The Congo in Books: Bram Posthumus’ Two-part Literary Postmortem
Senegal-based Bram Posthumus has written a two-part article about how reading certain seminal books on the Congo can help to understand why the Democratic Republic of Congo is the tumultuous place it is today. The aptly named Posthumus suggests that a dip into the past with Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, Michela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz and Ludo de Witte’s The Assassination of Lumumba will go some way to providing a diagnosis for the Congo’s decline. His own examination points to the “free access” given to the Congo Basin and its wealth of minerals.
However, read Part Two to the end and you’ll discover a second set of suggestions – Posthumus admits that there are “many more excellent works” in existence – consisting of The Rebels’ Hour by Lieve Joris and David van Reybrouck’s Congo (warning, the latter is in Dutch, though an English translation appears to have been forthcoming for some time now).
Of Posthumus’ suggestions, we featured de Witte’s book last week in a piece on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first elected president of an independent Congo. It seems fair, then, that the author of the original article, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja also get a mention for his book on the Congo, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History. And while we’re in the business of adding to Posthumus’ list, let it be known that a description of the “Congo in Books” cannot truly be complete without a mention of Tim Butcher’s Blood River and the more recent publication, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason Stearns. Time to get reading!
The 20th century is the era of mass murder with Congo at either end. The reign of King Leopold II between 1885 and 1908 sits on one side; the wars from 1997 onwards sit on the other. The Belgian monarch caused an estimated 10 million deaths, as the historian Adam Hochschild states in his seminal book King Leopold’s Ghosts, a must-read for anyone trying to understand why the Democratic Republic of Congo has become the dysfunctional place that it is. Congo is the product of arguably the most catastrophic colonial enterprise in history, the symbol of which is the deranged Kurtz, whose reign of terror is the real Heart of Darkness in Joseph Conrad’s short novel. Kurtz demonstrates the moral corruption that was the core of the colonial enterprise in Congo. Conrad, who served as a riverboat captain in Congo for six months called Leopold’s rule “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.”
In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz also takes us to more worrying examples of “muddling through”. Take the nuclear reactor on the outskirts of Kinshasa, the result of a deal struck between a Belgian priest and the United States, still grateful for the Congolese uranium that enabled them to produce the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Michela Wrong describes a howling lack of security in and around the reactor, run by a professor who has lost all touch with reality and thinks nothing of running an ageing nuclear facility near a landfill on a hill that shows signs of serious erosion.
Book details
- King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
EAN: 9780618001903
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- In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo by Michela Wrong
EAN: 9781841154220
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- The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo de Witte
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EAN: 9781859846186
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- The Rebels’ Hour by Lieve Joris
EAN: 9781843547549
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- The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
EAN: 9781842770528
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- Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns
EAN: 9781586489298
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- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
EAN: 9780099511540
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- Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher
EAN: 9780099494287
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Photo courtesy News Library
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