Consider your mobile phone. The mobile phones and computers that connect us to the world also conceal our relationship to it. The Democratic Republic of Congo its latest incarnation suffers from Western indifference as much as from Western exploitation. Prospectors for minerals are more likely to be African β or Chinese β than European. The river itself is a flowing signifier for colonial greed, rapacity and, of course, horror.
And not only Kurtz. Congo is endlessly fertile literary terrain. The Congolese, he believes, have been written out of their own history, and he means to write them back in.
He draws vividly on interviews with musicians, former child soldiers, political activists and people old enough to remember the days of the Belgian Congo, including a man who claimed plausibly to be years old. In the process the Congolese have paid a high price. When Henry Morton Stanley arrived in the huge landmass, mostly covered in forest and coinciding with the drainage basin of the river, had been ravaged by the slave trade and the hunt for ivory; tribal chieftains had lost out to Portuguese merchants and African-Arab warlords, notably the slave trader known as Tippu Tip.
He never once set foot in it. He celebrated its establishment in at the Conference of Berlin by sitting on his throne while a group of Congolese children sang and danced for him. Born around , Makulo was enslaved as a little boy by Tippu Tip, then purchased at 13 by Stanley. Instead of returning him to his parents, Stanley took him to Europe and placed him in the care of a missionary. Slave, servant boy, missionary pupil, soldier: not an unusual trajectory, and by Congolese standards a lucky one.
Kidnapping and then converting liberated slaves was state policy. Millions of Congolese were forced to abandon their native crafts and gather rubber under the supervision of black soldiers in the Force Publique and their white officers. Indiscipline was punished with the chicotte , a sharp-edged whip made of dried hippopotamus skin.
