Human Ecological Change in Kinshasa. Zaïrian Urban Anomie and African Palaver Systems

In: The international journal of sociology and social policy, Band 15, Heft 8/9/10, S. 265-282

Abstract

Analyses based on sociology, cultural anthropology, and the study of religion as well as interpretations of the situation in colonial and postcolonial Africa point out emphatically the growing tendency of confronting the world view, economics, and human ecological makeup of modernity with more or less occult magical practices. Description of urban development in Leopoldville/Kinshasa, the Congo/Zaïre respectively allows no exception to this. Analysts sensitized by pastoral sociology show anxiety over this "return to Kindoki magic" in the West African metropolis. Since these phenomena of urbanization—characterized more and more under the sociological categories "social pathology" or "structural anomie"—have recently received specific forms of expression in the capital of Zaire which are typical for Black Africa, the following should first briefly describe a few modern aspects of these developments in terms of traditional lifestyle interpretations. In the second part, one of the many possible forms of therapy should be presented which—and this is our working hypothesis—opens past encoding models useful in the current search for methods of resolving conflict: the African Negro palaver system.