31 Wide and Close, Above and Below: Visualizing the African City. Filip De Boeck What angle to adopt and how to position oneself in or- der to write an ethnography on the scale of the city? This is a question that many urban anthropologists are con- fronting and struggling with. 1 From the start, my own ur- ban anthropology of Kinshasa, the teeming capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has experimented with possible responses to this issue through a sustained collaboration with a number of photographers, visual artists and filmmakers with whom, over the years, I have been exploring some of the multiple possibilities that lay dormant in the combination of text and image in a joint efort to come up with a more adequate understanding of what cityness in such a context is all about. One such collaboration has been with visual art- ist Sammy Baloji. I would like to start this short es- say with one of his photographs, produced in 2013 during a joint research period in Kinshasa. What–at first glance–looks like an aerial photograph of one of the neighborhoods of Kinshasa, turns out to be something completely diferent upon closer inspec- tion. It is a photograph of a maquette, an architectur- al model from the Belgian colonial period. Between 1949 and 1959, the Belgian colonial administration launched a massive infrastructural plan, known as the Plan décennal du Congo Belge. 2 A major part of this plan consisted of a large-scale urban overhaul for the whole of the Congo. In an urgent response to the rising demographic pressure in Belgian Congo’s urban centers 3 , the colonial authorities proceeded to build tens of thousands of housing units across the Congo. The photograph shows the maquette of Kinkole City, one of the last fully planned zones of Kinshasa (then still called Leopoldville). It was to be- come a new satellite city to the east of the capital, but due to Congo’s independence in 1960, the plan was never fully implemented and was only very partial- ly realized in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today, the decaying maquette of this urban planning dream that never materialized gathers dust in a corridor of the municipal house of Nsele (one of Kinshasa’s 24 municipalities). The photograph of this maquette be- came part of a book and exhibition project that Sam- my Baloji and I co-authored later on. 4 To us, this photograph, shot from above by Sammy, represents the illusion of a colonial modernist plan- ning ideal that, by means of its comprehensive and authoritarian eagle-eye perspective, tried to extend its control and impose its planning logic onto what it considered to be a sprawling, unruly, and anarchic urban world in urgent need of domestication and civilization. As for me, the photograph of the Kinkole maquette also continued a reflection that had start- ed years before, in 2002, when I attended the Lagos Platform 4 of the Documenta 11, curated by Okwui En- wezor. I was invited to present an early version of my collaborative work on Kinshasa with photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart. 5 On the same occasion the renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas presented his research on Lagos, while also using his stay at the conference to shoot the film Lagos/Koolhaas, in which he famously presents Lagos hovering above the city in the helicopter of the city’s governor. 6 In his analysis of Lagos, Koolhaas surveyed the city from this bird’s eye view, aptly but also coldly capturing some major infrastructural bottlenecks and drawing out the flows of people and transport. Lagos viewed through this distant gaze essentially remained a dehumanized city, in which the bodies of the millions of Nigerians who populate the city were erased or reduced to the size of insects; a city in which urban dwellers’ voices, stories, dreams and aspirations barely, if at all, reso- nated. In sharp contrast with Koolhaas’ aerial visual- ity (a representational choice for which he was criti- cized by many during and after the Lagos event) 7 , my own lecture attempted to present an ethnography of Kinshasa by using a ‘vocabulary of the legs’ and by staying close to the ground and the level of the street as the main starting point from which to zoom out to a wider angle to narrate the city. Plissart later translated this idea of scaling from the close to the wide angle in a collage that subsequently became part of our joint book publication and accompanying exhibition. 8 In his initial response during the Lagos meeting, however, Koolhaas considered the close angle approach to be ‘mere story-telling’, an inefec- tual attempt to capture the city. In his view this near and close-up perspective prevented him from truly ‘seeing’ and understanding the structure of the city because there was too much foreground and too lit- tle distance. Significantly, though, in 2004, Koolhaas re-edited and re-released his film as Lagos. Wide and Close, in an attempt to also include the ‘close’ angle. 9 In some of his own work Sammy Baloji has been address- ing similar issues. His Essay on Urban Planning, a large photomontage that was created in the same year as the photograph of the maquette that I mentioned above 10 , he ofers another critique to the panoptic planning ‘view from above’. The montage consists of six aerial photos of the urban landscape of Lubumbashi, shot by Baloji from a commercial airliner just before landing at the local air- port, interspersed with six photographs he made of in- sects from the colonial entomological collection of the National Museum of Lubumbashi. Completing the art- work is an archival colonial postcard that Baloji found in the archives of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga, Belgian Congo’s largest copper mining enterprise. The picture shows two Congolese workmen of the UMHK in front of a heap of flies and mosquitos which they had to collect on a daily basis in return for a food ration hand- ed out to them by the mining company. Juxtaposing all these images, Baloji critiques the all-encompassing segregationist colonial urban planning order that con- sisted in designing so-called neutral uninhabited zones tampons or cordons sanitaires, in view of separating European and African neighborhoods. While the racial segregation thus efectively materialized in the colonial city (the neutral zones are still very visible in Baloji’s ae- rial photos), this separation was rationalized by means of a sanitary discourse and in terms of a public health necessity, in order to prevent European contamination by African germs that were supposedly spread by mos- quitoes living in the African parts of town. With the growing accessibility of drone technology, ae- rial vision has once again attained a prominent place in thinking about and dreaming of the city yet to come. In 2008, a British-Zambian real estate company released a video in 3D animation to promote the construction de- sign of La Cité du Fleuve, a new satellite city to rise from 2 artificial islands that were to be created in the Congo River. 11 Typically, the video starts with a view from above, slowly descending through the clouds and zooming in on this new promised island city that, as the video’s voi- ceover states, will become ‘a haven of modernity, sobri- ety, friendliness and the pleasure of living’, ‘a white wa- ter lily’, ‘a satellite floating on the riverside of the majestic Congo River’ that will showcase the new era of African economic development’. The descent from the skies has become a hallmark of the genre, and has been used over and over again to showcase similar projects elsewhere on the continent. Emblematic of a global architectural aesthetics and spectrality that promises to lift the new citizen out of the existing city’s infrastructural and social decay 12 , the drone visuality that has become a standard part of this kind of urban vision conjures up imagined city futures for (still largely hypothetical) urban middle and upper classes while simultaneously rekindling the older segregationist politics of colonialist modernity’s urban planning ideals, with their obsessive aversion of disorder and their irrational fear of ‘the slum’ as a site of possible contagion and contestation. At the same time, this aerial visuality also recycles the optical strategies so successfully used by postcolonial autocrats such as Mobutu, whose dictatorial grip on Congo spanned more than three decades, from 1965 to 1997. Older Congolese still have vivid memories of the propaganda film that, for years, was broadcasted on national television several times a day. In this clip Mobutu appeared as a godlike figure, descending from the clouds with a saintly halo around his head. 13 To- day, the authoritarian and religious overtones of such political propaganda are revived in the drone visuality used by Christian fundamentalist preachers in Kinshasa. One of the city’s largest neo-charismatic churches, the Ministère Amen of preacher and televangelist Leopold Mutombo, is designed in such a way that evangelical prayer meetings may be filmed from above by drones, visually underscoring the authoritarian omniscience of the Holy Ghost and the popularity of its chosen preach- er’s message. In the meantime, however, the very same drone visual- ity has been appropriated by local artists to subvert the colonizing gaze from above: by kidnapping the drone as it were, they use it to plunge us back into the animated life of Kinshasa’s streets. In 2017, for example, KOKOKO!, a Kinshasa-based band, released a video clip to promote its debut album. The clip was one of the first in what has by now become a familiar genre in which the visual possi- bilities of a newly available and afordable drone technol- ogy are explored. The clip opens with a view of Kinshasa filmed at a great height, and then the drone takes a daz- zling dive, and as the camera progressively zooms in on Kinshasa’s street level, the city’s ground zero, a diferent kind of urban ground, full of creative energy, opens up. 14 In this, and many other ways, Congolese artists decol- onize the view from above, subversively converting the vertical view into a lateral vision, in a reflexive attempt to appropriate colonizing surveillance visualities and to relocate our attention to the urban surface, edge and (un- der)ground. As such, their artistic interventions may be understood as activist exercises to make visible some of the most vital spaces of urbanity in the African city. In this they rejoin recent eforts in the field of Southern urban theory to decenter and redirect the scope of the hege- monic grammars of Western urban planning and theory in which these crucial spaces have often remained invis- ible, unnoticed or poorly understood. 15 Notes 1.   See e.g. Hilgers, Mathieu, 2009, Une ethnographie à l’échelle de la ville. Urbanité, histoire et reconnaissance à Koudougou (Burkina Faso). Paris, Karthala. 2.   Wigny, Pierre et al. 1949. Plan décennal pour le dévelop- pement économique et social du Congo belge. Brussels: Les  éditions de Visscher. 2 volumes. 3.   In Kinshasa (then still called Leopoldville), the urban popu- lation grew from 45.000 in 1940 to more than 400.000 by 1960.  Today, Kinshasa houses a population of over 15 million. 4.   De Boeck, Filip and Sammy Baloji. 2016. Suturing the City. Liv- ing Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds. London: Autograph ABP;  Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck. 2016. Urban Now. City Life in Congo. Brussels: WIELS. 5.   De Boeck, Filip. 2002. Kinshasa : Tales of the Invisible City and the Second World. In O. Enwezor et al. (Eds.), Dokumenta 11  Platform 4. Under Siege: Four African cities. Freetown, Johannes- burg, Kinshasa, Lagos. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz. 6.   Koolhaas, R. ( 2002). Fragments of a lecture on Lagos. In  O. Enwezor et al. op.cit; van der Haak, Bregtje. 2002. Lagos / Koolhaas.  7.   Hecker, Tim. 2010. The Slum Pastoral: Helicopter Visuality and  Koolhaas’s Lagos. Space and Culture 13 (3): 256–269; Fourchard,  Laurent. 2011. Lagos, Koolhaas and Partisan Politics in Nigeria.  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1):  40-56. 8.   De Boeck, Filip and Marie-Françoise Plissart. 2004. Kinshasa.  Tales of the Invisible City. Gent / Tervuren: Ludion / Royal Muse- um for Central Africa. On the exhibition at the 9th International  Architecture Exhibition of the 2004 Venice Biennale of Architec- ture also see: link. 9.   See link. 10.   De Boeck Filip and Sammy Baloji, op. cit: 42-43. 11.   De Boeck, Filip. 2011. Inhabiting Ocular Ground. Kinshasa’s  Future in the Light of Congo’s Spectral Urban Politics. Cultural  Anthropology 26 (2): 263-286. The video itself may be watched  at: link 12.   See also Easterling, Keller. 2005. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades. UK: MIT Press. 13.   To watch the video clip see: link 14.   To watch this video clip see: link 15.   See Mbembe, Achille and Sarah Nuttall, 2008. Introduction:  Afropolis. In Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (Eds.), Johan- nesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. See also: De Boeck, Filip, 2022.  Suturing the (W)hole. Vitalities of Everyday Urban Living in  Congo. In: Ash Amin and Michele Lancione (Eds.), Grammars of the Urban Ground. Durham: Duke University Press.