It takes much mental energy just to shackle himself to the present moment.
(Manu, central protagonist of Freight Dogs, page 322)
This is Giles Foden’s sixth and most recent novel. It’s a substantial work, weighing in at 400 pages. Like his first four novels it’s set in Africa and is based around fraught, politically and historically significant events. The first four were set during, respectively:
- the evil rule of Idi Amin (The Last King of Scotland)
- one of the main sieges of the Boer War (Ladysmith)
- the 1998 embassy bombing in Dar es Salaam (Zanzibar)
- the Anglo-German naval conflict on Lake Tanganyika during World War One (Mimi and Toutou Go Forth)
This one is set in Rwanda in 1996 i.e. two years after the Rwandan genocide (April 1994 to July 1994), just as the invasion of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda, the so-called First Congo War, is about to take place, and then follows the protagonist over the following six fraught, violent years in Congo’s history.
The plot centres on Manu (diminutive of Immanuel) Kwizera, son of a peasant family living on the Zaire side of the border with Rwanda (near the village of Pendele in North Kivu). Manu is a Munyamulenge i.e. a member with his family of the Banyamulenge, ethnic Tutsis who came into the South Kivu province of Congo from Rwanda between one and two centuries ago and considered themselves settled Congolese until North and South Kivu became ethnically polarised as a result of the genocide and also of Congo’s president, Mobutu, stirring up trouble, portraying them as alien immigrants and a threat to the majority Hutu population.
Manu has been lucky enough to be sent to a Catholic boarding school in the provincial capital Bukavu, which is where the story opens. The story follows him as he is caught up in the snowballing violence in the aftermath of the genocide then invasion.
‘Freight dogs’ is the rather flattering slang phrase which freelance pilots of freight planes jokily apply to themselves (p.59):
‘That’s the kind of risk-taking people we crazy freight dogs are!’ (p.75).
The bulk of the story describes how Manu wangles his way from endangered peasant into the world of these cargo pilots, running guns and whatever else is required between militias, armies and guerrillas, for the fee of gold or diamonds or whatever other loot they can bargain for.
The book is divided into six parts. [I’ve added the text in square brackets.]
- The Aftermath: June to November 1996 [of the Rwanda genocide]
- Seven to Heaven: November 1996 to May 1997 [the First Congo War]
- The Interbellum: June 1997 to August 1998 [between the two Congo wars]
- Fighting Fire, Treading Water: August 1998 to February 2002 [the Second Congo War]
- The Lights of Europe: March 2004 to December 2006 [Amsterdam and Belgium]
- The Deconfliction Zone: January 2007 [back in Uganda]
I didn’t like this book, for the following reasons:
1. History and footnotes
The novel is hag-ridden by the history. I’ve just read two very detailed histories of Rwanda (by Gerard Prunier and Michela Wrong) and Foden’s novel, at least to begin with, feels like a clumsy rehash of all the key facts, it feels like a Wikipedia article listing all the events from 1994 to 1996, with a very light skin of fiction laid over it.
Foden has so much factual research to cram into the text, especially at the start as he rushes to give the complicated backdrop to the genocide then to the first Congo War, that I was surprised he didn’t add it as footnotes. In fact very often it feels like footnotes:
This figure looked like a large bag of milk (milk is often served in bags in this part of Africa). (p.41)
The Lendu are the other ethnic group around Bunia, historically in violent conflict with the Hema over land usage. (p.136)
Take the scores of times Foden gives encyclopedia-style backgrounders on the major towns and cities of Congo, on ethnic groups, on colonial history, on the ongoing relations between Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire, on the origin of various guerrilla groups and so on.
Or when Foden just includes newspaper cuttings to convey the world of politics and fast moving events (p.110) or cites an old colonial-era work on Bantu mythology (p.179) or characters overhear radio news bulletins which handily update us on the developing political background.
Or the factual backgrounders on non-war-related subjects, such as the extended passage about East Congo volcanoes, or the migration of crested cranes, national bird of Uganda (p.253).
Or the very staged scene where Manu walks around the Belgian Royal Museum of Africa, staggered by its artificiality and lies, itself a flimsy pretext for shoehorning in some of the facts about the atrocious rule of Leopold II (p.305).
Or the extended sequence describing what it’s like to work in an abattoir. Or the different breeds of African cow. Or how to run a potato farm. Not to mention the technical details about flying a plane which recur throughout the story. The book is just overflowing with often only partially-digested background research.
You know the expression, ‘show don’t tell’. Well, fairly regularly Foden tells, he tells you what’s happening and what to think about it:
As Cogan [the pilot] fiddles with a lever…Manu is already reinventing, becoming someone else, despite constantly thinking back to the someone he was before. (p.58)
At moments it’s like reading the SparkNotes of a novel alongside the novel itself and, after a while, realising you prefer the Notes. They’re better written and get to the point faster.
The narrator or the characters are often fully aware of the exact nature of events and their significance, as they occur, in a way nobody in real life is. The characters anachronistically show the benefits of much later knowledge, but at the time of the original events.
For example, for the last fifteen years or so there’s been a growing awareness among western commentators that the RPF regime of President Paul Kagame is a repressive security state, which carried out atrocities against unarmed Hutu and Congolese civilians right from the start (i.e. 1996). See Michela Wrong’s devastating indictment, Do Not Disturb. But even a liberal sceptic like Wrong admits that for years and years after the genocide she believed the RPF line that they were knights in shining armour who ended the genocide and sought only to kill those responsible for it, during their invasion of Congo. Only slowly did the modern view of events and the very negative view of Kagame’s RPF emerge.
But Foden gives Manu this clear-eyed and authoritative opinion early on in the book. You could argue that that’s because he’s seen RPF troops carrying out terrible massacres but it’s more than that. Manu is a teenage peasant with only a superficial education caught up in terrible and confusing events – but he is given thoughts appropriate to a mature academic commentator, many years his senior, and with the benefit of the subsequent 25 years of history, research and revision.
Manu says nothing, knowing well enough by now about the grinding machine that’s not just Rusyo, but the whole security apparatus of the Rwandan state. (p.93)
How can some peasant brought up on a rural farm possibly know about ‘the whole security apparatus of the Rwandan state’? That’s not the voice of a confused character caught up in bewildering events but of Foden the history buff, benefiting from decades of hindsight and calm detached analysis, projecting his perspective back onto his character for the benefit of the reader.
It feels like Foden is keen to show the reader that he holds the latest (very negative) opinion of Kagame and the RPF, he is itching to convey this information, and so he has his cipher, Manu, think it – completely inappropriately for someone caught up in the middle of events, with no knowledge of how they’re going to pan out.
This is what I mean by saying that the novel is hag-ridden by the history. The history comes first, drives the events, provides the scaffold of the book – and the characters are made to twist and bend to illustrate the history, to come out, on every page, with dialogue and speeches whose sole purpose is to explain the latest developments, always with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, rather than express their psychologies or opinions.
The characters feel like puppets manipulated to dramatise a series of historical events which are far larger than them. This historical hindsight sometimes comes right out into the open. For example, the occasion when Manu hears a reporter on the radio saying the AFDL has taken Kinshasa and Kabila is now president:
He doesn’t say the First Congo War is over because he doesn’t know it’s the first yet but that’s what it is (p.153)
This is the tone of Foden the intrusive narrator emerging as puppet-master or, more precisely, omniscient knower of the historical record, beneficiary of 20 years of hindsight, ensuring that the historical record comes first, is the pre-eminent aspect of the narrative, and the so-called ‘characters’, with their necessarily limited knowledge, come a poor second,
All these history lessons and the frequent authorial nudges telling you what to think and how to interpret things feel claustrophobic, like being cornered by a drunk at a party who’s going to set you straight about the state of the world.
Examples of raw historical background shoehorned into the text or delivered as dialogue
Factual explanations of the complicated background and course of the two Congo wars are continually described in the narration or, more often, in stagey dialogue where characters talk to each other as if they’re quoting from one of Gérard Pruner’s books on the subject.
‘Mai-Mai,’ Cogan says casually, referring to the guerrilla units that have formed to protect local villages from the RPA and Ugandans and FAZ alike. (p.138)
I started keeping a record of pages which contain this kind of factual or explanatory content around page 135 and quickly realised that there’s some on almost every page:
- 130: Foden explains how Nelson Mandela tried to broker a deal between Kabila and Mobutu
- 135: Foden explains the behaviour of the Mai-Mai, for example massacring an entire village on the Massif d’Tombwe
- 136: Foden explains the conflict between the Hema and the Lendu about land ownership around Bunia
- 138: Foden explains the Mai-Mai, ultra-patriotic Congolese militias committed to defending local populations against all incomers
- 139: Foden describes how city after city falls to the AFDL, until Kinshasa is taken and Kabila named president
- 142: Foden describes Mobutu’s palace at Gbadolite, the Division Spéciale Présidentielle, Mobutu exiting in a Russian plane, the abandoned DSP angrily fire on the plane then loot and trash the palace (16 May 1997)
- 149: Foden gives a history of Karonga as a slave trading centre, history of British Nyasaland, Cecil Rhodes, African Lakes Company
- 150: Foden gives anecdotes about Hastings Banda
- 153: Foden describes the flavour of the new Kabila regime e.g. corrupt mineral deals and banyamulenge horse-whipping the locals
- 164: Foden describes Kabila’s unreliable performance of his presidential duties
- 168: Foden explains how diamonds, gold and coltan are becoming the new minerals to smuggle
- 173 to 176, and 181 to 183: Foden gives extended explanations of East Congo volcanoes, their behaviour, definitions of ‘active’, ‘dormant’ etc
- 199: Foden describes the proliferation of rebels groups in the east, Kabila’s erratic behaviour, alienation of his Rwandan and Ugandan backers
- 222 to 226: Foden describes the shooting down of the plane carrying Hutu president of Rwanda Juvénal Habyarimana which triggered the Rwandan genocide, the role of the SAM anti-aircraft missile, the growing rift between the Rwandan and Ugandan armies
- 229: Foden explains how Kabila called for all Rwandan and Ugandan forces to leave Congo ( 27 July 1998)
- 231: Foden explains how the Rwandans and Ugandans reinvaded Congo to overthrow Kabila, thus triggering the Second Congo War
- 235 to 248: Foden gives an extended description of Manu among the pilots hijacked into flying RPA forces to Kitona airport, west of Kinshasa, then his extended forced service during first part of Second Congo War
- 255: Foden explains the proliferation of militias in eastern Congo
- 258: Foden describes the assassination of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, 16 January 2001, and summarises the conspiracy theories about who shot him and why
- 266: Foden explains the failure of various peace treaties to end the second Congo war
- 280: Foden describes the street battles between Rwandan and Uganda forces in Kisangani
On almost every page the reader is bombarded with undigested chunks of historical background information.
2. Convenient coincidences
Related to this forced feeling, is the Zelig aspect of the narrative whereby the protagonist, Manu, just happens to be present at pretty much all the key events in Congo from the start of the narrative in 1996, onwards. The book shares this quality with The Last King of Scotland whose protagonist kept on being at the right place at the right time, meeting all the key players in a series of lucky coincidences which started off by being exciting, then began to be a bit too convenient, and then toppled over into feeling ludicrous and/or horrifically hallucinatory, according to taste.
Same here. When Manu is saved from murderous FAZ soldiers by a squad of AFDL fighters, it isn’t any old troop but the one led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the man handpicked by Rwanda and Uganda to lead the assault into Congo and who was, eventually, to replace Mobutu as president of Congo (p.29).
Later Manu will witness or hear about all the key turning points in the two Congo wars. In a striking scene he and two fellow fright dogs will be present when President Mobutu takes off from the private runway at his vast jungle palace, heading into exile, and confront his enraged troops as they loot the palace. In this respect – the hero being there at key moments, eye witness to historical turning points – it’s very like Last King but without the slowly mounting horror which makes Last King such an intense and, eventually, hallucinatory read.
The main thing about life in the real world is how random most of it is. Foden’s fictions are contrived so that they introduce us to all the key players in a certain set of historical events and stretch the concept of coincidence to snapping point.
I know that Foden’s novels are intended to be serious thrillers and they are certainly ‘serious’ in two senses, 1) that they lack any humour or warmth, and 2) they deal with horrifyingly violent events. And yet when it is revealed that one of the crates of contraband gold which Cogan and Manu pinched from a consignment and buried in secret contains, in fact, not gold but the rocket launcher which shot down Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane and so triggered the Rwanda genocide I burst out laughing, tickled by Foden’s chutzpah in making his hero or colleagues witnesses to every single one of the key events in the historical period.
The coincidences pile up when Foden has Manu among the commercial pilots whose planes are hijacked to fly RPA forces to Kitona airport in the bold but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to unseat Kabila, I was beyond laughing and just marvelled at the way the novel is entirely based on the history, a reskinning of the events in a light covering of ‘fiction’, and Manu, the central character, for all the effort Foden puts in to try and make his feelings believable, little more than a cipher.
In the final scenes, where Manu is absolutely down on his luck, impoverished and immiserated in racist Belgium, the sudden appearance of the old freight dog, Papa, to save and rescue him is presumably meant to be a sensible event but, in my mind prompted the image of the Monty Python cartoon of the clouds opening and angels blowing trumpets. Beyond ludicrous. A fairy tale.
3. The central figure is a cipher
The central character, Manu, isn’t very interesting. He doesn’t have interesting thoughts, he doesn’t have much to say for himself, he’s more of a cipher or front man pasted on top of what often feels like a factual summary of Rwanda’s recent history. ‘Sometimes he hates his own passivity’ (p.227). Exactly. A cork bobbing on the ocean has more character. It doesn’t help that he uses white western and old fashioned diction like ‘assuaged’ and ‘deems’ and ‘presages’. I don’t know exactly what a survivor of the Congo wars would sound like but almost certainly not like a middle-aged, English, public school author.
4. Awkward prose style
Foden’s prose style is really weird. It’s always been unstable: in King of Scotland there were some odd passages and chapters; Ladysmith and Mimi and Toutou use old-fashioned mannerisms and word order but I thought maybe these were tailored to the century-old settings, but they recur here, plus new oddities of phraseology, which I found disrupted my reading on every page.
Foden’s accounts and interpretations of post-genocide Rwandan history didn’t interest me very much because I’ve just read two much better, more thorough and professional accounts – and I wasn’t that interested in the main characters as characters – so the thing that ended up interesting me most in the book was Foden’s weird style.
1. The awkward preposition
There’s his dogged insistence on avoiding a ‘dangling preposition’ (ending a sentence with a preposition) which makes him put propositions in the middle of sentences, thus creating all sorts of unnatural contortions – maybe my obsession with this is irrational but it really bugs me:
- He looks exactly the sort of business-inclined person of whom her evidently prosperous parents would approve. (p.71)
- The demons which have been flitting in his head since the incident with the archbishop and Don Javier, for which he does not know whether he was to blame or not. (p.50)
- Manu reads the grease-stained page of newspaper in which his Rolex came. (p.109)
See how the obsession with not ending a sentence with a proposition leads him into all kinds of unnatural contortions. He prefers to use ‘of which’ as a connector:
- The bigger picture of which their actions that day had played a part… (p.37)
- Birds flitted between mossy branches as they ascended what seemed like a vast flight of basalt-black stairs, finally reaching the flat top of a mountain range, the expanse of which seemed to fill the cavern of the sky. (p.29)
- In the back of this first car, the metal of which was punctured with bullet holes…
I don’t know why this bugged me so much, but I’d have thought it would be more natural and fluent to just write ‘whose’ – ‘whose expanse seemed to fill…’, ‘whose bodywork was punctured with bullet holes’ etc.
- Are they faux amis, like those of which Don Javier used to speak in another context of translation… (p.147)
I looked this whole issue of dangling or hanging prepositions up online and came across the joke sentence allegedly written by Winston Churchill to highlight how stupid this ‘rule’ is and what ridiculous distortions it leads you into once you set off down this road:
“That is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put.”
The aversion to ending a sentence with a proposition is very old fashioned and formal and so sits oddly with other elements in the text, which are trying to be cool, woke and up to date.
- They descend through the dense green, amid which the dirt road winds like a slalom course (p.187)
- The sky is filled with just such a gas-laden plume of which she once warned him. (p.265)
- With visibility reduced, he has to rely on his instruments, with which electrical discharges in the gas cloud are in any case interfering. (p.265)
- He gathers up his few clothes and belongings, making a pile on the bed, before going back out to the kitchen and finding a bag in which to put them. (p.208)
- It’s a different prison from that in which Aisha is being held (p.216)
Why not the simpler easier to read ‘a bag to put them in’ or ‘the one Aisha is being held in’ or ‘which she warned him about’? It sounds trivial, but these sentences, rearranged into unnatural contortions in order to avoid ending with a preposition, occur on every page and help set the tone of Foden’s stilted, awkward prose.
- What Manu notices are the black plastic parts of the recording device that he stole from the journalist outside the court, about which he’d totally forgotten. (p.375)
- Afterwards, Manu’s hand is still gripping the banister, static hissing in the ear to which his other hand continues to hold the phone. (p.376)
2. Odd phrasing
Anyway, this specific issue aside, there’s plenty of just plain odd phraseology:
Recognition [the name of a character] turned the radio off at this point, falling into slumbers. (p.38)
Recognition looked on as the second beating Manu then suffered was conducted. (p.42)
Manu got up, supposing to make his way to the docks as instructed. (p.43)
He was at a moment of limits, tripping over kerbs and broken parts of buildings destroyed by munitions (p.43)
All this apparent cogitation was in truth too unwilled to be a called a decision. (p.44)
While he’s enumerating the options, the pilot door of the plane opens. (p.51)
He’s embarrassed, almost ashamed that he’s been making too much of things that some of them, with no better a history than his own…are facing down with equanimity. (p.108)
He drinks so much, in fact, that he loses track of the liquid courage for his future (p.159)
Not long later, reckoning that they are safe now… (p.195)
All that stuff he [Cogan] liked to sing, by turns bright and breezy, mournful and melancholy, whatever the weather outside the cockpit, reports on which the Texan told him not to trust. (p.219)
Seeing even worse atrocities than those committed against the women of Boma, Manu realises that there’s always something worse than what he thought was the worst before. (p.242)
One Monday morning further on in this period of steadfast resolution (p.256)
What I have learned is not to judge so quickly, as the moment oneself is to be judged is always about to arrive. (p.275)
But this animal at the Expo is much older a beast than even Joséphine would be now. (p.353)
‘I’m so sorry,’ says Manu, pulling himself jerkily back into joint and wondering if this bizarre episode is a conclusive rupture with the past that has been plaguing him. (p.355)
Now the breath in the old man’s chest is slowing stint by stint, as his illness comes to a terminus. (p.372)
As for Anke, he has (against his own past conjecture) almost forgotten her… (p.382)
A faint smell of piss wafted over from the latrine and Manu saw the financier’s nostrils mushroom – ever so widely, as if the pleasant occasion of a meal had been robbed away in some still greater larceny than this basic reminder of other facts of the body besides ingestion. (p.395)
The sun was pouring out its almost last tot of light, making the air tremble, like Cogan’s hands sometimes did… (p.397)
The prose consistently feels as if it’s written by someone whose first language is not English, someone who is struggling against mighty odds to express themselves in an unfamiliar language. It’s not the occasional oddity – the contorted sentence structure, the weird phrasing, they’re in every paragraph on every page.
3. Intrusive narrator
Sometimes the narrator intrudes into his own sentences to comment on the action, like an eighteenth century narrator, like Henry Fielding, or a moralising Victorian author:
In this moment, he wonders if he has become abhorrent to her and that this chance of love, perhaps his only chance (as he then presumes; fatal error of all disappointed in love!) has been blown entirely (p.312)
The clash between this very old tactic, the strange Victorian phraseology (‘fatal error of all disappointed in love!’) and then the slangy modern American phrase (‘has been blown’) create a really weird disjunctive effect.
4. The continuous present
Now I’ve started, there’s another aspect of Foden’s prose which is really distinctive and equally unsettling, which is his fondness for sentences with multiple clauses, at least one of which refers to ongoing events by using the present participle. These examples demonstrate what I mean:
- Manu also supposes, continuing to walk along, that he ought to inform Cogan’s ex-wife and son. (p.220)
- A black Mercedes pulls up alongside him. For a second, his reflection sliding along its wing, it’s like he’s back in Lubumbashi. (p.220)
- He decides, it being Christmas Day, that he will go to Mass again (p.253)
This is odd and unnatural word order. It would be more natural to write ‘As he walked, Manu realised that he probably ought to…’ or ‘For a second his reflection slid along the wing of the car, reminding him of…’ But Foden is really addicted to this unnatural, cluttered way of writing; an example occurs in more or less every paragraph, the text is saturated with them.
5. Having
There’s a kind of logical extension of the previous habit, which is to use the present participle ‘having’ to indicate an event which has taken place before the one being described in the sentence. So instead of describing the events in simple chronological order thus: ‘Manu opened the door and walked into the room’, Foden always prefers to complicate things by starting in the present, cutting back to an action which has just been completed in a subordinate clause, before returning to the present action for the second half of the sentence – ‘Manu walked, having opened the door, into the room’.
- They get out of the vehicle, Faithful having grabbed the drawer from Manu’s lap as they stopped. (p.222)
- Stinking, having not been able to wash properly for weeks, he just wants to go home. (p.242)
- Maquela’s over the border in Angola – nominally enemy territory, since the Angolan government, having been on the Rwandan side in the first war, are now aligned with Kabila and Zimbabwe. (p.245)
I suppose some readers might like this embroilment of the prose, this mixing up. But to me it felt like listening to a story told by someone with a stutter. The awkward phrasing, the stilted structuring continually distracted my attention.
It’s not grammatically incorrect, not incomprehensible, just strangely off and, along with the preposition-phobic sentences and the consistently strange phrasing, these oddities all build up into a sustained sense of awkwardness everywhere in Foden’s prose.
I suppose these odd phrases, these unwieldy sentences, could be a conscious effort to convey the difference of Manu’s African culture and the fact that he doesn’t speak or think in English. Maybe. Maybe that’s the aim, but I wasn’t convinced and, whatever the motivation, it’s just not very enjoyable to read this spavined prose. It was so distracting I wanted to stop reading the book after 50 pages but forced myself to go on to the end, less and less interested in the plot, more and more entranced by the strangeness of Foden’s prose.
6. Poor proofreading
It’s not helped by quite a few typos and proofreading mistakes, which made me think the proofreaders were sometimes as puzzled by Foden’s prose peculiarities as I was. Can you spot the mistake in this sentence?
Later he’ll hear how Phiri landed the Boeing, every second expecting it (as now Manu also expects) the Cargomaster to be brought down by a MANPAD. (p.238)
Which I think should be:
Later he’ll hear how Phiri landed the Boeing, every second expecting it (as now Manu also expects the Cargomaster) to be brought down by a MANPAD. (p.238)
The plot
Manu has barely returned from boarding school to the family farm before a squad of Zaire Armed Forces (AZF) soldiers drive up and murder his family, raping his mother and sister first, garrotting his father in an attempt to find out where the family treasure is buried.
Manu has a rope tied round his neck and is being led away when the AZF force is itself ambushed by Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) troops led by none other than Laurent-Désiré Kabila (this is the first of many improbable coincidences for Kabila is to go on to become the newt president of Congo).
Kabila gives Manu a gun and invites him to shoot dead the man who just killed his father but Manu, being the hero of a western fiction instead of a real person, can’t and doesn’t. Kabila is impressed and lets the AZF soldier in question run off into the jungle
Manu is then pressed into the AFDL and taken with other soldiers down to the Hutu refugee camps right on the border with Rwanda. Here Foden follows the modern view that the AFDL and the Rwandan Patriotic Force (RPF) carried out a mini version of the Rwanda genocide only this time it was Tutsis massacring Hutu men, women and children. Manu watches horrible killings.
In the marketplace of the town of Nyamwera he takes part in the torture and shooting of a) archbishop Christophe Munzihirwa, who had occasionally visited his Catholic boarding school, and b) his favourite teacher, Don Javia Mendia. It happens because the sadistic AFDL officer, Major Rusyo, made him shoot at a car approaching their convoy, it was only after they’d done so that the wounded archbishop staggered out and they discovered Don Javia dead inside. The AFDL troops then stabbed the archbishops with bayonets and ordered at gunpoint Manu to join in, which he misinterpreted to mean fire his rifle, which may or may not have actually hit the archbishop, who the other soldiers proceeded to finish off anyway.
Because Manu is such a cipher there’s no sense of how these opening 40 or so pages packed with horrific incidents affects him. You’d have thought he’d be catatonic with shock but there’s no attempt to convey shock, PTSD or psychosis, instead he remains the blank cipher used to shuffle the narrative along.
Supervising his induction into the AFDL is a brutal boy his own age, named Recognition. After receiving a number of brutal beatings from him, Manu manages to slip away from the AFDL camp and embarks on a long trek back to his farm. Here he buries the body of his mother and then sets off stumbling through the jungle in the direction of Uganda, which he hopes will be safe.
After some days in the jungle Manu stumbles across an airfield at Rutshuru on the border between Congo and Uganda, and witnesses black soldiers doing some kind of deal with the fat scruffy white pilot of a small cargo plane.
When the soldiers drive off, Manu stumbles into the light of the arc lamps (it’s night) and, after initially scaring the pilot, they get chatting. The pilot’s name is Norm Cogan and he’s a scruffy, disreputable, jobbing ‘freight dog’. His last assistant did a runner, so he asks Manu if he’d like the job of being his fixer (p.55). Next thing Manu’s washing and scrubbing stuff then getting into the plane and they fly from the edge of Congo to the airport at Entebbe, Uganda.
Norm then drives Manu to the bar he owns, The Passenger, run by his bad-tempered wife, Aisha, where he introduces Manu to his fellow ‘freight dogs’:
- Aisha, the bad-tempered African owner of the bar
- Gerry Magero from Kenya
- Max Chénal from Belgium, former priest, a ‘tight-faced old man in oversized specs’, known as ‘Papa’
- Evgeny Blok from Russia, muscular, moustachioed (p.81)
These guys are national stereotypes on the same kind of level as the foreign characters in cheesy movie adaptations of ‘Death on the Nile’ or ‘Murder on the Orient Express’. Cogan is the worst. In the same way that the chunks of history are shoehorned into the narrative, Cogan’s America-ness is rammed home every time he opens his mouth.
He says things like: ‘Kabila’s cockamamy outfit’, ‘that went down the swanee’, ‘my momma used to say’, ‘nothing sticks forever kid’, ‘go the whole nine yards’, ‘we done fell in love’, ‘fuckedy freak show, here we go’, ‘hold on to your hat, kid’, ‘we’re all yappedy doo-dah now’, ‘what’s the matter kid?’ ‘hot diggety, she looked good!’, ‘the one’s a biggee’, ‘shit’s about to hit the fan’. He is, in other words, a dictionary of Yankee clichés. He sounds like a character out of Indiana Jones.
For no particular reason these tough old guys decide to adopt Manu and teach him how to fly, start giving him lessons, buy him a flyer’s licence, a pilot’s uniform, training manuals, flight bag etc. He’s still only 19.
So Manu goes on seven or eight trips with Cogan and Evgeny, studies the manuals, and eventually gets his pilot’s licence. On one of these trips we see Cogan landing at a remote base in the middle of carrying a cargo of gold, and getting Manu to help bury one of the crates, allegedly with the help of the trip’s sponsor, Major Faithful.
Part 3. The Interbellum: June 1997 to August 1998
A chapter where Manu does a purely civilian job, unconnected with the war, namely ferrying a Belgian expert in volcanoes, an attractive young blonde (is there any other kind of expert in volcanoes?), Anke Desseaux, around the volcanoes of the Great Lakes.
Until their jeep (driven by a hired driver) is ambushed by a small crew led by none other than Manu’s old comrade, Recognition. Recognition explains he’s gone AWOL from the ADFL and is trying to set up a Tutsi militia to protect their own kind, here in East Congo.
Manu wrestles his machine gun off him, shoots dead the two other guerrillas in the ambush, shoots Recognition in the leg and would have finished him off if only Anke had started to come round from being knocked out.
So Manu knocks Recognition out with the rifle butt, hauls Anke into the jeep, recovers her belongings, and drives down the mountain to a town, sees doctor, checks into hotel, she cleans up, sleeps, next day demands to be taken to the nearest airport to catch the next flight to Europe.
(Given that the last section of the book is titled ‘The lights of Europe’ I’d be surprised if Manu doesn’t end up fleeing to Europe and looking Anke up. She will either be pleased and they resume their affair, or engaged or married to someone else, leaving Manu bereft. Either option will feel equally as clichéd.)
Talking of women, Manu spends time on the beaches of Lake Victoria and several times spies a beautiful woman sashaying across the sand, dipping into the lake etc and eventually plucks up the guts to talk to her. Her name is Edith.
Much later, on one of his trips with Cogan, into the jungle to ferry around crates of gold or ammunition, Manu is astonished to discover, amid the sprawling army base full of drunk or stoned soldiers, this very same Edith! Turns out she is the daughter of the Major Faithful they’re doing this trip for. (Manu may be surprised but any reader of Foden is used to his routine deployment of far-fetched coincidences.)
Even more far-fetched than Manu meeting Edith in the middle of nowhere, is the way she comes on strong to him, takes him to a hut, and makes him have modern sex with her (by modern I mean not just penetration but, after he’s climaxed, insisting on him stroking and masturbating her till she comes, too.)
Next morning he’s woken by Cogan and hustled off to finalise the cargo and fly off, his emotions understandably still reeling from this intense and unexpected rumble in the jungle.
Time marches on. Of the cadre of freight dog pilots, Papa quits and goes back to Belgium (after making a half-hearted attempt to chat up Manu, who only then realises he’s gay); Evgeny moves to Dubai, safer business and good schools for his kids).
And Cogan is shot dead, Manu (in another of those far-fetched coincidences) happening to drive by Cogan’s car crashed in a ditch to find the fat American still alive though bleeding profusely. Manu takes him to the local hospital which is closed and barred to new admissions (because they gunshot wounds generally deriving from gangland shootings which sometimes follow their victims into the hospital). Thus Cogan bleeds to death in his car before a doctor belatedly comes out from the hospital to see him.
A little before this Manu had arrived back at The Passenger (the freight dogs’ bar) where he’s still kipping in the spare room Cogan gave him, finding it locked climbs in through the back window and thus overhears Aisha complaining about Cogan being a) bad in bed b) serially unfaithful c) frittering away all the earnings of his freight company. Gerry reassures her that he won’t have to put up with Cogan much longer, then the pair have sex right there in the bar while Manu watches through a crack in the door.
Anyway, this explains why, upon Cogan’s death, Gerry and Aisha are arrested by the police, who turn up recordings of them plotting to kill Cogan (because the cops had been making recordings of an illegal drug baron who Gerry, it turns out, had been doing flights for).
As he lay dying one of the last things Cogan told Manu is that he’s made a new will, leaving everything to Manu i.e. 1) the bar, 2) his freight business, Normanair.
So by about half way through the story, Manu’s mentor, Cogan, has disappeared, and so have the other flight dogs Papa, Evgeny and Gerry, leaving him qualified enough to carry on the freight business, but lonely.
As a resident of Entebbe/Kampala, we’ve accompanied Manu on trips to see the nightlife, to various bars and entertainments, and learned that he got friendly with some guys (David and Matthias) who’d set up a dance troupe but were worried about the financial insecurity of the dance world, so Manu has the bright idea of hiring them as manager and barmen at The Passenger.
Part 4. Fighting Fire, Treading Water: August 1998 to February 2002
Things are just settling down when the Second Congo War kicks off and Manu finds himself just one of half a dozen commercial pilots who are held at gunpoint at the airport by his nemesis, Major Rusyo, who forces them to fly RPA troops to Kitongo, the airport on the far west of Congo, which the RPA plan to use as a base to overthrow the now out-of-favour Kabila.
But this dashing plan is foiled when the Angolan army come in to support Kabila and prevent a quick surgical coup. It was the Angolan government’s decision which triggers the long, drawn-out struggle of the Second Congo War which mutates into the Great War of Africa, which becomes bogged down in fighting between multiplying militias, guerrilla groups, warlords and so on, in a kaleidoscope of conflict.
Manu tries to duck out of all this but is conscripted at gunpoint by Rusyo, and spends months in an increasingly feverish blur of stress, lack of sleep and amphetamines, running guns and ammo into Congo and taking out all manner of goods – gold, coltan, diamonds, coffee, even train rolling stock. The RPA’s excuse of overthrowing Kabila to install a democratic government wears thin: Manu realises it is just looting, pure and simple.
After these months the Angolan troops close in on the airport the RPA have been using, at N’djili. The Angolans fire anti-aircraft missile at him which he only just dodges using a shake and roll technique which Cogan taught him.
Manu lands at a jungle airstrip, Maquela do Zombo, in UNITA-held north Angola, where he is trapped with the RPA for four months. Only on 23 December 1998 does he finally get to fly out, carrying as many RPA men and munitions as possible as Angolan government forces once again close in.
Time passes. The war unravels into chaos. Manu keeps completely out of it, spending two years doing clean commercial flights, ferrying tourists to see gorillas or sunbathe in Zanzibar. David and Matthias prove honest employees, turning The Passenger into a popular profitable bar.
Suddenly it’s early 2002 and Anke Desseux rings him up saying she wants to hire him to take her back to the volcano which her instruments tell her, may be about to blow. The flight is a disaster. Plumes of smoke and rivers of lava rolling down the side, burning towns, into Lake Kivu. Worse the acid fumes strip the paint off the outside of the plane and damage the windscreen. They barely make it back to Entebbe in one piece and Manu is furious at the damage to his one and only airplane.
He drives her to hotel, they both freshen up, sit sulking in the bar, eventually she gets him to spill the story of his life, all its many traumas, she takes him back to her hotel room and they have championship sex, twice. (As young healthy men and women protagonists of airport thrillers generally do, compare tall, handsome skindiver Nick Karolides and young attractive diplomat Miranda Powers in Zanzibar. When he tells us that Anke’s bare breasts are ‘lightly freckled’ you think, of course they are. That’s the kind of book this is: the history is true and horrifying but almost the entire fictional content is riddled with clichés.)
Next day Anke has to fly back to Belgium, of course and, of course, they have an emotional parting at the airport and, of course, Manu drives back to his apartment feeling abandoned, alone, again.
Part 5. The Lights of Europe: March 2004 to December 2006
Very abruptly it’s two years later, years of calm business flights as Manu slowly expands the company. Then Brigadier Faithful calls him to his office and asks him to go and fetch the buried crate containing the incriminating anti-aircraft firer. He will pay him $80,000 plus costs to dig it up, load it on board and fly it to Amsterdam where it will be handed over to a government enquiry. Why? Because the Ugandans, whose army Faithful is in, want to get back at the Rwandans who are systematically undermining them, backing anti-Uganda militias etc, by revealing that it was the RPA which shot down Habyarimana’s plane.
So Manu flies to the place in the jungle where he and Cogan buried it, digs it up and flies to Amsterdam and hands it over to the academic (who is probably a spy).
But then Manu is flabbergasted to be arrested! Turns out he’s wanted on an Interpol warrant for the murder of Don Javier and the Archbishop all those years ago in Nyamwera. Turns out an NGO has been pursuing murders of Spanish citizens and, having done the Franco regime and various South American governments, is now turning its attention to the murder of Spanish citizens in Africa.
The accusations are desperately unfair but then it turns out that the main witness against him is none other than Recognition, the comrade who forced him to perform these very deeds, and has now, bizarrely, become a Catholic friar in the monastery base of the NGO which is bringing all these accusations. Triggering in Manu a recurrence of the existential crises of doubt and personality which have dogged him throughout the narrative.
Standing there in the dock in his prison shows, he begins to think of himself as barely alive. (p.289)
Manu’s lawyer takes him outside the court for a cigarette (guarded by a security guard). A court journalist comes over and, in a mad moment, Manu grabs the journalist, puts the sim car of his phone to his jugular, forces the cop and lawyer to lie on the ground, gets the keys to the handcuffs he’s wearing, then runs off.
In the busy city streets he comes across a protest march, something about Palestine and Israel, blends in and marches along for bit, skips into a subway, gets away. A few hours later he’s on a train to Brussels courtesy the cash in the journalist’s wallet.
After a few days on the road he looks like any other hobo African immigrant. There’s a very staged and contrived scene where he wanders round the Royal Museum of Africa in Brussels, comparing the staged dioramas to the Congo he grew up in. Colonial fiction versus lived reality, imperialist lies etc.
Obviously he’s schlepped all this way to see Anke. (I knew from the moment they first met, had their violent visit to the volcano, then she scarpered back to Europe, that she would play a central role in the book’s final section.) When he finally gets to Anke’s office he is horrified to discover that she doesn’t retain the high idealised feelings for him that he has for her. It was only one night, years ago.
When she hesitantly tells Manu that she’s engaged to be married (p.313) I burst out laughing. That’s what I predicted 100 pages earlier. It felt as old and clichéd as a Thomas Hardy novel.
If she will not love him of her own accord, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, he can do that will convince her to do so. (p.315)
God, I wish this novel had just stopped on page 300 at the end of the second Congo War. Though it undermined the fiction, I quite enjoyed being harassed by the history. Now the reader is going to be hectored by Hardy for the last 100 pages.
Manu had put all his hopes on Anke helping him but she had screamed and threatened to call the police. So he goes to the African quarter of Brussels. Fellow Congolese recommend a hostel. It’s filthy and kept by a slimy predatory gay man who shows Manu to a disgustingly dirty room. He’s advised to get a job in an abattoir and there follows an extended, stomach-churning description of jobs in an abattoir which reads like the transcription of a research visit Foden made to one.
Woke ideology
Earlier, in the court scenes, Manu had raised the spectre of racism. On the run he encountered racist glances. In the Museum of Africa he was forced to think about colonialism. In the abattoir the supervisor showing him round makes the ‘racist’ comment that many of the African workers he has to supervise are lazy.
Part 5 is the woke part of the book, the part where Foden shows his white readers what white Europe looks like to a black outsider, a man unjustly accused and on the run, a victim of western imperialism and racism. Hmm. So maybe the reader isn’t going to be hectored by Hardy so much as worn down by woke.
Foden is the kind of liberal white man who went to an English public school, then Cambridge, and writes books attacking his own class and country. One of the characters in the immigrants’ hostel is a Somali whose village was bombarded by the Royal Navy, killing the rest of his family. This character says the Royal Navy is worse than the Russians.
‘Everyone should know that British people are thugs underneath, even as they pretend to be gentlemen on top. Only the Russians are worse. No! In some ways they are better, because at least they don’t pretend.’ (p.328)
Later Manu is made to equate the behaviour of the British Army with that of the RPA which, as we’ve seen, rapes, kills, tortures, massacres and loots wherever it goes:
…the horrors that happen when soldiers, English or Rwandan or whatever, invade a place, wrapping their their violence in necessity or duty or honour. (p.343)
This made me despise Foden and turn dislike of this badly written, cliché-ridden farrago into contempt. It’s his kind of superior, upper-class, woke anti-patriotism which has contributed to the decline of the Labour Party, the loss of its working class voters, the defection of the Red Wall to the Tories, the election of Boris Johnson and Brexit. It’s the kind of liberal literary superiority which has led to the rise of the right across Europe, to populist authoritarians who appeal to working class or lower-middle-class voters who feel they and their values, their patriotism, their support for their armed services and, very often their actual military service, are being attacked, dismissed, and ridiculed by a metropolitan elite of smug, superior, arrogant, public school tossers. Well, look no further. Voici le trahison des clercs.
Part 5 of the book turns into a festival of wokeness, a sequence of opportunities for Foden to highlight how racist Europeans are, how stupid and patronising (pages 377 and 378), especially farmers, they’re all racists, apparently (p.383).
As Carol Midgley has written, ‘The white working class seems to be the one group in society that it is still acceptable to sneer at, ridicule, even incite hatred against’ which is precisely what Foden does, by depicting the rough Belgian hostel keepers and the Belgian farmers visiting the Expo as unreconstructed ‘racists’, Papa’s farmer neighbours and the German tourists who pay to go on his tours of Great War battlegrounds, as racists, all racists, racists to a man.
Because what’s really harming Africa isn’t multinational corporations conspiring with corrupt leaders to loot their countries and keep their populations in crushing poverty, or the personal rivalries of military leaders vying for complete control (see the civil war in Sudan, the coup in Niger) – it’s definitely the owners of crappy refugee hostels and European farmers having ‘racist’ attitudes.
What makes me cross is not the race issue, it’s the classism. All the characters Foden creates in order to describe them as ‘racist’ are working class. Foden, as noted, went to one of the nobbiest private schools in Britain. So, for me, it’s not about racism; it’s an upper class white private schoolboy flaunting his woke credentials by denigrating working class oiks.
If you believe the British Army can be casually compared to the Rwandan Patriotic Front which spent years massacring up to 400,000 mostly unarmed civilians, systematically looting an entire country and triggering a war in which up to 5 million people died, mostly of starvation and disease, then this is the book for you.
Final stupid coincidence
Why am I going on about racist farmers? Manu is selected by the abattoir to represent the company at an industrial expo devoted to the meat industry. In the event no one’s interested in watching him preparing sausages so he packs up early and wanders around the other exhibits. He is overcome by pages of maudlin sentimental longing for his simple innocent life as a farmer’s son.
Anyway, being a cow farmer at heart explains why, when Manu sees a stand devoted to Ugandan cattle, he breaks down and cries. At which the raggedy horned cow which is the chief exhibit, in a piece of typically heavy-handed Foden symbolism, drops down dead. Almost as if the cow symbolises Manu’s boyhood hopes and dreams! (Remember what I said about the book being more like the SparksNotes outline of a novel than an actual novel, coming ready equipped with its own interpretative framework.)
In the final Ridiculously Unlikely Coincidence of the book, who should come round the corner as Manu is experiencing the latest and deepest of his psychological breakdowns, than Papa, the elderly gay pilot from the good old days back in Uganda!
Papa is appalled that Manu has fallen on such hard times and promptly takes Manu away from the Expo, helps him quit his job at the abattoir, check out of the slummy hostel, and takes him to stay in his lovely farm in the country. Saved by his fairy godmother, panto style.
Manu spends 6 months learning about potato farming i.e. Foden regurgitates all the research he’s done on the subject, just as the abattoir chapter felt like a big gobbet of factual research about abattoirs, skimpily rearranged into something resembling ‘fiction’.
Papa continues to be his fairy godmother, adopting Manu who takes a false Belgian name, Adamu Chénal. Another false identity. Then Manu learns that Papa is dying of AIDS. In his last few days Papa arranges where he wants to be buried, then informs Manu he’s leaving the farm to him. And the old Dakota plane he’s been patching up in a barn.
So this is the second set of gifts from white men which have transformed Manu’s fortunes, first Cogan’s freight company and bar, now Papa’s farm and plane. For a man who complains about white racism, he’s had nothing but life-changing gifts from white people. Maybe, in this respect, Manu is an allegory of Africa, which has received over $1.2 trillion in aid but still wants more, much more, for the indefinite future.
Tom Burgis’s book The Looting Machine explains in great detail how African elites steal foreign aid, loot their own countries, and live in luxury while their populations starve in the streets. But the implication of Foden’s narrative is that, because they’re Africans massacring each other, at least they aren’t committing the real crime here, which is making ‘racist’ remarks.
There’s a few more digs at the British authorities by this British author so keen to do down his own country (p.379), before Manu finally gets his licenses and permissions and whatnot and, with wild improbability, flies Papa’s old Dakota back to Uganda.
Part 6. The Deconfliction Zone: January 2007 [back in Uganda]
Happy endings all round. Papa’s old plane didn’t actually make it all the way to Entebbe but crash landed on a hillside outside Mbarara, south-west Uganda, and so Manu sets up shop here, planting European potatoes in adjacent farmland he buys and converting the wrecked plane into a restaurant for tourists (the ones he so liberally accused of being racist in the previous section). But Manu’s happy to take white people’s money, as he was happy to be gifted their bars and businesses and farms and planes throughout the narrative.
And Edith, the Brigadier’s daughter who he had championship sex with in the jungle that time, she hears he’s back in the country, seeks him out, they renew their affair, they’re going to get married. Disney happy ending. The Lion King. Hakuna Matata!
Big Theme: Identity
The book’s big theme is Identity. We know this because Foden lays it on with a trowel every couple of pages and there’s a big sign saying Author’s Message next to each one.
The topic of identity has been done to death, and then far beyond, in hundreds of art exhibitions, novels, plays, movies, TV shows, millions of articles, thousands of charities and so on. It is the Topic of Our Time, what with the political brouhaha surrounding immigrants and refugees, what with young people confused about their genders all wondering who they are, who they’re meant to be, what with the nations of the West undergoing a snowstorm of cultural crises. Here are some of the ways Identity is central to the novel’s conception:
– The Rwanda civil war, the genocide and the Congo wars were all about ethnic identity, on a massive scale. Manu is a Tutsi among predominantly Hutu populations, heir to ethnic strife and then victim of ethnic massacres.
– Manu struggles to maintain a sort of Catholic identity in the face of the horror of the world (he wants to attend a Christmas Day service). But he is caught between the rituals of European Catholicism and African tradition – we see him undergoing a traditional coming-of-age ceremony in the jungle.
– Working for the white man (Norman Cogan) offers an escape from these tangled ethnic conflicts but at the cost of making Manu very conscious of being a black man working in a predominantly white industry.
– On trial in Amsterdam Manu realises the enormous gulf between the real life person and the cardboard cutout concocted by the legal system.
– Traipsing through the Belgian countryside Manu swaps the specificity of his identity as head of Normair for the generic identity of black tramp, ‘just another African migrant’ (p.303).
– Manu has built up his night with Anka into a Great Amour so he is devastated to learn that she thinks of it as only a one-night stand with a bit of exotic and now, back in Europe, has slotted back into engagement and marriage with a respectable white fiancé. It knocks Manu’s sense of the value or validity of his own experience.
– Manu adopts a fake identity when he is adopted as Papa’s son, yet another identity to live up to, to perform.
So there’s at least half a dozen embodiments or enactments of the Issue of Identity to ponder and unpack.
A-level English exam question
Discuss the theme of identity in the novel Freight Dogs by Giles Foden.
Essay length: 5,000 words maximum.
Deadline: end of first term.
Refer to the useful quotes on pages 58, 60, 97, 98, 107, 111, 151, 205, 287, 303, 361, 390 and the following:
The person who flew through the sky is resisting being reduced back to an older form: that of one who must identify as Tutsi or sub-Tutsi (p.97)
Later that night, lying in his own loaned RPF tent and sleeping bag, desperate for the morning and the return to Entebbe, Manu fiddles with the threads of his own frayed identity… He must simply be a freight dog now, just like Cogan said. That’s my group, that’s my team, that’s the badge I must wear. (p.98)
He’s trying to hold on to his new pilot persona…his new role as a pilot (p.100)
Somehow, he knows, he must become more deeply his own person, find solidarity in himself… (p.131)
He wonders, as he tries to sleep, if there’s a way he can similarly be both, can stay among the freight dogs but be clean of their sins? (p.205)
Another morning in this period of his failing to become the person he wants to be, now that he’s truly on his own and there’s nobody to imitate. (p.230)
Conclusions
Pros
If you’re going to write a novel about the Congo wars, having a commercial freight pilot as a central character is a very clever idea because, as the narrative makes abundantly clear, all these wars involved the aerial transport of weapons and munitions into war zones, and contraband loot out of them. Plus it means you can rope in specific incidents, such as the hijacking of commercial planes by the RPA to fly them to Kitona airport, in the early part of the Second Congo War. If you’re going to have one protagonist navigate through this complicated sequence of events, then having him be a pilot is a smart move.
Cons
A novel is not made ‘serious’ by being a) completely humourlesss or b) by simply by treating ‘serious’ subjects or c) by having lots of harrowing violence in it. So do umpteen cheap films and crappy documentaries. A novel is made ‘serious’ by the integrity of its conception, the depth of its characterisation, and the integrity of its prose style. I’m afraid Freight Dogs, for me, failed on all three counts.
Credit
Freight Dogs by Giles Foden was published in 2021 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. References are to the 2022 paperback edition.
Giles Foden reviews
- The Last King of Scotland (1998)
- Ladysmith (1999)
- Zanzibar (2002)
- Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
- Freight Dogs (2021)
Books & Boots 