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Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier (2009)

The most murderous conflict since World War Two.
(Africa’s World War, page 352)

‘The incompetence of most [Congolese] politicians is only rivalled by their determination to keep their privileges.’
(French ambassador Raymond Césaire, describing the chaos of Congo-Brazzaville in 1995, page 169)

This is said to be the definitive book on the subject and it feels like it, a large-format, massive, heavy Oxford University Press edition, printed on beautiful high quality paper. It’s surrounded by impressive scholarly apparatus consisting of:

a glossary of African terms (49 entries)
4 maps
an impressively long list of acronyms (11 pages, 161 entries)
extensive notes (99 pages)
a huge bibliography (45 pages including not only books and articles, but reports from numerous official bodies and charities, plus films and works of fiction)
a long index

The great war

I’ve summarised the war, with maps, in my review of the relevant section of David Van Reybrouck’s great book, Congo: the epic history of a people. This is the briefest I can get it:

Rwandan Tutsis driven by low-level pogroms had fled during the 1980s into neighbouring Uganda
some of these served in the insurgent army of Yoweri Museveni during the Ugandan Bush War and helped him overthrow the dictatorial rule of Milton Obote in 1985
emboldened by their experience, some of these Tutsi exiles set up the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
in 1990 the RPF began small-scale incursions into northern Rwanda, fighting the army of the Hutu-majority government of Juvénal Habyarimana
after 4 years of civil war the parties were brought to a peace accord which Habyarimana signed and was about to implement when a plane carrying him was shot down in mysterious circumstances; most people think it was shot down by elements in the Hutu army and government which a) rejected the peace deal with the RPF b) wanted to implement the genocidal policy of the so-called Hutu Power group, which said that Rwanda would never be at peace until the Tutsis (about 15% of the population) were exterminated
they organised the Rwanda genocide, 7 April to 15 July 1994
as soon as the genocide started, the RPF recommenced military action, and successfully defeated the Hutu government forces, driving them into the south and west of the country and then over the border into Zaire
but it wasn’t just the Hutu leaders who fled; as cover and part of their ideological program, they forced up to 2 million Hutu civilians to flee, too, terrifying them with rumours of Tutsi massacres
having completely failed to prevent the genocide or halt it as it was carried out, the international community now over-compensated by flooding the refugee camps with aid
however aid agencies, UN officials etc quickly realised these vast camps were completely in the control of the extremist Hutu leaders and génocidaires
the génocidaires used some of the western aid to rearm and regroup and, as soon as possible, began raids back across the border into Rwanda, killing Tutsis and Hutu they accused of being collaborators
they also attacked, and caused others to attack, the Banyamulenge, ethnic Tutsis living in eastern Congo, particularly the province of South Kivu
the new Rwandan government of national unity which had been set up after the RPF victory protested loud and long about this anti-Tutsi violence and asked ‘the international community’ to stop it and properly police the camps but to no avail
eventually, the RPF, along with forces from neighbouring Uganda, invaded Zaire and seized the camps; they a) forced the hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda and b) pursued the génocidaires who, reasonably enough, fled deeper into Zaire, often taking large groups of refugees with them as cover
before the RPF embarked on their campaign they and their Ugandan allies realised ‘the international community’ would react badly to a straightforward invasion and so came up with the plan of covering their actions by using a native, Congolese rebel group and their leader, as a front man for the invasion, to make ‘a foreign invasion look like a national rebellion’ (p.115)
the figure they chose was Laurent-Désiré Kabila, not very effective leader of the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP), who in reality spent most of his time smuggling gold and running a brothel
so the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) was invented, with Kabila as its supposed leader; Prunier remarks that Kabila’s subservience to ‘the tall ones’ (as everyone called the Tutsis) earned him the Swahili nickname Ndiyo bwana, meaning ‘yes sir’ (p.124) (cf David van Reybrouck’s account, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, p.418)
as the RPF-led alliance forces experienced success which surprised even them, the idea developed to permanently cut off Zaire’s support for Hutu extremists by the simple expedient of overthrowing its long-standing President, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had been friends with Habyarimana and had supported the Hutu génocidaires running the camp
and so the border incursion developed into a full-scale march on the capital of Zaire, Kinshasa, which Mobutu and his cronies fled in panic (16 May 1997) and where Kabila, much to his own surprise, was installed as third president of independent Congo (which now changed its name back from Zaire to Democratic Republic of Congo)
Prunier says this incursion could be seen as the first postcolonial imperial conquest of one African country (Zaire) by another (Rwanda), ‘the first case of clear-cut African imperialism’ (p.333)
the period from the invasion to the new regime became known as the First Congo War (October 1996 to May 1997)
trouble was Kabila found himself in a tricky position: he had to please his Rwanda-Uganda masters who had put him in power, but he now had all the political factions and the general population of Congo to please as well
to please these new constituencies, in July 1998, Kabila ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan forces to leave Congo, they were widely perceived as an invading and occupying force (p.178)
but Kabila’s masters back in Kigali (capital of Rwanda) and Kampala (capital of Uganda) were understandably miffed at their puppet’s ingratitude and so they launched a second invasion, this time to overthrow Kabila
Prunier explains that it was support from Angola and Zimbabwe which saved Kabila’s ramshackle regime, along with some support from Sudan, Libya and Chad;
it was this second incursion which came to be known as the Second Congo War, which commenced in August 1998 but which then unravelled into a wider conflict, eventually drawing in forces from half a dozen other African countries, and degenerating into the armed chaos which came to be known as the Great War of Africa, which dragged on until (supposedly) ended by peace treaties in July 2003, a five-year war in which some 350,000 people died in fighting and as many as 5 million died from massacres, disease and famine
and it is this, the Great War of Africa, whose complex origins and tangled course that this book sets out to explain

Prunier’s critical attitude

I associate serious history with a serious, professional tone so I was surprised from the start by Prunier’s tone of blistering cynicism and withering criticism, above all of the ‘so-called’ international community, in particular of the West and the ‘so-called’ international community, which he sees as behaving with stunning ineptitude at every stage of the crisis:

‘Western incompetence and vacillation’ (p.23)
western ‘guilt, ineptitude’
‘the Western world reacted with stunned incompetence’
‘the West…was caught napping at every turn’ (p.24)
‘nobody in the international community had done anything to stop the genocide (p.33)
‘the utter spinelessness of the international community before, during and after the genocide’ (p.35)
‘the cowardice of the international community’ (p.35)
‘stunned impotence of the international community in the face of violence’ (p.38)
‘of course the international community remained totally passive’ (p.57)
‘the international community did not understand the nature of the problem’ (p.225)
‘the United Nations, that supposed repository of the world’s conscience…frantically doing nothing and avoiding any responsibility in the third and last genocide of the twentieth century…’ (p.331)

Humanitarian aid instead of political solutions

Prunier blames the spiral down to war on the international community’s failure to address the political causes of the Rwanda civil war, then the genocide in Rwanda, then the refugee crisis in Zaire, then the armed invasion of Congo. In all instances the West preferred to offer humanitarian solutions i.e. to send in the aid agencies and NGOs, but consistently ignored the political roots of the crisis. Sending loads of tents and emergency food is easier than trying to address the political problems. And so the fundamental political issues were left unresolved, festered and spread.

The international community rushed into humanitarian aid with guilty relief, never-too-late-to-do-good, thus greatly helping the perpetrators of the very crimes it had done nothing to stop. (p.30)

And:

‘The West treated what was essentially a political problem as a humanitarian crisis.’ (p.58)

cf p.347.

Critical of the RPF

Prunier is far more critical of Paul Kagame’s RPF than other accounts I’ve read, accusing the regime of developing into a dictatorship, and of its military wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) of carrying out numerous massacres of Hutus in Congo.

Prunier explains this by going back to the RPF’s origins in Uganda in the 1980s to describe the atmosphere of violence in which it was born and flourished a) fleeing anti-Tutsi pogroms in Rwanda and then b) getting caught up in Uganda’s Bush War. When the Rwandan exiles helped Museveni win this war and come to power, it clinched their experience that disciplined violence works.

Prunier goes on to describe the RPA’s violent ethos more unforgivingly than other accounts. In particular he is at pains to emphasise, right from the start, that as it fought its way across Rwanda during the genocide, the RPA a) carried out its own massacres of Hutus and b) didn’t plan its campaign in order to stop the violence i.e. target the worst areas, but was more focused on eliminated the Rwandan army and securing complete control of the country.

He discusses the report drawn up by Robert Gersony for the UN which conclusively proved the RPA was carrying out massacres of its own and claims this report was suppressed by the UN and western nations (pages 31 and 350) because of its accusations against a force the West was championing as a solution to the genocide. The report was suppressed and Gersony was instructed to never discuss the findings, and has kept silent to this day. We are in the world of conspiracy theory. Mind you, it fits Prunier’s withering view of the United Nations generally:

As to the UN human rights operation, it was a sad joke. (p.18)
[The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda was] despised by everybody in Rwanda as the embodiment of arrogant powerlessness. (p.33)

A key event was the Kibeho massacre, April 1995, in which up to 4,000 refugees were killed by RPA soldiers. Prunier describes it in detail and how it led to the collapse of the government of national unity which had been running Rwanda since the RPF victory. He draws the same jaded conclusion which he applies to the genocide and then the invasion of Congo as a whole:

Non-treatment of the consequences of genocide, well-meaning but politically blind humanitarianism, RPF resolve to ‘solve the problem’ by force, stunned impotence of the international community in the face of violence, and, finally, a hypocritical denial that anything much had happened.

It was one of what Prunier calls ‘massive human rights violations’ by the RPA (p.126). Much worse were the mass killings in and around the refugee camps in November 1996. Prunier cites the report of Father Laurent Balas (p.124) and of Roberto Garreton, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights whose work was blocked by Kigali (p.157). At the end of the chapter dealing with the Alliance’s swift advances through Congo, and accusations of widespread massacre, Prunier calculates that as many as 300,000 of the refugees disappeared, died of starvation, disease, lost in the jungle or were murdered by RPA forces (p.148).

(Cf David van Reybrouck’s account of the RPF carrying out ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘massive carnage’, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, pages 423 to 425, where he estimates that between two to three hundred thousand Hutus were murdered.)

Very broadly speaking, the idea is that ‘the West’, specifically America but others too, tried to downplay the massacres out of a) guilt at letting the genocide take place and b) the wish to believe that a clean, democratic new regime existed in Kigali. The massacres were embarrassing. It left the UN and others on a hook, not knowing how to react: so they consistently downplayed them (p.159).

Prunier makes this point, that Western guilt over having stood by and done nothing to stop the genocide, explains why the West gave large amounts of aid to Rwanda even as it was fighting an extensive war, and obstinately overlooked all evidence that RPF forces were carrying out large-scale massacres of their own (e.g. pages 246, 273). Rwanda was able, for years, to ‘surf’ on western guilt (pages 266, 350, 351).

And Prunier details the internal developments in Rwanda, namely the persecution of critics and the inevitable rise to power of Paul Kagame at the head of ‘a dictatorial minority government’ (p.273), his:

ruthless determination, his capacity to fine-tune white guilt as a conductor directs an orchestra’ (p.332)

and his creation of ‘an airtight authoritarian state’ (p.294).

[The enthusiastic support of the West, and especially Western journalists, for an underdog rebel militia with a noble cause fighting a brutal stronger power reminds me of the decade I spent watching BBC and ITV journalists in Afghanistan with the mujahideen singing the praises of these plucky Davids fighting the Soviet Goliath. Only after the Soviets left and the country plunged into civil war from which arose the Taliban were those western journalists forced to change their tune. Moral of the story: don’t take sides in foreign wars; neither side is ever as squeaky clean as we childishly wish them to be. All sides in a war are compromised.]

Encyclopedic complexity

As early as page 40 the text has got so complicated that it becomes difficult to follow. Everything Prunier describes he does so in immense, encyclopedic detail. The events in Rwanda I have a rough handle on, having read half a dozen accounts. I found it more challenging to read his long, detailed explanation of the civil war in neighbouring Burundi, his examination of the political and ethnic roots going back to the colonial period, starting with the fact that there were four different Hutu guerrilla groups, moving through dense complexity to the killing of Burundi president (Hutu) Cyprien Ntaryamira by Tutsis soldiers in an attempted coup in April 1994.

A contemporary journalist summed up the resulting situation in a quote I include not so much to clarify but as an example of the sheer number of entities the reader has to get clear in their heads, along with their changing motivations and policies.

The present situation in Burundi is largely a result of Zairean support for PALI-PEHUTU and CNDD. The final attack on Burundi would be a catastrophe for Rwanda because the plan is to allow Nyangoma to take power in Bujumbura and to bring the Interahamwe back in Rwanda. (quoted page 68)

Even more so his hyper-detailed explanation of the complex ethnic situations in the eastern Congo provinces of North and South Kivu, which also have long, very complicated ethnic histories. You’d have thought it would be difficult for anyone else to ever go into as much detail or display such scary erudition as Prunier. The situation in the Kivus is important because they form Congo’s border with Rwanda and therefore played a key role in the escalating crisis which eventually led to the Rwandan invasion, but the histories of ethnic rivalries, conflict, massacres, numerous parties and militias – for example the key role played by the Banyamulenge – are mind boggling.

And then he has a chapter titled ‘The Congo basin, its interlopers and its onlookers’ (pages 73 to 112). This is where Prunier slowly and painstakingly goes round all the countries which border Congo and explains why many of them were already infiltrating armed forces across its borders or through its territory in order to achieve a kaleidoscope of military and political goals. Featured countries include Congo and Rwanda (obvz), Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania and Angola, each of which themselves hosted complex civil wars, generally going back decades, as far as independence.

A feature of all these conflicts is the extraordinary number of military groups they give rise to, all of which have grand titles and imposing acronyms, hence the 161 acronyms listed at the start of the book. I found myself referring back to it on every page. Just the 5-page backgrounder on Congo includes:

Mobutu’s Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR)
Étienne Tshisekedi’s Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS)
the Conférence nationale souveraine (CNS) set up in 1990
replaced by the Haut Conseil de la République-Parlement de Transition (HCR-PT)
the FAZ or Forces Armées Zaïroises

By about page 75 the book was feeling less a history than a degree course in the history, politics, ethnography and sociology of half a continent. I think you’d have to read it at least twice, probably three or four times, stopping to consult histories of all the other countries mentioned, to stand a chance of getting your degree.

I particularly enjoyed the background sections on countries we don’t hear so much about in post-imperial Britain, such as Angola and, even more so, the Francophonie countries which you rarely read about, Central African Republic, Chad and Congo-Brazzaville.

Initially, I was surprised at the jaded bitterness of Prunier’s tone but after a while I began to realise that only the blackest of black humour can do justice to a continent whose rules have spent 60 years doing their damnedest to utterly destroy.

Angola is a much richer country than either the Sudan or Uganda, which allowed its process of national destruction to be carried out with an impressive array of military means quite unknown in other parts of the continent, apart from Ethiopia. (p.88)

The guts of the war are described in a chapter graphically titled ‘Sinking into the quagmire’. It’s challenging keeping track of all the state-backed militias and armed forces, but when these start splintering and fighting amongst themselves, it becomes almost too complex to understand. On page 201 Prunier humorously asks whether his exasperated reader is ready to give up, and he’s got a point:

Does the reader at this point want to throw in the towel and give up on the ethnopolitical complexities of the region? I would not blame him, although I can assure him that I am honestly trying to simplify the picture. (p.201)

The importance of Angola

The single biggest cause of the Great War of Africa is that Eduardo dos Santos’s MPLA government in Angola went to the defence of Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s regime in Kinshasa.

I’ve explained how Kabila was installed as a puppet ruler by the alliance of Rwanda and Uganda to replace Mobutu, who both countries wanted removed from power, but how, after a year, he then turned on his own backers and ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan forces out of the country. And how this triggered those two countries to make a second invasion and remove Kabila.

For a start, Prunier adds much more detail to the story by explaining that Kabila was a terrible leader, stuck in a Marxist timewarp from the 1960s, but also just shambolic, chaotic and unpredictable, managing to insult or irritate all the neighbouring regimes and running his own one in a deeply unpredictable way, arresting his own ministers on a whim etc. So when Rwanda-Uganda began their second incursion to remove him many were keen.

Kabila had sacked his (Rwandan) chief of the army staff, James Kabarebe, who returned to the east of the country and, in Goma, hijacked three commercial freight planes, filled them with RPA troops, and flew them to the government base of Kitona on the Atlantic coast where they quickly turned Kabila troops to their side. Towns around Kitona fell, as did the diamond centre of Kisangani. The rebels seized the Inga hydroelectric station that provided power to Kinshasa as well as the port of Matadi through which most of Kinshasa’s food passed. In other words, Kabila’s regime looked doomed.

Then Angola intervened to save it. Why? The answer has to do with conditions inside Angola. The Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) government based the capital Luanda had been fighting a civil war against Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) since independence in 1975. In 1994 the Lusaka protocol tried to broker a ceasefire and in 1995 UN peacekeepers arrived. But Prunier explains in detail why, by 1998, the truce had broken down and fighting began again.

The point is that the MPLA had, originally, in the 1970s, been a Marxist movement and Savimbi had presented himself as a business-friendly ally of the West, meaning America. In the simple binary of the Cold War, the MPLA were supported by the Soviet Union and the Cubans, UNITA by America and South Africa. And because Mobutu, ruler of Zaire/Congo, was also a creature of the CIA, supported by America, Mobutu had, for 15 years or more, offered UNITA bases and sanctuary in south Congo/Zaire.

Therefore, as Rwandan forces and Congolese forces backed by Rwanda closed in on Kabila’s regime, the MPLA, after some delay, finally gambled that supporting Kabila and having the gratitude of his weak regime, would guarantee that he would not support the MPLA’s enemy, UNITA. Angola threw itself behind Kabila as part of its ongoing civil war. And the key fact? Angola had one of the largest economies in Africa, based on its huge oil wealth. It had lots of planes, helicopters and a well-trained battle-hardened army, which it now sent to start supporting Kabila. The MPLA’s support for Kabila ensured he would stay in power and that the war would continue for three long, bloody, increasingly chaotic years.

Five layers of conflict

Prunier suggests the war had five layers (pages 201 to 203):

Layer 1: Core conflict: the RPF regime in Rwanda trying, with partner Uganda, to overthrow the puppet ruler, Kabila, who they’d installed.

Layer 2: Powerful players: Angola, Zimbabwe, with Namibia along for the ride, who had no interest in the Hutu-Tutsi conflict but wanted Kabila to remain in power (for Angola, to prevent UNITA taking refuge in Congo; for Zimbabwe, to continue mineral contracts made with Kabila; Namibia just went along with its big powerful neighbour, Angola).

Layer 3: Secondary actors: Libya, Chad, the Sudan, no interest in Congo but it was a zone to sort out relations between themselves and core players, mostly Uganda, which was more or less at war with Sudan.

Layer 4: bordering countries: Burundi which sent a small number of soldiers into the conflict; Central African Republic which tried to stay out.

Layer 5: South Africa: had no military or political interest and never sent troops to the war, but had a strong economic motive in infiltrating the economy of collapsing Zimbabwe and consolidating its hold on Congo’s huge mineral reserves so, on the whole, supported the rebels as being more desperate to turn the assets (mines etc) into cash i.e. let South Africa get bargains. This changed when Joseph Kabila came to power and, unlike his father, let it be known that he was open to business. South African banks and mining corporations suddenly packed his diary (p.262).

From all this you can see why Prunier calls it:

a war fought among foreigners on Congolese territory for reasons of their own. (p.274)

The shift to economic motivation

Why did so many of the countries neighbouring Congo get involved in the conflict? Prunier explains the motivation in the chapter titled ‘The Congo basin, its interlopers and its onlookers’ (pages 73 to 112). This has the added benefit of giving fascinating brief profiles of the countries involved, from Congo itself, through Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Congo-Brazzaville and so on.

Then there are the two increasingly mind-boggling chapters describing the chaotic conflict itself, ‘A continental war’ (181 to 226) and ‘Sinking into the quagmire’ (227 to 255).

He makes a vital point: the war might have started out from geopolitical considerations but as it went on it became increasingly economic i.e. about seizing Congo’s mineral resources:

What mattered more and more as the war went on were the economic interests. (p.234)

And this had a big military-strategic consequence. The first war had been fought to overthrow Mobutu and gain control of the country, so the key battlezone, the target, had been the capital, Kinshasa. But in the Great War the motivation increasingly became to seize Congo’s assets and so the target areas were provinces like Kasai and Katanga, in which the warring parties disintegrated into ever-smaller entities, sometimes fighting over just one mine. These had nominal ties with other groups in other areas, or with various outside parties, then again often went independent. Hence the unravelling complexity of the conflict which eventually nobody understood or could contain.

A useful recap

In the chapter describing the beginning of the end, ‘Not with a bang but with a whimper’, he gives a useful recap of why they got involved in 1998 and what had changed by 2001 to make many want to withdraw. In other words, why did the war ramify out so disastrously in 1998, and what allowed it to be dragged to an end in 2001/2? Here’s a list of key intervening countries, giving their initial motivation and what changed:

Kabila supporters

Angola supported Kabila to ensure Congo wouldn’t give safe havens for UNITA. In 1998 Savimbi was still a threat. But by 2001 he was a spent force, militarily and financially, struggling to survive. The MPLA had achieved its aims.

Zimbabwe had allied with Kabila in order to protect the investments and commercial deals it had made with him on his rise to power, and also to block South Africa’s slow rise to economic dominance of the whole of southern Africa. By 2001 Zimbabwe’s economic plight had significantly worsened while South Africa’s commercial ascent continued unhindered, and Mugabe was coming under increasing internal pressure. While peasants starved Mugabe was blowing tens of millions of dollars on an unpopular war. Time to pull out.

Namibia had supported Kabila at the bidding of South Africa and Zimbabwe, but the latter was pulling out and the former never committed men or resources.

Anti-Kabila

Burundi a minor player, had always been most concerned with securing its Congo border and never taken part in the wider invasions.

Uganda was under strong donor pressure to reduce its military budget if it wanted to continue receiving Western aid. Senior members of the army and the regime had done very well out of the war, not least from illegal smuggling of diamonds, gold etc. But Uganda never had the urgent internal political pressure to sort out the Hutu / génocidaire issue that Rwanda did.

In addition, one aspect of the general chaos was the slow falling-out of Uganda and Rwanda. Museveni came to really dislike Kagami’s ‘arrogance’ (p.241). Their forces ended up coming to blows, specifically in several different episodes of street fighting in Congo’s main north-eastern city, Kisangani (p.242). This queered the relationship between Uganda and Rwanda.

Rwanda By 2001 the international situation had changed. The Clinton administration, crippled with guilt, had passively supported Rwanda and been accused of fine rhetoric about a New Africa but no practical follow-through (p.338). However, George W. Bush’s new US administration commenced on 1 January 2001 and took a much tougher line on Rwanda, condemning its ‘grave human rights violations’ (p.266).

By the start of 2002 all the main parties had reached the same conclusion: withdrawal was a certainty, it was just a matter of agreeing schedules (p.267).

Laurent Kabila’s assassination

Arguably, the single most important event – certainly the easiest to grasp because one very specific event – was the assassination of the man at the centre of the conflict, Laurent Kabila, on 16 January 2001. He was shot at point blank range in his office by one of his bodyguards.

Now, since he was the man at the centre of a huge and ruinous war, conspiracy theories have abounded. It’s a kind of African version of Who Killed JFK? The (fairly) straightforward answer is that, while running his guerrilla group out east Kabila recruited lots of boys, young boys, thousands of them, called kodogo (‘little ones’). Kabila trained them to become fighters, and they in turn looked up to him as their Father or Mzee, Swahili for ‘elder’. But once in power he betrayed them. In lots of ways, which Prunier details. He let some be massacred, some ended up on opposing sides and fighting each other. The bodyguard was one of these former boy soldiers.

Then again, Prunier thoroughly describes all the other conspiracy theories, which wander off into huge conspiracies, involving enemy countries, the CIA, the Rwandans, or the dark and shadowy forces which lots of people like to think are behind any disaster or assassination. The likeliest is that Kabila had done a deal with the MPLA’s enemy, UNITA, to smuggle diamonds through northern Angola.

135 people were arrested, tried and convicted, some given the death penalty although no-one, in the end, was executed (pages 249 to 255).

(cf van Reybrouck’s account, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, pages 465 to 466.)

The key point is that, after a few days of confusion, the senior figures in the administration decided a compromise candidate who everyone could agree on temporarily was Kabila’s son, Joseph, a shy taciturn man who had, however, been moved by his father through the ranks until he was number two in the Congo army, and had helped with various diplomatic and administrative tasks.

In the event Joseph Kabila was to prove a very shrewd operator, the complete opposite of his chaotic unpredictable father. He outwitted all his superiors and peers, serving as president of Congo from January 2001 to January 2019.

From the point of view of the Great War, he was open to savvy negotiations and deals, and it was this new spirit of compromise and negotiation, combined with the war weariness of the key allies, namely Angola, which allowed the war to stumble to an end, sort of. Well, certainly for a peace treaty to be signed in 2002.

Peace, or conflict control

Prunier gives a fascinating summary of the year-long negotiations which eventually, reluctantly, ended with the signing of an inclusive peace treaty on 17 December 2002. Prunier humorously quotes a commentator who wrote that the deal offered the Congolese people the show of a government which was really made up of:

‘a coalition of people who looted their own country, predatory rebels and corrupt civil servants.’ (quoted page 277)

By the time of the treaty maybe 3.5 million people had died, 90% from the collateral effects of war. Agriculture had collapsed. 64% of the population was underfed. Maybe 33% were malnourished (p.278).

Massacre

Three days after Kabila’s murder Ngiti and Lenu warriors attacked Bunia, killing about one hundred Hema. The next day the Hema militia took revenge on Lendu civilians, killing about 25. (p.281)

Hardest to keep track of is the number of Africans killed by Africans. Every one of the 364 pages records Africans murdering other Africans, generally armed men killing defenceless civilians. A continent-wide abattoir. Thus in Prunier’s fascinating background to Angola‘s involvement in the war (pages 88 to 99), he describes the failed democratic elections of 1992 which led to panic on the streets of Luanda where MPLA soldiers killed about 1,500 UNITA soldiers and cadres (p.96). When UNITA took the strategic oil town of Soyo, the fall of the city was blamed on the Bakongo tribe and so about 1,000 unarmed Bakongo civilians were massacred in the streets of Luanda, Bloody Friday (p.97).

There’s killing on every page. The suffering of the population of Congo is beyond words. For the most part Prunier lets the facts of massacre after massacre convey the enormity of the horror to the reader.

In the period October 1992 and December 1993 the UN estimated civilian deaths at 450,000 to 500,000. In mid-1993, the UN counted about 1,000 war-related deaths per day. (Tufts University mass atrocities website)

Towards the end of the book he cites research by the US International Rescue Committee which suggested that between August 1998 and April 2000 there were some 1.7 million excess deaths in Congo (p.242). Of these only around 200,000 were directly due to fighting, the rest being due to:

frequent forced population displacement
overexposure to the elements
near collapse of the health system
disease
impossibility to carrying out agriculture, obviously leading to starvation
plain despair

(p.242, cf p.338).

Your life in their hands. 2015 photo of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) fighters. The FDLR is the latest iteration of Rwandan Hutu army and Iterahamwe militia génocidaires who fled Rwanda in 1994, plus other Hutus who’ve signed up since. Gang rape and mass murder a speciality.

The colonial borders

Prunier calls his final chapter ‘Groping for meaning’. You can draw all kinds of conclusions. The one that impressed itself on me was the old chestnut about Africa’s colonial borders. More than any other book about Africa this one shows how the borders the colonial powers drew had little or nothing to do with tribes on the ground and how most Africans’ sense of identity, especially in rural areas i.e. most of the continent, remained based on tribe, clan, religion and family, complex multi-levelled identities, with ‘nationality’ an evanescent Western invention (p.360).

This really reinforces Prunier’s criticism that western models don’t work on ‘nations’ which are nothing like the western concept of a ‘nation’. If the traditional definition of a ‘state’ is an entity which has a monopoly of legitimate violence over a defined territory, then Congo isn’t a state at all, as there were and still are areas where numerous other groups carry out systematic violence (p.305). As you read this:

‘There are more than 120 different armed groups active in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’ (Kivu conflict Wikipedia article)

Just because an African leader wears a suit and tie and has a ‘cabinet’ made of ‘ministers’, Western leaders and bankers shake his hand and think he’s like them, has the same mindset, comes from the same background, is managing the same kinds of problems. But they’re really not. African leaders are trying to run ‘states’ which often barely exist or only exist in patches, across territories which aren’t states in the way we in the West are used to them, lacking infrastructure, modern economies, integrated populations, a high level of education and so on.

Hence the repeated point Prunier makes about the ‘reality gap’ between the fine words of the international community – the lovingly worked-out details of various peace accords, with their withdrawal of forces and integration of troops and civil society and so on – and the generally chaotic, anarchic, often incomprehensible situations on the ground (p.225).

One aspect of this is the point I made at length in my reviews of books about the West’s attempts to impose ‘democracy’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is that the attempts revealed the complete lack of understanding, in the West, of what democracy actually is, where it came from, and what sustains it, in the advanced, economically developed nations.

Democracy as a form of government presupposes a certain degree of social integration, the existence of a political class with some concept of the national interest, and a minimum of economic development (p.xxxii)

All of which are as absent in a country like Congo as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan, probably most of the Middle East and Africa. Lacking the social and economic prerequisites for full democracy, undeveloped countries tend to adopt democratic window dressing, which conceals simple power grabs by ethnic or religious or tribal groups. Thus Prunier commenting that, ahead of the first free elections in Congo in 2006, dozens of new political parties sprang up across the country, but that:

These were parties in name only, since they were mostly tribal or regional gatherings around the name of one or two well-known local politicians. (p.309)

With the recurring result that as and when governments are formed, they are more often than not little more than:

a coagulation of groups operating out of completely mercenary interests (p.315)

(Prunier explains the arbitrary nature of the borders right at the start, pages xxix to xxx, and then gives a concentrated summary along with the characteristics of weak states and strong tribal identities which will plague Africa for the foreseeable future, on pages 360 to 362.)

The Kivus

Throughout the narrative it becomes ever clearer that the hotspot, the trouble spot, the recurring source of conflict, is the two small territories known as the Kivus, North and South Kivu, both of which have complex ethnic, political and military conflicts. This troubled little area turned out to be the hardest to fully pacify after the 2002 peace agreement, then trouble flared up all over again in the mid-2000s which had to be fought to a standstill by UN and government forces.

Kivu conflict Wikipedia article

At the time of writing the Kivu conflict constitutes the largest UN peacekeeping mission anywhere in the world, deploying some 21,000 soldiers.

Will the war happen again?

No. The conditions were unique, being:

the flight of the génocidaires and the refugees into eastern Congo provided a one-off motivation for the RPF government to invade, repatriate the refugees and wipe out the remaining génocidaires
– that whole crisis situation has disappeared
instead it turned into a mission to overturn the decrepit dictator Mobutu and then, in the sequel, to overthrow the unpopular puppet ruler Kabila – but Congo has had much more stable and effective leaders for 20 years
guilt over their role in the Rwanda genocide meant the West and the UN turned a blind eye to the RPF’s abuses and massacres – that wouldn’t happen again, indeed already with the arrival of the George W. Bush administration in 2001 the RPF had to start moderating its behaviour
but the key thing that turned it into a continental war was the decision by Angola to intervene and support Laurent Kabila in order to prevent their enemy, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, from using southern Congo as a base: but Savimbi died 20 years ago and the civil war ended with him, all parties are concerned with maintaining their grip on power and corrupt money, and any kind of war would only jeopardise that

So Congo will, like most African nations, continue to be a weak state for the foreseeable future; and violence may flare up in some its territory, especially the ever-troublesome Kivus. But a war on the same scale is extremely unlikely to be repeated. it was the result of one-off geopolitical forces which won’t recur.

Further issues

France’s shame

France sees all foreign affairs as a conspiracy of the Anglophone countries (mostly America and Britain) to undermine French glory and the superiority of French culture. Therefore, the French government stood by the genocidal Hutu regime in Rwanda even as the genocide was underway because they spoke French and the incoming Tutu forces, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, having been raised in former British colony Uganda, spoke English. Simple as that. The French supported the third great genocide of the twentieth century because its perpetrators spoke French (pages 341 to 343).

Viewing the war through European paradigms i.e. the Holocaust

The West could understand the genocide because they viewed it through the prism of European history and the Holocaust. This led to the tendency to blindly support the RPF, to regard the Tutsi regime as black Israelis, as a people who had suffered an appalling crime and so could be forgiven any behaviour in retaliation. The West tended not to understand the Congo conflict in its own right, for what it was, an imperialist attack by one African country (Rwanda) on another (Congo) which drew in a range of neighbouring countries who used the Congo as a battleground to fight their own conflicts (predominantly Angola).

Genocide narrative easy; Congo war narrative hard, complicated, sometimes impenetrable. Hence a) prolonged support for Rwanda and Kagame, whatever they did, b) long, long delay getting to grips with the political issues underlying the war.

Good guys

As remarked in my reviews about Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is plagued by a Hollywood simple-mindedness or regarding all foreign situations in terms of the good guys and the bad guys, consistently failing to understand complexities and shades of grey (p.340). Prunier sees this tendency to simplify situations and players into good guys/bad guys as distinctively American (p.357).

Credit

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. All references are to the 2010 OUP paperback edition.

More Africa reviews

Africa reviews

Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (2007)

I walked inside [the former Belgian restaurant in the Congo town of Kalemie] to find a wreck. A wooden bar ran along one wall and a Congolese lady stood behind it.
‘Do you have anything I could drink?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have anything I could eat?’
‘No.’
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, page 103)

In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks after the slaughter.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.134)

The Congo river system is potentially one of the most valuable assets in all of Africa, but in recent years it has been choked to a standstill by war and mismanagement.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.295)

As the lurid title suggests, Butcher is a journalist, not a historian or scholar. He was appointed Africa correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in 2000 and this book is a colourful description of his self-appointed task of repeating Henry Morton Stanley’s famous expedition across central Africa, from Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika, across country for 500 kilometres until he hit the River Congo, and then 3,000 or so kilometres down Africa’s second longest river, right down to the sea, beyond Boma – a journey he undertook in August 2004 (just as the Athens Olympics were about to start, p.322).

Limited use as a reference

Early on, Butcher inadvertently indicates the limits of his journalistic style or knowledge or interest or research, when he knocks off a description of the Rwanda genocide and how it unravelled into the two Congo Wars, which themselves degenerated into the Great War of Africa, in a mere two pages (13 to 14).

As it happens I’ve read about six book-length or chapter-length accounts of the Rwandan genocide and the wars which followed, all of which go into vastly more detail about this complicated and terrible sequence of events, and so I flinched a bit at the superficiality and, in my opinion, errors in Butcher’s brief summary. He has an interviewee say that Mobutu ‘invited’ ‘the Hutu gunmen’, the interahamwe, to flee into Zaire. He writes that ‘the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government’ then sent troops to support Laurent Kabila’s insurgency (p.13).

This is not only very simplified but, in my opinion, actively misleading. It wasn’t just the interahamwe that fled into Zaire but the entire Hutu government and administration which had planned and carried out the appalling genocide of the Tutsi minority. Justifiably terrified of being captured and punished for their crimes, the Hutu administration terrified millions of Hutus into thinking the invading Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front would take revenge on them for the genocide, and so it turned into a mass exodus of a large part (about a quarter) of Rwanda’s population across the border into Congo.

It’s true that Mobutu had a long-standing close relationship with the Hutu leadership of Rwanda, but he didn’t ‘invite’ the fleeing génocidaires nor their million peasant compatriots into his country, they just crossed the border and presented Mobutu with a crisis (and an opportunity).

Butcher skips any explanation of the pre-existing civil war in Rwanda which was the context for the genocide and helps to explain it. Nowhere in the book does he mention the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), or its leader and still the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, or the key role the RPF played in ending the genocide when the entire international community (the UN, Britain, America, France) was standing by and letting it happen (to our eternal shame).

He nowhere explains that the Hutu génocidaires established an iron control of the vast refugee camps just inside the Zaire border and used them as bases to launch attacks against Tutsi villages inside Rwanda, continuing the genocide on a small scale while marshalling their resources to launch a re-invasion with the aim of completing the job of exterminating all the Tutsis.

He nowhere explains that the new Rwandan government of national unity repeatedly complained about the Hutu exiles to the Congo government of Mobutu, and begged the UN and international partners to step in and stop the raids and to rein in the Hutu génocidaires but that, once again, the international community did nothing.

He doesn’t explain that this was why, after a year of putting up with this destabilising presence on its western border, the RPF-backed Rwanda government decided to do something about it: to send its army into the Congo, dismantle the refugee camps, force the Hutu population to return to their country with promise of safe passage and that they would be unpunished if they just returned to their villages, while at the same time chasing the genocidal Hutu leaders and their mass-murdering militia, the interahamwe, deeper into Congo with the aim of killing them and putting an end to their genocidal plans once and for all.

He doesn’t explain how Kigali found a willing partner in the government of Uganda, which contributed its own forces, and suggested they use as a fig leaf and front man for their invasion, the drunken, womanising guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had been ‘fighting’ a small-scale insurgency against the Mobutu regime for 30 years and who they now put at the head of a new rebel force concocted for the purpose (the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo). Nor that the initial operation was so successful that Rwanda and Uganda decided to send their forces on right across Congo to the capital, Kinshasa, forcing the ageing ailing dictator Mobutu to flee the country (May 1996) and installing their puppet, Kabila, as new president of Congo.

Butcher’s narrative gives the rough shape of these events but is, on my reading of the sources, wrong in most of its details, for example claiming that Rwanda and Uganda ‘backed’ a pre-existing military campaign by Kabila rather than Kabila being a convenient front man for an armed group invented for the purpose to cover an invasion entirely planned and led by Uganda-Rwanda.

It was when Kabila, safely established in power as the new president of Congo in 1997, began attacking his own Rwandan and Ugandan backers, ordering their troops to leave the capital, refusing to obey their orders any more, that Uganda and Rwanda, infuriated that their puppet had turned against them, mounted a second invasion, in 1998, to overthrow him.

This is why people refer to two Congo wars. The First Congo War, from 1996 to 1997 was the Rwanda-Uganda invasion to a) empty the Hutu refugee camps and b) overthrow Mobutu. The Second Congo War started in 1998 and was Rwanda-Uganda’s attempt to overthrow Kabila and impose a regime more friendly to them. It was this second invasion which got seriously bogged down because many of Congo’s neighbouring countries sent forces to support either the Kabila government or to ally with Uganda-Rwanda. Generally the alliances were influenced by deals to get their hands on Congo’s mineral resources. Thus Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe supported Kabila in exchange for access to minerals in Congo’s south-east, and so units of the Zimbabwean army found themselves fighting units from other nations in the tropical jungles of Congo, an expensive and bewildering waste of men and resources which distanced the Zimbabwe army from the regime (as described in Douglas Rogers’s account of the coup which eventually overthrew Mugabe).

This second conflict unravelled as not only forces from ten or so neighbouring countries got involved, but as regional warlords arose and seized control of different parts of the huge country. This is the complicated, multi-party conflict which is sometimes referred to as the Great War of Africa. Theoretically it ended with a peace treaty in 2003 but, on the ground, much violence continued in the form of roving bands of ‘soldiers’ or warlord-led militias, who emerged from the jungle, massacred villages, terrorised towns, looted all the food, raped all the women, murdered the men, then disappeared back into the jungle.

This, then, was the deeply insecure and scary environment in which Butcher planned to stage his recreation of Henry Morton Stanley’s epic journey down the Congo river. In the event, although he hears many rumours of roving warbands, although he hears from inhabitants of towns and villages of past attacks, and although he and his travelling companions race past small guard posts, he never in fact meets or has any encounters with any of the terrifying army, militia or tribal warriors.

I’ve summarised the events of the Congo wars in such detail because they are the vital backdrop to Butcher’s adventure, and because he refers to them again and again throughout the book, but mostly in what I regard as a misleadingly simplistic way. In particular I went from being puzzled to feeling a bit disturbed by his complete omission of the context of the genocide (i.e. the Rwandan civil war) and its cause (a deliberate policy of mass extermination in the name of Hutu Power), by his systematic downplaying of the genocide itself, by his complete omission of the name of the key organisation in both the civil war, the ending of the genocide, and the Congo wars i.e. the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and his preference for using the phrase ‘the Tutsi-dominated’ Rwandan government. The repeated use of this phrase cumulatively gives the impression that the source of all the disruption and violence in the region was the RPF-backed government in Kigali.

Now it is definitely true that the two Rwanda-Uganda invasions of Congo, first to overthrow Mobutu, and then to overthrow Kabila, massively destabilised the whole centre of Africa. But you have to understand that the RPF’s aim was to dismantle the Hutu regime which had just carried out the worst genocide of modern times, and then to overthrow the génocidaires’ main supporter, Mobutu, and install a government which would ensure that such a genocide never took place again. Unless you grasp that underlying motive for their actions you make it seem as if the Tutsi government was the unmotivated source of the disorder in the region. It certainly evolved into that situation, especially once all Congo’s neighbours piled in, but that wasn’t their initial motive.

The general thrust of Butcher’s account is correct and he repeats the outline of events several more times throughout the book, but almost all the fine details and the deeper background, which would help you make more sense of these tumultuous events, are either wrong or just missing.

In particular I found Butcher’s underplaying of the genocide (he mentions it but never dwells on what a truly horrific and regionally seismic event it was), his casting of the Hutus as helpless victims, and his continual nudging references to the violence across the region being caused by the ‘Tutsis-dominated’ government in Kigali, build up into a misleadingly incomplete and worryingly biased account of events. A casual reading of the book would lead you to believe that the Tutsis are the bad guys in the story and behind all the violence.

What I’ve just written is based on the following sources:

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane (1995)
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (1998)
In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michaela Wrong (2000)
Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern (2004)
The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005) – 2
Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck (2010) – 3 The Great War of Africa
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns (2011)

And, of course, Wikipedia:

But the same goes for Butcher’s versions of earlier events. On pages 58 to 59 he gives a brisk summary of the murder of Congo’s first president, Patrice Lumumba, which is heavy on gruesome detail (the acid used to dissolve the corpse) but very light indeed on the complex international and domestic crises Lumumba found himself facing and made considerably worse by his own troubled character and his chaotic and rash decisions, alienating the Americans who found him impossible to work with, then inviting the Soviet Union to send armed forces to help him put down secessionist movements, which alarmed all the Western powers, the Americans and the UN.

Again, Butcher’s account isn’t wrong, as far as it goes, but by focusing narrowly on Lumumba’s murder and heavily blaming the colonial power, the Belgians (Belgian army officers helped kidnap Lumumba then fly him to a remote part of the country, were present when he was badly beaten, then shot dead and buried in a shallow grave) Butcher’s account omits the six months of hectic crises which preceded it, and Lumumba’s role in exacerbating it.

He gives no sense of how Lumumba’s difficult character worsened the crises and, eventually, led everyone concerned (including many of his own ministers and his army) to believe that Congo would be better off with him out of the way and replaced by someone more stable and predictable.

I’m not defending these events. I’m just pointing out that Butcher’s zippy two-page account, focusing (like a thriller) on the gruesome events of the murder itself, omits the complexity of the context and so militates against a proper understanding.

For all these reasons I would actively advise against reading this book as any kind of authoritative source for the geopolitics of the region and the period. For that, the best place to start would be the outstanding ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’ by David Van Reybrouck (2010).

Chaps in Africa

So, having established Butcher as a poor source of historical description or analysis, I was, in a sense, freed up to read the book for what it really is: a boy’s own adventure story, a ripping yarn, a white man’s tale of derring-do in the heart of Africa etc.

The ripping yarn tone of the story explains the praise on the cover from an impressive list of white, public school-educated, male Africa hands who recognise one of their own. These include: Alexander McCall Smith, Giles Foden, John le Carré and William Boyd. Boyd is quoted as saying: ‘The day of the intrepid traveller is not over’, which can be translated as: ‘White chaps can still have ripping adventures in the jungle’, a slice of cheery public school optimism which, once you’ve actually read the book with its bleak descriptions of super violence, social collapse and cannibalism, you might come to regard as pretty inappropriate.

Look at me, I’m woke

Butcher is at pains to stay on the right side of the reviewers and modern woke opinion by lambasting the wicked colonialists who exploited Africa during the wicked colonial period (the evils of wicked colonialism are described or referred to scores and scores of time) with a vehemence typical of a certain sort of middle-aged, middle-class, literary white man.

But I found the same is true of his dogged insistence on the evils of colonialism as of his references to the origins of the Congo wars, namely he’s not wrong, but, after a while, you start to realise he’s not describing the issue in its full complexity. He is, after all, a journalist, and so he’s writing in catchy headlines and peppy phrases.

For example, in several places he elides the truly evil, wicked, genocidal regime of the disgusting King Leopold in the 1880s and 1890s with the much more benign rule of the Belgian colonialists after the Second World War. OK, maybe they still had the same racist, white supremacist beliefs, but, as his actual narrative makes abundantly clear, they no longer massacred entire villages and cut people’s hands off; instead the post-war colonial regime built airports and railways and roads, and ports and docks, and ran mines and plantations and businesses and, above all, maintained the peace, creating the basis of a potentially prosperous country. Eliding the two eras and their policies into one thing struck me as morally dubious but also historically and politically misleading.

At one point, in a typically jeering throwaway remark, Butcher says it was one of Belgium’s most notable blunders that they didn’t train up a cohort of educated native politicians and administrators to take over the running of the country when they left. This sounds fine but it’s really a cheap shot because the Belgian colonial authorities, just like the French and British ones, thought they would be running Africa for decades to come and so had plenty of time to create an infrastructure and slowly train up the indigenes.

None of them anticipated the sudden rush for independence which was triggered by the independence of Ghana (in 1957). In particular none of them anticipated a key factor, which I’ve highlighted in my reviews of, for example, Martin Meredith’s bleakly hilarious book, ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence’, which was that, once negotiations started, the African nationalist parties tried to outdo each other in demanding independence, soon, sooner, NOW!

With the result that the fiery nationalists at the conference called to discuss the future of the Belgian Congo demanded they be given independence within three months of the conference ending. Many commentators at the time thought this was wildly rash but they were, of course, all denounced as racist imperialists.

Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist is set against the backdrop of the crisis of 1960 and gives a lot of factual detail about the lead-up to Lumumba’s murder. Some of the secondary characters who the impeccably liberal protagonist meets at cocktail parties etc point out that the Africans are nowhere near being able to run a country, that handing over rule to them will lead to massacres, white flight and the collapse of the country into civil war and…they are treated as racist bigots, disliked by the woke hero, ignored by the politicians. Trouble is, those racist bigots turned out to be 100% correct and then some. Rushed independence turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for the people of the Congo.

White privilege

Butcher takes every possible opportunity to slag off the wicked Belgian colonialists, but he is considerably less attuned to the way that he, a middle-class, well-connected white westerner, with thousands of dollars stashed in his kit, along with zippy technology (laptop and satellite phone) and possessor of tiptop connections to government authorities, numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the press (his employer, The Telegraph newspaper) is only able to undertake the journey because of his (relative) wealth, his white privilege and his western privilege.

Quite a few times he walks into the offices of bureaucrats or confronts African officials who are notably more respectful of him than of their fellow Africans who they’ve just been bullying, simply because he is a white man. The entire journey is only possible because he is, by Congo standards, rich, because he has thousands of dollars stashed in his clothes and so is able to pay Africans hard cash to drive him through the jungle, canoe him down the river, and generally bribe his way out of trouble.

That William Boyd quote could more accurately be rewritten as: ‘The day of the intrepid [western white male] traveller [with lots of cash and connections] is not over’.

In the footsteps of Stanley

Butcher’s entire expedition is an attempt to recreate Henry Morton Stanley’s great expedition across country to, and then down, the mighty Congo River, in which he was accompanied by three white companions and over 300 African porters, and which took three long gruelling years, from 1874 to 1877.

As you might expect, this inevitably entails several summaries of Stanley’s biography and character, of the great expedition (pages 44 to 49), and Stanley’s narrative (and illustrations) are referenced throughout the book, in particular whenever Butcher arrives at a place which Stanley first visited, or a town he in fact founded (for example, the settlement of Stanleyville which he founded at the end of the series of treacherous rapids which he modestly named, the Stanley Falls). Inevitably, Butcher also references Stanley’s central role in opening up central Africa for the murderous genocidal regime of the truly evil King Leopold of Belgium.

But again, I found Butcher’s account good as far as it went, but it never goes much beyond the stereotype of the wicked, brutal racist Victorian explorer. Butcher takes the standard journalistic view that Stanley was a wicked, violent, racist who treated his hundreds of native porters with appalling brutality and didn’t hesitate to open fire on tribespeople who got in his way. All the subtlety and complexity about the man and his achievements to be found in the (obviously much longer) biographies like that of Tim Jeal (2007) are simply absent. Jeal doesn’t gloss over Stanley’s brutality, but places him in the context of his time, compares him with other explorers, and explains the challenges he faced, from the treacherous Arab slave traders who dominated the region, to the often violent and sometimes cannibal tribes Stanley had to deal with.

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal (2007)

I’m not in the slightest exonerating Stanley: the work he went on to do for King Leopold, systematically swindling scores of tribal leaders out of their ancestral lands by making them sign contract with Leopold which they obviously didn’t understand and had no legal validity, was obviously wicked and inexcusable. I’m just saying that, as with the Congo wars and Lumumba’s murder, Butcher’s journalistic summaries of Stanley gloss over the far more complex, more fascinating and therefore more useful facts.

Butcher’s mum

The blurb, the preface and much of the text all emphasise that Butcher is setting out to recreate Stanley’s epic voyage of explanation down the Congo – but on pages 8 to 11 we learn of a much more homely, domestic motive for his trip. His mother did it.

Butcher’s mum was a jolly hockey sticks daughter of the empire who, aged 21 in 1958, was packed off to southern Africa, with a friend, as a sort of finishing school. She travelled from Cape Town to Salisbury (modern Harare in Zimbabwe). It was the very end of the colonial era and so all the countries she travelled through – South Africa, Rhodesia – were still run by white colonial administrations, and so there was law and order and a good travel infrastructure: planes and trains and ferries ran on time and regularly.

This applied just as much to the 1958 Belgian Congo which the two young gells crossed as the final part of their journey. Leopoldville was the hub of one of Africa’s largest airline and the Congo’s chief port, Matadi, was served by a fleet of ocean liners. Everything – trains, planes, ferries – worked like clockwork , staffed by polite porters and obliging stewards – and so Butcher’s mother, when he used to question her, had little or no memory of it.

Now, 45 or so years later (2004), the countries she travelled through have collapsed into dictatorship (Zimbabwe) or chaos (Congo), most of the infrastructure of the latter having collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle (railway lines and railway sleepers long ago dismantled and sold for scrap or burned as firewood; stations derelict; docks abandoned, as in a dystopian sci fi movie).

Butcher’s mum kept brochures and posters and timetables from her trip which Butcher describes poring over lovingly as a boy and young man. And so Butcher’s adventure has this second level, not only retracing the steps of the man who ‘discovered’, mapped, named and revealed central Africa to western readers in the 1870s and 80s – but at the same time moving through the surreal ruins of what had once been the thriving and efficient colonial infrastructure remembered by his mum and recorded in the various brochures and timetables she kept, circa 1958 (plus other 1950s documents and guides he acquired in preparation for his trip).

So: two sets of ghosts, and that’s just the white ghosts. Obviously Butcher discovers, once he enters the country, that he is also moving among spirits of all the African tribes who lived and died, fought and were enslaved, and, more recently, burned and looted, their way through the same terrain. (See Ryszard Kapuściński’s excellent book, The Shadow of The Sun, for extended descriptions of how belief in the spirits of the dead continue to saturate African culture.)

So Butcher’s trip is alive with resonances and echoes.

Kalemie

Butcher starts his journey in the port of Kalemie on the west bank of Lake Tanganyika, which is where Stanley arrived with his huge expedition of over 300 porters, after having crossed country from Zanzibar and then crossed the lake from east to west. Instead Butcher kicks off his journey by flying there, direct from South Africa. I thought this was a slightly odd decision. To fully recreate the Stanley expedition he ought to have travelled overland from the Tanzanian coast to Lake Tanganyika, as Stanley did. It would have been interesting to have his description of modern-day Zanzibar and Tanzania, and would have maybe provided a useful contrast between one African country and another.

So anyway, Butcher flies direct to Kalemie on the western, Congo, side of Lake Tanganyika and it’s here that, after quite a few digressions about Stanley, his mum, the contacts he has drummed up in preparation for the trip, and the briefings he’s had, that he finally gets the journey started.

Kalemie straightaway provides a good example of the decline and decay all of Congo has fallen into, after 32 years of Mobutu’s systematic looting of his own country, zero investment and appalling corrupt local administration, followed by seven years (1997 to the time of his visit, 2004) of increasingly chaotic and widespread conflict. From a distance it looks like a modern town but once he’s landed and looks more closely:

What I had taken to be an estate of factories, damaged in the recent war in the Congo, turned out to be a ruin dating from a much earlier age. Faded advertisements could just be made out on the walls…Grass grew long and untroubled through the railway sleepers on the approaches to the disused station…An old railway carriage…stood rusting in the tropical heat. In one of the compartments someone had made a small cooking fire on the floor, now surrounded by various dirty pots…Instead of a functioning high street what I found was a dusty space filled by gaggles of meandering locals…Of the buildings themselves there was little beyond the fronts. Rust had not just coloured the roofs but eaten out huge holes through which tropical rain had flooded for countless rainy seasons…Pipes that once brought mains water to each building lay broken and there was not one working lightbulb…Without cobalt or diamonds or gold to draw outsiders’ interest here, Kelamie had been hollowed out by the years. Where there had once been a substantial settlement, nothing but the husk remained. (pages 85 to 85)

And this in ‘one of the biggest towns in the Congo’, a town with no state radio or TV, no newspaper, no landline phones and no internet, no petrol stations or cars, where the 1950s airport the Belgians built has become a bullet-riddled ruin (p.88).

This is what decades of neglect, lack of investment, lack of law and lack of local government produce, in a place ‘run by’ officials and administrators who do nothing but loot and steal and demand bribes for every transaction, a place where the state fails to provide either teachers or doctors or police (p.105). A key word or theme or image which threads through the text is ‘ruin’, along with its cousins, ‘derelict’, ‘wreck’, ‘decline’, ‘decay’ and ‘abandoned’.

Going backwards

Butcher hires some guys to take him by motorbike (two bikes and their owners for security’s sake, and because they know the route) inland from Kalemie. The key fact to grasp is that there are no roads any more, let alone railways. In the 1950s guides and the memory of his mother (and other accounts from the 1950s, which he cites) the major cities and many of the towns were connected by good asphalt roads which the Belgians built. Every single one of these has disappeared and been swallowed back into the jungle. Several times he comes across vehicles buried under decades of tropical foliage and realises that the narrow track through the jungle where he’s standing was, 50 years previously, an open, asphalt highway busy with cars and lorries. Now all gone, disappeared.

Similarly, Congo’s main cities were joined by railway lines and all of these have disappeared. In some cases the metal rails have been removed along with the sleepers and all that’s left is a track worn flat by the trudging of African feet. In town after town he comes across derelict, abandoned railway stations. In one particularly vivid moment he’s struggling through thick tropical forest, the sky blocked out by interlocking trees swaying high above him, dense foliage pressing right up against the narrow path he’s pushing his motorbike through when his boot clunks against something metallic. When he squats down and scrapes away at the thick soil and undergrowth at his feet he is stunned to reveal a metal rail. Beneath his feet and completely swallowed up by raw jungle is a railway which was part of thriving, developing country just 40 years previously. He is staggered by how quickly, and how totally all these infrastructures have been utterly lost, by how swiftly the country has unravelled and gone backwards.

Butcher’s journey

So Butcher rides pillion on the back of a motorbike from Kalemie heading directly west, roughly following the old abandoned overgrown railway line which once ran alongside the River Lukuga and linked Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika to join the River Lualaba between Kabalo and Kongolo. But after a 110k or so they take an abrupt right turn, heading north towards Mukumbo, then onto Kabambarre, and then to Kasongo, a now-ruined port on the River Congo.

This journey doesn’t look much on the (very good) map in the book, but it was in fact a mind-boggling 500 kilometres. (The book contains one master map of the entire route, done in a professional cartographic style, and then each chapter of the actual narrative starts with a charming hand-drawn map of that particular leg of the journey, complete with hand-drawn dotted lines, place names, and distances. Sweet. And handy.)

Anyway, Butcher covered this awesome 500k on the back of a motorbike! Along rutted, narrow, earth tracks bounded by tropical rainforest and continually littered with tree roots, bumps and ravines, streams, gulley and occasional rivers. No wonder he got a sore bum!

He takes a (very basic) ferry across the river and, on the other side, contracts more motorcyclists to drive him through 200km more narrow winding jungle paths, via the (ruined) town of Kibombo and on to another riverside port, Kindu. It’s on this leg that he comes across the wreckage of an armoured car which was shelled and destroyed during a firefight on a major road paralleling the river. Now the road has completely disappeared and all that’s left is a rusting metal hulk, almost completely overgrown by jungle.

In Kindu he contacts the local UN station (‘Hi, I’m a white jounralist’) which agrees to convey him in one of their river patrol boats 150k north, to the riverside settlement (not a town, just a few huts on the muddy bank) of Lowa. Here the friendly, civilised UN sailors set him ashore, with much shaking of heads over his folly, and Butcher, very scared, approaches some local Congolese lounging near huge wooden canoes. He is greatly relieved when one of them agrees to take him by canoe, or pirogue, the 200k by river further north to the town of Ubundu. This man, Malike Bade, quickly recruits three other oarsmen and off they set.

Ubundu, the ruined town which had once been the thriving Belgian port of Ponthierville, marks the start of the 150k or so of rapids and waterfalls collectively (still) named the Stanley Falls. Butcher has to transfer from the river to dry land and hitches a ride with some motorcyclists who work for a western charity (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’), who have just delivered supplies to Ubundu and are now returning to their base at Kisangani, the big settlement which marks the end of the Stanley Falls.

It’s on this leg that he has the haunting experience of stumbling across a rail from the railway the Belgians built running north-south parallel to the river, now not only abandoned but completely buried by the tropical jungle (pages 248 to 249).

It was one of the defining moments of my journey through the Congo. I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards. (p.249)

Kisangani is the first town in nearly 1,000 kilometres which has proper roads, car, electric power, hotels worth the name, and running water, and bed with clean sheets, so he has an orgy of showers and sleeping and eating proper food, and then more showers and more eating and sleeping.

He discovers Kisangani may look like a big functioning town but most of the infrastructure here, as everywhere else in Congo, is in ruins – the ruined railway station and the ruined harbour, the riverside cranes which look so impressive from a distance but haven’t worked for decades, broken beyond repair:

a shell, prone to spasms of political anarchy and chaotically administered by inept, corrupt local politicians…It owed what little stability it had to the artificial props of a large UN force and foreign aid workers. (p.255)

And the local politicians do everything they can to undermine even these fragile elements of stability. A few months before he arrived in Congo there had been conflict in the profoundly unstable Bukavu region far to the east on the Rwandan border, with reports of Rwandan forces massacring Congolese. Instead of calming opinion, Kisangani’s officials inflamed it and blamed the deaths on the UN for failing to protect the Bukavese, with the result that angry mobs went on the rampage, looting then setting fire to UN buildings, ransacking aid organisations’ offices and warehouses, while the so-called police stood by or even joined in.

When you read of events like this you wonder, why are we bothering to give money to help people who are so absolutely determined to ruin themselves?

I heard heartbreaking stories about corrupt Congolese officials pocketing aid money intended for local public-health workers, and local soldiers not just looting aid equipment, but brazenly asking for cash to hand it back to its rightful owners. Many in the aid community spent their time counting the days until their contracts were up and they could go back to the real world. (p.285)

A Catholic missionary, Father Leon, tells him about the notorious massacre of monks and gang rape of nuns which took place here in 1964 (24 November 1964, to be precise), was widely reported, and helped crystallise world opinion that Congo was slipping back into Stone Age barbarism (pages 270 to 274).

After five days Butcher moves out of his hotel and into the last large mission being run in the city, by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. After two weeks of sounding out local ship crews and NGOs, trying to find a boat which will take him down the river, after numerous disappointments, Butcher eventually secures a ride on a UN patrol boat (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’) which will take him the 1,000 kilometres down the river to the port of Mbandaka.

On the way he becomes ill and weak with fever so that by the time he arrives at Mbandaka, he just can’t face another week or two or three hustling for his next ride down the river. Mbandaka is much smaller and more ruinous than Kisanagani was, so there isn’t even a hotel. God knows where he’d stay. Whereas the UN riverboat captain had told him that a UN helicopter service left the following morning for Kinshasa.

Reluctantly, but with great relief, Butcher travels the 600k from Mbandaka to the country’s capital, Kinshasa by helicopter. Here he is put up in the amazingly luxurious gated compound owned by a major international mining company, which won lucrative contracts by helping with the smooth transition of power after wily old Laurent Kabila was unexpectedly assassinated (16 January 2001) and succeeded by his completely inexperienced son, Joseph Kabila, aged just 30 at the time.

Only after days of showers, lots of sleep, taking a variety of medicines, eating proper food and drinking clean water in this rich, privileged western enclave, does Butcher feel human again, and in a position to decide what to do next. He consults with the senior guy minding the mining company compound who explains that there are no buses or taxis in Kinshasa. The only possible option is to pay to have one of the mining company’s cars and driver drive him along the only remaining road in the entire country (recently refurbished with foreign aid money) the 350k to the Atlantic port at Boma. So that is what he does.

In total the journey took him ‘six harrowing weeks’, 44 days, and was a dazzling, deeply depressing insight into the state of contemporary Africa.

Butcher’s bleak view of Africa

As the Telegraph‘s Africa correspondent, Butcher is amusingly blunt: Africa is fucked, that’s his basic position. African nations were screwed by the colonial powers from the Congress of Berlin to independence (the 1880s to the 1960s); then suffered epic civil wars and/or the extended rule of vicious kleptocrats; and have now mostly fallen into states of disrepair, degradation, police states, autocracies, characterised by epic corruption, horrible everyday violence, and the regular occurrence of coups or civil wars.

The one constant through all these episodes was the heavy undertow of human suffering. It gnawed away at every African epoch I read about, no matter whether it was caused by nineteenth-century colonial brutes or twenty-first century despots. Generations of Africans have suffered the triumph of disappointment over potential, creating the only continent on the planet where the normal rules of human development and advancement simply don’t apply.

It was this sense of stagnation that troubled me most as I worked my way through my reading list. Sub-Saharan Africa has forty-one separate countries of stunning variety – from parched desert to sweaty rainforest, from wide savannah to snow-tipped volcano – and yet as I did my background research, the history of these varied countries merged into a single, pro forma analysis…as crude as the underlying assumption: that African nations are doomed to victim status.

By the time I started working in Africa as a journalist in 2000, its patina of despair had thickened to impenetrability… (p.4)

Certainly, when it comes to Congo, Butcher regards it as a country which has comprehensively gone to ruin, a place which has not only ceased developing but is actively undeveloping, moving at speed back into pre-20th century, pre-industrial times.

The failure of the Congo is so complete that its silent majority – tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery – are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you. (p.289)

Butcher has a map from 1961 which shows all the railways, roads, airports, mines and towns built by the Belgians. Now almost all of them are abandoned and have faded back into the jungle. The Great War has left the huge territory divided between regional powers, armies and militias or just local bandits, any of whom might stop and shoot you for no reason.

Butcher is continually, vehemently rude about the white man, about colonialists, about outsiders who came into Congo, and is much consumed by the white supremacist, racist, arrogance which thought it knew what was best for the Congolese. Again and again he makes the same point.

And yet very often, in the very next paragraph, he goes on to describe at great length, and very upsettingly, just how completely Congo was devastated by its kleptocratic rulers, by Mobutu and his clique in faraway Kinshasa, who developed the cult of the leader of the nation while all the while stealing every last dollar from their people, building grotesquely luxurious palaces and villas, buying scores of properties around the world, while the infrastructure of entire provinces such as Katanga collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle.

And then he goes on to describe the work of the United Nations which strives hard to bring the warring sides in Congo’s endless conflicts to the negotiating table, which expends a small fortune trying to police the ceasefire at locations all across this country as large as a continent. For example, the story of Kisangani which saw horrific levels of violence in various civil conflicts, whose infrastructure and economy collapsed, and is nowadays only just about propped up by the UN and western NGOs, when the local population aren’t ransacking them.

The point being that, no matter how woke, anti-colonial and politically correct Butcher tries to be in his editorialising, the blindingly clear conclusion from his long, gripping narrative is that the Congolese simply cannot rule themselves. (p.319).

As soon as they tried to (June 1960) the place collapsed into a series of civil wars along with tribal massacres on a hair-raising scale, and now, as he writes (2004), 43 years after independence, Butcher’s journey amounts to an odyssey through a country which has not only failed to develop but is, to use his powerful neologism, undeveloping, with communities all across the country deprived of the clean water, electricity, communications, industry, travel infrastructure, even minimal education, even the most basic medical facilities, all things they took for granted under the Belgians.

Now it’s all gone, decayed, corroded, overgrown, crumbled to dust, and the country has reverted to its African origins: impenetrably difficult to travel across, riddled with disease (cholera from the water, malaria from the ubiquitous mosquitos) and infested with blood-thirsty, savage warrior bands, who arrive out of nowhere, kill all the men, rape all the women, burn the village to the ground, then disappear back into the jungle.

It’s a tropical hell. It’s Hieronymus Bosch in the jungle.

Summary

As I’ve probably stated at too great a length, I was unhappy with Butcher’s journalistic and rather superficial descriptions of many key aspects of Congo’s modern history. And I am gently mocking of the contradiction that, despite his insistent criticism of colonialism and white racism and imperial exploitation etc, it is only because he is a white westerner and (relatively) rich that he can pay the locals to ferry him wherever he wants, waltz into UN offices anywhere in the country and not only get their attention but persuade them to help him out (by boat, by bike, by helicopter). He’s a white man. Of course they’ll help.

But what I haven’t emphasised enough is that Butcher is also a cracking writer, with a great eye for detail. His descriptions of the jungle, the ruined settlements, primitive villages or scary cities (like Kisangani) are vivid and compelling. It’s a gripping, exciting read.

And also, Butcher has a knack for interviewing people or getting them to tell him about themselves and stories about their trade, village, town, or local history. Obviously these stories are tidied up and made fit for western consumption, he’s a journalist, that’s what he does. But he talks to a wide range of people who begin to build up a sense of opinions and experiences from right across this vast country.

(There are obvious omissions: he never speaks to anyone from any of the armed militias which, according to his interviewees, roam so much of the jungle, emerging to carry out unspeakable atrocities, but then journalists rarely do. They’re not the kind of people who make for compliant and articulate interviewees and so their voices are consistently absent from most western accounts.)

So although there are better books to go to in order to to understand the recent political and military history of the Congo, Butcher’s sweaty, fearful, sleepless, buttock-bruising account gives you a really vivid feel for what the country and its actual population – thousands of miles from the slick government spokesmen and official narratives of downtown Kinshasa – are really like. And a vivid and almost overwhelming sense of the dreadful fate, almost complete social collapse back into the Stone Age, which so much of it has undergone.

On the long slow journey down the river aboard a UN patrol boat (more accurately, a primitive tug or ‘pusher’) Butcher finds himself audience to an impassioned diatribe by the Malaysian captain, Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, who explains that Malaysia, like Congo, was colonised for centuries; Malaysia like Congo was subject to a cruel racist colonial masters (the British); Malaysia gained independence about the same time as Congo (1957 and 1960); Malaysia like Congo was dragged into Cold War conflicts. And yet, 50 years later, Malaysia is part of the world, has achieved great things in education and health, has a booming economy, they even host a Grand Prix every year. While Congo is collapsing year by year into pre-industrial, Stone Age poverty. Why? Why has Malaysia stormed ahead and Congo fallen so far behind? The skipper:

had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa? (p.310)

Credit

Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher was first published by Chatto and Windus in 2007. References are to the 2008 Vintage paperback edition.

More Africa reviews

Africa reviews

Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck (2010)

In Africa an archaic social organisation collides with the supremacy of a technical civilisation that causes the former to fall apart without replacing it…simply by being ourselves , we destroy traditions that were sometimes hard but venerable, and we offer as a replacement only white trousers and dark glasses, in addition to a little knowledge and a vast longing.
(from the diary of Vladimir Drachoussoff, a Russo-Belgian agriculture engineer in the 1940s)

Kimbanguism

Simon Kimbangu was born the son of a traditional Congolese healer in 1899. Taken in by British Baptist missionaries, he became a catechist i.e. highly instructed in the faith, before, in 1921, having a revelation that he himself had miraculous powers, given directly by Jesus Christ. Simon healed a dying woman (named Kintondo, p.146) and stories about his healing powers spread like wildfire, that he healed the deaf and blind, that he even raised a woman from the dead. From all over the region people abandoned their fields and markets and flocked to behold the saviour.

The authorities in the shape of district commissioner Léon Morel quickly became alarmed, van Reybrouck saying the Protestant missionaries (who had trained Simon) took a moderate and sympathetic view of his teachings, but the Catholics lined up with the colonial authorities to find Kimbangu a threat to order and conformity (p.149).

Kimbagu was arrested and put through a show trial, without the benefit of a defence lawyer. Van Reybrouck gives us extensive quotes from the transcript of the trial and points out its similarities to the trial of Jesus Christ, another religious zealot shopped by the religious establishment who the prosecuting authorities found difficult to convict of any particular crime. The part of Pilate was played by commander Amadeo De Rossi (p.149). The result was a foregone conclusion and Kimbagu was sentenced to death when, to everyone’s surprise, he was given a personal reprieve by the Belgian monarch, King Albert, the sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and he did indeed spend the rest of his life in a Belgian prison, most of it in solitary confinement, 30 years in a small cell, longer than Nelson Mandela.

The authorities tries to suppress Kimbagu’s followers, arresting them, sending them to remote parts of the Congo, outlawing his sect, sending his chief followers to camps fenced with barbed wire where they were subjected to forced labour, as many as one in five dying in the process (p.152). But this policy had the perverse result of spreading the faith throughout the country, with witnesses appearing all over to testify to miracles and healings performed by the imprisoned master. The result is that Kimbaguism has become a solidly established religion, a spinoff from Christianity in the style of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons. Today around 10% of the population of the Congo are followers, with devotees and churches established in many other countries.

Van Reybrouck not only devotes an extended passage to Kimbagu’s biography and trial but makes a personal pilgrimage to what has become the Kimbanguists’ holy city, Nkamba, where he describes the peaceful atmosphere, and then interviews a leading figure in the church, Papa Wanzungasa, one hundred years old and still going strong. Indeed Kimbanguism is now a recognised religion. Some 10% of the population of Congo are followers. Papa Wanzungasa tells van Raybrouck about the early days of the movement, and describes how his own family members were forced to convert to Catholicism or sent to labour camps in the 20s and 30s, how the true believers held secret conventicles in the jungle, using coded messages to rendezvous at safe spots like the early Christians meeting underground in ancient Rome (p.153).

Van Reybrouck broadens the story out to place the Kimbanguists in context among a number of other charismatic religions which broke out in the Congo between the wars: Ngunzism, a spinoff from Kimbanguism which was overtly anti-colonial; Mpadism, founded by Simon-Pierre Mpadi, whose followers engaged in ecstatic dances; Matswanism, founded by First World War veteran André Matdwa; the Kitawala, the name a corruption of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ magazine, the Watchtower; and many more.

And then van Reybrouck gives a brilliant sociological explanation for all this, explaining that the new charismatic sects arose in precisely the parts of Congo where traditional life and beliefs had been most disrupted by European intervention, Kimbanguism in the coastal region of Bas (or Lower) Congo, the Kitawala (which grew to become the second largest indigenous religion after Kimbanguism), in the highly developed mining region of Katanga, in the far south-east of the country.

In all instances, then, it was a response to the disruption or destruction of the old tribal beliefs and social systems, their very imperfect replacement by zealous but thin Christianity, and maybe most important of all, to the simple fact that most Congolese, after half a century of promises, remained second rate citizens in their own country, most of them caught up in conditions of semi-forced labour to vast European mining and agricultural businesses, which ruthlessly exploited them and their entire families, uprooting villages, relocating entire populations, with no hope of any end in sight.

All these charismatic native religions offered hope to their adherents that a new and better life, one the colonial authorities had completely failed to deliver, was at hand. The Tupelepele (meaning the Floaters) followed Matemu a Kelenge (known to his followers as Mundele Funji, or ‘White Storm’) who hoped for a return to the time of the ancestors who would restore balance and prosperity for all. Its followers threw their identity papers, tax receipts, bank notes and all the other symbols of the European capitalist system which had ensnared them into the river in anticipation of a Great Liberation (p.162).

David Van Reybrouck’s history of the Congo is a brilliant and stunning achievement, a history like no other, and his extended treatment of Kimbanguism (pages 142 to 154) exemplifies many of its many strong points.

1. Van Reybrouck is not British

Van Reybrouck is not British. Much of the writing about the nineteenth century explorers is by British chaps about British chaps and, despite its best intentions, can’t help falling back into the gravitational pull of admiration for the plucky epic exploits of someone like Livingstone or Burton or Stanley. Van Reybrouck is completely clean of all this cricket and tiffin cultural baggage. He is Belgian. It’s quite a relief to read a book about colonial Africa in which the British are barely mentioned. In this book the European power which takes centre stage are the Belgians, their kings, parliaments and civil service, with walk-on parts for the French, Germans and Portuguese.

(I was pleased to read the first hand account of a Congolese who fought in the Second World War describing his initial transfer to British-run Nigeria where he found that local Africans were treated hugely better than they were in the Congo – properly fed, treated with respect, and he was amazed to discover that black Africans held senior posts in the Nigerian army, something still unthinkable in the segregated Belgian Congo of the 1940s).

2. Van Reybrouck is not a historian

Van Reybrouck is not a historian, at least not by training. He trained as an archaeologist and his first publication was of his doctoral dissertation, From Primitives to Primates. A history of ethnographic and primatological analogies in the study of prehistory, in 2010. Since then he has gone on to write historical fiction, literary non-fiction, novels, poetry and plays, but somehow this archaeological background helps or might explain why his book feels open to a far wider range of influences and sources than a more narrow and conventional history by a professional historian would.

For example, it explains the brilliant and illuminating passage in the Introduction where he imagines five slides, each depicting the life of a 12-year-old boy in the Congo at widely separated moments of time, namely:

90,000 years ago on the shore of Lake Edward (the time and place where the bones of a group of prehistoric humans have indeed been found)
a Pygmy boy in the rainforest two and a half thousand years before Christ
AD 500 as the slow spread of agriculture (specifically, the fast growing ‘new’ crop, the plaintain) as well as basic iron tools arrive at the village where our 12-year-old lives
1560, when the 12-year-old lives in a society where small isolated villages have given way to clans of villages, themselves building up, especially on the savannah, into complex societies which can be called kingdoms, like those of the Kongo, the Lunda, the Luba and the Kuba
1780, when there’s a fair chance our village 12-year-old will have been trafficked by enemy tribes down to the coast and bought by European slavers who ship him off under terrible conditions to Brazil, the Caribbean or the American South

So by just page 23 van Reybrouck has already given us a breath-taking sense of the historical and geographic scope of his account, that it will be a wide-ranging and, above all, beautifully imaginative and creative history.

3. Van Reybrouck is interested in byways

A conventional historian might mention the rise of charismatic sects and religious leaders in the 1920s and 30s as a result of the ongoing deracination of the Congolese population, but it is distinctive of van Reybrouck that he finds the story or angle which brings such a theoretical topic to vivid life. He not only gives us transcripts of the trial of Simon Kimbangu but then travels to the Kimbanguists’ holy city to interview leading adherents for himself.

What I’m driving at is that van Reybrouck’s account not only covers the conventional history and dates and events, but turns over all kinds of odds and ends and details and fragments and insights which bring the country, the Congo, and its people, really vividly to life.

He stumbles across the huge statue of Stanley which used to dominate the main square in Leopoldville, now taken down and dumped inside one of Stanley’s own early steamers in a junk yard in Kinshasa (p.99).

He explains the origins of the pop music and jazz which took Kinshasa by storm between the wars, and its mix of African languages and American jazz with the (rather surprising) importation of Cuban rhythms and sounds to create what is called Congo rumba. He tells us about Camille Feruzi, the great accordion virtuoso of Congolese music, and Wendo Kolosoyi whose guitar playing laid the basis of Congo rumba ‘the most influential musical style in the sub-Saharan Africa of the twentieth century’ (p.168). African Jazz ‘the most popular band in the Congo on the 1950s’ led by Joseph Kabasele.

He mentions the godfather of Congolese literature, Paul Lomami-Tshibamba, who published elegant essays immediately after the Second World War questioning colonialism and was arrested and beaten in prison for his trouble before fleeing into exile in the (French-controlled) Republic of Congo, across the river (p.170). I immediately went looking for his first novel, Ngando, and am very irked to discover it has never been translated into English.

His book is studded with scores of other facts and byways and insights about Congo and its social and cultural and musical and artistic and social life which combine to build up a much more vivid and colourful portrait of the country than any purely ‘historical’ account could do.

4. Van Reybrouck has carried our many interviews

Van Reybrouck makes the commonly made observation that so many histories of Africa omit the voices of actual Africans – the difference is that he has done something about it. From his first trip to Congo in 2003, van Reybrouck sought out and interviewed the oldest people he could find, eye witnesses who saw at first hand the events they describe, or had them from parents or grandparents.

It is typical of van Reybrouck that he travelled to the Kimbanguist holy city to see for himself. Historians working from colonial records in libraries and archives don’t do that. Van Reybrouck combines history with the vivid sense of journey and place of a good travel writer. And then, the qualities of a good journalist who knows how to make an interviewee at ease and extract the good stuff from a wide range of old timers.

So there are two types of Congolese testimony, written and oral.

a) People van Reybrouck spoke to

One had informants who had seen a lot but had little to say, and one had informants who had little to say but talked a lot anyway. (p.220)

‘Étienne’ Nkasi (introduced page 6), over a hundred years old, who remembered the name of Stanley as a living presence, who knew Simon Kimbangu when he was a boy, who remembered the building of the first railway from Matadi to Stanley Pool, and much more. His story weaves in and out of the main narrative so he appears on page 117, witnessing the early development of Kinshasa.

Victor Masundi (introduced page 75), aged 87 and blind, grew up in the Scheutist mission in Boma, and Camille Mananga (page 76) aged 73 recounted his grandfather’s memories of first being taken into a Christian mission.

Colonel Eugène Yoka, a former air force colonel, tells van Reybrouck about his father who had been a soldier who served in World War 1, and that his grandfather, a Bangal tribesman from Équateur province, had been one of the first recruits to the Force Publique (p.77).

Albert Kudjabo and Paul Panda Farnana, two Congolese who volunteered to fight in the Great War to defend the ‘motherland’ Belgium and were promptly captured by the Germans and spent four long years in a prisoner of war camp. Liberated after the war, Farnana lived for a while in Brussels where he eloquently made the case for the Congolese being treated as adults in their own country (pages 138 and 178).

André Kitardi, veteran of the First World War (pp.129 onwards) and again on pages 185 and 199 where he ends up serving in Palestine. Libert Otenga, the Congolese medic who was transported north into Egypt, then the Middle East, to India and ended up serving in Burma (p.188). Louis Ngumbi who fought for the Allies during World War Two (p.185).

Martin Kabuya, 92, whose grandfather took part in the Sudan campaign, who enrolled in the Congo army, describes his rgandfather’s experiences in the Great War (p.135) and his own role as a Morse code operator in the Second War (p.187).

Hélène Nzimbu Diluzeti, mother of Colonel Yoka, 94-year-old widow of Thomas Masamba Lumoso, a Great War veteran who served for only a few weeks short of the entire duration of the war (pp.135 onwards).

Père Henri de la Kéthulle de Ryhove, a Jesuit missionary in his 80s, nephew of the most famous Belgian missionary to the Congo, Raphaël de la Kéthulle who shares memories of his famous uncle who, alongside schools, built soccer stadiums, swimming pools and the huge Stade Roi Baudouin (pages 172 to 175).

Longin Ngwadi, aged 80 when van Reybrouck speaks to him in Kikwit, largest city of Kwilu Province, in the southwestern part of Congo, born in 1928, baptised by Jesuits, who wanted to become a priest but was rejected by the church hierarchy, so drifted to Kinshasa like so many young men in the 1930s and went on to become one of the first black professional footballers (pages 207 to 211).

Sister Apolline, also 80, a mixed race Congolese nun who started her career as a schoolteacher (p.211). Victoria Ndjoli, the first Congolese woman to get a driving licence (p.212).

Jamais Kolonga subject of a famous Congo rumba song, who’d had a long and varied life, who worked on the docks at Kinshasa as a young man, how his grandfather was converted to Catholicism and sent away two of his three wives, how his father was sent to Catholic school, taught to read and write and got a job with the Belgian company Otraco as manager of the housing district for the native workers, inspected their homes, made speeches to visiting directors and dignitaries and, once, even the king! Appointed to the Otraco works council and then the local council he was one of the first Congolese to have even a slight say in the administration (p.222). Jamais was born in 1935. At home he spoke French with his father, Kikongo with his mother, and Lingala with everyone else (p.223). Jamais went to work for Otraco in 1953 (pages 219 to 224).

b) Written texts recording African testimony and voices

Disasi Makuli (introduced page 29) was born in the early 1870s, son of tribalpeople, grew up in the tribal world and, aged ten, first heard rumours of outsiders raiding into their territory, who they nicknamed the Batambatamba, meaning the slave traders (p.41). Disasi was kidnapped by a gang led by the famous slave trader Tippu Tip. Then he is purchased by Stanley and set free, handed over to the case of the Englishman Anthony Swinburne who managed the small early settlement at Leopoldville. When Swinburne died he aged just 30 in 1889, Disasi found a new home with the British Baptist missionary Anthony Grenfell (p.68). In 1902 he set up one of the first black-run missions in Congo, at Yalemba (p.71). He witnessed at first hand atrocities caused by the Red Rubber Terror (p.89) and had many more adventures before dictating his life story to one of his sons before his death in 1941.

In 1895 a young man named Butungu left for England with a Baptist missionary, John Weeks. A year later he returned home with tall tales of sailing ships and salt water and the miracles he’d seen in London and wrote his stories down in Boloki. ‘It is the only known text by a Congolese from the nineteenth century’ (p.65).

Testimony recorded in official reports about the rubber terror: for example given by Eluo, a man from Esanga, about red rubber atrocities (p.89).

The long and colourful life of Lutunu, born at the end of the nineteenth century, as recorded by Belgian artist Jeanne Maquiet-Tombeau (The Life of the Congolese Chief Lutunu, 1952), given as a slave by chief Makitu to Stanley (p.102).

The memories of Joseph Njoli, a man from Équateur province, as recorded by a missionary and describing the imposition of the heavy tax burden on native workers levied from after the Great War (p.128).

Excerpts from the articles of Paul Lomami-Tshibamba (pages 170 and 216). An editorial from one of the colony’s most popular papers, L’Avenir Colonial (p.177).

The memoirs of André Yav, who worked all his life as a ‘boy’ in Elizabethville and wrote his recollections in the 1960s (p.123). He is quoted remembering the big miners strike during the war, which was violently suppressed by the authorities in December 1941 and the long and bitter legacy it left (p.192).

The wonderfully insightful diaries of wartime Congo kept by Vladi Souchard, pen name of Vladimir Drachoussoff, ‘a young Belgian agricultural engineer of Russian extraction’, pages 194 to 199.

Chapters

The quickest way to convey the structure of the book is to list its chapters. Each one has a ‘colourful’ title, such as a quote, and then a factual sub-title indicating the period covered. Here are the factual sub-titles and dates covered:

Central Africa draws the attention of the East and West 1870 to 1885
Congo under Leopold II 1885 to 1908
The early years of the colonial regime 1908 to 1921
Growing unrest and mutual suspicion in peacetime 1921 to 1940
The war and the deceptive calm that followed 1940 to 1955
A belated colonisation, a sudden independence 1955 to 1960
[Assassination of Patrice Lumumba 1960]
The turbulent years of the first republic 1960 to 1965
Mobutu gets down to business 1965 to 1975
A marshal’s madness 1975 to 1990
Democratic opposition and military confrontation 1990 to 1997
The Great War of Africa 1997 to 2002
New players in a wasted land 2002 to 2006
Hope and despair in a newborn democracy 2006 to 2010

Between the wars

All the books I’ve read recently were about the Victorian explorers of central Africa and ended around 1910 with the death of King Leopold and his handing over the Congo to the Belgian state to become a proper colony. It’s the period after that which interests me, from the Edwardians to independence and van Reybrouck’s does a wonderful job of explaining that period, both in terms of conventional history, but also with his extensive use of individual biographies, memories, interviews and anecdotes.

The period saw the real entrenchment of colonialism but also the development and changing phases of that colonialism. Much happened but the key strands were:

Incorporation into global capitalist economy

In the 1890s the economy was a barter one. Even King Leopold’s rapacious Force Publique in effect bartered for rubber or paid forced labour exclusively with rations. The period through and after the First World War saw the introduction of money, Congo was incorporated into the global capitalist economy, with the introduction of contracts and wages (pages 127 and 157).

The budding industrialisation of Congo led not only to an initial form of urbanisation and proletarianisation, but also to a far-reaching process of monetisation. (p.127)

And once you have money i.e. once you have transitioned a population from barter and traditional forms of exchange, to money, the state can control huge aspects of life, starting with contracts for wages, all kinds of laws about commercial dealings. Previously individuals worked out their own forms of exchange; now the state intervened in everything. Most of all, the state can now introduce and collect taxes. Taxes for what? Why, to pay for the state.

These economic, trade, financial practices had been introduced across Europe over centuries (think of the evolution of money and banking) and so, like the frog in the slowly heating up saucepan, everyone in the West had not only got used to them but regarded them as ‘natural’.

It’s only when you see all these instruments of state and social control being imposed on a completely virgin society that you realise how exploitative and controlling they were.

Industrialisation and proletarianisation

Industralisation and ‘development’ all sound fine until you realise their inevitable concomitant, which is the creation of a proletariat. Again, since many of the workers in the new factories or in the huge mines being created in the east of the country or on the vast new plantations growing coffee, cotton, tobacco and other export crops were only one generation removed from illiterate tribal villagers living on subsistence agriculture, the process was all the more dramatic and defined (p.125).

Between 1908 and 1921…Congo experienced its first wave of industrialisation, thereby prompting the proletarianisation of its inhabitants. (p.125)

You can see why Marxist ideology gained such traction in the developing world or Third World as it came up to independence. In Europe and America capitalism had developed a very large middle and lower middle class which benefited from it, which enjoyed a standard of living to which the more skilled workers aspired. These acted as a kind of social ballast, meaning that the industrial proletariat or working class, whatever you call it, even at their most radicalised, were never in a majority, never had the potential to overthrow the state.

Whereas in most countries coming up to independence, the clear majority of the population was treated as second class citizens and the great majority of them exploited by European employers and screwed for ever higher taxes by a state biased entirely to protecting Europeans and maximising their wealth.

When you add in the race aspect, the notion that whites exploited blacks, so that when the whites were overthrown and blacks were in power, paradise would come – and you have a very heady mix of ideas and ideologies and hopes.

Population explosion

Schools, hospitals, better nutrition, a more varied diet and medical advances such as inoculation against the worst tropical diseases, meant that the 1930s and 40s saw a population explosion (p.164). This took a very particular form, namely the explosive growth of cities. Word spread there were jobs, decent housing, money and all the excitements of modern urban life just a hundred miles from the traditional village where you lived. The village denoted crushing poverty, a corrupt chieftain and wizened elders who married all the young women. Farming was back breaking work and the crops grown were specified by the state according to unknown plans or you might be dragooned into one of the mandatory road building schemes.

So you upped sticks and hitched to the city to take your chances. Between 1920 and 1940 the population of Kinshasa doubled to 50,000. (Remember that Stanley founded it from nothing and named it Léopoldville just 40 years earlier, in 1881.) Elizabethville (named after the wife of King Albert of Belgium), centre of the mining industry in the south-east of the country, double in size between 1923 and 1929, from 16,000 to 23,000. Huge investments in the 1920s in both the mining industry and in transport infrastructure led to Katanga province becoming one of the world’s major copper ore producers.

In 1919 the big Union Minière de Haut-Katanga corporation based in Katanga employed 8,500 workers; by 1928 it was 17,000. In 1920 there were 123,000 salaried black in the country; in 1929 there were 450,000 (p.127). By 1945, what with the huge demand for metals and foodstuffs generated by the war, the number of payrolled workers had risen to 800,000, possibly as many as 1 million (p.191).

Van Reybrouck uses the decision of Union Minière to allow workers to bring their wives to the workers’ accommodation as a symbolic moment when many black employees stopped being transitory single men on short term contracts and began to become families with careers. Black men acquired the skills required by a modern urban economy, carpenters, masons, woodworkers, as well as white collar roles such as nurses, clerks, warehouse foremen. And bar and music hall owners and the new jazz musicians who played in them. In the late 1930s the first pensions were introduced by some of the corporations. It was during the 30s, 40s and 50s that a Congolese society was created. The Boy Scouts were introduced. Football. Music.

Repression

As the colonial state extended its grasp out across all regions of the country, it faced two kinds of revolt: one the old traditional, rural one from the country and the other a new, urban one, fomented by workers and unions. This explains why ‘almost all the prisons in Congo were built between 1930 and 1935 (p.160).

When a young Belgian named Maximilien Balot, visiting a village in Pende country to collect taxes, mishandled the situation, was murdered and his body hacked to pieces, the colonial government sent in soldiers who killed at least 400 natives, probably more (p.163).

Elsewhere, strikes among mine workers or dockers were put down with force, although actual unions weren’t very active. Most were set up by the white employers and so were another symbol of repression rather than vehicles of protest and negotiation. As late as 1955, of about 1.2 million Congolese on payrolls, only 6,160 belonged to a union (p.214).

What is an évolué?

Against this background of industrialisation and modernisation, the rapid growth of urban centres with all the features of urban life i.e. modern jobs, modern accommodation, electricity, telephones and entertainment in the form of clubs and bars and cinemas, it’s no surprise that an educated black bourgeoisie emerged. The Belgian authorities used the French term ‘évolué’ meaning, literally, people who had evolved from their primitive illiterate tribal culture to become well educated, assimilated urbanites, people who dressed, walked and talked like Europeans.

An évolué had benefited from post-primary school education, had a good income, was serious about his work, monogamous (polygamy was one of the great indicators of the tribal mindset), dressed, walked and talked in the European manner. He was proud of owning Western consumer goods like a bicycle or record player (p.215).

Like any other class rising up into one above, they were very conscious of their new status and formed groups, clubs and circles to protect it. They read and they wrote. The first Congolese writers come from this caste such as Paul Lomami-Tshibamba. But they were in the classic piggy-in-the-middle position. After the Second World War they wrote the first tentative essays about greater equality and autonomy for blacks but deep down they wanted to live like whites and be treated like whites. The irony was that, after the war, more white women came and settled in the Congo, a new white middle class came into being, more consumer orientated, with big villas and chauffeur-driven cars and children at private school.

And at exactly the historic moment when a new black middle class and intelligentsia reached out to them, van Reybrouck portrays white bourgeoisie as withdrawing into its gated communities and enforcing a new, more unbreakable colour bar. If a white journalist took a black colleague into a European bar, conversation stopped. Trains were segregated into black and white. If a black man dived into a swimming pool at a European club, the whites got out (p.216).

They had done everything asked of them, but still the évolués were treated as second class citizens. Van Reybrouck quotes a plaintive petition from the évolués of the small town of Lulabourg, who describe themselves as ‘a new social class…which constitutes a new sort of native middle class’ and concludes plaintively: ‘It is painful to be received as a savage, when one is full of good will’ (p.217).

The authorities made what, in retrospect seem like pitiful attempts to mollify these pleas. In 1948 they declared the évolués could apply for a ‘certificate of civil merit’. Holders of this grand certificate would no longer be administered corporal punishment and, if charged with an offence, be tried before a European judge. They had access to white wards in hospitals and were allowed to walk through white neighbourhoods after 6pm (!).

Unsurprisingly this was met with resentment and so the authorities introduced the carte d’immatriculation in 1952 which gave the évolué exactly the same civil rights as Europeans, most notably the ability to send their children to European schools. However, in order to qualify you had to submit to a humiliating inspection of your home life, which scrutinised every aspect of your home from the sleeping arrangements right down to the state of the cutlery and the kitchen.

Very few évolués volunteered to undergo this humiliation and even fewer passed the stringent criteria with the result that, in 1958, from a population of 14 million, only 1,557 civil merits were handed out and only 217 registration cards (p.219).

All of which explains why so many of the early leaders of the African nationalist parties in the Belgian Congo were members of the frustrated évolué class.

A succession of raw materials

Congo was victim of a kind of ironic curse: the conquering Europeans discovered the country possessed a whole series of raw materials which brought the exploiting whites vast wealth but very little benefit and a lot of forced labour and misery for the native population. Van Reybrouck points out these raw materials formed a kind of relay race: just as one material ran dry or ceased to be needed by Western countries, another took its place (p.119).

Thus ivory was the commodity which attracted traders to Congo in the 1870s and 80s. But just as supplies of ivory were being exhausted in the 1890s, there was a sudden explosion of demand for rubber sparked by the invention of pneumatic tyres for bicycles and cars and Congo turned out to be home to millions of wild rubber vines, which the population was terrorised into milking throughout the 1890s and 1900s.

Then the rubber boom collapsed because so many rubber tree plantations were opening in the Far East. In 1901 rubber had accounted for 87% of Congo’s exports, by 1928 just 1% (p.119). But just as the bottom fell out of the rubber market, Congo was discovered to be one of the world’s great sources of precious metals and minerals, chiefly copper, which underwent an explosion of demand during the First World War.

The British and American shells fired at Passendale, Ypres, Verdun and on the Somme had brass casings made from 75% copper mined in the east Congo region of Katanga. The bullet shells were made of nickel, which is 80% copper (p.137). There was steady demand between the wars, and then another huge spike 1939 to 1945.

And then, just when demand for copper dropped following WW2, its extensive supplies of uranium made Congo’s mines out east of permanent interest to the Americans (p.191). And when demand for this fell with the end of the Cold War in 1990, a new demand was opened up with the spread of personal computers and then mobile phones, which require cobalt and other rare metals which are found in the eastern part of the country.

Conclusion

My reading of Eric Hobsbawm’s history of the industrial revolution and the age of capital is that the industrial revolution was a kind of catastrophe. Contemporaries marvelled at the power and size of the new machines, especially the new railway engines unleashed on the world in the 1840s, but were puzzled and horrified at how such incredible ingenuity and engineering prowess seemed to make a large part of the population poorer than it had been before, the puzzle Karl Marx set out to solve and which his devotee Hobsbawm echoed 100 years later.

Nobody knew then what we know now about the cyclical nature of capitalist boom and bust, about successive waves of technological, consumer and marketing innovation. After the second industrial revolution provided a cornucopia of new inventions into the 1870s and 80s it was possible to believe that the new sciences of economics and sociology would guide society towards a technological utopia.

What is quite obvious is that nobody at the time understood the forces driving Western societies and the entire world forward with such relentless energy to a series of disasters: from the prolonged depression of the 1870s and 1880s which nobody understood, through to the gathering rivalries of the 1900s which led to the unprecedented cataclysm of the Great War and then to the thirty years of chaos which followed – the instability in Europe, America and Asia crystallised by the collapse of the entire financial system in 1929 followed by the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe and Asia which ten stricken years later plunged the world into an even greater cataclysm.

My point is that Stanley and Leopold and the sadists in the Force Publique and then much of the colonial administration and the white Belgian masters certainly made countless mistakes, indulged in lies, extortion, torture and murder, or the relentless humiliation of colonial racism. And I’m not suggesting we ‘forgive’ them or let them off the hook. But at the same time this epic account, for me, brings out how humans in all areas, at all levels of society, don’t really know what’s going on. How could we? We can’t see the future from whose perspective the general trends of things even begin to make some sort of sense.

Who today can really predict the long-term impact of the digital revolution, of COVID-19 or global warming? After all the colour and vibrancy of van Reybrouck’s brilliant account I was left with a profound sense of humanity’s helplessness, a blinkered inability to understand the situation or manage ourselves which the next sections of the book – about the rush to independence, followed by civil war, military coups, corrupt dictatorship, political chaos, catastrophic war and social collapse are not, I suspect, going to do anything to disabuse me of.

Credit

Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck was published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij in 2010. All references are to the paperback version of the English translation by Sam Garrett, published by Fourth Estate in 2015.

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Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck (2010)

Kimbanguism

1. Van Reybrouck is not British

2. Van Reybrouck is not a historian

3. Van Reybrouck is interested in byways

4. Van Reybrouck has carried our many interviews

a) People van Reybrouck spoke to

b) Written texts recording African testimony and voices

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A succession of raw materials

Conclusion

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