The Power of Language: Using Sociolinguistic Methods to Write African History

Sociolinguistic methods, such as the historical linguistic approaches used by precolonial Africanist historians, can enable historians to read and analyze historical changes via linguistic ones and thus provide new insights into social, cultural, and political change in post-colonial Africa. I focus primarily on popular experiences of political power and thus work especially with language ideologies and language practices, bringing these concepts from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics into conversation with work by Africanist historians.

Studying social change through linguistic change has been a core part of Africanist history since its earliest years as a discipline in the Western academy.Footnote ⁵ This research, however innovative, has primarily been limited temporally to the precolonial period and, methodologically, to historical linguistic approaches.Footnote ⁶ Historians and historical linguists, from Jan Vansina onward, have used historical linguistic analyses in conjunction with archeological and ecological evidence to illuminate otherwise inaccessible elements of precolonial African history and made foundational contributions to the field in the process.Footnote ⁷

I propose in this article that sociolinguistic approaches to studying African history, although still tentative, have the potential to open up new vistas into understanding Africa’s recent past. My starting point is the work of the late sociolinguist and anthropologist Jan Blommaert, who concluded that on-the-ground sociolinguistic processes such as language practices represent “an extremely sensitive index of broader social change.”Footnote ⁸ Following Blommaert, changes in language practices and language ideologies index social changes in the same way as loan words and morphological variation index changes for historical linguistics. In the Zairian context, a change in language practices—Lingala’s nation-wide expansion—indexed social and political changes connected to Mobutu’s nation-building project, in the form of his personalized rule and efforts to centralize state control and strengthen national identity. At the same time, a change in language ideologies—increasingly prevalent criticism toward Lingala among Swahili speakers in eastern Zaire—indexed shifting popular attitudes toward the central government, which manifested in the form of popular support for multiple rebellions and culminated in the AFDL movement that toppled Mobutu in 1997. Sociolinguistic approaches to history differ from historical linguistic approaches by indexing short term social, political, and cultural changes rather than longue durée changes.Footnote ⁹ Another difference lies with the object of analysis for changes in language practices and ideologies—that is, speakers of languages rather than languages themselves as with historical linguistics. This focus on speakers, rather than linguistic structures, means that this sociolinguistic approach is especially suited to studying time periods still within living memory using oral histories. Drawing from oral history testimony, sociolinguistic historical methods can contribute to African social history by historicizing and contextualizing the language practices and ideologies of ordinary Africans whose linguistic repertoires do not include the European languages in which most research in African history is presented, debated, published, and consumed.Footnote ¹⁰ Describing the historical linguistic approach, the influential historical linguist Christopher Ehret wrote that “every language is an archive” whose “documents are the thousands of words that make up its lexicon.”Footnote ¹¹ To adapt Ehret’s analogy, the primary archives for sociolinguistic historical research are speakers whose memories and experiences of different language practices or ideologies represent the individual documents for this research. Sociolinguistic historical evidence is accessible not only through interviews but also through music, novels, and other fora where language ideologies are expressed or through sociolinguistic publications that document language practices and changes. In contrast to the relative durability of historical linguistic evidence, sociolinguistic evidence is more localized, specific, and contextual, but can still be analyzed historically.Footnote ¹²

Over the past twenty-five years, linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have developed methods and approaches—especially research into language ideologies and language practices—with significant potential for historical research that has not yet been fully realized.Footnote ¹³ Language ideologies, a foundational concept of linguistic anthropology, are the “beliefs and attitudes that shape speakers’ relationships to their own and others’ languages, mediating between the social practice of language and the socioeconomic and political structures within which it occurs.”Footnote ¹⁴ Historically, they act as archives of speech communities and their ideas surrounding language.Footnote ¹⁵ Language ideologies are rooted in historical events, and processes, and they can thus be used to read historical change.Footnote ¹⁶ Language ideologies represent complex historical evidence in that they can be adopted, performed, and altered based on who someone is speaking with and in what context.Footnote ¹⁷ In recent years, scholars have succeeded in linking both hegemonic and counterhegemonic language ideologies to shifting political and social power relations, demonstrating how language ideologies can both index and contribute to historical change.Footnote ¹⁸ Language practices refer to the varieties and variants of language(s) that communities use for different communicative functions.Footnote ¹⁹ Language practices such as language ideologies are an important object of analysis for sociolinguists, and much recent research focused on the language practices of different sub-cultures, speech communities, and communities of practice.Footnote ²⁰ Both language ideologies and language practices index historical changes and thus hold potential as tools of historical research.

Oral history plays a central role within this research because of the informality and orality of Lingala usage in Zaire, and because of the particular value of oral history for sociolinguistic research. As critical as oral history has been for African history, it has been even more important to Congolese historiography due to the importance of orality in Congolese culture(s), Congo’s fractured archival landscape, the destruction of archival materials amid civil war and economic crisis, and the unreliability of many government documents.Footnote ²¹ While the Congo Crisis period (1960–1965) and, to a lesser extent, the early Mobutu period (1965–1974) have a very extensive archival documentation, the archival picture becomes far less certain for the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote ²² Oral history offers additional benefit for sociolinguistic research because it enables researchers to access the interplay “between reminiscence, narrative and identity,” enabling linguists or historians to “link the personal to the social and historical, setting a speaker’s use of language and dialect within the wider cultural context.”Footnote ²³ These linkages are especially relevant in the case of Lingala, which, beyond missionary-sponsored writing up to the independence period, and limited popular publications since, has primarily been an oral language for much of its history, as with other urban lingua francas across Africa.Footnote ²⁴ Lingala’s orality has contributed to its relative scarcity in the political science literature into Mobutu’s regime, in which researchers drew their primary sources mainly from written government and archival documents and periodicals in French, supplemented by interviews with regime officials and other political actors.Footnote ²⁵

While oral history represents a central part of this research due to the sociolinguistic and historical context, the complexity of using language ideologies and recollections of language practices as historical evidence requires additional corroborating evidence. The two main, specialized sources that I consulted in order to corroborate my oral testimony were, first, sociolinguistic publications from and discussing the Mobutu period and, second, focused interviews with Congolese sociolinguists on their observations of language practices and ideologies relating to Lingala.Footnote ²⁶ In order to gain a comprehensive view of Congo’s highly multilingual linguistic landscape, I interviewed numerous Congolese linguists with specialized knowledge of the four national language regions during the course of my fieldwork.Footnote ²⁷ These expert perspectives provided a critical supplement to oral history interviews with members of the general population and a careful reading of Congolese sociolinguistic publications.

A sociolinguistic approach to African history has particular potential for social history because it can illuminate the challenges and realities facing the majority of Africans who do not speak former colonial languages and thus find limited avenues for socioeconomic advancement within formal economies in which European languages often dictate advancement. At the same time, a sociolinguistic approach can also illuminate the experiences of Africans—who might not speak European languages—as they navigate informal economies and irregular work in order to make their living and provide for their families.

Sociolinguistic approaches can also advance African history by responding to Larmer and Lecocq’s objective to “achieve an understanding of African nationalisms in a comparative context within the African continent and beyond.”Footnote ²⁸ Beginning from their conclusion that “nationalism is as created, imagined and successful in Africa as it is elsewhere,” the role of language—central to nationalism’s imagined communities worldwide—holds particular relevance for understanding nationalisms in Africa’s multilingual social, cultural, and political contexts.Footnote ²⁹ Studying the language practices and ideologies of African state and civil society actors can deepen our knowledge of the imagination, formation, and contestation of official and non-official nationalisms during and since colonial rule. Additional analysis regarding the relationship between official (often formerly colonial) and national languages within contexts of contested nation-building projects would be especially beneficial.

The Language of Power: Lingala and Political Power in Mobutu’s Zaire

In the Zairian context, sociolinguistic methods help to illuminate how Lingala, as the language of power under Mobutu, both contributed to and revealed the Mobutu regime’s privatizing of the Zairian state, fracturing of Zairian society, and strengthening of Zairian and later Congolese national identity.Footnote ³⁰ A “language of power,” or langue du pouvoir in French, is a concept emerging from Congolese political culture that has structured Congolese perceptions of political power and authority dating back to the colonial period.Footnote ³¹ While this article engages with an emic perspective of this concept, it has major parallels in other African countries that could benefit from further study.Footnote ³²

Congolese frequently use the term “language of power” when explaining the relationship between language and political power. Congolese political historian Jean-Marie Mutamba Makombo defined langue du pouvoir to me as referring to “the language spoken by those who are in the circle of power … the chief’s language.”Footnote ³³ Effectively, “language of power” refers to the language(s) used by those who hold political power, or in Congolese Swahili, benye pouvoir. Footnote ³⁴ This term does not correspond to formal recognition through language but rather to the language practices of those holding political power. In this way, it evokes the concept of a language regime as formulated by Liu.Footnote ³⁵ Implicit within this discourse is the idea that speaking the language of power provides differential access to those in authority. For example, when Laurent Desiré Kabila seized power in 1997, Congolese politicians seeking an audience with Kabila needed to speak at least some Swahili in order to gain an audience with him; by speaking Swahili they demonstrated their recognition of his authority, creating a favorable environment for their requests.Footnote ³⁶

The language that became Lingala, one of Congo’s four national languages alongside Ciluba, Kikongo, and Swahili, originated as a Bobangi-based pidgin in the late nineteenth century along the upper Congo River when European explorers, colonial authorities, missionaries, and their Congolese and other African workers came into contact with local Bobangi-speaking communities.Footnote ³⁷ This heterogeneous group of speakers then spread Lingala across the area of northwestern Congo, which became known as the Lingala zone, and also reached the colonial station at Léopoldville where Lingala quickly became implanted in the city.Footnote ³⁸ The years from 1895 to 1900 were critical to Lingala’s eventual expansion beyond this region and to its taking on a national as well as a regional status. Congo Free State authorities reacted to the Tetela mutinies of 1893–1894 by ethnically mixing units of the colonial military, the Force Publique, which had previously been recruited and deployed along ethnic lines. In order to overhaul and nationalize the Force Publique, colonial authorities needed a unifying military language of command. Lingala won out over its main competitor, Swahili, due to the loyalty of the significant number of soldiers from the Lingala region during the mutiny.Footnote ³⁹ Lingala quickly took root among the Force Publique across all of Congo, gaining further momentum with a 1931 law, intended to combat ethnic factionalism, which required soldiers and their families to speak Lingala off-duty as well as on.Footnote ⁴⁰

Lingala provided the soundtrack to life in Mobutu’s Zaire. Lingala’s dominant position extended to almost every aspect of the regime, from the military to the police, from the party-state, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR), to the regime Mobilization and Propaganda (MOPAP) and to the territorial administration. Lingala was the language that Mobutu’s unpaid, badly behaving soldiers used when demanding bribes or looking for “rebels.”Footnote ⁴¹ Lingala was the language that Mobutu’s all-knowing security services used when interrogating suspects or “disappearing” dissidents. Lingala (alongside French) was also the language through which Mobutu convened and addressed the nation, with many national slogans being in Lingala.Footnote ⁴² As Sarufi explained, “Lingala was President Mobutu’s language, and because of this, it carried powerful authority.”Footnote ⁴³ Sarufi expressed a common theme throughout my interviews: Lingala’s close popular association with Mobutu gave the language power, due to the personalization of his regime. This motivated Zairians from non-Lingala-speaking parts of Zaire to learn Lingala, contributing to the language’s further spread across Zaire during Mobutu’s rule.Footnote ⁴⁴

Lingala’s status as the language of power under Mobutu had important limitations. It was neither recognized by formal legislation, nor used in (most) official written contexts, nor taught in classrooms (beyond the primary level in the Lingala zone).Footnote ⁴⁵ Political scientist Amy Liu’s concept of a language regime can help us to understand Lingala’s position in Zaire. Liu defined a language regime as “the rules that delineate which languages can be used when and where.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Liu and other scholars of political economy primarily focus on efforts by states to enact language regimes through rules and regulation but also allow for less direct impacts on language, similar to theories from some recent language policy scholars.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Zaire, the Mobutu regime enacted a hybrid Lingala-French language regime, primarily through the regime’s language practices and ideologies rather than through formal policies. French was the official language and language of formal governance, elite communication, written documents, secondary and tertiary education, and communication with the outside world. Lingala—known as the language of power—was the language of informal governance, mass communication, and the military and police. Lingala was also the language of Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, and its world–famous Rumba music, and it thus indexed urban modernity and sophistication.Footnote ⁴⁸ Lingala held particular importance in shaping popular experiences of the Mobutu regime due to its status as the main language for the regime’s more informal and intimate relations with its subjects, and also its status as the language that Zaire’s elite spoke among themselves in the corridors of power and political decision-making.Footnote ⁴⁹

In comparing Lingala under Mobutu with other dominant lingua francas that expanded after independence in Africa, three aspects that stand out are as follows: first, Congo/Zaire’s complex linguistic context; second, the fraught political context in which Mobutu launched his nationalist project; and third, Mobutu’s use of Lingala to convoke the Zairian nation. Congo’s high degree of linguistic diversity, with around 240 languages, is on the higher end of the spectrum in Africa, but what really distinguishes Congo from many of its contemporaries is the at least limited degree parity among different regional lingua francas that exist on top of the local languages in a three-tiered sociolinguistic hierarchy with French at the peak (see figure 1).Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1970, Congo’s four national language zones divided the country along almost equal linesFootnote ⁵¹—with 18% of the population in the Kikongo zone, 16% in the Ciluba zone, 28% in the Lingala zone, and 38% in the Swahili zone.Footnote ⁵² This relative parity among competing lingua francas contrasted with numerous other multilingual African countries where one lingua franca predominated as, for example, with Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania, Wolof in Senegal, or Chichewa in Malawi.Footnote ⁵³ Congo’s multiple lingua francas and their concurrent regional identities complicated Mobutu’s efforts at promoting Lingala, particularly given these languages’ political mobilization as markers of regional and national identity during the Congo Crisis.Footnote ⁵⁴

Figure 1. Map of Congolese national language regions. Courtesy of Nico Nassenstein, 2019.

The fraught political context from which Mobutu seized power both necessitated his strengthening of an official national identity and made this task more difficult.Footnote ⁵⁵ As head of the army during the Congo Crisis, Mobutu supervised a brutal and exceptionally violent crackdown of separatist regions that made little distinction for civilians. In Kwilu, for example, Mobutu’s soldiers imposed Lingala on the population (as the Force Publique had done during the colonial period) while inflicting horrific violence. This experience caused a whole generation of people in Bandundu and elsewhere to largely reject Lingala as a language of violence and oppression, even as economic and political reasons pushed many of them to speak Lingala regardless later on.Footnote ⁵⁶

Mobutu largely disregarded these attitudes as he used Lingala in order to convoke the Zairian nation, in contrast with many of his African contemporaries.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Senegal, for example, as Leigh Swigart has written, President Abdou Diouf’s decision to use Wolof in a major speech in 1988 represented an unprecedented moment for a polity where French was the only language used for addressing national audiences, owing to the French colonial legacy plus the influence of President Senghor and other Francophone elites.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda convoked the state solely in English; he would give his speeches in English, and all of his government’s slogans were in English. Zambia’s motto under Kaunda, which he would repeat in many of his speeches, was “One Zambia, One Nation.” Both Kaunda and his regime would utter this slogan in English, meaning that he constructed his state, verbally and symbolically, through English in order to avoid criticisms of tribalism.Footnote ⁵⁹ Mobutu, by contrast, established a Lingala-centric language regime from his seizure of power onward through his addressing of domestic audiences and stating of government slogans primarily in Lingala. For example, he would ask his audiences in Lingala: ekolo bo? (how many nations/ethnic groups?) and they would respond moko (one).Footnote ⁶⁰ While ekolo can be translated as nation, it is also often used to mean ethnic group. Given Lingala’s association with the conflict from which Mobutu seized power, his calls for ekolo moko, or one nation. encountered opposition initially. but his regime’s continual yet uncodified convoking of a Zairian nation through Lingala contributed to the strong sense of national identity among Congolese, which Englebert has discussed.Footnote ⁶¹

Locating Lingala in the Mobutu Regime Literature

From a political science perspective, the Mobutu regime stands as one of the most thoroughly analyzed post-colonial regimes on the continent.Footnote ⁶² The picture that emerges from these political analyses is one of a highly centralized and personalized authoritarian regime that repeatedly changed and adapted but eventually lost control over much of the society that it ruled.Footnote ⁶³ After his 1965 coup, Mobutu gained control of Congo in the late 1960s and early 1970s through cooptation and intimidation internally, and by cultivating favorable relations with Belgium, the US, and later France externally, before seeing his power ebb under the weight of mismanagement and greed after the late 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁴ Mobutu held onto power until 1997 by shifting the form of his regime whenever politically expedient, and coopting whatever opponents he could not muzzle or eliminate.Footnote ⁶⁵ Cooptation, as Young and Turner explained, was “used with remarkable effect throughout the Mobutu era … as the far-flung apparatus of the state offered a large reservoir of positions for those willing to pledge faithful service.” Lingala represented an important point of continuity amid the regime’s repeated reinventions across the decades. Speaking Lingala allowed Zairian officials to demonstrate their loyalty to Mobutu and their buy-in or cooptation to his political system.Footnote ⁶⁶ Mobutu began his rule in 1965 facing numerous threats to his rule from political rivals and formerly rebellious regions, but he consolidated power between November 1965 and 1967 by ruthlessly eliminating internal opposition and cultivating a close relationship with the US, solidifying his power through the formation of the MPR party state in 1967.Footnote ⁶⁷ Mobutu further transformed his government through the 1970s to increase presidential power and broaden his elite coalition.Footnote ⁶⁸ Mobutu made additional changes later during the 1980s in response to the political threat posed by the opposition Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrés Social (UDPS), and Mobutu ushered in a further transformation in 1990, when he embraced and attempted to coopt and control democratic reforms to placate increased internal and external opposition.Footnote ⁶⁹ Each of these shifts saw Mobutu transform the structure and function of his regime in order to maintain control. During each period, Lingala remained core to the regime and especially to Zairians’ experience of it, through Mobutu’s nationally broadcast speeches and through the use of Lingala by members of the regime in the territorial administration and the MPR party apparatus.Footnote ⁷⁰

Politically, Mobutu cultivated an extensive patronage network, making his elite supporters’ access to positions, wealth, and power entirely dependent on their staying in his good graces.Footnote ⁷¹ Whenever any of these elites appeared to pose a threat to him or the regime, Mobutu would either imprison them, muzzle them, or demote them in favor of their political rivals, creating a revolving cast of would-be politicians who sought to take as much for themselves as they could whenever they were in power.Footnote ⁷²

Lingala also contributed to Mobutu’s patrimonial system by being the main language used for actions of patrimonial largess. For example, when I interviewed former MPR Central Committee advisor and speech-writer, Remi-Nathan Mungimur, he recalled—code-switching into Lingala during our French-language interview—that MPR party secretary Kithima Bin Ramazani had given Mungimur a substantial compound in Kinshasa by simply telling an aide: pesa ye ndako (give him a house), after which Mungimur immediately received the house.Footnote ⁷³ This followed a pattern whereby Mobutu and members of his inner circle would use Lingala when giving favors to their supporters, contributing to an ethic of patrimonial reciprocity that reinforced Lingala’s status as the language of power.Footnote ⁷⁴ Through its association with Mobutu’s patrimonial politics, Lingala also became associated with a shift in moral expectations that critics labelled with the Lingala moniker sopeka. As historian Martin Kalulambi Pongo analyzed, this social change overseen by Mobutu contributed to “the deprivation of the social and professional morality of everyone from government officials, to the unemployed, to car washers,” as Zairian adapted to new norms of corruption and inequality normalized by Mobutu’s regime.Footnote ⁷⁵

Mobutu took a divide and rule approach to ethnicity, systematically favoring his fellow Equateuriens and setting different ethnic groups against each other even as he preached and sometimes practiced politics of national unity.Footnote ⁷⁶ Mobutu preached and sometimes practiced politics of national unity through a regional quota system for education and careful regional balancing of his many governments, but he also took a divide and rule approach to whatever opposition he encountered, systematically favoring his fellow Equateuriens in the military and in internal security, while setting different regions and ethnic groups against each other in times of crisis.Footnote ⁷⁷

In the political science literature on Mobutu’s regime, discussion of Lingala has remained relatively muted. Most analyses have drawn sources mainly from the formal, French language side of Mobutu’s hybrid language regime in terms of government documents, official speeches, and statements, and regime-aligned newspapers, supplemented by interviews with regime members. Turner and Young, in their exhaustive account of the regime up to the early 1980s, acknowledged widespread perceptions within Zaire of Lingala’s importance in the regime, but they primarily looked elsewhere to explain Mobutu’s longevity in power.Footnote ⁷⁸ Reflecting much later, Crawford Young saw Mobutu’s affinity for Lingala as pragmatic in nature in that it was the only national language that he spoke proficiently and that it was already firmly established when he took power as the language of Kinshasa, and the Zairian army, two power centers that Mobutu needed to control.Footnote ⁷⁹ Studying Lingala’s role in Mobutu’s regime contributes to the literature on Mobutu first by providing a new vantage point, showing us how a leader that has often been presented as an archetypical African dictator appeared to Zairians living under his rule.Footnote ⁸⁰ Second, studying Lingala under Mobutu deepens our understanding of how his regime operated, complimenting the administrative correspondence, government publications, and recorded speeches that have formed the main primary source foundation of numerous previous studies.Footnote ⁸¹

While the Mobutu regime has received extensive treatment from political scientists, the history of the Mobutu period, in the words of the late Congolese historian Jacob Sabakinu Kivulu, “still remains to be written.”Footnote ⁸² Isidore Ndaywel laid down the historical blueprint for discussing Mobutu’s rule through his Histoire Générale du Congo, where he primarily analyzed the regime’s political and cultural evolution but also noted how the decline of Zaire’s economy after 1974 transformed Zairian society.Footnote ⁸³ Recently, Sarah Van Beurden has discussed how Mobutu’s politics of authenticité and his efforts at cultural guardianship influenced the transnational worlds of Congolese art, and Miles Larmer and Erik Kennes have ably depicted the complex history of how the Katangese gendarmes fought against and interacted with Mobutu’s Zairian state.Footnote ⁸⁴ Several other monographs and many dissertations have covered different aspects of the Mobutu period since Ndaywel’s magnum opus; however, Sabakinu Kivulu’s observation continues to resonate regarding much of the social history of Mobutu’s rule (1965–1997).Footnote ⁸⁵ This study of Lingala’s role within the regime fills a crucial gap within the literature in terms of illuminating the linguistic means through which, first, Mobutu and his state ruled over Zaire and, second, into some of the ways that Zairians responded to Mobutu’s language regime, deepening our knowledge of Zaire’s social history in the process.

Lingala’s Role in Privatizing the State and Fracturing Zairian Society

Lingala’s power under Mobutu stemmed, first of all, from its association with Mobutu himself. Mobutu, a member of the Ngbandi ethnic community from Equateur province, was born in the Lingala-speaking town of Lisala and grew up mainly in Equateur’s towns. Mobutu then served in the Lingala-speaking colonial military, the Force Publique, and later seized control through a military coup and thus brought Lingala with him to the center of political power.Footnote ⁸⁶ Mobutu viewed Lingala as a neutral means of communication and unification for the whole country, and members of his regime, seeking to demonstrate their loyalty to Mobutu, adopted Lingala en masse. Footnote ⁸⁷ My interviews with members of Mobutu’s inner circle—in particular, former chief-of-staff Mokonda Bonza and long-time confidant Jonas Mukamba—corroborated Young’s assessment. As Mokonda Bonza explained: “Mobutu did not really analyze Lingala or advance a language policy for it, he simply used the language.”Footnote ⁸⁸ It was Mobutu’s high-profile use of Lingala to address the Zairian public and his use of Lingala when speaking with his inner circle that propelled the language to its informal yet premier status.

Lingala’s powerful status under Mobutu pushed politicians and other regime officials across Zaire to learn the language. Politicians from Shaba (Katanga) and other restive provinces came to see learning Lingala as a critical way to demonstrate their militantisme or fervent loyalty to Mobutu, which Callaghy termed the “the key criterion of selection, maintenance, and promotion” in the regime.Footnote ⁸⁹ As Christopher Mwenze Mulangu, a former regime official from Katanga recalled, “if you did not make at least an effort to speak Lingala, you just could not make it as a politician. It was the language of power!” Per Mwenze and other former regime officials from Swahili- and Ciluba-speaking parts of Zaire, officials needed to learn and speak Lingala because the perception was that “you gained access to power through this language.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Mutations was one key policy that pushed Lingala usage among members of the territorial administration and Zairian government. Mobutu instituted mutations during a December 1966 speech to congress by stating that government officials, first, could not serve in their home regions and, second, would be rotated to a different territory every three years.Footnote ⁹¹ This policy was intended to prevent officials from building up too much independent power and from becoming too close to their subjects.Footnote ⁹² Although never codified, mutations also had the effect of making Lingala the de facto language of popular communication for Zairian government members and especially territorial administrators, a core component of Mobutu’s regime that Callaghy characterized as “Mobutu’s prefects.” Under Mobutu’s system, territorial administrators were hand-picked by Mobutu or his advisors and served at his discretion. According to former commissaire de zone Lazar Tshipinda, MPR doctrine established commissioners as “little Mobutus” in the areas that they administered, with almost unrestricted powers and supervision over their own staff, the gendarmerie, security police, JMPR (Jeunesse de la Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution) leaders, MOPAP, and the population. Tshipinda explained that “by speaking Lingala, commissioners were able to access Mobutu’s authority” and more effectively broadcast his rule over their territories.Footnote ⁹³

If speaking Lingala brought administrators closer to Mobutu, it often distanced them from the populations under their rule. Political scientist Waruzi Bianga, during his study of rural reform in Eastern Congo, found among the rural farmers whom he interviewed in the Swahili-speaking Kivu province that the use of Lingala by the regional authorities when communicating with the local population contributed to popular perceptions that these authorities were “not interested in local welfare.”Footnote ⁹⁴ As Baraka recalled regarding her perception of people from the Swahili zone, “people thought that if someone spoke Lingala they considered themselves better than everyone else. People saw speaking Lingala was a way to oppress other people in a humiliating way (kukandamiza bengine literally means to push down or stomp on other people).” Thus the Lingala language practices of regime officials contributed to the fracturing Zairian society by fueling resentment in the form of negative language ideologies against what some Zairians, particularly in the Swahili zone, experienced as linguistic oppression.Footnote ⁹⁵

Mobutu addressed domestic audiences only in Lingala, even in places like Katanga or Kasai where many people did not understand the language. In this way, Mobutu used Lingala to build a sense of national community. As one elderly interlocutor recalled, “from the beginning, Mobutu spoke Lingala, only Lingala, not French.”Footnote ⁹⁶ With Mobutu using French mainly for foreign consumption, Lingala served as the medium for his frequent popular rallies across the country. As Congolese Linguist Sesep N’sial noted in 1986, “Marshal Mobutu makes his speeches most frequently, if not exclusively in Lingala, as much in Kinshasa and Equateur, as in the linguistic regions of Kikongo, Ciluba, and Kiswahili.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Mobutu’s Lingala speeches served as an important reason for ordinary Zairians, as well as regime officials, to learn Lingala. As Mucheko remembered growing up in rural Katanga: “We started to sing in Lingala [through the MPR and popular music] and we began to listen when Mobutu would give speeches in Lingala. We also started trying to speak Lingala little by little, and so we began to understand Mobutu’s speeches better and better.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Nearly every Congolese whom I have interviewed from non-Lingala speaking parts of Zaire shared this sentiment about learning at least some Lingala under Mobutu’s rule, with Mobutu’s speeches and slogans being a major point of focus in addition to the significant role of Lingala’s association with Kinshasa and its rumba music and with the MPR.Footnote ⁹⁹ The regime never made this practice explicit and, in fact, never gave Lingala an official status at all, though not for lack of trying.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Mobutu addressed popular audiences in Lingala throughout his rule, building a national speech community and strengthening Zairian national identity through Lingala in the process.

The use of Lingala by Mobutu and other regime officials also facilitated their privatization of the state by enabling them to transmit the messages to internal audiences while avoiding criticism from the regime’s Western backers in Washington DC, Brussels, and Paris. For example, in May of 1976, Mobutu instructed an audience of MPR party-state officials in Kinshasa that while the brazen theft of some members of his government was wrong, koyiba na mayele (stealing cleverly; literally, stealing with intelligence) was an acceptable and even laudable practice for both government officials and ordinary Zairians. A month later, when American diplomats questioned Mobutu for his apparent instruction to steal, Mobutu responded at another rally by asserting that his Lingala phrasing had been misinterpreted, but he did not deny his original position.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This was common practice according to former regime official Christopher Mwenze Mulangu who stated,

Mobutu could speak bluntly and openly in Lingala and thus demonstrate his power to his domestic audience; he could then deny these inconvenient truths in French. Mobutu’s use of Lingala helped power his demolition of the state and gave his American, Belgian, and French supporters plausible deniability regarding the regime’s worst excesses.Footnote ¹⁰³

Using Lingala rather than French allowed Mobutu to filter his audience, enabling him to transmit his message to the people as he intended to and then to deny it later on, which was particularly important as he sought to maintain both domestic stability through fear or paternalism and external support for his regime through foreign policy and an appearance of legitimacy. Mobutu’s use of Lingala also sent a clearer message to his Zairian audience due first to Lingala’s association with direction and command and, second, due to its association with the fast-paced moral ambiguity of urban life as the main lingua franca of Kinshasa.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Mobutu’s instructions to steal cleverly, or in other versions, to steal but not too much (yiba kasi mingi te) became a license for officials and a rallying cry for opponents as Mobutu normalized state theft.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In terms of linguistic change, the fact that Lingala became much more widely spoken beyond the Lingala zone after Mobutu gained power caused Zairians, particularly from the East, to associate Lingala with the predation and corruption of the regime.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This association reverberated across much of Zaire in the form of negative language ideologies toward Lingala. Indeed, language attitudes toward Lingala both contributed to and revealed the strained relationship between Eastern Zaire and the Congolese central government in Kinshasa that nourished multiple rebellions and continues to this day.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Whereas before Mobutu, people only recalled Lingala as having had connotations of impoliteness and brutality owing to the exactions of the Force Publique, under Mobutu, Lingala became associated with theft, oppression, and menace as well.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These negative ideologies existed alongside positive language ideologies associating Lingala with modernity, urban sophistication, and trendiness; however, across Eastern Zaire, negative ideologies toward Lingala appear to have outweighed the positive ones.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In understanding why these associations became established, the actions of regime members—starting with politicians—provided immediate proof for this association. As historian Donatien Dibwe observed, “[Zairian] politicians spoke Lingala, they held power, and they were thieves.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Widespread attitudes of Lingala as being a language of theft, which extend beyond the Swahili zone, can be linked to its association with Congolese politicians, in particular, of whom Mobutu was the most prominent. Among Ciluba speakers in Kasai, thieves are often referred to as mwivi a mangala (literally, Lingala thief) in a kind of embedded protest against the normalization of theft that many people connected to Mobutu’s rule. Among Congolese Swahili speakers, as Katangese linguist Marcel Kalunga explained, the Mobutu regime’s imposition of Lingala violated expectations of respect (eshima in Katanga Swahili) and deference to established linguistic norms in terms of using either Swahili or another local language. A very common statement that Katangese and other Congolese Swahili speakers voiced to me regarding Lingala is that Lingala aina eshima (Lingala has no respect). Swahili speakers link this statement of language ideology to Lingala’s highly direct and low-distance style of communication (in contrast to the indirect and differential style of Congolese Swahili dialects) and thus to Lingala’s use by violent security forces and political leaders for whom the population has little affinity, in an instance of linguistic iconization.Footnote ¹¹¹

Zairian women suffered particularly under Mobutu’s rule, and in areas that the regime viewed as especially rebellious like Shaba province, women came to associate this suffering with Lingala due to the fact that Lingala was the language spoken by the soldiers and gendarmes who exploited or harmed them most directly. Much of this violence occurred in day-to-day life, in addition to the extraordinary violence that the regime deployed when encountering real or perceived opposition.Footnote ¹¹² Regarding this quotidian violence, Nuru, a farmer who would transport her goods to market remembered, “it was simple, if soldiers wanted to, they would stop you and seize whatever you were carrying … they would ask, in Lingala, ozokende wapi? Omemi nini? (where are you going? What are you carrying?)”Footnote ¹¹³ The women’s linguistic abilities mediated these interactions. If women spoke Lingala and could respond, then the soldiers would not demand payment and would treat them well because as Nuru explained, “soldiers did not know Swahili and only spoke Lingala. If you could speak Lingala, then they would treat you like family.” For those who could not speak Lingala, the soldiers would demand money, and if the women did not have it, these interactions would quickly turn violent. “Soldiers would especially target older girls and women, if they seized you and you were sexually mature, they would assault and rape or kidnap you.” For “Ritafwari,” who spoke Lingala as the daughter of a Katangan Force publique veteran, these interactions were far less confrontational and violent. She reflected, “it helped me a lot knowing Lingala. When I came across a military roadblock, I would just say in Lingala mbote, sango nini (hi, how are you)? And they would let me pass every time without any problem.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ These women’s testimonies underscore the critical role that Lingala played in mediating Zairian women’s interactions with soldiers and other members of the Zairian state.

In situations of crisis, the quotidian violence of Mobutu’s state increased to horrifying levels, and Lingala then contributed to both the fracturing of Zairian society and the enforcement of Zairian national identity. During the first Shaba War in 1977, Forces Armées Zaïroises (FAZ) soldiers—on at least a few occasions—pushed the connection between Lingala and being Zairois through the barrel of a gun.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In the Zairian border town of Dilolo (and likely elsewhere), FAZ soldiers used Lingala to test suspected “rebels,” local civilians caught by the army, during their interrogations. Once the rebels fled, Tumaini recalled that “the [Zairian army] soldiers came back and killed many people. If someone spoke Lingala, they would let them live, the soldiers would think, oh, you’re from Kinshasa, speaking good Lingala made the soldiers think of them as fellow countrymen.” Tumaini also recalled that “if someone couldn’t speak Lingala, they would say, this one is a foreigner [implying they’re a rebel from Angola], and kill them. In the time of Mobutu, knowing Lingala was very important, it saved people’s lives. It truly was the language of power!”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Several other interviewees corroborated Tumaini’s account of Zairian soldiers weaponizing Lingala during the Shaba Wars.Footnote ¹¹⁷

During multi-sited fieldwork across Congo’s four linguistic zones, I found these negative attitudes to be most concentrated and vehement in Katanga, where the regime’s perceptions of the province as being a zone rouge led to military occupation of sections for much of 32-year rule.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Lingala’s imposition also clashed with Katangese nationalism centered around Swahili, which had flourished during the Katangese secession, as Katangese politicians used Swahili in speeches and radio broadcasts to imagine their own, ultimately unsuccessful nation. When the long-time Katangese rebel Laurent Kabila took power at the head of the multi-national AFDL rebel coalition in 1997, he adopted Swahili as his language of power within his government and inner circle and also attempted (unsuccessfully) to impose the language on the Congolese armed forces.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Regime violence enacted through Lingala fractured Zairian society and deepened the resentments that tore the country apart during the Congo Wars.Footnote ¹²⁰ As “Musafiri,” a recruit who joined the AFDL rebellion during their march across Zaire in 1996 and climbed through the ranks explained, this violence also underscored the necessity of knowing at least some Lingala in order to demonstrate Zairian identity and survive encounters with the state. Zairian soldiers in these instances used a logic of erasure an important aspect of language ideology—by erasing Zaire’s multilingual reality and Shaba’s status as a non-Lingala speaking area—in their shibboleth test of national belonging.Footnote ¹²¹ The fact that many people passed these tests through their knowledge of Lingala in rural Southwestern Shaba far from the Lingala zone pointed to the success of regime language practices in imposing Lingala on the Zairian population as an often violent part of their nationalist unification project.

Mobutu himself exhibited a similar logic of erasure during a 1989 nationally broadcast speech when he stated: “I wrote this speech in French but I am giving it to you all in Lingala so that we can all understand each other (po toyokana).” Mobutu then listed Zaire’s provinces, saying after each, “I am speaking in Lingala so that, they can understand me (bayoka ngai).”Footnote ¹²² Mobutu’s statement implied Lingala could serve uncritically as an inter- and pan-Zairian language of communication and national unification. On one level, by 1989, when Mobutu gave this speech, he was largely correct; his regime’s imposition of Lingala had succeeded in the sense that much of Zaire’s population could understand at least basic Lingala by that point.Footnote ¹²³ On another level, Mobutu’s statement reflected a dominant language ideology within the regime that downplayed Zaire’s extensive linguistic diversity and multiple regional lingua francas in favor of a view of Lingala as a “neutral” national language capable of unifying Zaire.Footnote ¹²⁴

Under Mobutu and later on, the oppositional attitude toward Lingala that many Congolese from the other three national language zones express has also been counter-balanced—particularly among young people—by language ideologies holding that not speaking Lingala or speaking Lingala badly makes someone a yuma (wimp, sissy, or halfwit), a word that Kikongo speakers have borrowed as well.Footnote ¹²⁵ Young people across Congo/Zaire have thus been an important driving force in Lingala’s expansion, both through engagement with music and culture from Kinshasa, but also under Mobutu, through the JMPR youth movement.Footnote ¹²⁶ Another common sentiment from my interviewees was that speaking Lingala connected them more into the Zairian national community, which was indeed Mobutu’s objective in order to strengthen his rule.Footnote ¹²⁷ The ambiguity between these contrasting responses to Lingala underscores the complexity and richness of using sociolinguistic evidence for historical writing, as sociolinguistic changes in language ideology and practices reveal ongoing cultural, social, and political changes.Footnote ¹²⁸