The Fictions of Europe: Coloniality, Borders and the Political in Blaise Ndala’s 'In the Belly of the Congo.'

This article examines Blaise Ndala’s novel In the Belly of the Congo as a sustained interrogation and decolonisation of the political fictions that lend credence to the contemporary European Union. Ndala unsettles dominant narratives of Europe as bounded, coherent and as the unique site for a global democratic heritage. Set between Brussels and Kinshasa, in 1958 and in 2003, the novel reconstructs the colonial afterlives embedded in the symbolic architecture of the Atomium, the architectural figuration of Brussels Expo 58. In this novel the Congo is situated as the centre of Europe—and arguably the world. The article develops three related arguments. First, it reconstructs how Ndala situates Europe in relation to ongoing histories of empire, extractivism and Eurafrican political economy that shaped the early formation of the European Economic Community. Second, it argues that the novel provincialises European understandings of “the political” by foregrounding alternative temporalities, including ancestral memory, spectral haunting and matrilineal inheritance. These exceed secular narratives of sovereignty, citizenship and historical progress. Third, the article considers how the novel imagines reparation and restitution, not as juridical closure or symbolic apology, but as an ongoing confrontation with the afterlives of coloniality that continue to organise migration, borders and political belonging in the present. In the Belly of the Congo’s spectral narrative treats Europe as a precarious political fiction sustained through acts of historical disavowal. The novel challenges both the universalist self-understanding of Europe and the territorial fiction of the postcolonial Congolese state, recovering interrupted political histories and alternative figurations of collective life.