Erik Kennes and Miles Larmer. The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central Africa

The history of the Katangese gendarmes, or gendarmes katangais, as they are better known in French, has been truncated in several ways. First, historians have focused only on their military interventions in the 1960s and early 1970s. Second, their role in both Congo and Angola has been compartmentalized and treated separately. Last, but not least, they have been largely relegated to footnotes and considered a minor actor in the political changes that affected central Africa from the Cold War onward. This is due to the protean roles the gendarmes have played, straddling periods, national borders, and ideologies, and acting as “a state-based army, an agent of colonial repression, a national liberation movement, a security guard for valuable mining installations, an insurgent force, and a division of someone else’s national army” (5). Historians Erik Kennes and Miles Larmer set out to rectify this truncated history and fill the gap in our knowledge about the Katangese gendarmes in The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central Africa: Fighting Their Way Home, a vividly wrought chronicle that combines a superior grasp of major events unfolding in a broad area that extends from Kigali to Luanda with meticulous analyses.

Ancient history · Colonialism · Dismemberment · Economic history · Genealogy · Guard (computer science) · Ideology · National guard · National security · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · African Studies and Ethnography · African Studies and Geopolitics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Public Administration