No abstract

This article considers humour at the international border between Kinshasa (DR Congo) and Brazzaville (Republic of Congo) as a means through which ordinary people navigate between fulfilling the values of individual opportunism and interpersonal responsibility. Kinshasa's border zone, nicknamed Rome, often echoes with laughter as people who engage in unregulated livelihood strategies (Romains) engage in two genres of humour: verbal irony, expressed in nicknames for people, places and activities; and interpersonal joking, expressed in playful teasing. Laughter and jokes are a prevailing mode of interaction at the border, and the ways in which humour is constructed and experienced reveal much about social and moral life. The jokes define membership of a community of Romains distinct from other urban citizens, while making further distinctions between physically disabled people, who dominate trade as intermediaries, and others by playing with hierarchical social relationships in which disabled people are expected to be subordinate. Ultimately, the humour that shapes the community allows for a critical voice on values within it. This article argues that the inconsistencies pinpointed by humour reflect and shape the instability of social relationships and contradictory values that Romains aspire to fulfil. Humour is a means of navigating critical commentary on the conflicting values of individual aspiration and responsibility towards others.

One of the most conspicuous livelihood strategies for physically disabled people in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, is a particular style of begging known locally as “doing documents.” Confronted with the stigma of begging, disabled beggars create documents in an attempt to legitimize and regulate begging through formalization and bureaucracy, presenting their relationship with donors as NGO fund‐raising and government tax‐collecting. The dynamics of petitioning for these “contractual dependencies” provide a nuanced perspective on desired dependencies: dependencies can be presented in multiple ways, and people consider some dependencies more legitimate and valuable than others. Recipients are not passive but play a defining role in shaping these relationships, seeking a balance between proximity and desired distance to patrons. [dependence, disability, distribution, bureaucracy, begging, temporality, Democratic Republic of Congo]

In moral careers of personhood and subjectivity of people who are mobility impaired, technologies such as mobility aids can become intertwined with teleologies of personal progress. This article examines how technologies shaped and expressed personal growth and social identity among those who took part in transnational trade between Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Engaging with a particular socio-technical environment facilitates both personal movement and cross-border mobility, and therefore becomes central to the ways in which individuals present themselves as ‘losing complexes’ – that is, their perceived frustrations about their disability. Exchanging a stick for a crutch or a hand-cranked tricycle for a wheelchair facilitates different forms of movement and expresses how one seeks to navigate between embarrassment, pride and respectability. Mobility aids thus serve as an index of different moments in moral careers of progress and decline, while their complementarity or incompatibility with public infrastructure is instrumental in creating and disaggregating social assemblages of disabled people. Through the rise and collapse of border trade between Kinshasa and Brazzaville, I discuss how crutches, cargo tricycles, wheelchairs and ferries shaped socialities and subjectivities over the long term. Considering the role of technology problematizes analyses of moral careers of personhood as attributed by others, drawing attention to personal agency and entanglement with a socio-technical environment.