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f o r e i g n p a r t s pat r i c k marnham Roads to Nowhere Congo: The Epic History of a People By David Van Reybrouck (Translated by Sam Garrett) (Fourth Estate 639pp £25) Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo By Anjan Sundaram (Atlantic Books 265pp £12.99) Whether the Democratic Republic of Congo should properly be described, even today, as a country is open to question. Most readers probably regard the DRC as a land of exotic disease, extreme poverty, political chaos, massacres, rape and drugcrazed child soldiers. But in an area roughly the size of Western Europe, where there is no national road or rail system, there are many levels of daily reality. And if you say ‘war’ in the streets of Kinshasa, the capital city, the people are quite likely to hear ‘beer’ and expect the latest news of a different battle. The years between 2005 and 2009 were notable in Kinshasa for a bitter struggle between Heineken and Skol. In the competition for market share these rival breweries enlisted leading pop musicians – J B Mpiana versus Werrason. The duel was fought out face to face on podiums erected at opposite ends of a football stadium. As ‘the Great War of Africa’ in the east of the DRC was causing the death of an estimated five million refugees, musicians a thousand miles to the west gave their songs appropriate titles – ‘Attack’, ‘Ceasefire’, ‘Curfew’, ‘State of Emergency’ – and turned up the volume. After one such encounter the police were prevented from disconnecting the loudspeakers by a ‘living shield’ of street children who were defending the electrical generators. A crowd of 200,000 rolled their buttocks and danced the ndombolo, urging their heroes on, until the army eventually dispersed them with tear gas. After a four-year struggle Skol rolled over. Heineken had improved its market share from 30 to 75 per cent and the company’s commercial director there was promoted to CEO of Heineken USA. David Van Reybrouck has devoted many years to understanding the Congo and his masterpiece, Congo: The Epic History of a People, first published in Dutch in 2010, has finally appeared in an English edition. This is both a high-spirited rampage through Congolese reality and a closely sourced history that is studded with personal experience as well as dozens of interviews with ordinary people. The oldest of his eyewitnesses claims to have been born in 1882. If these oral histories sometimes bear a close resemblance to West Africa’s unreliable narrative tradition recounted by the griot, they also add considerably to the book’s appeal. Van Reybrouck summarises what is known of the region before the arrival of Portuguese navigators in the 15th century and then traces the story from the brutal exploitation by Leopold II of Belgium through the colonial Belgian Congo to 1960 and the early years of independence. These last are broken down into three phases, during which the country’s first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was tortured and murdered in a joint CIA–Belgian military operation, the Congo was enlisted onto the American side in the Cold War and Washington’s imposed president, JosephDésiré Mobutu, initially a responsible and rather diffident leader, degenerated into a brutal despot pillaging his countrymen’s heritage. With the Cold War at an end, Washington lost interest and Congo (or Zaire, as it had become) was left to its own devices. The results can be seen today. Outside the cities the highways lead nowhere. Many of the Belgian colonial settlements have been reabsorbed by the forest. A journey that fifty years ago took an hour now takes a day. In the 2013 Failed States Index, the DRC is listed second. In a country with some of the richest natural resources in Africa, or indeed the world, there is an infant mortality rate of 16 per cent. Over 30 per cent of the population is illiterate, nearly three-quarters of people have no access to clean drinking water, and so on. Meanwhile the kleptocracy that runs the Congo – les grosses légumes – continues to grow fat on the deals signed with expatriate mining companies. Congo is the best book I have read on its subject. It is not history in the conventional sense, but it is a beautifully written and scholarly account that explains why so many outsiders have found the country both horrifying and irresistible. (The English translation, by Sam Garrett, is generally excellent.) Van Reybrouck ends with an astonishing tour of the Congolese community in the Chinese province of Guangzhou, where African traders who speak little but Lingala are teaching themselves to read and even write in Mandarin. Here the author abandoned his attempt to purchase a souvenir thong, decorated with the Angolan national flag, when the lady running the stall explained that they were only available in boxes of a thousand. Stringer is also set in the Congo, though it could be set in any disturbed tropical society since it is primarily the story of a young man’s confused decision to abandon his privileged North American existence and turn himself into a foreign news reporter. We learn quite a lot about the problems of a self-appointed Associated Press stringer in a difficult part of Africa, rather less about the DRC. When he made this decision, Anjan Sundaram had no experience as a journalist and was studying mathematics at an unnamed American university. Then, to quote the author, ‘I broke with America. Congo consumed me.’ But it would be unfair to give the impression that the entire book is written on this portentous and self-obsessed level. Sundaram arrived in Kinshasa just before the presidential election of 2006. (He has an exasperating stylistic habit of omitting essential factual information in order to impose a patina of supposedly universal truth.) But he found his feet quickly enough, having risked his life by travelling without any contacts or protection to interview a warlord, ‘General Mathieu’. He ended up terrified and alone in a Kinshasa suburb while the final count of the ballot boxes was interrupted by approaching shellfire. His reporting was eventually rewarded Literary Review | m a y 2 0 1 4 10
page 13
f o r e i g n p a r t s with a regular job and a prize. Stringer, the author’s first book, describes a real adventure and a real achievement, and the highly personal style conveys the blurred vision of an innocent abroad overcoming his fear to learn an unfamiliar trade. But there is a worrying moment when he confesses his admiration for the work of the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, a dishonest fabulist who worked as a foreign correspondent and then presented his book-length fictions as reportage, thereby greatly increasing his sales. Few of those who worked in the same parts of the world at the same time as Kapuściński accepted these improbable ‘reports’ as factual. War reporting requires less raw talent than fiction, but it is usually more demanding. Fortunately Stringer is better, in the sense of being more trustworthy, than the work of Kapuściński, as well as being more interesting if one accepts it at face value. To order these books, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 15 a dam l e b or Report from Sarajevo The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War By Tim Butcher (Chatto & Windus 326pp £18.99) T he Trigger is an evocative and ingen- ious take on the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. While the big guns among our historians, such as Max Hastings and Margaret MacMillan, battle over the political and economic causes of the conflict, Tim Butcher has chosen to focus on the individual. His book follows the footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb radical who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 and so triggered the start of the war. Butcher, a former war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, is a bestselling travel writer. His previous books include Blood River, which took him through the Congo, and Chasing the Devil, a journey through Sierra Leone and Liberia. Like his African works, The Trigger is a well-crafted mix of personal encounters, vivid descriptions and incisive musings on the landscape and its bloody history. Butcher’s masterstroke was to persuade Arnie, his interpreter during the Bosnian War, to return to Bosnia with him to retrace Princip’s journey to Sarajevo. The interplay between the two travellers and Arnie’s still-powerful emotions about his homeland bring added depth and texture to the narrative, and are also a useful prophylactic against the overlong inner monologues that sometimes afflict travel writers. The Trigger starts, very effectively, with Butcher’s encounters with Princip’s surviving relatives in Obljaj, the hamlet where he was born in 1894. Princip was brought up in deep poverty, which may have accounted for his small stature. His parents had nine children, six of whom died in infancy. He moved to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where, like many of his generation, he was radicalised when in 1908 Emperor Franz Joseph declared Bosnia to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Princip was expelled from school and moved to Serbia. There he joined the Serbian underground and received military training. His former family home is now derelict but three wreaths still moulder by the crumbling masonry. Nevertheless, Butcher finds something that links directly back to Princip himself. Scratched into a wall is ‘G P 1909’. The surviving Princips of Obljaj are poor, but warm and welcoming, eager to tell their stories about their most famous relative: ‘The family history was kept like a rosary by the last Princips in Obljaj, polished in the retelling, a chain strung with fact, memory and myth, reassuring for later generations in its completeness and circularity.’ For me, The Trigger brought back a lot of memories. A little over twenty years ago I was one of several reporters covering the Bosnian War for The Times. Nowadays, in the era of slashed editorial budgets and less curious editors and readers, it’s hard to imagine that there were usually three of us in the field for each paper: one in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, another in Belgrade and a third in the Lašva valley, the spectacular swathe of land that runs through central Bosnia. For a while, this was my and Butcher’s beat, covering the conflict between the Bosnian Croats and Muslims. Princip in prison, c 1915 The last known photograph of Princip, circa , before dying in prison from tuberculosis At the start of the fighting in 1992, the Croats and Muslims had warily united against the Serbs. But Franjo Tudjman, the first president of independent Croatia, cut a secret deal with Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian president. Even as Croatian and Serbian troops were fighting on one front, they formed a de facto alliance on another. Bosnia was to be carved up between Belgrade and Zagreb. The wooded streams and lush pasture of the Lašva valley echoed with shellfire, the houses burned and the population fled in terror. Butcher and Arnie traipse through towns that we got to know well, most of all Travnik, a beautiful Ottoman-era settlement that sat just behind the front lines. We would often see foreign fighters returning from battle in Travnik, especially around the mosque. The ‘muj’ as we dubbed them, short for mujahideen, were deeply hostile to the press, especially Western journalists. We know now that the Bosnian War, dismissed by so many savants in m a y 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 11

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f o r e i g n p a r t s pat r i c k marnham

Roads to Nowhere Congo: The Epic History of a People

By David Van Reybrouck (Translated by Sam Garrett)

(Fourth Estate 639pp £25)

Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo

By Anjan Sundaram (Atlantic Books 265pp £12.99)

Whether the Democratic Republic of Congo should properly be described, even today, as a country is open to question. Most readers probably regard the DRC as a land of exotic disease, extreme poverty, political chaos, massacres, rape and drugcrazed child soldiers. But in an area roughly the size of Western Europe, where there is no national road or rail system, there are many levels of daily reality. And if you say ‘war’ in the streets of Kinshasa, the capital city, the people are quite likely to hear ‘beer’ and expect the latest news of a different battle.

The years between 2005 and 2009 were notable in Kinshasa for a bitter struggle between Heineken and Skol. In the competition for market share these rival breweries enlisted leading pop musicians – J B Mpiana versus Werrason. The duel was fought out face to face on podiums erected at opposite ends of a football stadium. As ‘the Great War of Africa’ in the east of the DRC was causing the death of an estimated five million refugees, musicians a thousand miles to the west gave their songs appropriate titles – ‘Attack’, ‘Ceasefire’, ‘Curfew’, ‘State of Emergency’ – and turned up the volume. After one such encounter the police were prevented from disconnecting the loudspeakers by a ‘living shield’ of street children who were defending the electrical generators. A crowd of 200,000 rolled their buttocks and danced the ndombolo, urging their heroes on, until the army eventually dispersed them with tear gas. After a four-year struggle Skol rolled over. Heineken had improved its market share from 30 to 75 per cent and the company’s commercial director there was promoted to CEO of Heineken USA.

David Van Reybrouck has devoted many years to understanding the Congo and his masterpiece, Congo: The Epic History of a

People, first published in Dutch in 2010, has finally appeared in an English edition. This is both a high-spirited rampage through Congolese reality and a closely sourced history that is studded with personal experience as well as dozens of interviews with ordinary people. The oldest of his eyewitnesses claims to have been born in 1882. If these oral histories sometimes bear a close resemblance to West Africa’s unreliable narrative tradition recounted by the griot, they also add considerably to the book’s appeal.

Van Reybrouck summarises what is known of the region before the arrival of Portuguese navigators in the 15th century and then traces the story from the brutal exploitation by Leopold II of Belgium through the colonial Belgian Congo to 1960 and the early years of independence. These last are broken down into three phases, during which the country’s first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was tortured and murdered in a joint CIA–Belgian military operation, the Congo was enlisted onto the American side in the Cold War and Washington’s imposed president, JosephDésiré Mobutu, initially a responsible and rather diffident leader, degenerated into a brutal despot pillaging his countrymen’s heritage. With the Cold War at an end, Washington lost interest and Congo (or Zaire, as it had become) was left to its own devices.

The results can be seen today. Outside the cities the highways lead nowhere. Many of the Belgian colonial settlements have been reabsorbed by the forest. A journey that fifty years ago took an hour now takes a day. In the 2013 Failed States Index, the DRC is listed second. In a country with some of the richest natural resources in Africa, or indeed the world, there is an infant mortality rate of 16 per cent. Over 30 per cent of the population is illiterate,

nearly three-quarters of people have no access to clean drinking water, and so on. Meanwhile the kleptocracy that runs the Congo – les grosses légumes – continues to grow fat on the deals signed with expatriate mining companies.

Congo is the best book I have read on its subject. It is not history in the conventional sense, but it is a beautifully written and scholarly account that explains why so many outsiders have found the country both horrifying and irresistible. (The English translation, by Sam Garrett, is generally excellent.)

Van Reybrouck ends with an astonishing tour of the Congolese community in the Chinese province of Guangzhou, where African traders who speak little but Lingala are teaching themselves to read and even write in Mandarin. Here the author abandoned his attempt to purchase a souvenir thong, decorated with the Angolan national flag, when the lady running the stall explained that they were only available in boxes of a thousand.

Stringer is also set in the Congo, though it could be set in any disturbed tropical society since it is primarily the story of a young man’s confused decision to abandon his privileged North American existence and turn himself into a foreign news reporter. We learn quite a lot about the problems of a self-appointed Associated Press stringer in a difficult part of Africa, rather less about the DRC. When he made this decision, Anjan Sundaram had no experience as a journalist and was studying mathematics at an unnamed American university. Then, to quote the author, ‘I broke with America. Congo consumed me.’

But it would be unfair to give the impression that the entire book is written on this portentous and self-obsessed level. Sundaram arrived in Kinshasa just before the presidential election of 2006. (He has an exasperating stylistic habit of omitting essential factual information in order to impose a patina of supposedly universal truth.) But he found his feet quickly enough, having risked his life by travelling without any contacts or protection to interview a warlord, ‘General Mathieu’. He ended up terrified and alone in a Kinshasa suburb while the final count of the ballot boxes was interrupted by approaching shellfire. His reporting was eventually rewarded

Literary Review | m a y 2 0 1 4 10

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