USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology
Revue scientifique consacrée à l’étude critique des systèmes politiques, des structures de pouvoir et des fondements épistémologiques de la gouvernance africaine. Elle met en avant la pensée décoloniale, la souveraineté intellectuelle et les modèles politiques inspirés du Mandombe.
Abstract This paper introduces the concept of Colonial Narcissistic Inversion to analyze a contemporary form of postcolonial domination in which former colonial powers appropriate the vocabulary of liberation while preserving structures of influence, access, and strategic centrality. Using contemporary examples, including Emmanuel Macron's Nairobi intervention and his reported claim that France is the 'true Pan-Africanist,' the paper argues that the incident cannot be reduced to a diplomatic gaffe, rhetorical excess, or isolated arrogance. It reveals a deeper structure in which the former colonial actor, even where its policies, security posture, or strategic interests have undermined sovereignty, attempts to reposition itself as moral author, guardian, or interpreter of the liberation tradition created against colonial domination itself. This mechanism is not limited to France. The United States has frequently used similar framing while strangling Cuba through sanctions, invading or bombing states such as Iraq and Libya, and using covert action, economic pressure, and security doctrine to limit the autonomy of states that challenge U.S. primacy. This broader pattern belongs to the Crying Demon Syndrome: the imperial posture in which a violent or predatory actor presents itself as wounded, benevolent, democratic, or morally burdened while continuing practices of domination [61]. The analysis proceeds through six connected dimensions. The psycho-historical dimension situates the incident within France's longer pattern of colonial centrality, postcolonial rebranding, and unresolved imperial psychology. The cognitive-diplomatic dimension examines how terms such as partnership, youth, reciprocity, security, and Pan-Africanism can become instruments of semantic capture when defined by external powers. The security-strategic dimension argues that symbolic language prepares material access through military cooperation, legal immunity, intelligence relationships, critical infrastructure, data systems, and financial arrangements. The predictive dimension warns that the next phase of foreign influence in Africa may operate less through overt occupation and more through youth diplomacy, innovation platforms, AI partnerships, climate finance, elite pipelines, risk-pricing reform, and the domestication of Pan-African language. The legal and elite-accountability dimensions translate the analysis into safeguards, institutional tests, and standards for judging those who claim to represent African sovereignty. The paper further argues that African elite responses to such incidents reveal a crisis of dignity as a sovereignty indicator. Where leaders, diplomats, intellectuals, and security officials tolerate symbolic humiliation abroad while exercising harsh authority toward their own people at home, they demonstrate a dangerous asymmetry of courage. The paper therefore advances the doctrine: no dignity, no mandate; no courage, no negotiation authority; no foreign actor above African law; no reciprocity without material symmetry; no Pan-Africanism without African-defined sovereignty. The paper also places the Nairobi moment beside two wider indicators: the March 2026 United Nations vote recognizing the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity, and the France-Kenya defence cooperation debate over visiting-force jurisdiction and military immunity [42-46]. The purpose is not to overload the Nairobi case, but to show its broader pattern: Western powers mobilize strong legal, financial, and diplomatic tools when European security is at stake, yet often become cautious, procedural, or evasive when African historical justice and African jurisdictional sovereignty are at stake [47]. Macron is further situated as a symptom of Western Imperial Inversion: a recurring Atlantic pattern in which France, Britain, and the United States convert histories of enslavement, colonial conquest, covert interference, primacy doctrine, and strategic domination into narratives of abolition, liberation, democracy, partnership, and moral guardianship [50-61]. Finally, the paper proposes an operational framework for African states and Pan-African institutions, including reciprocity audits, restrictions on blanket military immunity, jurisdictional safeguards, data sovereignty clauses, critical infrastructure reviews, foreign influence risk indexes, diplomatic training modules, conceptual sovereignty archives, elite accountability scorecards, and annual sovereignty audits. The central conclusion is that outrage must become doctrine, doctrine must become tools, tools must become institutions, and institutions must become power. Keywords: Colonial Narcissistic Inversion; Crying Demon Syndrome; Pan-Africanism; France-Africa relations; cognitive sovereignty; material reciprocity; military immunity; elite capture; Françafrique; security cooperation; reparatory justice; false diplomacy; coercive relevance; Western Imperial Inversion; imperial psychology; covert action; abolition memory. 1.
This article argues that many contemporary African crises should not be read as isolated failures of governance, ethnicity, migration management, or peacebuilding. They are better understood as recurrent expressions of a broader anti-sovereignty mechanism in which colonial injury is softened or selectively remembered, legitimate grievance is redirected inward, local relay actors police acceptable diagnosis, and external powers or aligned interests regain leverage over fractured political space. The article develops a mid-range mechanism theory called the Fracture-Buffer-Capture model and applies it through a comparative historical analysis of South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo. South Africa is treated as a paradigmatic case of redirected grievance under conditions of selective reconciliation, durable inequality, and recurring xenophobic mobilization. The DRC is treated as a paradigmatic case of capture under conditions of proxy war, strategic mineral competition, peace-coded political discipline, and civic narrowing. The core claim is not that every conflict is centrally engineered by the same hands. It is that similar actor-types, discursive moves, incentive structures, and political outcomes recur often enough to justify a unified framework and a continental anti-capture response. The article adopts an assume-compromise, zero-trust perspective: hostile shaping, fragmentation, and strategic interference are treated as standing risk conditions to be assessed through motive, capability, precedent, synchronized indicators, and patterned benefit rather than through self-reporting by the actors involved. The article concludes that Africa requires a Pan-African anti-capture architecture able to defend historical clarity, detect redirected grievance, map buffer actors, correlate conflict with extractive and diplomatic pressures, and train public pattern recognition before crisis hardens into governable fracture. [1-4] A superficial reading would interpret the assume-compromise posture as making external parties the architects of every situation described here. This reading is inaccurate: a hostile party does not need to initiate every single disruption. It suffices that they engineer and sustain a system that will be more likely to promote capture and manageable chaos where opportunistic intervention and targeted incitement are less costly for the hostile party and locally aligned interest groups than successful redress by the target society.
Civilizational Failsafes, Entitlement, and the Adaptive Scaling of Dark Patterns
Abstract Comparative analyses of domination often rely on broad categories such as violence, hierarchy, servitude, cruelty, or oppression while leaving the underlying mechanism under-specified. Similar outward forms can arise from different patterned configurations and can generate different trajectories of scale, duration, reversibility, and personhood erosion. This article develops an ecology-psychology framework for differentiating those configurations without collapsing into either moral essentialism or flat universalism. The framework shifts the explanatory center away from dark traits alone toward a broader spectrum of pathological formations organized around entitlement, inversion, dissociation, domination, and the regulation of personhood. Within this structure, manipulative, grandiose, cold, and coercive tendencies function as adaptive strategies rather than as the final level of explanation. Entitlement carries the main mediating weight because it links patterned operation to normalized asymmetry, weakened reciprocity, and the institutional scaling of harm more directly than aggression alone. Social failsafes supply the main comparative hinge, including kinship obligations, shame systems, personhood boundaries, ritual constraints, and institutional checks that raise or lower the cost of destructive conduct. The article also reconstructs oppression as an internal selector rather than as a merely external force. Domination reorganizes the internal field of the targeted population by redistributing reward, elevating compromise-susceptible actors, and increasing the viability of brokerage, mimicry, and selective cruelty. Language enters the mechanism at the same level, since euphemism, irony, bureaucratic naming, and moral inversion reduce inhibition and normalize conduct that would otherwise remain more legible as predatory. Comparative historical discussion, including African adaptive variation, migration memory, personhood coding, and the limits of migratory determinism, clarifies why movement, ecological stress, and conflict do not mechanically produce the same thresholds of entitlement, dehumanization, or scalable domination [1]–[4], [13]–[22]. A final contribution formalizes diabolical entitlement as the outer limit of pathological entitlement: a condition in which severe violence, degradation, or dehumanization persists beyond proportionate strategic necessity, despite less destructive alternatives and often at no commensurate gain. The article concludes that human dark potential varies less by essence than by regulation. Historical systems differ most sharply in the strength, distribution, and durability of the restraints that prevent entitlement from hardening into common sense, procedure, and durable rule [9]–[12]. [FR] Résumé analytique Cet article part d’un constat simple mais décisif : les analyses de la domination utilisent trop souvent des catégories larges comme violence, hiérarchie, servitude, cruauté ou oppression sans préciser le mécanisme qui les produit. Or des formes extérieures apparemment semblables peuvent reposer sur des configurations psychologiques, morales et institutionnelles très différentes. Une hiérarchie n’implique pas toujours le même rapport à la réciprocité. Une violence n’implique pas toujours le même rapport à la personne visée. Une dépendance n’implique pas toujours le même degré de déshumanisation. Le texte propose donc un cadre d’analyse destiné à distinguer ces configurations au lieu de les aplatir. La thèse centrale est que la variable la plus explicative n’est pas l’agression en elle-même, mais la prétention pathologique, c’est-à-dire le sentiment de droit à l’asymétrie, à l’exemption, à l’extraction et au mépris de la réciprocité. L’article soutient que l’agression est trop hétérogène pour servir de clé principale, puisqu’elle peut être défensive, opportuniste, situationnelle, rituelle ou sadique. La prétention pathologique, en revanche, permet de comprendre pourquoi certains acteurs vivent la domination comme normale, légitime, voire due. Il éclaire donc mieux le passage entre conduites individuelles, institutions durables et systèmes de déshumanisation. À partir de là, l’article distingue plusieurs niveaux analytiques qui sont habituellement confondus. D’abord les formations pathologiques larges, comme l’entitlement pathologique, le narcissisme malin, l’inversion perverse, la dissociation prédatrice, la domination sadique ou ce que le texte appelle la prétention diabolique. Ensuite les stratégies adaptatives, par exemple la grandiosité, la manipulation, le charme sélectif, la froideur affective, la cruauté instrumentale ou la flexibilité opportuniste. Enfin les résultats, comme la domination, la déshumanisation, l’exclusion héréditaire, la fragmentation interne ou la prédation à grande échelle. L’un des apports les plus importants de l’article est précisément de montrer que les traits sombres ne doivent pas être traités comme l’explication finale, mais comme des stratégies opérant à l’intérieur de formations plus profondes. Le texte introduit ensuite la notion de failsafes sociaux, c’est-à-dire les dispositifs sociaux qui freinent, limitent ou renchérissent la possibilité de comportements destructeurs. Parmi eux figurent les obligations de parenté, la honte, les normes de réciprocité, les frontières de personne, les contraintes rituelles, la surveillance communautaire, certaines structures familiales, ainsi que les mécanismes institutionnels capables de réduire le prestige ou la légitimité de la prédation. L’argument n’est donc pas de dire que certaines sociétés seraient naturellement bonnes et d’autres naturellement mauvaises, mais que les systèmes humains diffèrent fortement dans la solidité de ces freins. Là où ils tiennent, la domination reste plus coûteuse, plus honteuse, plus bornée. Là où ils s’érodent, l’entitlement se normalise, les stratégies sombres deviennent adaptatives, et la déshumanisation s’étend et s’intensifie plus facilement. Un autre apport majeur du texte consiste à redéfinir l’oppression. Elle n’est pas présentée seulement comme une contrainte extérieure, mais comme un sélecteur interne. En pratique, un système oppressif ne se contente pas de frapper. Il réorganise le champ interne du groupe dominé. Il redistribue les récompenses, valorise certains profils plus compromisables, renforce la viabilité de la médiation opportuniste, du mimétisme, de la trahison sélective ou de la cruauté tournée vers son propre groupe. L’article montre ainsi que la domination devient moins coûteuse pour le pouvoir extérieur lorsqu’elle parvient à produire ou à amplifier des intermédiaires internes plus faciles à piloter. Cela donne au texte une portée importante pour penser non seulement la colonisation de la phase négrière à la phase néocoloniale, mais aussi et plus précisément, les classes tampons, les élites cooptées, les dispositifs de renseignement, les fractures intra-groupes et la psychologie des populations dominées. Le rôle du langage constitue un autre axe central. L’article soutient que le langage n’est pas un simple commentaire sur la violence. Il fait partie du mécanisme lui-même. Les mots peuvent excuser, normaliser, requalifier, abaisser l’inhibition morale, transformer une prédation en ordre, une manipulation en stratégie, une cruauté en discipline, un harcèlement racial en amusement ou en “trolling”. L’inversion morale devient ici un procédé majeur : l’agresseur se présente comme assiégé, l’humiliateur comme blessé, l’exclusion comme prudence, la domination comme protection. Cela permet de comprendre pourquoi certains systèmes ne tiennent pas seulement par la force, mais par la capacité à faire percevoir l’inadmissible comme raisonnable. Sur le plan comparatif, l’article accorde une place importante à l’Afrique, non pour idéaliser les sociétés africaines, mais pour corriger les fausses équivalences. Il montre que les mobilités, les conflits, les expansions, les hiérarchies et les formes de dépendance ont existé dans de nombreux contextes africains sans déboucher automatiquement sur le même type de déshumanisation héréditaire et abstraite que dans certaines formations européennes et coloniales. Le texte insiste sur le fait que les migrations africaines, y compris celles liées aux populations « bantouphones », ne peuvent pas être lues comme de simples machines à produire le même profil psychopolitique que celui de la domination racialisée européenne. Les variables décisives ne sont pas la mobilité ou la dureté écologique prises isolément, mais la manière dont elles traversent des mondes moraux différents, des structures de parenté différentes, des codes de personne différents et des dispositifs de freinage différents. L’exemple des mémoires migratoires africaines, en particulier dans l’aire Kongo, sert ici à montrer que les récits de fondation, même lorsqu’ils incluent conflit ou conquête, peuvent rester structurés autour de l’alliance, de la négociation, de l’incorporation et de la recomposition politique, plutôt qu’autour d’un droit illimité à l’élimination de l’autre. Cela renforce l’idée que la mémoire politique d’une migration peut être organisée autour de la cohésion et de la fédération plutôt qu’autour de la déshumanisation. Le texte mobilise aussi les structures de parenté, notamment les formes matrilinéaires, pour soutenir que certaines organisations sociales africaines ont fonctionné comme des freins distribués contre la fracture, l’entitlement unilatéral et la concentration incontrôlée du pouvoir. L’argument n’est pas que ces systèmes élimineraient toute violence, mais plutôt qu’ils épaississent les obligations, élargissent les champs de responsabilité et rendent socialement plus coûteuse la prédation sans reste. L’article ajoute enfin une critique importante des seuils psychologiques occidentaux en matière de sexe et de genre. Il rejette l’idée selon laquelle les hommes devraient être codés comme naturellement plus agressifs, plus durs et plus dominants, tandis que les femmes seraient naturellement plus douces ou plus relationnelles. Le texte suggère que ce type de codage fonctionne souvent comme un mécanisme secondaire de normalisation : des conduites qui devraient être interrogées comme entitlement, froideur, manipulation ou cruauté sont réinscrites dans une anthropologie naturalisée du masculin. Le problème n’est donc pas seulement l’erreur descriptive. C’est le fait que certaines psychologies adaptent leur baseline à des comportements déviants au lieu de les corriger. L’un des concepts les plus originaux du texte est celui de prétention diabolique. Il désigne le moment où la violence, la dégradation ou la déshumanisation se poursuivent au-delà de toute nécessité stratégique proportionnée, malgré l’existence d’alternatives moins destructrices, parfois même au détriment de l’efficacité. Ce concept permet de distinguer la brutalité stratégique, aussi grave soit-elle, d’une forme de destruction où la souffrance de l’autre acquiert une valeur propre ou devient constitutive du droit que l’acteur s’accorde à lui-même. C’est un apport important parce qu’il évite deux erreurs fréquentes : tout moraliser sous le mot “mal”, ou au contraire tout rabattre sur un calcul stratégique caché. Sur le plan des contributions théoriques, le texte en apporte plusieurs. Il redéfinit d’abord le centre explicatif en remplaçant l’agression par l’entitlement. Il réorganise ensuite le rapport entre formations pathologiques, stratégies adaptatives et résultats. Il propose la notion de failsafes sociaux comme outil comparatif plus solide que les oppositions vagues entre civilisations vertueuses et civilisations mauvaises. Il introduit l’oppression comme sélecteur interne. Il intègre le langage à la mécanique même de la domination. Il formalise enfin l’entitlement diabolique comme concept-limite pour penser les excès destructeurs répétés. L’importance de l’article tient aussi à sa fonction architecturale. Il n’essaie pas seulement d’expliquer un cas. Il construit une grammaire théorique réutilisable pour d’autres travaux sur l’empire, la violence institutionnelle, l’humiliation symbolique, la déshumanisation raciale, la psychologie coloniale, les classes intermédiaires compromises, ou encore les blessures psychiques produites par la domination longue. En ce sens, il sert de texte de fondation. Il ne clôt pas les débats. Il donne un outillage plus précis pour les rouvrir. Sa pertinence scientifique est donc double. D’un côté, il corrige des simplifications fréquentes dans les sciences sociales et psychologiques, notamment l’aplatissement des formes de violence ou l’universalisation de baselines occidentales. De l’autre, il propose un modèle plus mécaniste pour comprendre comment certaines sociétés, institutions ou classes dirigeantes parviennent à transformer des conduites destructrices en ordre normal, en procédure, en bon sens, voire en idéal implicite. En résumé, l’article soutient que la différence décisive entre systèmes historiques ne réside pas d’abord dans la simple présence de violence ou de hiérarchie, mais dans la force, la distribution et la durabilité des freins qui empêchent l’entitlement de se transformer en domination durable, déshumanisation scalable et règle ordinaire. C’est là son idée la plus forte, et probablement son apport le plus durable.
Target audience: African Union (AU) organs, Ministers of Education/Health/Youth/Gender, national curriculum authorities Keywords: agriculture, IMF, capture, Economies of Obedience, ISM,PDI, public health, nutrition in Africa, policy, Africa, caloric sovereignty Abstract This paper uses Burkina Faso’s recent agricultural performance as a test case for a broader hypothesis: that loosening Western institutional capture – military, financial, and narrative – can rapidly increase a state’s caloric sovereignty, while long-term IMF/World Bank structuring correlates with persistent food import dependence and vulnerability. I frame this through the Extraction–Inversion Architecture (EIA): extraction of value, coercive constraint, and narrative inversion that relocates blame to the victim society. Using a simple comparative design, I contrast Burkina Faso (post-2019 insurgency crisis, post-French military exit, AES realignment) with three cases: Haiti (catastrophic collapse under long IMF/US tutelage), Ghana (average “reformer” under a 2023 IMF programme), and Morocco (high-performing but structurally import-dependent “model pupil”). FAO and official data indicate Burkina’s cereal production at about 6.1 million tonnes in 2024 (20 percent above the five-year average) with provisional 2025–2026 figures suggesting 7.14 million tonnes and 126.4 percent coverage of national cereal needs. I show how changes in security doctrine, land allocation, and budget focus translate into caloric coverage, price stability, and space for productive innovation, whereas heavily “programme-managed” states remain structurally dependent on imports and vulnerable to shocks.
The Tribe Trap and the Muzzle of the Native
Context. For more than a century, Africa has been ruled and narrated through a single downgraded category: the “tribe.” Conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, DRC, Nigeria or the Sahel are routinely described as “tribal violence,” implying ancient, irrational feuds. Equivalent conflicts in Europe or Asia are framed as “nationalist,” “federal,” or “geopolitical.” The same empirical complexity is run through different conceptual filters. Problem. We argue that tribe is not a neutral translation of African social units but a muzzle: a technology of epistemic containment that reclassifies sovereign polities as biological specimens. It collapses layered governance (lineage, city-state, alliance, federation) into biology, erases indigenous concepts of state and contract, and triggers In-Group Psychopathy through pseudospeciation (seeing neighbors as another species) (Erikson, 1966; Bandura, 1999). Research question (Singini). Does the imposition and internalization of the tribe label (a) systematically erase indigenous concepts of sovereignty in African political vocabularies and (b) measurably increase zero-sum, dehumanizing framing in conflict discourse, thereby lowering readiness for alliances and federations? Method (protocol, Ma1–Ma2). We specify a mixed-method design: (1) A comparative linguistic audit of political vocabulary in five major African zones (Kikongo, Yoruba, Igbo, Amharic, Wolof) versus colonial translations, coded through a “Disconnect/Muzzle Matrix” (Johnson, 1921; Van Wing, 1921; Vansina, 1990). (2) A framing experiment comparing “tribal conflict” wording to precise mechanism wording (institutions, incentives, jurisdiction) and measuring effects on blame attribution, solution preference, and federation support. (3) A diagnostic tool, the In-Group Psychopathy Diagnostic Protocol (IGP-D), to score media and policy narratives for pseudospeciation and moral disengagement (Bandura, 1999; Erikson, 1966). This is a conceptual + protocol paper: it specifies mechanisms and preregisterable tests and reports pattern-level archival observations, but does not analyse any newly collected empirical dataset. Results (current status, Kia). Desk-based audit of existing dictionaries and histories shows a consistent pattern: indigenous terms for city-state, republic, confederation, nation and citizen (Nkangu, Ntotela, Ilú, Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì, Obodo, Hager, Réew, Isizwe) are routinely translated as “tribe,” “village group,” “paramount chief” or “customary elders” (Van Wing, 1921; Johnson, 1921; Southall, 1970; Vail, 1989). This is a structural erasure of sovereignty concepts, not a random vocabulary gap. We treat these as pattern-level findings, not a fully executed quantitative study, and specify precisely what data would falsify or weaken the model. Conclusion (Wa–Nga). Pan-Africanism cannot be engineered as a “unity of tribes.” The tribe is a non-scalable unit for sovereignty. Once the correct layers are restored, lineage (luvila), people/ethnos (kanda), country/jurisdiction (nsi), alliance (nkangu), confederation/state (ntotela), continental integration becomes an engineering problem: federating jurisdictions through enforceable alliances, while protecting identity as culture. We outline an implementation package: a No-Tribe precision style guide, an AU “No Tribe” policy directive, and a monitoring protocol that treats tribe framing as a measurable security risk
Colonial borders are not only lines on maps. They are jurisdictions that distribute protection, movement, land access, and political voice. When state capacity is uneven and historical literacy is thin, border disputes become ignitable through narrative operations that convert ambiguity into mobilizable certainty, often accelerating coercion or proxy violence. This paper models that ignition pathway as Border Mythogenesis (BM): a codeable set of claim motifs (restoration, priority, othering, delegitimation, and security laundering) that predictably intensify under specific conditions. To remain consistent with prior work, we treat these motifs as a domain expression of the Entitlement Cascade and its allied selection dynamics (ISM/PDI): when beneficiary systems face accountability stress or perceived loss of dominance, they frequently deploy portable entitlement scripts (priority claims, credit seizure, universalization, and victim inversion). We refer to this operational motif family as Colonial Entitlement Rhetoric (CER), not as a separate theory but as a measurable surface form of the same cascade logic across border disputes and privilege‑defense contexts. CER does not replace material drivers such as resources, security fragmentation, or elite rent capture. It functions as an accelerant that lowers moral cost and raises mobilisation capacity, and it becomes most visible under credible weakness signals. Methodologically, we provide preregisterable codebooks, low‑tech replication protocols using public sources (official speeches, parliamentary records, broadcaster transcripts, archived newspapers), and a worked empirical pilot template with falsification conditions. The paper closes with circuit‑breaker recommendations for heritage institutions, educators, and civic actors that increase epistemic thickness, expand non‑violent pathways for boundary settlement, and reduce the conversion of narrative spikes into coercion.
Kinship, Bridewealth and Scapegoating: The Political Economy of Mothers-in-Law
Mothers-in-law are usually treated as stock characters in popular culture, yet their position at the junction of kinship, gender and property makes them key actors in the micro-political economy of African households. This article investigates how bridewealth systems, inheritance expectations and residential patterns shape the capacity of mothers-in-law to scapegoat or protect daughters-in-law. Using life-history interviews and dispute-resolution cases from customary and urban courts, I show that narcissistic configurations described clinically by Kibavuidi Nsiangani in his health-psychology work (2023) are not merely psychological but structurally enabled by economic and legal norms. I deliberately read these micro-cases through the macro lens of Pan-Africanism Reimagined (2010; 2022 issue) and From Mvemba Nzinga to Modern Puppets (2016), asking how the same logic that sacrifices one family member for “peace” mirrors the way states sacrifice regions or social groups to maintain international patronage. The article also engages the 2022 analyses of Kikongo and symbolic sovereignty to show how kinship terminology and proverbs already encode models of justice and responsibility that could underwrite alternative, anti-narcissistic arrangements. I conclude that any attempt to reform family law or design Pan-African federations must grapple with this political economy of scapegoating, not only its psychological manifestations.
Spiritual Authority and Intimate Control: Churches as Laboratories of Political Obedience
This article examines African churches as micro-laboratories of political obedience that subtly train believers in the same dispositions demanded by authoritarian states. Moving beyond crude denunciations of “manipulative pastors,” I draw on participant observation, sermon transcripts and pastoral counselling notes from urban Congolese congregations to show how spiritual authority structures everyday affect. Building on Scripts of Warfare (Nsiangani, 2022), I argue that many church environments reproduce the triad identified in his household analysis: sacrificial subject, charismatic abuser and complicit bystander. However, whereas Nsiangani focuses on family systems, I show how liturgical scripts, confessional practices and miracle narratives habituate believers to accept opaque decision-making, retroactive justification of harm and the redirection of anger away from leaders toward invisible enemies (demons, witches, “Jezebels”) or their own families when internalized bias is at play. I connect these dynamics to the long history of religious legitimation of empire described by Mawete (2022), tracing a line from Papal Bulls to prosperity-gospel covenants. The article concludes that churches can also become counter-laboratories of disobedience when they intentionally re-write liturgical and narrative scripts in the direction of mutual accountability and shared discernment, suggesting a research agenda on “de-imperial liturgies.”
From Household Tyranny to State Violence: Narcissistic Micro-Politics and the Architecture of Power
This article proposes that the family is more than a mere metaphor for the state : it must instead be treated as its primary rehearsal stage. Building on my earlier clinical analysis of imperial behaviour (The Dark Tetrad Traits of Empire, 2014) and the psycho-historical case study of Congolese governance (From Mvemba Nzinga to Modern Puppets, 2016), I argue that narcissistic family systems reproduce, at a reduced scale, the same patterns of instrumentalisation, gaslighting and sacrificial scapegoating that later appear in autocratic regimes. Drawing on testimonies and case material analysed more clinically in my separate work on narcissistic mothers-in-law and scapegoating (Journal of Health & Psychology, 2023), I identify three recurring configurations: the sacrificial child, the charismatic abuser and the silent institutional bystander (extended family, church, school). I place these configurations in dialogue with the symbolic and epistemic frameworks laid out in Scripts of Warfare (USK JPSE, 2022), particularly the analyses of scriptural justification of empire and symbolic sovereignty. The article suggests that the colonised mind described there is not only the product of external propaganda but also of internalised, everyday micro-violence. The historical and psychosocial evidence suggest that any serious Pan-African federative project must be accompanied by a politics of psychological demilitarisation at the level of households, or it will simply transfer the architecture of intimate tyranny to the scale of the state.
Universities as Sites of Epistemic Warfare: The Case of USK, CENA and Kimbanguist Pedagogy
Contrary to the polite fiction that universities are neutral spaces of “free inquiry”, this article argues that they are primary theatres of epistemic warfare. Using the case of Université Simon Kimbangu (USK) and CENA as a focal point, I examine how curricula, language policies and publication standards either reinforce or subvert the imperial order analysed by Kibavuidi Nsiangani (2010, 2014; this issue) and historicised by Mawete (this issue). The empirical base includes internal syllabi, minutes of faculty meetings, interviews with students and lecturers, and a mapping of which languages and scripts are authorised in teaching and assessment. I identify three axes of struggle: (1) the fight over legitimate references (who gets cited), (2) the fight over scripts (Latin vs Mandombe) and (3) the fight over diagnostic frameworks (Eurocentric psychology vs DSM-H). The article shows how Kimbanguist pedagogy, grounded in African spiritual and historical experience, offers a counter-epistemic infrastructure that supports the federative and linguistic proposals advanced elsewhere in this issue. At the same time, it critically documents internal contradictions and co-optation risks, warning that even decolonial institutions can reproduce the narcissistic patterns described in Kibavuidi’s later clinical work in the health and psychology journal. The conclusion calls for a deliberate re-weaponisation of universities in the service of African sovereignty.
From Papal Bulls to Policy Briefs: Scriptural Justifications of Empire Across Five Centuries
This article reads a long series of documents – from 15th-century Papal Bulls on “discovery” and slavery to contemporary policy briefs on “stability”, “governance” and “development” – as a continuous scriptural apparatus of empire. Drawing inspiration from Kibavuidi Nsiangani’s clinical reading of imperial psychology (2014) and his re-centring of African federative projects (2010; this issue), I treat these texts not as transparent descriptions of reality but as ritual instruments that license dispossession. The analysis focuses on three moments: (1) theological charters of conquest, (2) colonial “civilising” decrees and (3) post-Cold War policy frameworks around “good governance” and “humanitarian intervention.” Across these moments, I show recurring narrative devices: infantilisation of African peoples, securitisation of European interests and the erasure of indigenous epistemologies such as Kikongo and Mandombe. The article also highlights the materiality of writing: Latin and later European scripts monopolise legitimacy, while African scripts are depicted as fetish or cipher. By reading imperial documents alongside emerging texts from USK, CENA and Kimbanguist archives, I illustrate how a counter-scriptural tradition is forming, one that refuses to accept the moral grammar of empire. The article closes by suggesting that any credible Pan-African federation must not only reform institutions but also repudiate the textual lineage that normalised our dehumanisation.
continuous scriptural apparatus of empire
Kikongo as Prototype Language: Linguistic Sovereignty Against Colonial Lexicography
This article advances a provocative thesis: Kikongo can be modelled as a prototype language whose phonological richness, noun class system and onomatopoeic logic provide a template from which later, more degraded systems diverge. Rather than a mystical claim, I treat this as a working hypothesis for decolonial linguistics. First, I review missionary grammars and dictionaries, showing how colonial lexicography systematically fragmented Kikongo’s internal logic to make it legible to European categories. Second, I use a set of formal features – tonal patterns, nasalisation, consonant–vowel symmetry – to compare Kikongo with selected Bantu, Afroasiatic and Indo-European languages. Third, I link these linguistic observations to political epistemology: if Kikongo encodes a classification of reality that is more densely structured than the languages of empire, then policy conducted exclusively in French or English necessarily discards part of our cognitive capacity. The article dialogues directly with the contributions on Mandombe and symbolic sovereignty, showing how Kikongo’s structure maps naturally to Mandombe’s geometry. It concludes with concrete proposals for using Kikongo as the base language in regional legal drafting and scientific terminology. I do not place Kikongo as "better than" or "superior to" than other african languages. It is an example of linguistic sovereignty that can be replicated with other languages.
Linguistic Sovereignty Against Colonial Lexicography
Mandombe as Political Epistemology: Script, Symbol and Sovereignty in Central Africa
This article treats Mandombe as a political epistemology: a way of organising reality that has direct implications for sovereignty. Extending the institutional argument advanced by Kibavuidi Nsiangani in “Pan-Africanism Reimagined” (2010), I claim that federative projects fail when they are expressed through colonial scripts whose symbolic logic encodes hierarchy, linearity and external reference. Through close analysis of Mandombe’s geometric base, recursive construction and quadrant logic, I show how the script affords a matrix view of relations, better suited to federal, polycentric governance. The article mobilises examples from grassroots educational experiments at USK and CENA, where Mandombe is used to teach logic, design thinking, innovationand risk modelling. Further, I rely on semiotic analysis, classroom ethnography and comparative script studies, while engaging critically with Eurocentric typologies that classify African scripts as “secondary” or “mnemonic”. In dialogue with the articles on Kikongo, Papal Bulls and symbolic sovereignty in this issue, I argue that script choice is not neutral: adopting Mandombe in core state functions (education, statistics, legal codification) would constitute a concrete step towards epistemic and political independence much like Mvemba Nzinga's adoption of latin script in insitutions cemented western codes and dominion in Kongo.
This article revisits my earlier programmatic work Pan-Africanism Reimagined (2010) in light of a decade of political stagnation and digital recolonisation. I argue that the traditional discourse of “African unity” has functioned largely as a sentimental alibi: it has masked the absence of enforceable federative mechanisms. Building on my previous institutions clinical diagnosis of imperial behaviour (The Dark Tetrad Traits of Empire, 2014) and the psycho-historical case study of From Mvemba Nzinga to Modern Puppets (2016), I propose a shift from rhetorical Pan-Africanism to a federative engineering paradigm. The article outlines a modular architecture of Pan-African institutions (family, education, currency, research, cyber risk, health) that can be prototyped by coalitions of willing states or non-governmental organisations, to promote continental adoption. Methodology: I combine psycho-political analysis, institutional design and scenario modelling, propose predictive tools and low-cost interventions. I show how script and language – in this instance Mandombe and Kikongo – provide a cognitive grammar for such federative engineering. Conclusion: The eveidence and analysed corpus show that without binding, testable protocols of cooperation, Pan-Africanism will remain an attractive myth that stabilises the very imperial order it claims to negate.