Roadblock politics in Central Africa

Abstract

A frequent sight along many roads, roadblocks form a banal yet persistent element across the margins of contemporary global logistical landscapes. How, this article asks, can we come to terms with roadblocks as a logistical form of power? Based on an ongoing mapping of roadblocks in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, it sketches a political geography of “roadblock politics”: a spatial pattern of control concentrated around trade routes, where the capacity to disrupt logistical aspirations is translated into other forms of power, financial and political. While today’s roadblocks are tied up with the ongoing conflict in both countries, the article shows, roadblock politics has a much deeper history. Before colonization, African rulers manufactured powerful polities out of control over points of passage along long-distance trade routes crisscrossing the continent. The article traces how since precolonial times control over long-distance trade routes was turned into a source of political power, how these routes were forcefully appropriated through colonial occupation, how after the crumbling of the colonial order new connections were engineered between political power and the circulation of goods in Central Africa, and how control over these flows ultimately became a key stake in ongoing civil wars in the region.

Keywords

Democratic Republic of Congo Central African Republic long-distance trade supply chains roadblocks logistics

Introduction

In late 2012, the M23 rebel movement took control over substantial portion of eastern Congo’s North Kivu province. While popular imagination associates rebels in Congo with “conflict minerals,” M23 instead concentrated on roads and derived its revenue almost exclusively from transport taxes instituted at checkpoints strategically situated along the few international trade routes. The following anecdote conveys just how important this roadblock system was for M23:

In July [2013, red.], the chief of finance of M23, Erasto Bahati (see S/2011/738, para. 310), wrote a memo complaining that the activities of the Mai Mai and Nyatura groups were decreasing traffic through M23 territory and consequently leading to a loss in taxes. (UN GoE, 2014, para 33–34)

The example of M23 illustrates what I will call “roadblock politics,” in which actors impose themselves on strategic points of passage on trade routes, to derive power—financial or political—from the capacity to disrupt the trade flows concerned. I start with the example of M23 because, from the perspective of roadblock politics, they temporarily laid claim to what can be considered the prize: becoming obligatory points of passage for global supply chains, positioning themselves in such a way that they become un-skirtable—incontournable in French—for logistical aspirations. It is for this reason that one M23 roadblock operator could claim in an interview: “here, the road passes through here,” while pointing at his pocket.¹ Control over key bottlenecks along strategic trade routes was not only a way for M23 to forge a strong negotiation position with the Congolese government. M23 also made an estimated 180,000 USD a month from their roadblocks (UN GoE, 2013: 13), turning their year-long “rebellion” into a profitable enterprise. Peddlers, NGOs, mineral traders, and multinational corporations all helped finance M23’s rebellion (see Miklian and Schouten, 2013).

About 500 years ago—in 1568 to be precise—an alliance called the Jaga made a similar move, conquering a particularly strategic point along a key trade route between the Atlantic coast and the Malebo Pool in current-day Congo. It had hitherto been under control of the Kongo kingdom, and it would take Portuguese military support to eventually dislodge the Jaga again. “This,” writes Jan Vansina (1990: 201), an authority on precolonial Central Africa, “was the first instance of an inland people attempting to gain wealth by cutting out middlemen along the trade routes”.

While both these events stand out, they do so only as clear instances of contemporary political geographies with a much broader purchase. There are today so many roadblocks in Central Africa that it is hard to find a road which does not have one; and in the centuries after the Jaga episode, numerous African polities would be crafted out of control over bottlenecks along trade routes. This article is about these political geographies, about how control over passage points along trade routes embodies a key form of logistical power and an object of struggle in Central Africa, contemporary and historical.

Roadblocks, logistics, and power

In the most general sense, roadblocks—or checkpoints—are obligatory points of passage astride routes. In Central Africa, they typically take the shape of rudimentary barriers, ranging from simple cords strung between two trees to more intricate setups involving thatched huts and signposts. However diversely shaped, they share that they allow their operators—accepted or contested—to deploy the threat of force to stop passersby for examination and, more often, taxation. As a light and portable modicum of power, the roadblock seems a preferred tool to govern mobile economies for rebels and state agents alike. Yet some notable exceptions aside (Hoffmann et al., 2016; Laudati, 2013; Lombard, 2013; Pottier, 2006), roadblocks have garnered little attention from studies concerned with political order and conflict in Central Africa. As Quirk and Vigneswaran (2015: 2) note, dominant accounts have instead tended to construe meaningful governance in Africa largely in terms of control over fixed territories and populations. From this angle, the Central African Republic (CAR), even before its current crisis, has been labeled “worse than a failed state” (ICG, 2007); Herbst and Mills (2009) even deny Congo’s very existence as a state. The countries, of course, do exist—yet these authors imply that they diverge radically from how we usually conceive of “states,” namely in terms of exclusive control over force throughout a national territory and over its population. By that measure, granted, both countries do not score too well: Congo today harbors over 120 armed groups (Stearns and Vogel, 2017), and the government in CAR proverbially holds little sway beyond its capital Bangui. Not only states, but rebels too, tend to be measured along the same yardstick. Nelson Kasfir (2015: 24), for instance, proposes that “rebel governance, at a minimum, means the organization of civilians within rebel-held territory for a public purpose”. Absent control over territory and population, so goes the argument, no meaningful governance—whether by rebels or states—can be spoken of. To be sure, both are important to understand patterns of conflict and order in Central Africa (see Hoffmann and Verweijen, 2019). But what if such conventional approaches to statehood also conceal other spatial logics of power and contestation?

Two excellent “roadblock ethnographies” hint toward another such spatial logic in those Central African countries this article is concerned with—the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the CAR. In his ethnography of humanitarian access in Congo, Johan Pottier (2006) describes how roads in Ituri were infested with roadblocks, an ethnic minefield for local humanitarian workers trying to negotiate access past its “roadblock militias.” Writing about Central African roads before the recent war broke out, Louisa Lombard (2013) argues that as a materialization of jurisdiction over navigation, roadblocks epitomize sovereign power. She shows that roadblock operators invoked discursive registers of the state to legitimize their expropriations, but their quest for personalized gain made their overall effect one of noncentralized rule. These ethnographies notwithstanding, roadblocks remain strangely tangential to political geographies of conflict in the region. They appear anecdotally in media reporting or are studied as corruption inhibitive of economic growth (Olsson et al., 2016; cf. Sabates-Wheeler and Verwimp, 2014). Yet roadblocks consistently recur among the concerns Congolese and Central Africans evoke when asked about the impacts of conflict.² Both to lend substance to this widespread concern and to contribute to the politicization of roadblocks, a team composed of national human rights defenders in the DRC and CAR,³ the Belgian International Peace Information Service, and the Danish Institute for International Studies collectively designed and conducted a “counter-cartography” (Cowen, 2014: 226) in which roadblocks take the center stage. This ongoing mapping (published as Schouten and Kalessopo, 2017; Schouten et al., 2017), which has already yielded data on over 1,000 roadblocks in both countries, combines qualitative fieldwork and mobile technology-based geosurveying methods specially designed for this purpose.⁴

All parties shared two overarching interests. First, to assess the scope of, and render visible spatially, a key mechanism of exploitation, and second, to nuance the narrow policy focus on natural resources as the main source of conflict financing (see Vogel and Raeymaekers, 2016). Just as mapping the militarization of mining sites and the spheres of control of armed groups intervenes in ongoing controversies, so too, does literally putting roadblocks on the map inevitably conjure new spaces of contestation. Given the extent to which roadblocks are tied up with dynamics of conflict and underdevelopment, the mapping exercises on which this article builds exactly hope to provide the tools to engage with the question of roadblocks.⁵ As with any map, the political life of the mapping depends on future engagement (Loughlan et al., 2014: 26), and here, different members of the team have overlapping but also diverging goals. The Congolese partner, for instance, now works to draw on the mapping as a tool to engage disproportionately affected communities and local authorities to formulate priorities and action plans to mitigate some of its most nefarious effects. Already, other local civil society organizations have crafted their own strategies out of the mapping. In the CAR, where there is currently less opportunity to resist, the key findings circulated widely among NGOs and the national “blogosphere.” In both cases, the local partners felt they benefited from working with outside partners who were, because of that distance, able to interview people they could not, and it was safer for “outsiders” to present some of the more sensitive results. While the article throughout draws on this collective effort, the academic reading of the material is the author’s alone. It situates this new dataset within a “new cartography of the political” (Cowen, 2014: 62) in equatorial Africa—a geography built up around control over the circulation of people and goods rather than over territory or population. Building on Lombard’s assertion that roadblocks are essentially concerned with the governance of navigation, I draw on critical logistics studies attempt to theorize them as a logistical form of power. Calling attention to the forms of violence, inequality and power used to assemble control over the movement of things, this field of study etches out the emergence of alternative geographies of power—one of lines and junctions, frictions and flows—bound up with the governance of circulation (see Chua et al., 2018 for an overview). From such a perspective, rather than only techniques to craft territories and govern populations, roadblocks also intervene in the twin universal aspirations of making things circulate and deriving power, financial or political, from the capacity to shape or disrupt them. “Roadblocks,” writes Judith Verweijen (2015: 138) for Congo, “inscribe military might into the landscape”, but the capacity to translate that might into other forms of power is contingent on the logistical aspirations of those that aim to transact across that landscape.

The import of this form of power has been propounded elsewhere. James Scott (2009: 49) suggested that roadblocks enmesh with state-making when he noted the existence, in precolonial southeast Asia, of what he called “toll states” arising around “certain strategic choke points on land and water trade routes, the control of which might confer decisive economic and political advantages.” In much the same vein, Timothy Mitchell (2011: 19) describes how control over chokepoints along early 20th century coal supply chains “could be used to assemble political agency, by employing the capacity to slow, disrupt or cut it off completely”. Focusing on contemporary Ghana, Brenda Chalfin (2010: 1) has similarly argued that such obligatory passage points remain disproportionally important for projects of state-making and neoliberal reform in Africa, as the services there deployed provide the bulk of state revenue. Since, a vivid discussion emerged around the purchase of Frederic Cooper’s notion of the “gatekeeper state” to capture this form of politics in Africa (see De Grassi, 2018; Dorman, 2019) . All these studies have tended to focus on the power positions that central governments manufacture out of ports, railways, and other permanent transport infrastructures that embody government control over access to resources, while saying little about efforts to control mobility where this infrastructure is absent (cf. Shell, 2018). Nonetheless, they provide a useful heuristic to understand roadblocking as a form of power—an enunciation of sovereignty—which does not necessarily require extensive territorial control but is rather focused on loci which acquire significance only in relation to the flows they might obstruct. The next section shows how in the contemporary Central African Republic, control over trade routes has turned into a lynchpin of the contemporary conflict. Here, rebel groups and the state alike manufacture positions of power out of the capacity to disrupt circulation. While this pattern only emerged in 2013, the roots of this contemporary dynamic lie much deeper. The article then turns to the longue durée of control over supply chains in the region. In the 19th century, African rulers began to compete over, and accrue power from, a new source: control over crucial bottlenecks along the long-distance trade networks that had begun to crisscross the continent. Along those, they levied caravan taxes called hongo, which was at the source of veritable roadblock polities. Colonial rule upended these hongo polities, supplanting them with centrally engineered colonial logistical orders. Against this backdrop, I return to contemporary roadblock politics in Congo, to explore how roadblocks figure in armed group strategies in terms of “nonconventional logistics,” a term coined by one of Congo’s most notorious armed groups, the FDLR,⁶ which I propose encapsulates a connection between mobility and political subversion under conditions of unconventional warfare.

Governing subversive mobilities

In the CAR, some armed factions have managed to cling onto the prize that M23 only managed to sustain during a year: factions issued from the Seleka rebellion in 2013 today retain control of over half of the 284 roadblocks along key long-distance trade routes running through the country.⁷ The majority sits along just three long-distance trade circuits, relatively stable patterns of long-distance exchange centered, respectively, on cattle trade, Sudanese trucking, and the Cameroon–Bangui corridor. The latter is the only all-weather road in the country and a magnet for state agents; the other two have characteristics that make them difficult to govern from a statist standpoint, which is interested in channeling flows of trade through stable pathways of conveyance and a set of taxable passage points; 126 rebel-controlled roadblocks—or about half of all roadblocks found—cluster along these two economic circuits.

Livestock is one of these. About 10% of the CAR population is constituted by “transhumant pastoralists”: nomadic cattle herders who migrate within and beyond the country to pasture an estimated 2,000,000 heads of cattle. Their routes follow seasonal variance in rainfall and respect neither national borders, claims to political authority nor, often, claims to land by sedentary populations (De Vries, 2018). Cattle is both coveted and considered a burden by Central African rulers. On the one hand, cows are “mobile banks,” a sought-after investment of cash otherwise obtained. Yet they are banks which are difficult to keep track of, able to roam where road-dependent government agents cannot. Cattle herders are then from a statist standpoint also considered a “subversive logistics” (Shell, 2018), often associated with smuggling, arms trade, and banditry (Chauvin and Seignobos, 2013). To govern them, owners ally with strongmen specializing in deploying violence to secure movement—a form of operating so typical in CAR’s hinterlands that Louisa Lombard (2013) called it “raiding sovereignty”—a form of rule which is itself mobile and thus able to control mobile banks by following them around.

There is one portion of the cattle economy where static control can effectively be exercised and which therefore constitutes “the prize” of its political geography: the supply chain to Bangui, which annually consumes around 70,000 heads of cattle. A cow costs about 90 USD when it pastures in the borderlands, but butchers in Bangui pay 900 USD for that same cow. For both cattle traders and Central African rebels, the stake at stake here is to capture as large a percentage as possible of this price difference across space. The most effective points to apply the capacity to disrupt the cattle supply to Bangui and translate it into profits are at the end-points of the short stretches of all-weather roads that branch out from Bangui in the direction of the pastoralist hinterlands, where cows enter the road-based logistical purview of the state. It is exactly at these frontier points of encounter between different logistical landscapes that we find the two biggest cattle markets of the country, Kaga Bandoro and Bambari (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Map showing roadblocks on cattle trade routes in CAR in 2017. Source: Courtesy of IPIS.

Under control of ex-Seleka factions, a series of roadblocks around each cattle market regulate the meeting of cattle sellers (often allied to and escorted by the armed group in control), buyers from Bangui and the transporters who will ship cattle by truck to Bangui, submitting each of them to specific tax regimes. Taxing a total of about 15% of the local value of cattle, the ex-Seleka groups make an estimated USD 2.5 million a year just from control over these two profitable nodes in the cattle circuit—when taking into account all 62 roadblocks on cattle routes (Figure 1), the armed groups generate an approximate 4 million USD yearly. When they need extra money, they occasionally use the roadblocks around the Kaga Bandoro market to temporarily cut off the flow of cattle and ship their “own” cows—gained through raids or taxes—to Bangui.

The second central economic circuit in CAR, the Sudanese trucking routes, at present entirely escapes the purview of the Central African state and is instead thoroughly entwined with the logistics of ex-Seleka armed groups. For centuries, Sudanese long-distance traders have shuttled between Port Sudan on the Red Sea, Nyala in Darfur, and the CAR. After entering the CAR at Am Dafok, their routes split into two in the town of Birao, and end in Bambari and Kaga Bandoro, respectively (see Figure 2). The vast area covered by these routes is under the exclusive control of ex-Seleka armed groups. Because Sudanese traders supply ex-Seleka factions with weapons, ammunition, and other essential supplies, they are granted profitable monopolies on long-distance trade, which largely revolves around imports of basic manufactured goods—medicine, bottled drinks, ammunition, powdered milk, batteries, cell phones, etc.—and the export of natural resources from CAR—mostly coffee, nuts, honey, beeswax, peppers, and bamboo. No other motorized traffic—save escorted UN vehicles—is allowed.

Figure 2.

Map showing roadblocks along the Sudanese trade routes in CAR in 2017. Source: Courtesy of IPIS.

The trade routes Sudanese truckers take—connecting all major towns in the northeast—are home to strings of roadblocks at each town, bridge, and intersection. Thirty-two roadblocks exist between Birao and Bambari; 18 between Birao and Kaga Bandoro. The truckers are about the only sources of income for these roadblocks, and generally pay USD 100 at each of them. Cattle aside, in the depopulated savannahs of northeastern CAR, there is little else by way of economic activities for armed groups to try and control. Long-distance trade is virtually the only material out of which pay for foot soldiers, local power, and a strong negotiation position toward the government can be crafted. This means that competition over nodes along these trade routes is fierce, leading to pitched battles between different ex-Seleka factions, which last until all movement grinds to a halt with the onset of the next rainy season.⁸

The Central African government, too, relies on roadblock politics. It forms a perfect example of a “gatekeeper state.” According to Louisa Lombard (2016: 85), “controlling territory has never been a preoccupation of the Central African government”, which has instead preferred to concentrate its governance on those narrow points of passage along which it can tax transnational economic circulation. A limited ensemble of passage points along all-weather roads generates over half of all Central African customs taxes and thence 20% of the government’s operating budget, and the bulk of government roadblocks—around 100—concentrate along these corridors. Just as ex-Seleka groups limit who can transact across their fiefdoms, the Central African government has instated a monopoly of sorts for French companies, who have the exclusive rights to import fuel (Total), soft drinks (MOCAF), and sugar (SUCAF), all working through the French logistics giant Bolloré, who operates the Cameroonian port of Douala and through a public–private partnership with the Central African government also retains a monopoly over the Bangui port. Transport along the all-weather Douala–Bangui corridor is embedded in a security assemblage composed of UN escorts as well as a dedicated Central African brigade, composed mainly of customs agents. The disproportionate concentration of efforts around this corridor is logical as it alone constitutes the umbilical cord of Bangui, through which 80% of its consumption goods is imported. The corridor is complemented by the Ubangi river, which is slower but less prone to frictions and therefore the preferred pathway—again for Bolloré subsidiaries—to supply the capital with fuel, cement, and cars. What Louisa Lombard (2013: 160) observed before the crisis then still holds: “profit is made out of movement, and those who move find themselves subject to seizure”. Yet contrary to the patterns of “noncentralized rule” Lombard observed before the 2013 rebellion, today roadblocks are also the raw material out of which strong rebel power positions are manufactured. Based partially on his exclusive control over trade routes in CAR’s northeast, ex-Seleka warlord Nouredinne Adam even declared the secession of the “Republic of Logone”—modeled loosely on the precolonial sultanate of Dar al-Kuti, which was crafted out of a monopoly on slave-raiding in the area and the long-distance conveyance of Central Africans to the Mediterranean coast.

A prehistory of the roadblock

Hoffmann et al. (2016: 1437ff) meticulously trace the origins of contemporary rebel taxation in Congo back to the colonial period. The brutal ways in which the Belgians extracted resources and various forms of monetary and in-kind taxes undoubtedly left its traces on the contemporary nexus between power and the taxation of local populations. Yet as the example of secession in northeastern CAR suggests, there is a longue durée of roadblock politics whose origins lie deep in the precolonial period. Significantly, rather than taxing “subjects” within a claimed territory, in this prehistory of the roadblock, the emphasis for African rulers seems inversely to have laid exactly on imposing levies on passing strangers—transit taxes called hongo. Such dimensions did this phenomenon take that whole polities were forged out of it. In the areas affected by long-distance trade, control over or participation in these profitable circuits eventually even supplanted older forms of traditional authority (Roitman, 2005: 108; Vansina, 1990).

While regional trade had always existed—exchanging salt, iron, beads, cloth, and other prized goods across ecotones—as a result of increasing European demand for slaves and ivory, two things happened hand in hand. On the one hand, long-distance trade began to increase exponentially and for the first time, African entrepreneurs aimed to directly trade commodities over long distances, attempting to eliminate the many intermediaries along the way. On the other, as a response, forms of political organization adapted to the expansion of these ambitions. Control over passage points along trade routes took on a new significance, and monopoly rule over crucial bottlenecks or stretches of these trade routes became “the basis of wealth and power of precolonial states” (Coquery-Vidrovitch and Lovejoy, 1985: 13). To be sure, transactions between and travels of “known strangers” such as neighboring visitors remained frequent and regulated through mechanisms of reciprocal hospitality or gift exchange arrangements, but this was not the case for traders from afar (Sundström, 1974: 10ff). Around the increasing frequency of such new visitors, a different set of institutions spread. African chiefs “tried to keep a tight monopoly on the trade, and they all levied transit tolls and market taxes from which they derived wealth and prestige which they invested in a strengthening of their political positions” (Vansina, 1962: 388).

Along many African trade routes, this transit tax, or right of way, was called hongo. Chiefs levied this themselves or allowed tax farming by vassals in exchange for tribute, often in the form of slaves, gunpowder, or ivory (Cameron, 1877: 46; cf. Roitman, 2005: 107ff). Hongo was often levied at natural bottlenecks to passage, such as narrowing points in rivers, fords, bridges, or entries to towns, but rulers also actively fabricated artificial road- or river-blocks along much frequented passage points (Sundström, 1974: 10). Articulated within polities which hardly aspired to exclusive control of bounded territories, such roadblocks became what historian Igor Kopytoff (1987: 9) called “interstitial frontiers,” intervening rather in relations of passage than matters of inclusion and exclusion. Making real on the threat implicit in roadblock politics, if a party attempted to pass without paying, it was attacked (Cameron, 1877: 54). If, as Cowen (2014: 11) puts it, “logistics space is produced through the intensification of both capital circulation and organized violence,” then African logistics space long predated colonial rule.

From the 1820s, networks of coastal traders from Tripoli, Egypt, and Zanzibar started incursions ever-deeper into Central Africa, on the way settling in or replacing extant hongo polities. By the time the first “explorers” set foot on land, they found elaborate long-distance supply chains in place, and the trade networks which operated along them became the vehicle for their expeditions (Kennedy, 2013). Traveling along those—with portage and other logistical considerations outsourced to their Arabized subcontractors—led to the realization how profitable these overland routes were, if only the many “middlemen” could be eliminated (Hinde, 1897: 3–4). Early colonization of Central Africa took the form of antislavery campaigns, which also aspired to take over these effective supply chains. Belgian and French control was grafted onto the Arab-dominated logistical order. French colonial regulation simply copied the elaborate organization of logistics developed by zariba sultans before them: a substantial part of the local colonial budget derived from customs and from a caravan tax of one-tenth of produce or one-fortieth of livestock passing through—taxes copied from local sultans who had hitherto held sway (Newbury, 1960: 118, 123; cf. Sundström, 1974: 134). In neighboring Congo, a Free State governor concluded à propos the existing logistical order that “The need to maintain what exists imposes itself … Our regime is, in short, the one that the Arabs have created” (cited in Ceulemans, 1959: 53–54).

The rise and demise of the colonial logistical order

Colonial control over logistical space intensified after First World War, when infrastructure spending across colonies shifted gears (Gwilliam, 2011: 2). Epitomizing what Franz Fanon (1965: 34) meant when he posited that “in colonialism, infrastructure was also superstructure,” railways, telegraphs, and roads were deployed to manufacture economic and political control bundled in European metropoles (Schouten, 2013). Both Belgian Congo and French Ubangi-Shari in effect became “logistical states,” centrally involved in engineering long-distance circulation. The later Belgian Congo (1908–1960) in particular stood out for the degree to which it relied on infrastructure to govern circulation (Schouten, 2014). Boasting 140.792 kilometers of road, 175 airports, and 5.152 kilometers of railroad by the 1940s, “Congo could well have been the best-equipped colony in Africa” (Leslie, 1993: 100). Yet whereas Congo was covered in a dense network of feeder roads to supply the colony’s burgeoning mining sector, French physical presence and infrastructure investments in CAR limited themselves to a few supply routes, checkpoints, outposts, and access points to concessions. These formed crucial elements in a colonial form of jurisdiction that, following Louise Lombard (2013: 161), entailed mainly authority over navigation. Both were then simultaneously “gatekeeper states,” whose power and profit derived not only from mediating the interface between the international system and the colonial interior, but also and crucially from limiting all other internal circulation. Subject populations across both colonies required “mission orders” to be able to move beyond their allotted districts, and all other circulation, not mediated by the colonial apparatus, was out of order (Likaka, 1997: 47–48; 69ff).

Yet these colonial logistical orders were not sustainable. In the immediate postindependence period, transport infrastructure in both countries decreased by over half⁹; this should come as no surprise, as newly independent states hardly had the funds to pay for the maintenance that tropical conditions required and had been “free” (coerced) under colonial rule. A large number of roads which had under colonialism been profitable due to this sponsorship, lost economic feasibility after independence (Wolfe, 1966: 375). To be sure, former colonial powers and Cold War competition meant continued funding for both kleptocratic regimes, but after the 1973–4 crisis, prices for the primary resource niches they occupied—copper in Zaire, cotton and coffee in CAR—plummeted. Deprived of their main sources of foreign exchange, over the next decades, both countries had to allocate large portions of earnings toward imposed debt servicing rather than on maintaining transport infrastructure (Fole, 2003: 68).

While roadblock politics has a long history in Central Africa, today’s roadblocks date back to this period. Concomitant with the ruination of permanent transport infrastructure, the reduction in formal state revenues in the 1980s meant that across both countries, unpaid state agents abandoned their offices associated to taxing formal trade, to instead try their luck as agents in the informal economy. Government presence has therefore tended to converge along the trade routes which remained—which James Fairhead (1992) for this reason called “paths of authority.” The subsequent proliferation of roadblocks in Central Africa echoes broader global tendencies whereby “the linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the military and political spatiality of the nation state has splintered into a multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable and removable border-synonyms” (Weizman, 2007: 6). Permeable borders combined with the semi-permanent state of exception resulting from recent civil wars in both countries understandably activated the notion that all mobility is potentially suspect (see Carayannis and Lombard, 2015: 322), yet out of this suspicion forms of roadside power and predation are manufactured whose significance exceed roadblocks' classical bordering functions.

Nonconventional logistics

Just as in the neighboring CAR, the Congolese economy is premised on putting things into circulation. Agricultural resources need to be brought to local markets; minerals need to be exported; beer and manufactured goods need to find their way to customers. But Eastern Congo’s particularities—its demographic density, itself largely a function of its enormous environmental richness—mean that there is simply much more economic life than in the CAR. This also means that against CAR’s total of 284 roadblocks, in just two Congolese provinces—North and South Kivu—we mapped 798 roadblocks, which is probably only about two-thirds of the actual number (see Figure 3).¹⁰ Congo’s routes are heavily militarized: at 75% of all roadblocks, at least one armed actor is present, whether formally affiliated to the state or not. The sheer number of roadblocks and the diversity of their operators attest to the fragmentation of taxation, itself a function of the frictions of mountainous and jungle terrain and the deeply disputed character of public authority across the Kivu provinces. In many communities, those enjoying a measure of public authority will erect their own roadblocks. Whereas Central African roadblock politics echo precolonial patterns and concentrate on the country’s few high-value long-distance trade routes, Congolese roadblocks are marked by a colonial inflection (cf. Hoffmann et al., 2016) and rather tax everything that moves, however little the value.

Figure 3.

Map showing roadblocks in North and South Kivu in November 2017. Source: Courtesy of IPIS.

Women exiting the field with their daily harvest are taxed a portion of their tubers; artisanal palm wine tax is measured in cups; anyone passing a bridge pays.¹¹ Not only bulky goods are subject to imposition; roadblock jurisdiction over movement also extends to access to farmland, movement between chieftaincies, access to markets, exit from fields, passage of bridges, entry to mines, exit from towns. At an average density of one roadblock for each 18 kilometers, any such itinerary unfolds as a repetitive series of monetized passages: soldier, rebel, police agent, chief, local state representative, another soldier, secret service, migration office, road maintenance service, provincial governor, forestry services, road police, soldier again. No single center of power steers this fine-grained topography of imposition; rather than emanating from state intention, its aggregate “agency” only becomes visible in motion, across chains of roadblocks along whole supply chains. Maman Joséphine, a woman North Kivu, outlines how this works.

We carry beans in bags of 25 kilos over the 10 KM footpath from our field to the Kitchanga market. Along it are three roadblocks. The APCLS,¹² sons of my own community, first tax access to our fields and two kilos from each bag when we return. Further along there’s one Nyatura, and then finally one army roadblock. The Nyatura take three, the army two kilos, meaning that each bag is only eighteen kilos before we reach the market. To enter Kitchanga, there is a roadblock of the secret service, Police, and the chieftaincy. They take FC1000, equivalent to two kilos. At the market itself I pay FC200 plus a cupful to the chieftain for the right to sell. And on the way back, they all ask a part of my profits.¹³

Congo is where, contrary to Tilly’s (1985) compelling argument, taxation by stationary bandits does not give rise to monopolies in anything but the most local and fleeting fashion.

Roadblocks are by preference situated at crucial bottlenecks for flows of goods, people, and capital—typically obligatory passage points such as bridges, footpaths leading to mining sites, the entry of towns, bends in the road, or places where a road is so dilapidated that travelers have to slow down anyway. To illustrate, in December 2016, we visited the FDLR and Nyatura rebel groups, off Kitchanga in North Kivu. Just before a bridge over a small creek, a large hole in the road had been freshly filled with large boulders. A small group of people was standing next to it. After we passed, the driver explained: “this is the entry. Normally you [a vehicle, red.] can’t pass because from here on there’s no road, only holes.” This bridge marks the boundary between Congolese army and rebel control over the road, at the point that it becomes impassable for cars. As we descended and continued by foot, the small group of people removed the rocks from the hole again, closing the temporary opening into enclaved rebel territory. This instance provides a glimpse into the workings of the FDLR, the armed group that has probably developed the most sophisticated approach to roadblock politics in the DRC.

If the propensities of long-distance trade form one crucial aspect of roadblock politics, we need to delve into another aspect of logistics in order to unpack Congo’s roadblock proliferation. The concept of logistics is originally a military concept associated with stable lines of supply to front lines—hardly achievable, one might surmise, under circumstances where road- or air-based conveyance is a luxury reserved for expat NGO workers. Rebels themselves have best theorized what military logistics might look like under such conditions. The FDLR is composed of ethnic Hutu, partially comprising the remnants of what was the pre-genocide Rwandese government and armed forces, who, having fled to Congo, were now forced to attempt and maintain their military organization in the road-resistant dense rainforest. Nonconventional warfare precipitated “nonconventional logistics.” Coining that term, the FDLR devised a form of rebel governance which aspires exactly to turn its new handicaps into its strength, by strategizing the rough terrain of the bush to remain intractable to its enemies. Inverting conventional military logic, FDLR units had to become independent of base while still generating revenues for overarching goals. One of FDLR’s main tactics comprises interposing rebel units onto strategic nodes in the most profitable web of economic circuits and exchanges, creating obligatory passage points for those who aspire to transact across the mountainous rainforest they inhabit.¹⁴

Today, the FDLR’s logistical power concentrates mostly on strategic points of passage along the supply chain of charcoal and wood from the remote Virunga Park toward Goma (Verweijen and Marijnen, 2016). We have mapped a total of 45 FLDR roadblocks, all situated away from the army-infested main roads, along the footpaths over which mostly women carry charcoal and firewood toward Goma. For the FDLR, the portable and ephemeral nature of the roadblock, applied temporarily at points of passage away from fixed roads, suits their ambition to remain essentially intractable.

If the FDLR stands out for having explicitly reflected on, and even coined, the theoretical notion of nonconventional logistics, it is only the most clear-cut instantiation of a premise that undergirds most military logistics in equatorial Africa: that in the absence of intricate supply lines, military deployment and public authority need to be self-funding. In the absence of practicable roads, all armed groups in Congo who have elements that are under arms full-time by necessity practice a form of nonconventional logistics—something that holds for each of the around 120 armed groups today (Stearns and Vogel, 2017). If household taxes form another option for rebels in the repertoire of state-inspired predation tactics, it seems roadblocks are easier to get away with. As one militia leader explained it in an interview about an armed group he was part of before,

Of course roadblocks formed the main way we survived. What else can you do as an armed group?! Both for food and to generate the money for necessary supplies. We moved around a lot, and roadblocks are easy to raise wherever you are.¹⁵

But ever since Mobutu told them to become a “subsistence army,” the purchase of roadblocks as an element in military logistics suitable for rough terrain has been most widely appropriated by the Congolese army (FARDC). With a presence at half of all roadblocks mapped, the FARDC is the largest single roadblock operator in the Eastern Congo. Almost every one of the FARDC’s positions is turned into a roadblock. To be sure, when it is impossible to supply military positions from base, individual military positions by necessity have to engage in an “economy of the bush” (Roitman, 2005: 157). It comprises what military historian Martin Van Creveld (1977) called the oldest form of supplying war: imposition on the local population. Congolese soldiers in rural areas tax any kind of agricultural or mineral produce in-kind, however insignificant the value. Yet the level of impositions practiced by the Congolese army show that logistical aspirations of armed actors are often trumped by considerations of profit (cf. Verweijen, 2013). For every FDLR roadblock near charcoal-producing sites, and for every gold mining site under rebel control, we encountered at least three army roadblocks further down the supply chain. And not only the army, but big men from virtually any Congolese state service with a mandate to perceive taxes send out its agents to “work the road,” often imposing on those deployed at roadblocks a weekly quota they should generate in taxes (cf. Baaz and Olsson, 2011). Nonetheless, Congolese occasionally consider such roadblocks as providing protection. In the ethnic minefield of Masisi and Rutshuru in North Kivu, for instance, Hunde women denounce excessive taxes in general but decry those imposed by the Nyatura, an armed group hailing from another ethnic community. Maman Joséphine, whom we met before, is one of them. She explains that the Hunde APCLS armed group tax her just as much on the footpath between her field and the village as the Nyatura do, “but they protect the hills of our ancestors; the Nyatura harass and threaten us, telling us we are complicit with the APCLS.”¹⁶ To capture how charged individual roadblocks are with politics, one would have to be attentive to the histories of violence and the dense web of politics of belonging and grievances with which efforts to make things circulate mesh (cf. Cowen, 2014: 4).

Concluding remarks

Understood as devices through which the capacity to disrupt circulation can be translated into other forms of power, financial or political, roadblocks are a defining feature of Central African roads. From the basin of Lake Chad to the sources of the White Nile, all the way to the southernmost tributaries of the Congo River, rebels, robbers, soldiers, police, traditional authorities, and administrative officials all partake in complex choreographies of taxation on circulation. While often waved away as a mere practical nuisance typical of the region, roadblocks form a crucial element in a contested logistical order that structures the lives of millions of people. Articulating but one logic pervading the rich material collected in an extensive roadblock mapping across Congo and CAR, in this article, I have argued that these roadblocks are not tangential to either the politics of logistics or Central African political geographies but are also constitutive of them, in patterns difficult to extricate from their entanglements to the centuries-old long-distance trade routes that constitute the region’s global supply chains. A cursory historical overview forwarded that while perhaps an aberration to notions of the state premised on control over territory and populations, contemporary roadblock politics are very much a continuation of the historical experience people in Central Africa had of political order. From long-distance trade networks to colonial roads to today’s supply chains, there has never been a moment when exchange across Central African space has not been imbricated with organized violence. On the aggregate level of roadblock geographies, a general politics of circulation seems at work; one which depends on efforts to put things into motion but, paradoxically, is only activated when these aspirations encounter obstacles. Whereas in the precolonial past roadblock polities could be forged out of the capacity to disrupt long-distance trade, today this is hardly the case. If it is possible to some extent to see today’s roadblocks as a creative mechanism through which those excluded from the limited access order built around supply chains violently pursue a measure of redistribution, the degree to which locals are the bigger victims of roadblock impositions belies this logic. Today, still, public authority in Central Africa more often than not interfaces with its subjects chiefly at moments when the latter aim to put their modest production into circulation. In extending authority over circulation to taxation of even the most minute exchanges and displacements, many Central African roadblocks encapsulate a form of logistical politics so infinitesimal that it slips through the net cast by “logistics space” if that is conceived of as an “intensification of both capital circulation and organized violence.” To capture this more fine-grained politics, the notion of “nonconventional logistics” forwards how organized violence—by rebels or state soldiers—under conditions of infrastructural ruination is itself contingent on mobilizing supplies through, indeed, roadblocks. Logistics as an aspiration and practice then entwines with the local prolongation of conflict and the structuration of patterns of political disorder in Central Africa by contributing to the economic survival of conflict actors. Under such conditions, “logistics” denotes not a technical domain but rather an entangled geography where concerns of military strategy and profit, survival and power, and circulation and imposition merge to become virtually indistinguishable.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the European International Studies Association’s 2015 Annual Convention in Giardini Naxos, Italy; at the Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Antwerp, 2016; the International Studies Association 2016 Annual Convention in Atlanta; at the “States of Circulation” workshop held at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016; and at the colloquium of the African Studies Center at UC Berkeley, 2017, and at the Congo Research Network Conference at Oxford, 2018. I want to explicitly thank Maximilian Mayer, Christoph Vogel, Kasper Hoffmann, Judith Verweijen, and the anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was funded by the Danish Research Council.

Notes

Peer Schouten (PhD) is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and an Associate Researcher at the International Peace Information, whose work revolves around the multiple intersections of global politics, capitalism, and conflicts in Central Africa.

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