(Photo: Alex Engwete)
I finally got my copy of Jason Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa Wednesday evening at Barnes and Noble on 12th Street N.W. in DC as I was heading to the nearby E Street Cinema to watch Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. My very first movie in one year: there are no more cinemas in the Congo. A very terrible situation indeed. In Nairobi, by contrast, boasts quite a few terrific cinemas: my favorite was the one in Village Market. I can recall the time when, in my hometown of Kisangani, we had 5 cinemas… and in Kinshasa, more than two dozen theaters!
I like the feel of books in my hands; the tactile sensuality of a hardcover. That’s why e-books are devoid of thrill and anticipation for me. The cover design: the touch of an artiste on the cover of Stearns’s book: a fantastic jacket design by Pete Garceau that reminds me of the great Congolese painters I grew up with. I grew up on a daily diet of Tintin, graphic novels, and pungent scents of colors. The whole “paratext” of a book is therefore pregnant with meaning for me: the title, the name of the author, the blurbs on the back covers, etc.
The first blurb on top of the back cover of Stearns’s book is shocking and insulting to the vast tribe of scholars and writers who’re delving on the Congo right now. Some of those scholars and writers have wasted precious years of their lives trying to make sense of the continental entity called the Congo and its peoples—let alone the region of the African Great Lakes.
The blurb reads: “Jason Stearns is probably better qualified and better able than any man alive to write about the Congo. This is a history felt on the body, and told from the heart.”
The man who wrote this nonsense happens to be Cold War spy novelist John Le Carré. Was Le Carré high on something or has the man gone so terminally senile he'd come up with such a preposterous comment? And when he says “a history felt on the body,” whose body is he referring to, precisely? Jason Stearns’s body?... I’d let “told from the heart” pass, as anyone who’d met Jason in person would feel and know that he is passionate about the Congo and its long-suffering people. Has Le Carré even bothered to read Stearns’s book? I don’t think so. In an ideal world the man would be sued for writing malpractice, for intentionally misleading unsuspecting readers…
It turns out that, as I’m typing this sentence, John Le Carré’s The Mission Song (hardcover) is on the table in front of me, on top of Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. This copy of the Mission Song was a present from my buddy James Williamson from Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the book came out in 2006. On the back cover of the book, a color photo of the author, without any superfluous blurb. The inside flap of the jacket has a caption of the photograph: “Author at Lake Kivu, 2006, © Michela Wrong.”
Michela Wrong wrote the next blurb on the back cover of Stearns’s book. Hers is also superlative: “Anyone who knows Congo will tell you there’s no one to rival Jason Stearns on the topic.” All this sounds uncannily Hollywood—or even Bollywood—and cheesy to me. Hey, who am I to cast the first stone here? I’ve always admired this kind of star-studded activism. I’m a fan of the works of George Clooney, Ben Affleck, or Angelina Jolie on behalf of the downtrodden of Africa…
Michela Wrong herself wrote In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, a take on the Congo which is as powerful as anyone else’s, though I’ve already voiced here on many occasions my distrust of people engaging in this kind of cheap Conradian tropes…
Mission Song is the recent foray of Le Carré into the Congo (2006). Don’t blame the guy: with the end of the Cold War, one has to find new materials somewhere—especially in Africa, where natural and symbolical materials are legion…
Mission Song has a very improbable (and goofy) plot; a plot involving, as the flap of the novel’s jacket has it, one:
“Bruno Salvador, known to friends and enemies as Salvo, (…) the ever-innocent twenty-year-old orphaned child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese woman. Educated first at the mission school in the East Congolese province of Kivu and later at a discreet sanctuary for the secret sons of Rome, Salvo is inspired by his mentor, Brother Michael, to train as a professional interpreter in the minority African languages of which, almost from birth, he has been an obsessive collector.”
Wow!... The plot is ridiculously convoluted and unreal (missionaries who lapsed in the Congo didn’t bother to carry their love children to Rome; Rome, of all places!), but it is buttressed by all the artifices of a thriller masterfully written by a crafty novelist. Talking of the Irish, I’ll give Le Carré a Northern Irish novelist who’s written a credible, powerful plot set in the Congo: Ronan Bennett and his gripping novel The Catastrophist.
Moving on…
I like post-apocalyptic yarns. And the title of Jason Stearns’s book seems to promise one of those spell-binding dooms I very much enjoy. Which reminds me that 26 years ago, Crawford Young and Thomas Turner had their own doomsday book on the Congo: The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (which means that the Congo post-apocalyptic genre doesn’t date back from yesterday). A massive scholarship that put a lie to Le Carré and Wrong’s superlatives: both Crawford Young and Thomas Turner are still alive and kicking! And btw, I have in my library in Kinshasa Thomas Turner’s 2007 book Congo Wars—another repudiation of the claims put forth by Le Carré and Wrong.
My point here is that this kind of out-of-control "shoot-outs" doesn’t do any good to a densely-woven and meaningful book such as this one just produced by Stearns.
Anyway, to make a long story short, when I got home last evening, I feverishly read the first 10 pages of the book—that is, the “Introduction: Understanding Violence” and the first chapter of “Part I: Prewar”: “The Legacy of Genocide.” Over the coming days, I’ll be giving by increments my take on the book. I need to make one thing clear: I do neither pretend nor purport to write a review of Stearns’s book. I’ll be giving, in an “impressionistic” fashion, fragments of the feelings that the book stirs in me.
Here are my feelings this time around…
1) The title of the book. Stearns quotes Mzee Laurent Kabila as blurting out at a press conference: “Who has not been Mobutist in this Country? Three-quarters of this country became part of it! We saw you all dancing in the glory of the monster.”
Was the Mzee a fairy or what? Every single Zairian citizen, including myself, was a member of the MPR. This wasn’t a question of choice. It was mandatory, compulsory. It was the law of the land. In fact, the country was then called a Party-State. Some public dancers and performers (called “animateurs” and “animatrices”) willingly joined those Mobutu’s propaganda “ballets.” But schools, state agencies, and private-sector enterprises were also compelled to set up and maintain small pro-Mobutu propaganda “ballets.” And these ballets floundered after the outcry of the Catholic Church.
BTW, what would the Mzee Kabila say for himself as regards probity? He was a rebel leader who didn’t live through the indignities of the Mobutu regime but his record is shabby at best. Just read the account of Che Guevara quoted in Stearns’s book: pp. 84-85, courtesy of the index. While Che Guevara was fighting in the Congolese jungle with the men of Kabila, the latter was living large in Dar es-Salaam, on Cuban money.
In the summer of 1975, cash-strapped, the Mzee had his men abduct 3 Stanford graduate students in primatology who were doing fieldwork research in a reserve just across Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania: Barbara Smuts, Emilie Bergman, and Carrie Hunter (last time I checked, Dr. Barbara Smuts was teaching psychobiology at the University of Michigan)… These students were released only after a substantial ransom had been paid to the Mzee… So, the man was in no position to give “morality lessons” to anyone…
Contrast these empty “morality lessons” with what Mobutu actually did for the youth of his country (I consistently maintained, on the now-dormant blog of Cédric Kalonji, that there were several Mobutu entities: Mobutu-1, Mobutu-2, Mobutu-2, down to the Mobutu-dinosaur of terminal decay; just as Stearns rightfully says the Mobutu’s regime was “initially popular” for instance): a massive investment in the educational sector that allowed a kid like me, despite my parents’ poverty, to go to expensive state-subsidized Catholic schools and to win, on the basis of a test, a scholarship to my hometown university! Today, parents of primary and secondary schools are fleeced by the education ministry; and universities have turned into ghettos where college officials are the bane of students.
2) In his Africa’s World War, Gérard Prunier cautions against drawing fallacious parallels between the Rwandan genocide and the Shoah—though this was based on the sole aspect of geographical distance (Nazi genocidal maniacs didn’t return home in the wake of the war to live side by side with the surviving Jews they’d just enslaved and massacred). Though Jason Stearns can by no means be accused of using this kind of stereotypical comparison (and he actually rejects this kind of analogy), I had, however, the feeling that he, somehow, was doing just that, but at a higher, more sophisticated, philosophical level, for lack of a better expression.
Invoking the Third Reich, Adolf Eichmann, and the inference from his case by Hannah Arendt who came up with the infamous “banality of evil” and then turning the latter into the paradigmatic pivot of understanding violence in the African Great Lakes seems to me a bit too far-fetched and not convincingly demonstrated. This is the same kind of downside I found in Achille Mbembe’s analysis of mass rapes in the Congo with conceptual tools developed by the French surrealist philosopher George Bataille in the 1930s or 1940s or thereabout. You don’t need Arendt to explain violence in the region. You have one clue in the abduction of the 3 Stanford primatologists mentioned above. It’s all about money… also access to resources and land (according to René Lemarchand, exclusion comes first; then, violence; then, blood minerals—an almost linear causal concatenation of “evil”).
If there’s a “nature of the system” to look for, it’s all there: in the money! A system of thieves. A kleptocratic system… It’s a postcolonial Africa’s phenomenon; Congo is just an exacerbation of a nearly universal African constant. Consider the Nigerian Internet crooks. Consider the way albinos, in Tanzania or Burundi, or the youngsters in Gabon; they are assaulted and abducted in broad daylight; they are killed, their limbs harvested… and sold to those willing to spend the right amount of dollars in the manufacture of costly jujus purported to generate money or political power for those owning or wearing them! Do we need Arendt to understand this kind of ignorance and greed run amok?
3) I also find puzzling that Stearns should state that Congo is “a country in which the state has been eroded over centuries.” We need to go back to the fundamentals here and put to contribution the work of, say, Jan Vansina. Congo, as a country, was carved out by King Léopold II in the wake of the 1885 Berlin Conference. Prior to that, there were some scattered relatively big entities, but by and large, the country called today the DRC was a constellation of unrelated “villages-states” or “villages-clan” for which the very notion of an erosion of a non-existent entity called the state would be gratuitous. In point of fact, Congolese ought to be grateful to King Léopold II for giving them—for better or for worse—the state formation we now call the DRC.
4) At one point, Jason Stearns mulls over this scenario:
“It would have been an interesting experiment to drop a young, relatively unknown Mahatma Gandhi into the Congo and observe whether he, insisting on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, would have been able to change anything (…)”
Well, in 1960 Congo had one such “young, relatively unknown Mahatma Gandhi.” His name was Patrice Emery Lumumba and on many an occasion he’d insisted his methods were Gandhi’s. Western powers had him promptly assassinated and replaced by Mobutu. We often forget that Mobutu wasn’t a grim murderous buffoon who happened upon the Congo ex nihilo. He was put there by global powers-that-be, who maintained his regime until their interests shifted. It’s my contention that there’s a direct causal link between the political engineering implemented by western cold-warriors in the 1960s in the Congo and the deep shit the country wallows in today…
