ABSTRACT
I believe we have collected evidence in the two previous chapters of the particular situatedness of Tshibumba’s writing. Both in terms of writing skills, genre awareness, and access to sources, the Histoire is a deeply situated document, placed, so to speak, in a sub-elite social space in Katanga. The code he uses, his ortho-graphic effort, and the way in which he organises and reviews the information that enters into his Histoire: all these things must be seen as determined by the particular position that Tshibumba occupies as a subject. They are defined by that position, and what we have learned so far all points towards one conclusion: he was not in a position to write a history of his country, at least not one that satisfied the criteria of what historians would understand by ‘history’.
