Tropical Cowboys Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa [Paperback]

During the 1950s and 60s in the Congo city of Kinshasa, there emerged young urban male gangs known as Bills or Yankees. Modeling themselves on the images of the iconic American cowboy from Hollywood film, the Bills sought to negotiate lives lived under oppressive economic, social, and political conditions. They developed their own style, subculture, and slang and as Ch. Didier Gondola shows, engaged in a quest for manhood through bodybuilding, marijuana, violent sexual behavior, and other transgressive acts. Gondola argues that this street culture became a backdrop for Congo-Zaires emergence as an independent nation and continues to exert powerful influence on the countrys urban youth culture today.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Falling Men
1. Big Men
2. A Colonial Cronos
3. Missionary Interventions
Part II. Man Up!
4. Tropical Cowboys
5. Performing Masculinities
6. Protectors and Predators
Part III. Metamorphoses
7. Pere Buffalo
8. Avatars
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

An innovative and original study that sheds light on masculinity, youth culture, performative violence, and the circuit of global imagery in the townships of Kinshasa.In conclusion, both undergraduate and graduate students of African history, urban history, women's sexuality, gender studies, and even transnational film studies would benefit from this book. . . . Additionally, as the provocative title suggests, American undergraduate studentseven those unfamiliar or new to Central African literatureswill find this book both engaging and accessible because of parallels and differences drawn between the American Far West and Kinshasa.

Ch. Didier Gondola is Chair of the History Department and Professor of African History at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. He is editor (with Peter J. Bloom and Charles Tshimanga) of Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (IUP).lÓ,