Poisonwood Bible and the Legitimacy in Naming

In The Poisonwood Bible, a now-married Leah finds herself living in the changing political climate of the Congo. Post-Lumumba's death, post Tshombe-expulsion, post-Tshombe re-entry by the orders of Kasavubu, post-Kasavubu firing Tshombe after he wins election, and now, finally, post-military overthrow by Minister of Defense Mobutu. Mobutu, as the story often goes, becomes mad with power over his tenure as Dictator of Zaire. But he begins with intensions that seem legitimate at the beginning--to rename the cities and colonial street names of the old Congo to better represent Sub-Saharan kin and history--but soon drift off course, spiraling into nonsensical and oxymoronic manipulations of language. In the context of Poisonwood, however, Leah finds herself (on page 446) grapppling with the beginning of Mobutu's name-changing legislation. Her thoughts come off as such:

Change all the names of cities on the map-->Become more African.

Understandable.

Change the African name of "Congo" to Zaïre...to make the nation "African-er".

This makes much less sense. But at least we can understand where Mobutu may have been coming from. Mobutu wanted to have an African name never used or manipulated or misspelled by Europeans.

Then, however, the ball was really dropped, when Mobutu decided to call the period of African reclamation of the Congo “l’authenticité” (authenticity, in case you were doubtful). Leah, a speaker of Kikongo, Lingala, and French, likely saw that this was oxymoronic. The term used by Mobutu to call upon the re-Africanization of the Cong—achem, I mean...Zaïre, is French. Not Kikongo. Not Lingala. Not Tshiluba, not Kingwana. .

Leah very clearly demonstrates her lack of respect for these changes, highlighting not only nonnative language use by Mobutu, but also a disrespectful glossing-over of political events, noting, "But what is authentic about it, I keep asking Anatole. Kinsasha's main street is Boulevard the 30th of June, in memeory of that great Independence Day carefully purchased by thousands of pebbles thrown into bowls and carried upriver. How authentic is that? What really became of that vote is another matter, not memorialized in any public place I can see. There is no Boulevard Janvier 17 Mort de Lumumba."

What the book brings up here is obviously that choice of not only physical language but the language of that which one chooses to depict in history is very powerful in setting a background for the day-to-day life of a nation's people. Even, as in this case, for setting up an inauthentic background. This point caused me to wonder, however, where does the government split with the people in terms of language, and why? When claiming to represent the people who were oppressed, why make official the language of their oppressors (French), the language that a markedly small portion of the 55%-61% literate country even knows how to or bothers to speak ? Is this simply to keep legitimacy in the realm of international politics, to claim that the government can communicate in a prominent world language, and that it is thus deserving of attention?

Such reasoning would surprise me, considering Mobutu reduced his government to a kleptocracy in which the Dictator leeched its people’s income for his own good (which entailed palaces, cars, and other luxuries). The great extent of this illegitimacy was exemplified in Mobutu’s defaulting on all his loans to (ex-colonial overlord) Belgium in 1989 (), cancelling development programs in the country and worsening the economic disparity of Zaïre’s populace.

What good is caused, and who does a leader truly represent, when such a leader declares a colonial, non-native, language (which, in this case, brings back memories of terrible manipulation and mutilation, which is not a typo) official? To what extent can the historical removal of nation-changing events (like Lumumba's assasination) in street signs (and, subsequently, a large part of the public sphere) be powerful in controlling the collective memory and thought in a particular society? I know of friends' parents who grew up learning inaccurate, government-fabricated history in their classrooms; they were shocked to learn the truth upon leaving their home nation's education system. In this case, as depicted in the Poisonwood Bible, I think the manipulation and misuse of language demonstrates a particularly powerful example of unjust control by the government.

Whether Mobutu was entirely effective in his manipulation of language or whether he can really be given all the blame for the subsequent pight of the Congolese could be contested, I suppose. Who is to say whether the widely-despised Mobutu achieved his goal of blindfolding the people to his kleptocracy, erasure of history, and international illegitimacy? Who is to say that, if he did succeed, it wasn't the concurrent American government's fault nearly as much as Mobutu's, being that they would support anybody but the somewhat-socialist Lumumba, whose dedication to peace was apparently of no great testament to his worth as a leader? And of course, one could always argue that none of this would have occured without the vicious colonial rule over the Congo by the Belgians. But that's all essentially speculation, and one could always argue that no one could have predicted the full extent to which Zaire would be manipulated by its own leader after Belgium's departure. However, what can definitively be said, as Leah later points out, is that with so much wrong done linguistic, economic, and political levels, and with so many parties involved, that "We have in this story the ignorant, but no real innocents."