with institutional racism, in part due to unequal COVID-19 mortality rates (Gaynor & Wilson, 2020).
I knew I wanted to support clinicians to work with race-based material so as to better meet the needs of people of colour; needs that the empirical literature tells us remain, by and large, unattended to within mainstream mental health services and psychotherapy (Carter, 2006; Bryant-Davis, 2007). This is despite stark and ongoing mental health inequalities along racial lines (DoH, 2003, 2009) and people of colour continuing to report that racism is central to their psychological distress (McKenzie & Bhui, 2007). But…
Everything grows in the Congo,
Everything grows.
The thesis I intended to submit was partly conceptual, partly empirical, and oriented towards clinical application. My aims, I thought, were clear: firstly, to explore the ways race-based material is dealt with in the clinic, and to propose how we might better work with the trauma of racism, centring primarily, though not exclusively, the voices of people with lived experience of racial trauma. But… ‘it comes in the morning haunting us with the beams, to take us where we need to go’.
As I progressed, the phenomenon I was studying began to close in on me. As much as I was studying my participants, I became the object of study. An additional site of theorisation. As I turned the analytic lens internally, I moved from vulnerable observer (Behar, 1996) to vulnerable observed — largely from within. I felt exposed. At times, naked but always connected to the data under exploration.
This experience informed the strong autoethnographic turn. The relevance of my own genocidal history emerged as the world became plunged into genocidal conflicts. My ancestry came to reclaim me, and with it, links to colonial extraction surfaced. The turbulence of the data, in many ways, became reproduced in my encounters within institutions.
I was left disturbed as the project took on a life of its own, leading me in unanticipated directions including the thickness of the equatorial forest of the Congo**, where the soil is most fertile but also most bloodied. The trip deeply disrupted my equilibrium and shaped my scholarship profoundly, though it lasted only 11 days. But it was an intense trip. My thinking deepened; my ideas evolved.
Everything grows in the Congo,
Everything grows.
In those 11 days, I saw distant family. Most of them for the first time. I travelled up and down the country. I visited the slave port of Louango, the phantom port as I call it. A port without a port. Where millions of helpless and frightened souls were dispatched into the unknown of the Americas and the West Indies to work to death or be murdered in transit, at sea or on land.
I met historians.
I visited museums.
They felt like spiritual places, inhabited spaces; not only by the ornaments and exhibits on display, but by souls protecting these walls. Haunted. Perhaps this explains the absence of security around the art pieces, which initially took me by surprise.
I asked searching questions.
Sometimes they were answered directly. Sometimes they could not be answered.
Mostly, I heard what I wanted answered, and what I needed to know. At times, I was left hanging, frustrated, unknowing. I went to pay homage to my late father. He laid buried in a white marble grave in a private cemetery in the capital, the province of important people. I brought him white roses. I laid my hands on his tombstone for the first time. Our first reunion in decades. A close encounter with death in the midst of the heat and the thickness of the rainforest, where all is green and all is fertile.
Everything grows in the Congo,
Everything grows.
I meditated on the extraordinary life he had lived. I learned more about his involvement in various colonial wars and about other poignant aspects of a life well lived. How much of his fighting spirit continues to live through me, I wondered.
I discovered more troubling details about the country’s hidden colonial atrocities. I had not known this was possible. But I have come to believe colonialism is like a bottomless pit of depravity: the more you seek, the more you find. There is no end. I was, at times, rendered dizzy by the uncontainability of what that land carries. The blood that runs through its soil.
In the midst of it all, I confronted a dense denial and dissociation when I attempted to pay homage to those ancestors who were forcefully taken from the land. The stolen lives. Denial and dissociation that strongly echo the absence of Central Africa, and the Kongo from memorialisation and conversations on enslavement in the African and Black diaspora. The collective black dot on our consciousness.
I cried.
I wanted to fall to my knees and ask for forgiveness that we were not robust enough to hold the memory of the horror done to them. That we were so feeble that we had let that port disintegrate into nothingness, vanish into thin air, into the sand, into the sea, like those tormented bodies, again, we were never to see.
I did not fall to my knees. It was in my heart that I said sorry. As I stood on the beach, at the point of no return, I missed something I only noticed upon my return to England. I saw nature memorialise and honour those forgotten lives by growing trees and canes just outside the docking station where tears had been. I cannot be certain, but the growth seems spontaneous. It was not pointed to me as a structure of interest. It looks unkempt and nothing human marks its presence.
Everything grows in the Congo,
Everything grows.
(Re)membering…
Close shot of the point of no return and the docking of the “port,” Louango, Congo (photo credit: Guilaine Kinouani, April 10, 2024).
Re-membering goes beyond remembering, though the latter, in contexts of erasure and disavowal, is an act of resistance in and of itself, I have argued elsewhere (Kinouani, 2023). Narrative therapy has used the idea of re-membering to honour the reality that identity is constituted through a network of relationships sustained through conscious reconnection:
‘purposive reengagements with the history of one’s relationships with significant figures and with the identities of one’s present life and projected future’ (White, 2007, p. 129).
Decolonial scholars have gone beyond the revisions and explorations of such associations and their current role in our lives by contextualising re-membering within the realities of archival violence, actual bodily dis-memberment and amputation, as well as communal displacement and consequent psychic fragmentation (Ndlovu, 2024; Park, 2021; Reeves, Di Gianfrancesco, & Kinouani, 2025).
One thing we Congolese people can do is dance through everything. And so, I was taken dancing. I impressed my people with my rumba skills and musical taste. With the unmistakable Congoleseness of the movements of my hips, of the rhythm of my feet, of the enlivening of my soul to music. Re-membering is a musical practice, it is indeed an ancestral practice.
I was recurrently compared to my mother and grandmother. It warmed my heart and anchored my body to this land, to the lineage it belongs to, to the atemporality of homeness.
I was brought to tears again and again by the bone-chilling, unmitigated beauty of the Congolese natural landscapes, its divine evocation, its otherworldly experience. Where life and death dance before your very eyes, again and again, and you are invited to join in. Only you never know which hand will enthral you in your next move.
Everything grows in the Congo,
Everything grows.
I have been trying to rethink the PhD with the centrality of this trip and the fragmentation and transformation it caused to my worldview. Paradoxically, this fragmentation and this transformation took me home, if only epistemically; a notion I will return to repeatedly.
Whether through the phenomenology of racialised space and time in Chapter One, the reimagining of recognition in Chapters Three and Four, or the ontological reclamation of core analytic ideas by Africa, in Chapter Four.
In On Being Included, Ahmed (2012) rethinks the dialectics between knowledge and transformation by suggesting that, contrary to the radical proposition that knowledge about the world should lead to its transformation, equal attention should be placed on what kind of knowledge comes into being by seeking to transform the world.
While her theorisation arguably focuses on the decolonisation of institutions and disciplinary domains, via what she calls ‘diversity work’, the insight that ‘the very labour of seeking to transform institutions is how we come to learn about institutions’ (Ahmed, 2012, p.172–173) offers a critical reorientation that speaks to her use of Husserlian phenomenology.
What was previously known about institutions, as one comes against the weight of their defences, walls, silences, and violence, brings to consciousness what was receded from view, altering perception, experience and description of the very problem one sought to resolve.
Echoing wa Thiong’o’s (1986) liberatory perspective and its heavily Biko-influenced ideas of self-decolonisation in Decolonising the Mind, I would say that Ahmed’s (2012) proposed reversal of the causality of knowledge has significant implications for the direction of change and for self-knowledge.
That the process of transformation or decolonisation is also necessarily how we come to learn about ourselves. How we come to face within ourselves analogous defences, walls, silences, and violence so we may come to ‘see ourselves clearly’. Paralleling the posited permeability of the individual and their matrix by institutions and social structures — the foundation matrix, in Group Analysis.
Reading this thesis is a significant undertaking, as has been writing it.
It asks the reader to witness the unrelenting nature of racial violence and injustice. It requires cognitive and affective stamina and the willingness to see when the eyes shut. This contemplative exercise, which I later term necrocontemplation, is required of anyone confronting racial trauma and mass enslavement and colonialism-related atrocities.
And this is the crucial shift the Congo allowed me to make from my own diasporic positionality. From reconnecting to my own history and, in many ways, to my own body.
In four years, the geopolitics have transformed: mass violence broke out in Ukraine; in Palestine, Israel was taken to the International Court of Justice over ‘allegations’ of genocide. Race riots occurred in the UK in the summer of 2024.
Extraction-fuelled violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has silently claimed over six million lives since the 1990s, has become mainstream. While these well-publicised campaigns of aggression have occupied our collective mind, the movement for reparations, justice, and decolonisation has in parallel gained prominence, reminding us of the links between what has been and what is now.
In the midst of it all, two years after I had returned to the land of my ancestors, and a decade after I started to pay attention to the internally generated images of the mass of corpses floating in the ocean; during the write-up of the PhD, I devastatingly lost my mother.
She too was taken back home where she now rests, in the soil of the Congo.
Everything grows in the Congo,
Everything grows.
A philosophical reading of Skyline To, the song from which Frank Ocean’s (2016) line, “everything grows in the Congo,” is drawn from, evokes time, space, movement, the loss of innocence, and grief through lyrical engagement with the mundane and the everyday. Through the unstable temporality of the song, what is felt is already memory and what comes after shifts the experience itself. It poses, phenomenologically, a complex question: how may we fully experience an experience while knowing that it opens us to the confrontation of loss, to being liminally connected to life and death simultaneously, in everyday encounters?
The repeated return to the Congo in the chorus, arguably captures these evergreen mysteries.
My profound loss at the very end of the project symbolises the silent work implicated in decolonial work, in ‘wake work’ (Sharpe, 2016), and in racial trauma work, specifically in mass confrontation—the structure of the affective framework to which I return in the concluding chapter, to make visible the internal labour of decolonial scholarship as mourning work. Further, it illustrates the inexorable relevance of Hartman’s (2007) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route to our understanding of racial traumatisation, revealing how experiences that are so intimately personal can illuminate Black consciousness and, thus, should not be separated from the structures and collective memories of enslavement and colonialism.
It comes in the morning haunting us with the beams […]
Everything grows in the Congo,
Everything grows.
Ooh, can you come when I call again?
References
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Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
* Part of this preface has been previously presented including at my lecture at Liverpool International Slavery Museum, in 2024.
Please note this preface has not yet been submitted but will form part of my PhD. I share it in the spirit of African communality, to invite reflection, feedback and engagement.
All respectful comments and feedback are welcome. Feel free to use the form below.
Guilaine
.