Author: Emmanuel Mbala

A Cultural Diplomat Ascends the Political Ladder Before entering the cabinet, Martin M’Beri was best known as a musicologist who helped professionalise Brazzaville’s National Ballet in the late 1970s (UNESCO archives, 1991). The red carpets of cultural festivals introduced him to foreign ministers and heads of state, endowing him with a rare fluency in both artistic and diplomatic language. When he joined President Denis Sassou-Nguesso’s first administration in 1984 as Minister of Culture, he turned cultural performance into soft-power outreach, dispatching orchestras to Lagos and Paris at a time when Congo’s economy was faltering under oil price shocks. His trajectory…

Scramble for Africa and the Birth of Twin Polities When the Berlin Conference adjourned in 1885, Europe’s cabinet cartographers believed they had imposed definitive order on Central Africa. The signatures of diplomats, however, travelled faster than surveyors’ theodolites. France and Belgium each secured a stake along the sinuous Congo River, a waterway whose commercial allure was celebrated by King Leopold II as “the highway to untold riches” (Hochschild 1998). The northern bank fell to Paris as part of French Equatorial Africa, while the southern arc became the personal preserve of Leopold’s Congo Free State. Two administrative capitals—Brazzaville, named after explorer…

A geographically landlocked nation looks to the sea When the National Defence University of Zimbabwe (NDUZ) unveiled its new Centre for Maritime Strategy late last month, sceptics were quick to point out the obvious: Zimbabwe has no coastline. Yet, in a region where over 90 percent of external trade moves by sea, even a land-locked state cannot afford strategic myopia. According to Vice-Chancellor Air Vice-Marshal Michael Tedzani Moyo, Harare’s decision to court expertise from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) stems from a sober reading of Southern Africa’s economic map. The Beira and Durban corridors that feed Zimbabwean commerce are…

Batola’s political pedigree and his moment on the national stage The name Franck Davy Batola rarely featured in diplomatic dispatches until late 2023, when the legal-scholar-turned-advisor began circulating a memorandum titled “Nouvelle Confiance, Nouvelle Gouvernance” to parliamentarians in Brazzaville. A former lecturer at Marien-Ngouabi University and, briefly, a consultant to the Economic Commission for Central Africa, Batola has cultivated an image of technocratic independence while maintaining discreet ties to the governing Parti congolais du travail, according to two senior officials who requested anonymity. His recent media interventions, amplified by independent broadcaster Vox and the pan-African daily Jeune Afrique, have cast…

A discreet graveside ceremony in a symbolic pantheon On a humid June afternoon, the cortège bearing Martin Mberi’s coffin slid through the gates of the Marien-Ngouabi mausoleum, a sanctuary normally reserved for the republic’s foundational figures. The decision to deposit his remains there only “à titre provisoire”, pending final burial in his native Mouyondzi, spoke volumes about the delicate equilibrium the presidency must strike between honouring a former confidant and managing regional sensibilities (Les Dépêches de Brazzaville, 6 June 2024). Under the subdued gaze of President Denis Sassou N’Guesso and First Lady Antoinette Sassou N’Guesso, the chaplain repeated the passage…

A vanishing safety net worth sixty billion Few figures travel the corridors of development ministries this summer with the velocity of the €60 billion projected collapse in official development assistance for 2025. The number, disclosed by Agence française de développement chief executive Rémy Rioux before the French National Assembly, is not merely a budgetary artefact. It encapsulates a systemic retreat from the solidarity architecture painstakingly erected since the 1960s. According to preliminary tallies circulating in Paris and Brussels, overall aid volumes are set to contract by roughly nine percent year-on-year, an erosion unmatched since the immediate aftermath of the 2008…

Owando’s Pageantry Masks a Nation’s Strategic Anxiety The military parade on 22 June in Owando unfolded with predictable pomp: impeccably pressed uniforms, precision drills and the ritual laying of a wreath at the Place de la République by Prefect Emma Henriette Berthe Bassinga. Yet the choice of the anniversary’s motto—“Serve with honour and devotion, protect and defend with rigour”—betrayed an undercurrent of urgency. Captain Misère Dieudonné Okana, commander of Defence Zone No. 4, used the occasion to warn his officers that “the profession of arms is a vocation of sacrifice.” His admonition was less rhetorical flourish than a thinly veiled…

Fragile Freedoms in a Post-COVID Political Climate The Republic of Congo’s civil society thought it had weathered the worst of the pandemic’s disruptions, only to discover that the reopening of political life did not translate into an opening of civic space. The most recent United States Department of State Human Rights Report highlights an uptick in the denial of permits for peaceful assemblies and lingering obstacles to wp-signup.phping associations. These findings echo the grievances voiced in Brazzaville during a capacity-building workshop convened by the Observatoire congolais des droits de l’homme, Acted and the European Union. Participants portrayed a landscape in…

Cartography of abundance and neglect Satellite imagery of the Congo Basin still evokes Joseph Conrad’s fabled green heart of Africa, yet the statistical portrait sketched by the CIA World Factbook, the World Bank and the African Development Bank reveals a state that has the footprint of a middle-income exporter and the development indicators of a low-income agrarian society. Stretching over 342,000 square kilometres and dotted by a mere 6.1 million inhabitants, the Republic of the Congo sits on a coastline that grants it maritime access few landlocked neighbours enjoy, but the port of Pointe-Noire struggles with chronic congestion (World Bank,…

A Symbolic Reunion of Old Allies When Brigadier-General Francis Chakauya led twenty-two Zimbabwean officers across the manicured parade ground of Brazzaville’s Marien-Ngouabi Military Academy in late June, it was more than an academic courtesy call. The Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe forged a battlefield fraternity during the Second Congo War, when Harare deployed combat aircraft and elite troops to buttress former president Laurent-Désiré Kabila (International Crisis Group, 2001). Two decades later, the leitmotif is pedagogy rather than firepower, yet the political message endures: Southern and Central Africa intend to write their defence doctrine in their own lecture halls, not…