Making a “second Vietnam”

An immersion into postcolonial Congo’s revolutionary imagination, this chapter advocates against a division of labor between Third World bodies and First World minds in histories of the 1960s. Even some scholars who have underlined African, Asian, and Latin American contributions to the decade’s political creativity have been captive of that division. ¹ However, much is lost when historians limit the relevance of Congolese insurgents, Cuban barbudos, or Chinese Red Guards to their impact on the political outlook of students in Paris, Berkeley, or Berlin. Our accounts of the 1960s should not repeat an engagement with Third World histories that privileges the symbolic over the empirical. ² In the following pages, I develop a narrative of the Congolese revolution that seeks to account for a Congolese understanding of global connections in the 1960s.