Contenu du sommaire : Le Congo, banlieue de Brazzaville.

Invaded cities : international migrations. Demographic growth in Congo creates an urban migration of the youth, attracted towards schools and jobs. But the structure of the urban job market does not often allow them to fulfill their desire. Jobs have to be created in rural areas, but how ?

The debt cycles. Over the last twenty years the Congo has been confronted by a cyclical financial crisis characterised by a considerable foreign debt. Petroleum resources have permitted massive investments in unproductive sectors which have accentuated the debt. Today, the Congo is totally submitted to external market and financial fluctuations.

The race for urban space. In Brazzaville the sale of the same parcel of land to several buyers is a generalised practice. This situation produces endless conflicts involving a multiplicity of actors : landlords, neighbourhood committees, resellers, buyers and representatives of the administration. In this game, public authorities are absent as an institution, but their representatives are omnipresent individually.

Survival in the urban context. The proportion of inactives is particularly high among the urban population. The survival of all the members of the house hold demands a ressort stategies of survival where family solidarity and the activities of wives count very much. In such a context, the least service becomes exchangeable for money.

A school for people ? One of the principal themes of the socialist state used to be free and compulsary education for all. This principle while generous a priori, has had negative effects : the recruiement of unqualified teachers, absence of a real policy on school equipment, wrong use of funds and programs that were not adapted to the needs of the country. One has therefore ended up with overpopulated schools, with important age differences between pupils of the same class and therefore, a decline in standards.

How to do away with the symbolic to restore the value of traditional medicine. The preeminence of magico-religious practices in the treatment of disease and ill luck poses an important ideological problem from the moment that the question is posed of organizing a traditional medecine in conformity with the option of scientific socialism. The medical corps relays the state in its resolve to rationalise these practices. But beyond the ideological debate, one sees in this resolve the desire of the state to control public order in the face of all sorts of remedies always suspected to be causing of trouble.

To every one his prophet. The development of religious movements of a prophetic character appears to be a response to the crisis and corresponds to new modes of individual sociability. The attitude of the central authority in the face of these movements is uncertain. At Independence the emerging state depended on these movements with nationalist demands. Today, the state hesitates between proscription for ideological reasons and compromise due to the generalised ressort of the population to these movements.

Bars and «nganda» in Brazzaville. Bars have become an institution in Brazzaville. Noisy with music that evokes not only the disappointments of the city dwellers but also political events, they constitute places of commentary and rumour. They are also areas where social differences are manisfested depending on the brand of heer consumed and the nature of the place frequented : public bars or private ones «nganda».

Marx and the shadow of the fetish. 500 kilometers to the North of Brazzaville, a powerful non-syncretic group «Njobi», whose declared aim is the fight against witch craft exercises an important sway on the population. The local representatives of the central authority are thus necessarily led to negotiate with this group. In a general manner, for the adherents of the different mouvments in the struggle against witchcraft, there is no contradiction between the use of these practices and subscription to the tenets of the socialist state.