Diplomacy through Speech: Mbochi Tradition and the Sassou N'Guesso Doctrine in the Congo (1979–2026)

Abstract

Published in 1997, at the turning point of its author's return to power following a civil war, Le manguier, le fleuve et la souris is at once a life narrative and a statement of foreign policy, written by a Congolese head of state who has led his country for nearly half a century. Drawing on the text itself, this article reconstructs the diplomatic doctrine that Denis Sassou N'Guesso claims therein. It then tests this doctrine against the independent historiography of the episodes it recounts, as well as against the diplomacy actually conducted by the Republic of Congo since the mid-2020s. I draw on the theoretical framework of the "politics of the belly" and neopatrimonialism (Bayart, Médard), together with African oral traditions of conflict resolution through speech, palabre, mbongi, kanza, in order to interrogate the legitimizing function proper to autobiographical writing. The analysis shows that the book sets out a doctrine built around four stable pillars: a balance between rival powers rather than exclusive alignment, regional mediation converted into political capital, African regionalism claimed as an alternative to external tutelage, and a renegotiated rather than severed partnership with France. To these is added a fifth, more diffuse yet equally coherent trait: the articulation of this doctrine in the idiom of African palabre, and specifically of the Mbochi kanza, which lends Congolese mediation a distinct cultural legitimacy. This doctrine continues, for the most part, to structure contemporary Congolese diplomacy, even as the text performs a narrative selection that minimizes the episodes least compatible with the image of a disinterested mediator it seeks to construct. Le manguier, le fleuve et la souris should not, therefore, be read as a treatise on international relations to be taken at face value. It nonetheless deserves to be taken seriously as a first-hand historical document and as an object of study of a personalist diplomacy, one rooted in a grammar of speech, whose coherence exceeds the personality of its author alone.