This
ambitious history of the Congo tells a story of ravishment – and dark comedy
Like
“genius” or “masterpiece”, “epic” is a word that has suffered semantic
inflation at the hands of over-eager book reviewers. But the Congo is a country
that merits the word in all its original grandeur; epic landscapes, epic
rivers, epic greed, epic suffering and epic history too.
Such
is the baffling size and complexity of the place that David van Reybrouck’s new
history, with its 550 pages of wide sweep and riveting detail, could be seen as
a short story. It certainly possesses the economy and deftness of the best
short stories and avoids the bloat of your average history book.
Van
Reybrouck begins his account in 1874 with whispers deep in the jungle about the
sighting of “a man, white from head to toe, like an albino”. He ends it in 2010
with two peroxide blonde Congolese women returning from a trading expedition to
the Chinese city of Guangzhou, the labels of their brand new clothes flapping
in the kerosene-scented air. In between, he tells an epic tale of ravishment,
in which the motifs of greed, exploitation and violence remain fairly constant,
as do their opposites: faith, courage, humour and music. The names and the raw
materials change: Emperor Leopold II, King Baudouin, Lumumba, Mobutu, Kabila
père et fils, ivory, rubber, palm oil, diamonds, copper and coltan. Tiny traces
of the latter can be found in almost every smartphone, laptop, Xbox or sleek
toy of modern civilisation you might care to mention. The fact that the world
has electrified and digitalised itself thanks to the riches of the Congo, while
the country remains one of the poorest on Earth, is the kind of irony that gets
Van Reybrouck’s considerable literary juices flowing.
His
father Dirk worked as an electrician on the railway line that linked the
mineral-rich province of Katanga with the Angolan coast in the 1960s and the
Congo inveigled itself into Van Reybrouck’s blood as a child and populated his
dreams, just as it did with millions of his fellow countrymen. His love for the
country runs through the book, breaking through the horror and regret in
passages about music or forgotten heroism. It’s in the plea that appears in the
last few pages for us not to mistake “this wondrously beautiful country” for
one big cash-and-carry for crops and minerals but to see it as place that has
“helped to determine and form the history of the world”.
More
importantly, Van Reybrouck chooses to tell this story from “the bottom up”, to
coin his own phrase. The majority of the book comprises the testimony of
ordinary Congolese, dramatised by the dazzling powers of Van Reybrouck’s
imagination. The 128-year old Nkasi who was alive when the first white traders
and missionaries trudged into that immense forest, Jamais Kolonga the man who
dared to ask a white woman for a dance, Zizi Kabongo the cameraman who captured
Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, Ruffin the child
soldier, Masika Katsua the rape-victim… These, and more like them, tell their
country’s story. A few “good” Belgians also contribute, most memorably the
dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s personal tailor Alfons Mertens, who describes his
former employer as “a nice person”.
Van
Reybrouck swoops and glides through their dark comedy with the poetic agility
of an Orson Welles. Personal stories, memory and philosophy are intercut with
breathless factual narrative, as precise as Morse code. He throws a clear light
on the horrific conflicts of the late 1990s and early 2000s in eastern Congo,
which are to recent African history what the Higgs boson is to particle
physics, in other words, mysteries almost impossible for a layman to
understand.
The
angel is in the detail strewn in great abundance throughout the narrative. We
learn for example that “Belgian colonialism contributed to the spiritual
dimension of reggae” by helping to return Ethiopia to Haile Selassie in 1941,
and that Mobutu’s pathetic attempt to launch Africa’s first ever space rocket
in 1978 produced only a “parabola of soot”. The research, the devotion, the
inventiveness in Van Reybrouck’s writing are a gift to everyone, not just fans
of African history. This book not only deserves the description “epic”, in its
true sense, but the term “masterpiece” as well.
Available
at Tel:4494345
