1 - Introduction: Sovereignty on a Shoestring

Summary

On 20 November 2012, the rebel group M23 seized control of North Kivu’s provincial capital, Goma. Over the subsequent year, it occupied much of that province. M23 made itself an obligatory passage point for trade by occupying strategically situated points at the heart of flows of internal displacement, minerals, aid, and trade. It handled taxation professionally: it gave out receipts, and set fixed rates for different sizes and types of vehicles, which were also slated according to contents. About half a millennium earlier, in 1568, the Jaga had made a similar move, conquering a strategic point along a key trade route in present-day Congo. Jan Vansina has called this ‘the first instance of an inland people attempting to gain wealth by cutting out middlemen along the trade routes’. These events are clear instances of strategies with a much broader purchase. Today there are so many roadblocks in Central Africa that it is hard to find a road which does not have one; and in the centuries following the Jaga episode, numerous African polities were crafted out of control over trade route bottlenecks. This book is about these roadblocks, and this chapter explores how control over passage points along trade routes embodies a key form of power and an object of struggle in Central Africa, contemporary and historical.