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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the practices and the context of the elaboration and confirmation of the “Luba-Kasai” and “Lulua” categories as political identities in the Kasai region. It examines the ways in which colonial ethnopolitical entrepreneurs invested these categories with groupness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the practices and processes, the mechanisms and the contexts of the elaboration and confirmation of the “Luba-Kasai” and “Lulua” categories as political identities in the Kasai region. It examines the ways in which colonial ethnopolitical entrepreneurs invested these categories with groupness and how these categories became institutionalized and incorporated in administrative routines, myths, memories, and narratives. The paper also tries to understand how the local notables internalized and appropriated the new political identities and labels and struggled to reinterpret and reconstruct the “customs” and “traditions” to make sense of their situation under the pressure of growing capitalist relations of production, taxation, land alienation, urbanization, and westernization.

The study addresses the following questions: how did successive groups of western Luba migrants who settled in the Kasai region at different time periods became identified, essentialized, and naturalized as distinct ethnic groups? Why was the prospect of decolonization accompanied by the emergence of intense political, but ethnically framed, conflict between proximate groups who had been getting along well until then? How did the discursive framing of grievances operate? How was the conflict managed and resolved? How did the process of production of historical narratives take shape? This research is informed by the scholarship on the "invention of traditions," “the creation of tribalism,” and the “imagined communities.”