25 & Trying

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

Source: Harper Collins

It’s been a long time since I read a hard hitting non fiction book. Pa dum ching. Yes, I know. It seems as though all I read is filled with semi-depressing histories of places far, far away. I think what I like about these works is the ability to understand things in the full contexts. You can’t work in African NGO’s without understanding Africa – and that is one of the main reasons I read these types of books.

My husband is African – but he is from a relatively peaceful country in the South, and knows little of the hardship of many people and places on the continent. He isn’t naive, but stories of the Democratic Republic of the Congo seem as far away to him as they do to me.

Michela Wrong is fast becoming one of my favorite voices in African history writing. She is a British journalist, and writes with a varied and dynamic perspective like I haven’t seen before. I loved it. She wrote of the fall of Mobutu, the infamous dictator/cult personality of Zaire (now DRC). It is definitely worth reading some details. His dynasty is notorious, but I really like how Wrong is able to stay within this period of history. She doesn’t meander around in the current state of the country, or in the past (except to give a brief history of how Mobutu came to power.)

To focus like this on his ultimate demise as a leader is to do an exceptional thing. African history is large, complex, and overrun with detail. This can be overwhelming for a foreign audience. Wrong talks about large issues like the relationship of Zaire with the IMF and The World Bank, as well as the way Mobutu was able to play foreign powers against each other to get what he wanted (mainly Russia and the U.S.)

Ultimately, his dictatorship left Zaire wide open for future conflict and problems. Foreign powers closed in, each having an incentive to avoid devastation to their own nations. This included Angola, Rwanda, and Burundi. The dynamics of this need to be saved for another post – but I think Wrong’s point is that Mobutu left a hole in the middle of the continent — literally.

Modern Day Map

Surrounded by countries on all sides, the pressure to keep Zaire stable was certainly felt by Western powers. Today, the DRC is not a place I would volunteer to visit. It’s definitely a country that has known nothing but war and oppression for so long, that it’s hard to even get people to take notice.

The connection she makes to Joseph Conrad’s famous work Heart of Darkness

What Wrong’s book does is explain many origins. Aside from the effects of colonization and war, there is really just a man. A man that was born to the name of Joseph-Desire Mobuto, who later changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko. It is really his biography that shapes her work – and I think it is his persona as a MAN and not some entity that really captures her attention as a writer.

Her description of him being cast out of Zaire in 1997 is one that borders between sympathetic and sarcastic – the ultimate result of all human beings is the same, no matter how powerful they appear.