Chapter 3 considers another prominent economic activity, the particular form of begging known as ‘doing documents’. Examining the performances and invocations of this practice, the chapter considers how the documents produced by these beggars attempted to legitimate the act of begging through formalisation and bureaucracy. This reflected an ideal of a valuable form of dependency, but conflicted with a moral logic of the dignity of independence and honest work. As such, the sentiment of conviviality and official regularity conveyed by the document was frequently at odds with the practice of exchange itself: donors frequently viewed disabled people as suspect and aggressive. This chapter examines the debates that ‘doing documents’ provokes on who is ‘deserving’, what kind of work is ‘honest’, and whether or not begging is truly work. Desiring shallow relationships with many donors, the beggars aimed to build ‘contractual dependencies’ with them, deploying the symbolism of the bureaucratic (social) contract both to enforce and limit the relationship.

The first chapter provides an orientation in the lives of disabled people in Kinshasa through a consideration of how the interlocutors were identified and identified themselves as disabled, as handicapé – a relatively narrowly defined and recently agreed-upon category of persons. People sometimes overtly pursued this identity for the occasional advantages it could provide, but recognition as an handicapé, and enforcing associated privileges, is far from straightforward. Rather than a depoliticised knowable fact of the body, making handicapé into a recognised identity continues to be politically contested and destabilised, among others through internal rivalries among disabled people and between their organisations. The chapter thus considers the role of a wide variety of disabled peoples’ organisations, and especially the bureaucracy represented by their membership cards, as means of establishing disability status. ‘Real’ membership and leadership was ultimately uncertain and based on constant mutual evaluation. Keeping uncertainties alive allows for an expression of values on the distribution of resources, while creating a productive uncertainty around the question of membership itself.

The Conclusion urges us to consider practices that lead to becoming ‘valuable people’ as something that goes beyond overcoming stigma to changing the evaluations that define what is good. It brings the discussions about values together with a final example of how my interlocutors pursued valued inclusion, by embracing a biomedical model of personhood where people are judged on their minds rather than on their bodies. This draws attention to the wider relevance of questions of entitlement, distribution, and values: wherever my interlocutors went, discussions of values followed.

The Introduction combines a contextual introduction to disability in Kinshasa with an outline of the research problem as the tension between exceptionality and normality in a city that has long defined itself as in ‘crisis’. The interlocutors, their city, the times in which they lived, and their livelihood activities were all subject to ambiguous judgements as to whether they stood out as a negative or positive example, or if they were better viewed as simply part of the general experience of life in the wider community. The Introduction thus outlines the focus on mobility-impaired people in the grey area between work and welfare, where ‘crisis’ (mpiaka) opens a discursive space for experimentation, critique, and evaluation. The unpredictability that marks life in Kinshasa, in this respect, leads people to constantly reckon their social and economic value projects in relation to time. The Introduction introduces how crisis confronts people with choices of realising the short-term values of ‘fending for yourself’ or the long-term values of cultivating dependent relationships.

Focusing on the 1961 UNESCO Conference of African States on the Development of Education, this chapter shows how and why public schooling became the defining development project of West African independence. At the highpoint of African decolonization, two radically new propositions intersected, each shaping the other: the rise of new economic tools, including human capital theory and manpower planning, and the triumph of anticolonial and antiracist demands that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indeed be universally applicable.

This chapter argues that colonial, Europhone education was the discursive terrain where battles over race and development were waged. Debates over education – access, curricula, credentials – were contests in which European and African men struggled over perceived limits to the African future. As such, contests over colonial education were clashes over different development visions, which were themselves veiled debates about race.

The Coda outlines ways that actors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have continued with the work of preventing disability through polio vaccinations campaigns and promoting disability rights since the end of the primary fieldwork undertaken for this book. Remarkable progress has been reported in the fight against polio, while news from the disability rights front has been momentous, with a national law on disability rights passed on 3 May 2022. My interlocutors were hopeful about these developments, while expressing vigilance on the potential disadvantages of articles in the law that could be used to discourage, prohibit or punish the informal livelihoods described in this book.

Completing the arc from the desire to assert membership and rights as an handicapé, the final chapter considers how disabled Kinois turned away from this identity to pursue one of becoming a responsable, someone ‘responsible [for others]’. While controversial, begging and brokering gave access to hard-won economic resources that made it possible to have and care for children. Aspiring to such responsibilities, disabled people showed that integrating economic and social values was both means and ends. By successfully fulfilling the responsibilities of parenthood – the comparatively stable, higher value of social respectability that was once considered impossible for disabled people to achieve – they sought to become ‘valuable people’ (batu ya valeur). Claiming full adult personhood, they both conformed to and transformed the measurement of this highest regime of personhood, enjoining a debate over whether it is good to have many or fewer, well-supported children. Between action and aspiration, a testing and critiquing disposition towards value demonstrates how the extraordinary livelihood strategies of disabled people in the margins of urban society may be a most productive stage from which to examine the emerging debates about what is, or should be, good in society.

The Introduction defines the paradigm of anticolonial development, acquaints the reader with the scope of the book, and situates its main contributions in the literatures on education, decolonization, race, and development in Africa. It argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling’s essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. The second part of the Introduction details the book’s unique methodological approach of comparison in global perspective. Such comparison allows for dialogue across two different colonial and postcolonial histories (Ghana/British empire and Côte d’Ivoire/French empire), in the process offering a regional history of the global spread of public schooling during the twentieth century.