Erik Kennes and Miles Larmer have written an important and extraordinarily well-researched book. Future historians studying Katangese separatism will find this book sitting alongside Jules Gerard-Libois' Katanga Secession (Reference Gerard-Libois1966) as the two vital touchstones that all students of this topic must know well. As the title indicates, their story follows the twisting history of the Katangese gendarmes as they moved through time and space, from being the purported ‘national’ army of the secessionist state from 1960–63, to their many decades in exile in Angola, to being a largely mythical force in the Congo today, along the way passing through shifting, counterintuitive alliances, adopting various and contradictory ideological styles, and taking on seemingly innumerable names and acronyms. But what is remarkable about this book is that from this single, tangled strand the authors are able to tell a much broader African story that escapes from the narrow borders of the Congo, laying out in a profound way the transnational and multi-layered nature of Central African history.

This book performs two simultaneous actions on Katangese history: it frees Katanga's history from the confines of Congolese national history, while also repatriating the Katangese experience as being properly within African history. One of the more fascinating themes of this book is its destabilisation of the terms autochthonous and foreign in African history, which have been more often been used rhetorically or pejoratively than analytically. Kennes and Larmer convincingly argue that the Katangese secession, and later the Katangese gendarmes in exile, had aims and goals that were allied with, but independent from those of their various foreign supporters, whether they were Belgian, Portuguese, Angolan or Cuban. In so doing, this book stands against the majority of scholarship on Katangese separatism, which almost uniformly strip Katangese leaders of any independent agency. But in calling on scholars to ‘rethink’Footnote ¹ the secession as being in significant part the result of indigenous initiative (p. 59), the authors express that they have ‘no intention … to romanticize the Katanga project’ (p. 42).

In addition to restoring agency to Katanga's secessionist leaders, the authors challenge a slightly different, but related, characterisation of the exiled Katangese gendarmes as being mercenaries devoid of any ideology except filthy lucre. In making this argument, the authors are forced to make sense of the gendarmes' apparently wild swings from representing Moise Tshombe's rightist regime and fighting with the Portuguese colonialists against the Angolan liberation armies, to allying with the MPLA and Cuba, and later Laurent Kabila's AFDL. The consistent compass point that explains their bizarre politico-military behaviour, they argue, was that they were fighting for ‘not money or ideology, but rather a home, a nation-state in which their Katangese identity would find expression’ (p. 1). The authors finish their story with a fascinating section on present day ‘neosecessionism’ in Katanga, concluding that: ‘… the dream of a return to the mythic paradise of an independent Katanga has never disappeared’ (p. 184).

But how many dreaming Katangese did it take to support their claim that the dream of an independent Katanga never truly disappeared, and how similar must these various dreams be to one another? As thorough and as carefully argued as this book is in most respects, the authors perhaps subtly overdraw the lines of continuity of Katangese national feeling across time and across borders. For instance, as the authors acknowledge, there are significant differences between the ‘authentic’ Katanga imagined by the nativist political elites who initiated the secession and the memories of those who were only seeing Katanga from the ‘long gaze of exile’ (p. 200); and from the widely felt hostility many Katangese felt towards Mobutu's repressive central government and the ethno-national fantasy of restoring the Lunda-Tshokwe kingdom across the tri-border region (p. 129). While the authors make a convincing argument that the gendarmes never gave up on the idea of liberating Katanga, they are less clear whether or not those who stayed on shared this same dream.

The idea that there has been an enduring dream of an independent Katanga is further troubled by the fact that two primary protagonists of Katangese independence, Moise Tshombe and Nathaniel Mbumba, both harboured ambitions to take control of not just Katanga but the entire Congo, something that Tshombe was briefly able to do as Prime Minister in the mid-1960s. Kennes and Larmer even write that in exile the gendarmes' ‘primary objective’ was to ‘retake power in Katanga and if possible all of Zaire …’ (p. 95). While there was not a direct contradiction between their secessionist cause and their more ambitious aims of capturing the whole of their mother country, this nonetheless seems to lend weight to the proposition that these Katangese ‘nationalist’ leaders were at least as interested in leveraging Katangese wealth as a regional power base to dominate all of the Congo as in achieving the dream of a sovereign Katanga.

Separate from the actual degree of historical identification with, and support for, self-determination, modern politicians have found there is much that is usable in this history, and the authors describe how the secession's rhetoric and symbolic repertoire have proven to be potent political tools with which to make certain political claims today. In describing the early 21st century secessionist movement, the authors tellingly describe this newest manifestation as ‘no longer the preserve of intellectual elites or of exiled political leaders but has taken a popular form’ (p. 184). This quote's contrasting conjunction seems to be an admission that perhaps the gendarmes' historic dream of a free Katanga might have been theirs and theirs alone.

Historians can only reconstruct the past from those fragments left behind, as incomplete and as imperfect as they are. It is hard to imagine future scholars will be able to match the breadth and depth of primary research done on this specific topic by Kennes and Larmer, which not only includes sources drawn from several national archives and personal papers, but also extensive personal interviews of ex-Katangese gendarmes conducted inside and outside Africa. Yet even though the scope of their primary research is both wide and deep, the authors still must rely heavily on the recollections of participants many years after the fact, informants who might in reconstructing their participation in events retroactively attribute them to a higher purpose and ascribe more support for their cause than was actually the case. In their conclusion, the authors directly acknowledge these unavoidable limitations of their informants' narratives, and the authors eloquently discuss these complex relationships between history, memory, and present day political agendas. Kennes and Larmer's book will not be the last word on the Katangese separatism, but it will likely mark an important shift in the literature that may be challenged in parts by future scholars, but will prove impossible to ignore.