appendix n for VOLCANO CITY SOUKOUS

 

ayoh kré Duchâtelet, Ornaments and Crimes

Wanted to do a last post before the twin scourges of term papers and grading take me out of commission - a couple folks have expressed interest in my NooFutra campaign set in the Eastern DR Congo, so I thought it would be cool to write up a quick survey of some stuff I read (still reading in some cases) to prepare for this game. 

Housekeeping

A new friend, UnFuturism/Rachel, asked me if I plan to make Volcano City Soukous into a setting guide or the like when the campaign is done. I honestly don't know. Not fully comfortable trying to codify stuff for this game. It's easy to read a bunch of books in prep; the real trick is being able to encode all that background reading + general knowledge in a text meant to be played. I'm also unsure of the boundaries: my position has long been that Afrodiasporic people don't have carte blanche to speak about the Continent without putting in work just by virtue of having another shared experiential referent (Blackness here) and I constantly worry about clearing the necessary bar. The bundle of wounds that make up VCS are still very raw and require special care to navigate. Not even sure that I'd want to transform it into text, tbh. Spent a lot of time feeling like my tendency to have personal settings that exist only at my table was a failing, largely thanks to the literary affectations popular in the hobby, and I've been trying to unlearn that + find other ways to share my love of games on/about the Continent (like this blog!)

Disclaimer!

Much of Shadowrun's African lore is bad and some of it is remarkably bad, like god fucking awful. It includes a handful of the most genuinely disgusting things I've seen printed in a major RPG. Even the "ok" stuff on Central Africa sucks: super-disease and a magically wild rainforest (which covers all of the DR Congo now) has turned the region into an almost literal heart of darkness called the Congo Tribal Lands/Zone. I had to keep even less of the classic theming than SP did in her work, because most of it was useless racist trash entirely unrelated to Congolese experience. There are some echoes - a forest resurgent around the old timber concessions does still appear in greatly mutated form and the concept of talislegging is present relatively unchanged. No great loss, I think, but worth explaining. 

A Congopunk Library

Splitting these arbitrarily into capitalism and culture sections. The distinction is artificial and many should be in both. Not including the scattershot reading I've done on the scientific side, since it's mostly just stuff about Lake Kivu and Mount Nyiragongo (the eponymous volcano of Volcano City Soukous.) Goes without saying that I am deeply indebted to all of the authors here, even the ones I disagree with. To paraphrase our elder V. Y. Mudimbe, bow and grin but bow all the same. 

Capitalism -

• Hendriks' Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession and Smith's The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern DR Congo were the first non-fiction books I'd read expressly for the purpose of campaign prep. They are demonically good, just the right kind of anthropologically-minded analysis of regional capitalism that you'd need to embark on a project like this. Both also spend time on the possibilities for transcendence generated by Congolese people within these systems, a genuine rarity in this sort of book. They're also excellent from an academic perspective, rigorous and theoretically competent. Eyes of the World wipes the other recent book on artisinal mining in the Congo, Kara's Cobalt Red…which actually replicates many of the issues that EotW points out about writing on digital mineral mining. These two books were the skeleton of Volcano City Soukous and some player favorite factions - the Deep Forest Brotherhood and the Shacklebreakers - are almost direct borrowings from them. 
• Lesley Nicole Braun's Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa is an even newer book and I really wish I had access to it earlier. Powerful and incisive study of musical patronage politics, (quasi-)sex work, visibility systems, and gendered identity formation in the DR Congo. Reading this deepened my engagement with many existing elements of the setting and added an entirely new dimension to the rumba/soukous angle. 
• I was v much lukewarm on golden boy of Congolese political science Jason Stearns' Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, but his recent book The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo is considerably better. His analytical toolkit is less wedded to the conventional account that he reproduced in earlier work - likely because of the experience of the past 7-8 years - and his detailed focus on the Kivus made this helpful for my Goma-based project. Stearns' liberal allegiances are on clear display but his critique has sharpened and I thought his discussion of the perverse incentives built into the peace process was illuminating. I would still pair this with the fantastic radical counterpoint America’s War on Democracy in Rwanda and the DRC by Justin Podur, one of my favorite books on modern African politics. Podurpill yourself and you'll never read think-tank lit on E-C Africa the same way again, it's like a They Live glasses experience.  
• On a similar note, Milli Lake's Strong NGOs and Weak States: Pursuing Gender Justice in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa is focused on the massive power of NGOs in the DR Congo's judicial system but largely sees this as a positive bc it leads to stronger protections for women. I have, uh, a lot of problems with this book but kinda inverted the argument forVCS - most of the modern DR Congo is openly ruled by NGOs affiliated with major hypercorp donors under the pretense of humanitarian aid and good governance. Ten points if you recognized the justification from the Free State period. A very recent book that takes aim at NGOcrats is Vogel's Conflict Minerals, Inc: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo, written for the African Arguments series. I haven't finished this one yet, so I'll reserve judgement for the moment, but it does complement EotW in some interesting ways.

Culture -

•  I'm decently familiar with academic work on precolonial Congolese history/myth and I draw on it liberally for VCS - there's a lot of cross-pollination in the modern DR Congo. We'll go through the canon in detail for Kubalubalundaland/The Equatorial Tradition but for now I'd like to spotlight David Newbury's work on Lake Kivu, our region of interest. The Land Beyond the Mists: Essays on Identity and Authority in Precolonial Congo and Rwanda collects Newbury's most important papers on the Kivus into one volume and his modern classic Kings and Clans: Ijwi Island and the Lake Kivu Rift, 1780–1840 was an indispensable resource.
• For the neighbors of the Havu, Shi, and Hunde to the west and east, I mostly just referenced the old standbys - Biebuyck's work on the Lega cultural complex (Hero and Chief: Epic Literature from the Banyanga, Lega Culture, and his notes on the Mubila Epic were especially helpful) and Vansina's work on Rwanda (Antecedents to Modern Rwanda remains the gold standard.)  
• I'm sure y'all were expecting the music bullet, so I won't disappoint - the inimitable Achille Mbembe's essay on Congolese popular music was a core inspiration. Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds (cairn.info...) is the shortest thing on this list and it's so good, highly highly suggest that you read it instead of the rest of this post if you have time. To his wonderfully complete list of citations, I'd add Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire (an exploration of the [nonexclusive] revolutionary + patronage-seeking dimensions of Congolese popular music) and Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos (great for orienting neophytes.) You could do worse than just listening to a bunch of Franco, tbh. 
• If Rainforest Capitalism and Eyes of the World formed the bones of the setting, Fiston Mwanza Mujila's novels provided the heart. Tram 83 was deeply influential, a meditation on neocolonialism, mourning, recovering Congolese time, musical encounter, the carnivalesque, and the absurdities of national identity all in a stylish package. I stole so so much from this book, up to and including surface details like the City-State and the Back-Country, "heterogenite" as a comedic term for a vague mineral wealth, the use of "tourist" to refer to corp agents (it's the local equivalent to "shadowrunner" or "edgerunner" in-game), the "foreplay is like democracy..." refrain and even the Tram 83 bar itself (lightly rebranded as Trolley 38 lmao.) I'm still reading through The River in the Belly (published by a hometown press in English) but it's been similarly impactful, especially on my framing of diaspora relationships to Volcano City and the importance of the lake itself. Sony Lab'ou Tansi's Life and a Half is a bit more remote but its blend of "magical realism" (not the right term, but that's what all the Goodreads guys say and they're clearly the reigning authorities on Tansi) and pitch-black Congolese humor has provided a ton of the city's vibe. 
• Kimbanguism is weirdly important in VCS (the setting's Kimbanguist analogues - The Prophetic Current - were already around, but the players fixated on them in the way players tend to) so I've been doing some reading! Gampiot's Kimbanguism: An African Understanding of the Bible was a clear and hyperinformative intro, done from a dual emic/etic perspective (Gampiot is the son of a Kimbanguist cleric and was raised in the faith.) Covington-Ward's Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo was a massive help in starting to get my head around modern Congolese forms of embodied religious performance. The experience of another revolutionary Christian syncretic prophet from Central Africa - Alice Lenshina - also went into the Prophetic Current, tho I mostly took stuff from David Gordon's mentions of her in Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History . 

enjoying Franco makes you a better person