“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Israel Bongo Lord has made his history as suggested by Karl Marx, men make their own history. He claimed to be a member of the DRC’s national assembly and at some point a senator. He had access to a site of national strategic importance with neither accreditation nor an electorate constituency, the Palais du Pleuple, the seat of the National Assembly and the Senate in Kinshasa the capital city of the DRC. Multiple pieces of evidence validate the claim that the courageous Lord Bongo has participated in various works of the national assembly and the senator, calling the members of the Palais du Peuple, Colleagues. Other shreds of evidence in the form of short videos show him in both government and private events being introduced as an “Honorable member of parliament” or “Monsieur le sénateur.”
Is this a history that he has made by himself?
A Marxist answer to the above question would suggest that the Congolese Bongo has made history by himself, but it is not a hazardous history because he did not make it as he pleased. Dialectically speaking, one would still refer to Karl Marx by asking another critical question that validates his assumption, that men do not make history as they please. The question can therefore be:
Looking at Lord Bongo’s confidence and courage to take such a suicidal risk, sabotaging both the security and bureaucratic protocol of the national assembly, if the DRC had created job opportunities for young people; and a good, productive, unoppressive and unoppressive environment for every talented young person to prosper, could he made such history?
The DRC has exposed its security and public bureaucracy deficit in various forms but the recent ones are more than alarming, they motivate those who claim that the DRC is a Banana republic to sound unequivocally correct. A few months ago almost similar sabotage happened at the Palais de la Nation, the official residence and office of the DRC’s President. A group of foreigners and Congolese in military camouflage managed to break the Palais de la Nation claiming that they had overthrown the regime in Kinshasa, they raised the then DRC flag, Zire. Luckily, the army managed to reverse the attempt. Currently, a group(s) of rebels supported by Rwanda and Uganda, according to some official documents, are controlling part of the Eastern DRC.
Taking all the above into consideration, a Marxist can go back and reread Karl Marx’s assumption, that men make history under the current circumstances in which they live, in a given time and which have been transmitted from one generation to another. Bongo the Congolese seems to unconsciously understand Aristotle’s teachings “Nature Abhors a Vacuum,” nature does not allow a vacuum. The current circumstances, the context and the histories of the DRC that guide both the operations of state security agencies and the management of the public bureaucracy made it possible for him to create his history. The author’s worry is many men are making their own history, histories that damaged the remaining tissues of a country that has been unhappily declared a Banana Republic.
