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Understanding the current civil war in Congo requires an examination of how the Congo's identity has been imagined over time. Imagining the Congo historicizes and contextualizes the constructions of the Congo's identity during four historical periods. Kevin Dunn explores "imaginings" of the Congo that have allowed the current state of affairs there to develop, and the broader conceptual question of how identity has become important in recent IR scholarship.
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The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, continues to struggle with socioeconomic and political development. Culture and Customs of the Congo provides the full context of traditional culture and modern practices against a backdrop of a turbulent history. The volume opens up a land and peoples little known in the United States. Written expressly to meet the needs of students and the general audience, the work will inform about the geography, economy, political history, and history from the slave trade to dictatorship; ancestral religions and inroads of western faiths; ancestral literary heritage and communication; art, architecture, and housing; diet and dress; marriage, family, and women; lifestyles and life events, and traditional and modern music and dance. ... Read more

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The populations of many Third World mega-cities have far outstripped any apparent economic basis for their size and survival. In this volume Congolese and Western social scientists cover most aspects of urban life in Kinshasa--how ordinary people hustle for a modest living; the famous "bargaining" system ordinary Kinois have developed; and how they access food, water supplies, health and education. The NGOization of service provision is analyzed, as is the quite rare incidence of urban riots. Equally interesting are the studies of popular discourses (including street rumor, witchcraft, and attitudes to big men, like musicians and preachers). The studies are full of the most startling facts and the wonderfully evocative phrases coined by ordinary Kinois as they confront the huge obstacle course that is urban life. Concrete, readable, intensely interesting, and always illuminating, this book is a model of how to do urban sociology in the developing world today.
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Customer Reviews (3)

Incredible--fascinating book
This is a sociological study of the people living in Kinshasa, Zaire. You will enter another world of perception, such as the first world and second world of the witch-children, the child-soldiers, of cannibalism, the mire of sex and sorcery. It is broken down into individual essays by leading sociologists regarding the economy, survival on the streets, witchcraft, prostitution, matriarchal system ect...

It is hair-raising and unbelievable at times. If you plan on going to the DRC, this book could save your life.

For the love of Congo
Theodore Trefon is an excellent editor for Reinventing Order in the Congo: How People Respond to State Failure in Kinshasa. Ifound myself mesmerized by the book, the sorrows of the people, their efforts to survive. Reading the book,I could hardly recognize the city that I loved in the 70's, so exuberant, dancing at the Cafe de la Paix! Trefon clearly has an understanding of the people who have suffered so many wars, so many Grosse Legumes, so many losses. Nevertheless, there is a strength to the people, hoping to find a bit of something to eat,to find a bit of humor, to make something out of their difficult days. How have they survived Leopold, Mobutu, and all the others, with strength. Hustling to stay alive, listening to their bits of hope, we realize that they are stronger than we. As Theodore Trefon and others tell their stories,you will be unable to lift your eyes from the text, and the power of these citizens who still manage some dignity and pride despite all wars, and degradation. Let Congo rise again.

Exciting new approach to the study of failed states
Since the term "failed state" was coined in 1992 by Helman and Ratner, many articles have been written about states that don't work. After September 11th, US, Canadian and European national security policies set out commitments to work in failed states on the grounds that lack of order and security in such states presented a threat to international security. The increased emphasis on peacebuilding which has resulted (and is most evident in Iraq and Afghanistan) has led to extensive discussion about how best to rebuild failed or collapsed states. But most books and articles have focused on the "big picture" - on lack of governance of the state, rather than on how the people of that state manage to live within the chaos that surrounds them.

This book, which looks at the capital city of what most observers regard as a "collapsed" state, brings a welcome new perspective. As Margaret Wheatley showed us some years ago, even within organizational chaos, there is order, if you know how to look for it. In this case, the order can be found at the local level, within Kinshasa, the capital of the huge and resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo. This book shows how the Kinois, as Kinshasa's residents call themselves, manage to create order within their own lives. For example, in a setting where many people eat only once every two days, starvation is not at the levels that would otherwise be expected, because people have developed their own social systems and structures for obtaining and distributing food. And as in many such states, women play a key role in this alternative system.

Looking within failed states for order is an exciting new approach in this field, both in scholarly terms and in terms of offering new ideas for how peacebuilding can be designed to work effectively in failed states. The international community spends a great deal of money in trying to rebuild failing and failed states. This book offers a new perspective that will be valuable for both policy-makers and peacebuilders alike, in showing us peoples' great creativity and capacity to create order even when governance structures collapse around them.
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Profiles the activities of the UN and its peacekeeping forces in the Congo from the period 1960 to 1964 when a precarious internal situation resulted from the civil war. The author recounts his experiences as the unofficial ONUC Force Commander. ... Read more

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This study of transnational trade between Central Africa and Europe focuses on the lives of individual traders from Kinshasa and Brazzaville who operate across national frontiers and often outside state laws. Excluded from other social and economic opportunities, participation by traders in this international second economy challenges and resists the constraints on their lives in both Africa and Europe. Their trading activities are unmeasured, unrecorded, often outside or on the margins of the law, and are sustained by complex networks through which their commodities are circulated. Who are these traders? What strategies do they have, not only to survive but to shine? What kind of networks do they rely on? And what implications does their trade have for globalization? The authors consider these and other questions in this study.Published in association with the International African Institute North America: Indiana U Press ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

This lively book shows benefit from jets and mobile phones.
Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law is about globalization as practiced by Congolese traders who operate a thriving second economy linking Central Africa and Europe. She investigates the transnational trade between Central Africa and Europe by focusing on the lives of individual traders from Kinshasa and Brazzaville, who operate across national frontiers and often outside the law. Challenging the boundaries of anthropology, Janet MacGaffey follows complex international networks to examine the ways in which the African second economy has been extended transnationally and globally on the margins of the law. Who are these traders? What strategies do they have, not only to survive but also to shine? What kinds of networks do they rely on? What implications does their trade have for the study of globalization? The personal networks of ethnicity, kinship, religion, and friendship constructed by the traders fashion a world of their own. From Johannesburg to Cairo and from Dakar to Nairobi as well as in Paris, the Congolese traders are renowned and envied. This lively book shows that it is not just the multinationals that benefit from jets and mobile phones.

Crossing boundaries, in more ways than one
"Congo-Paris" is a fine example of the recent trend in anthropology away from the localized study of communities and towards analysis that transcends geographic boundaries.Not that this study is "multi-sited" (to use the dominant buzzword):MacGaffey and Bazenguissa conducted their fieldwork for the book entirely in Paris, interviewing dozens of subjects from both Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa.But Paris is just one venue in these transnational subjects' life histories as they range back and forth across national, legal, commercial, and cultural frontiers.

While the authors set out to validate the Congolese quest for relief from political and economic hardship at home, the image they present of this loosely-defined community of traders will do nothing for its image abroad.These individuals define themselves through the act of quietly circumventing the rules (particularly import duties and immigration laws), resisting governmental authority without manifesting any visible signs of dissent.This is understandable, given the corrupt and authoritarian Congolese regimes of recent decades.But the transnational traders' ethos of stealthy noncompliance extends to their overseas existence as well, with the result in these Parisian cases being a gamut of criminal activity from smuggling and apartment squatting to drug dealing and theft."Model immigrants" they are not, regardless of whether their behavior represents a survival strategy.One wonders just how representative this underworld is of the larger community of Congolese living in Paris, and whether those Congolese living more lawful existences there object to being tarred with this brush of illegality.

Such moral qualms aside, I give "Congo-Paris" high marks for its thorough and penetrating analysis of its subjects, a very difficult group to interview given its members' legal status and clandestine activities.No doubt its success owes much to the collaboration between MacGaffey (British) and Bazenguissa (Congolese).The book also skillfully negotiates the difficult and shifting theoretical territory of anthropology to bring outside perspectives to bear on its subjects.Finally, it makes a strong case for redefining anthropology in the context of ongoing processes of globalization.I suspect that we will be seeing a good many more studies like this one in the future. ... Read more

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This masterful social and economic history of rural Zaire examines the complex and lasting effects of forced cotton cultivation in central Africa from 1917 to 1960. Osumaka Likaka recreates daily life inside the colonial cotton regime. He shows that, to ensure widespread cotton production and to overcome continued peasant resistance, the colonial state and the cotton companies found it necessary to augment their use of threats and force with efforts to win the cooperation of the peasant farmers, through structural reforms, economic incentives, and propaganda exploiting African popular culture.As local plots of food crops grown by individual households gave way to commercial fields of cotton, a whole host of social, economic, and environmental changes followed. Likaka reveals how food shortages and competition for labor were endemic, forests were cleared, social stratification increased, married women lost their traditional control of agricultural production, and communities became impoverished while local chiefs enlarged their power and prosperity.Likaka documents how the cotton regime promoted its cause through agricultural exhibits, cotton festivals, films, and plays, as well as by raising producer prices and decreasing tax rates. He also shows how the peasant laborers in turn resisted regimented agricultural production by migrating, fleeing the farms for the bush, or sabotaging plantings by surreptitiously boiling cotton seeds. Small farmers who had received appallingly low prices from the cotton companies resisted by stealing back their cotton by night from the warehouses, to resell it in the morning. Likaka draws on interviews with more than fifty informants in Zaire and Belgium and reviews an impressive array of archival materials, from court records to comic books. In uncovering the tumultuous economic and social consequences of the cotton regime and by emphasizing its effects on social institutions, Likaka enriches historical understanding of African agriculture and development.Riveting. A major social and economic history of the Zairian countryside.Allen F. Isaacman, University of Minnesota

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Customer Reviews (1)

Interesting and disappointingat the same time
This book does a decent job describing the music scene in present day DR Congo (former Zaire). It especially highlights the hierarchial nature of Congolese bands and the sorry plight of most band members who don't hold the title of band leader (Le President). It also reveals the unusual and intricate relationships between bands and their fans in the Congo

Unfortunately the author is very unconvincing when he delves into how Mobutu's political system helped define the Congolese music. Apart from constantly repeating the old and tired "Mobutu was a ruthless and corrupt dictator routine", there is no particularly revealing analysis of how Mobutu's system influenced music direction. His main assertion that Mobutu nurtured and propped up an unpopular school of Zairean music style (Odemba) over the more "independent and popular" Soukous comes out as lame and unresearched. All evidence cited to support this premise is curiously from "anonymous sources from the streets of Kinshasa."

Overall this would have been a good book, without the author trying a bit too hard to politically endear it to a specific audience. ... Read more

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Frederich Stanley Arnot was among the first of the Plymouth Brethren to take the gospel to Africa in the late 19th-century missionary expansion across the Kalahari desert, opening Protestant missions in Barotseland, Angola and Katanga in the 1880s. ... Read more

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The definitive account of early twentieth-century exploitation in the world’s only privately owned colony.

In the early twentieth century, the worldwide rubber boom led Britishenterpreneur Lord Leverhulme to the Belgian Congo. Warmly welcomed bythe murderous regime of King Leopold II, Leverhulme set up a privatekingdom reliant on the horrific Belgian system of forced labor, aprogram that reduced the population of Congo by half and accounted formore deaths than the Nazi Holocaust. In this definitive, meticulouslyresearched history, Jules Marchal exposes the nature of forced laborunder Lord Leverhulme’s rule and the appalling conditions imposed uponthe people of Congo. With an extensive introduction by Adam Hochschild,Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts is an important and urgently needed account of a laboratory of colonial exploitation.

Customer Reviews (1)

Fine study of the brutality of colonial rule
In this fascinating book, introduced by Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost and Bury the Chains, Jules Marchal shows in detail the atrocities that colonialism brought to the Congo. The Congo was and is cursed with great natural riches - palm oil, rubber, copper, tin, gold, uranium, coltan, timber and diamonds.

Marchal was a Belgian diplomat who served in the Congo. He spent 20 years researching forced labour there, producing four volumes on the 19th century, when King Leopold of Belgium owned the Congo, and three volumes covering 1910 to 1945. This volume examines the role of William Lever, the soap magnate from Port Sunlight in Liverpool who later became Lord Leverhulme. His company, Lever Brothers (now part of Unilever), exploited the Congo's palm oil to make soap.

In the late 19th century, Belgium forced men to get the oil by taking the women hostage. This gross exploitation caused a 50% death rate - ten million Congolese people were killed. King Leopold destroyed much of the evidence, ordering the Congo State archives to be burned.

In the 20th century, the Belgian state still forcibly recruited Congolese workers including women and children as young as five, and used prison to reinforce compulsory labour contracts, renewed automatically. Lever helped to enforce this vile system. Marchal describes `the triangle of State, Catholic missions and companies'. The practice of forced labour continued until independence in 1960. There was similar serfdom in Portugal's Angola, Germany's Cameroons and France's Equatorial Africa.

The exploiters made a show of philanthropy but in reality, as a director of the Compagnie du Kasai said, "You must remember that we are a commercial company not a philanthropic enterprise, and that our shareholders will not ask us if we have taken good care of the natives but what dividends we have earned them."

Naturally, the Congolese people constantly rebelled against their oppressors. In the 1931 revolt, 550 were killed, and Belgian forces tortured to death many prisoners. Only one Belgian soldier was killed, since "we have got the Maxim gun and they have not."

Still today, the Congo's riches attract predators. Since 1997, four million Congolese have been killed in wars for resources, in which a US-British ally, the Rwandan state, has repeatedly attacked the Congo.

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This volume is one of Conan Doyle's appeals to public opinion, in this case calling for international intervention over the running of the Belgian Congo (modern-day DRC), which he called "the greatest crime in history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Low readability in a number of passages
When I ordered this book, I was not informed of the production process. At the reception of the book I read "How We Made This Book" on page IV.I quote: "We automated the typing, proof reading and design of this book using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software on a scanned copy of the original rare book. That allowed us to keep the cost as low as possible."
Nice. If I had known this before I whouldn't have bought it, for I had already worked with OCR and found out that you often get some odd results as OCR frequently does not recognize characters and vomits parts of sentences in some not yet discovered language. For example: "wittTfijeacHaL", or:"Jf Jhev will notgCL-thfij are shot down, theijJeiUiandsbeing cut off". That's what the reader of this book is confronted with. Okay, not on every page, but too often for me to enjoy reading it. ... Read more

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Among the preconditions for establishing colonial authority was communication with the colonised. Verbal exchanges depended on a shared communicative praxis providing common ground on which unilateral claims could be imposed. Use of, and control over, verbal means of communication were needed to maintain regimes - military, religious-ideological, economic - in power. In the Belgian Congo brutal physical force never ceased to be exercised. In this study Professor Fabian examines the more subtle uses of power through controls on communication, by looking at the history of Swahili as it spread from the East Coast to Central Africa and demonstrating connections between -changing forms of colonial power and the development of policies towards Swahili. Using a wide range of sources, including numerous and sometimes obscure vocabularies, he combines concepts derived from literary theory and sociolinguistics to uncover, through the flaws and failures of these texts, deep-seated attitudes to language and communication. ... Read more

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In this book, Robert Harms makes an important advance toward recovering the history of the people of the rain forest by telling the story of the Nunu, who live in and around swampy floodplains of the middle Zaire River.Using concepts drawn from game theory, Professor Harms explores the changing relationship between nature and culture among the Nunu. Picturing Nunu society as animated by a never-ending competition among lineages and households, he traces how the competition pushed people into new environments, and how adaption to the new environment, in turn, led to new forms of competition. ... Read more

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In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West.Amazon.com Review
King Leopold of Belgium, writes historian Adam Hochschild inthis grim history, did not much care for his native land or hissubjects, all of which he dismissed as "small country, small people."Even so, he searched the globe to find a colony for Belgium, franticthat the scramble of other European powers for overseas dominions inAfrica and Asia would leave nothing for himself or his people. When heeventually found a suitable location in what would become the BelgianCongo, later known as Zaire and now simply as Congo, Leopold set aboutestablishing a rule of terror that would culminate in the deaths of 4to 8 million indigenous people, "a death toll," Hochschild writes, "ofHolocaust dimensions." Those who survived went to work mining ore orharvesting rubber, yielding a fortune for the Belgian king, who saltedaway billions of dollars in hidden bank accounts throughout theworld. Hochschild's fine book of historical inquiry, which drawsheavily on eyewitness accounts of the colonialists' savagery, bringsthis little-studied episode in European and African history into newlight. --Gregory McNamee ... Read more

Customer Reviews (207)

Reinventing Congolese history
Adam takes the reader on a long journey to discover what underpins the reality of Congolese history which continues to bear its consequence up to today. If one has to understand the patterns of current congolese situation, he or she has to start by reading this book in order to get a solid foundation. From the advanture of Diego Cao to E.D.Morel, the book shows all the sides of what Europeans have been able to do on Democratic Republic of the Congo. I strongly recommend to everyone to start by this book.

European Arrogance: might makes right in 1890s Africa
This is the quintessential tale of sophisticated overlords, the flunkies of an ambitious king, reducing a hunter-gatherer population to mutilation based slavery. At almost exactly the same moment that Custer and his more astute counterparts were reducing the Native American Indian tribes to reservation servitude and desparation, European monarchs sought hegemony over the land and populations ofthe last frontier available to them and it was Africa.
Weapons and harsh enforcement measures enabled ruthless domination of native tribes by white men wherever gold, ivory, potash, or imaginary wealth might be found. Unlike most campaigns at the end of the 19th century, King Leopold of Belgium waged his campaign as an individual not a nation. And that makes his excesses more repulsive in retrospect. His goal was to own the totality of the African rain forest and all the riches of the lands abutting the Congo River.

King Leopold created corporations to mimicthose with humanitarian goals. He raised money for his enterprise through the issuance of bonds, by hero ( Henry Morton Stanley) based fund raising and by suborning his government. He flim flammed his way to the equivalent of United Nations approval for taking the Congo. Then he discovered rubber, gave natives' production quotas, held hostages to ensure productivity and chopped off thousands of hands to enforce his edicts.

A resolute but small number of critics researched, wrote and exposed his travesties. Finally Leopold caved to pressure, sold his private property to his government and then died.By that time 10 Million natives had died and almost every crusader against the monarch's rule of the Congo had come to ruin.

This book follows the historical evidence of those who discovered the brutal regime and tried to bring it to a halt. It is rich in detail and ably allows one to feel the pain of the abused and the frustration of the opposition.
It is well written and enjoyable to read; and for me was a well researched account of a grim 30 year period when one greedy meglomaniac and his minions' methods took supreme advantage of the riches, primitive culture and vulnerabilityof the Congo populations.

What an awesome, revealing, sad book.
There's a very clear defining moment at which Europeans began pilfering the world...and this is one of the defining moments.This book shines light on the horrors of what Leopold did but as the author states, this is only the tip of the iceberg.The Dutch, Germans, French, and British (to name the main gang of vile imperialists) were no better...they just managed to slip under the radar somehow.

The amazing part is how self-righteous the British were in this whole ordeal...being the premier imperialists of rather recent history, it's incredibly repulsive on their part to act as though what Leopold was doing was somehow more evil than what the Brits were doing to the rest of the world which they ordained to be theirs.

What really adds to the final puzzle is now we can understand how the new world imperialists like America have come about.As far as I'm concerned, the US is simply an extension of European imperialism...particularly from the British angle.Nothing gets by 10 Downing Street when the Americans want to pull a dirty deed somewhere around the world...regardless of how "unilateral" it may seem.

Leopold was the beginning of the type of self-righteous imperialistic mentality we see today.The excellent example the author gives with Mobutu and Zaire and how the US played him and the people of that country shows how related the two times in history really are.

While we are enjoying our cell phones and computers and whatever else we take for granted, next time we should consider where the materials to build these items come from..how many "negros" in 2010 are in some mineshaft digging up precious metals so Steve Jobs can get is Ipad out in time and a bunch if self-indulgent yuppies somewhere in LA or NY can sip their lattes and cruise the web.

Brilliant and Desperately Needed
While Hochschild does an excellent job shining a light on the happenings in the Congo from its initial colonial conquest until the downfall of its imperial master (the eponymous Leopold) perhaps his greater contribution is to remind us how little of actual history we are taught in our classes in school.

Nearly everyone of my friends who read this book was shocked and saddened and not a little astounded as to how this colossal genocide has been erased from our collective memory. The book is best seen as an exhortation to scholars and historians in general to delve deeper into those obscure lacunae of history and tell us more about what really happened on the path here

Remarkable
"King Leopold's Ghost" is a brilliant piece of historical non-fiction.The narrative examines the brutal colonization and exploitation of a huge swath of Africa in the late 19th Century under the wicked direction of King Leopold II of Belgium.Millions are slaughtered in the name of King Leopold and based on the outrageous belief that Africans were lesser people, closer to animals.Along the way, the book touches on the issues of race, greed, human rights, international politics and what it takes to call out the truth about any government and its actions. "King Leopold's Ghost" will pull you along. The narrative is straightforward and the accounts are riveting. In spots, they are even hard to digest, such as when seven-year-old African boys are whipped for laughing in the presence of a white man."King Leopold's Ghost" plays out on a global landscape and demonstrates (how many examples do we need?) how a government can dominate when it controls the story and manipulates impressions through the media.

"Belgium's lack of great-power status meant that Leopold was dependent on cunning, above all on his skill at manipulating the press. As he waged his countercampaign, the king showed himself to be as much a master of the media as his archenemy Morel."(Morel is Edmund Dene Morel, a shipping-business worker turned journalist who mounts a relentless campaign of news stories about what's really happening in Africa.)Travel writers are dispatched and their costs are picked up in order to best showcase the "territory's delights."I can't think of a better example of the word "junket." Hostages are released before the travel writer lands in each town and prisons leveled, too.Reporters from English and German newspapers are bribed. "Readers observed similar mysterious transformations in other German newspapers," writes Hochschild. They "suddenly began publishing pro-Leopold Congo news items from `a most reliable source' or `a Congolese source' or a `well-informed source.' The newspapers Brussels correspondent, not in on the take, sent home more critical reports, including a long piece that apparently got into the paper without first being read by the editor in chief."

From beginning to end, "King of Leopold's Ghost" fascinates. The narrative involves the shape-shifting Henry Morton Stanley, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle and a large international cast as the colony is built and later as the regime crumbles.But the book never strays far from the manipulations of "King Leopold" and his greedy, manipulative and vicious plans for self-satisfaction.
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A story of grim comedy amid the apocalypse and a celebration of the sheer indestructibility of the human spirit in a nation run riot: Michela Wrong's vision of Congo/Zaire during the Mobutu years is incisive, ironic and revelatory.Mr Kurtz, the colonial white master, brought evil to the remote upper reaches of the Congo River. A century after Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' was first published, Michela Wrong revisits the Congo during the turbulent era of Mobutu Sese Seko.From the heart of Africa comes grotesque confusion: pink-lipsticked rebel soldiers mingle with track-suited secret policemen in hotels where fin de siecle dinner parties are ploughing through vintage wines rather than leave them to the new regime. Congo, the African country richest in natural resources, has institutionalised kleptomania. Everyone is on the take. Someone has even swiped one of the uranium rods from the country's only nuclear reactor.Having presided over unprecedented looting of the country's wealth, Mobutu, like Kurtz, retreated deep within the jungle to his palace of marble floors and gold taps. A hundred years on and nothing has changed.Amazon.com Review
During Mobutu Sese Seko's 30 years as president of Zaire (now the Congo), he managed to plunder his nation's economy and live a life of excess unparalleled in modern history. A foreign correspondent in Zaire for six years, Michela Wrong has plenty of titillating stories to tell about Mobutu's excesses, such as the Versailles-like palace he built in the jungle, or his insistence that he needed $10 million a month to live on. However, these are not the stories that most interest Wrong. Her aim is to understand all of the reasons behind the economic disintegration of the most mineral-rich country on the African continent; in so doing, she turns over the mammoth rock that was Mobutu and finds a seething underworld of parasites with names like the CIA, the World Bank and the IMF, the French and Belgian governments, mercenaries, and a host of fat cats who benefited from Mobutu's largesse and even exceeded his rapaciousness.

Wrong turns first to Belgian's King Leopold II, who instituted a brutal colonial regime in the Congo in order to extract the natural and mineral wealth for his personal gain. Mobutu, with the aid of a U.S. government determined to sabotage Soviet expansion, stepped easily into Leopold's footsteps, continuing a culture built on government-sanctioned sleaze and theft. Under the circumstances, it's hard not to feel some sympathy for the people who survived in the only ways they could--teachers trading passing grades for groceries, hospitals refusing to let patients leave until they paid up, cassava patches cultivated next to the frighteningly unsafe nuclear reactor. What is less comprehensible--and rightly due for an airing--are Wrong's revelations about foreign interventions. Why, for example, did the World Bank and IMF give Mobutu $9.3 billion in aid, knowing full well that he was pocketing most of it?

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz is a brilliantly conceived and written work, sharply observant and richly described with a necessary sense of the absurd. Wrong paints a far more nuanced picture of the wily autocrat than we've seen before, and of the blatant greed and paranoia of the many players involved in the country's self-destruction. --Lesley Reed ... Read more

Customer Reviews (50)

A Fascinating View
In The Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz follows the history of Mobutu Sese Seko, president of Zaire. The Mr. Kurtz in the title is, of course, Joseph Conrad's character from The Heart Of Darkness; a European who came to conquer the African Congo but instead found failure and madness.Mobutu was a young scholar and military leader when he took over the reins of the newly independant Zaire. Unlike many African leaders who reign for short periods of time, Mobutu reigned for over thirty years, and took a vibrant, thriving economy to ruins in the process.

Michele Wrong follows and tries to understand what went wrong. The biggest part of the problem was the sheer amount of money that Mobutu and his family and friends took out of the country. Hundreds of millions of dollars were diverted from trade, aid, and thriving businesses to their secret bank accounts. While Mobutu was a master manipulator of people and understood how to do that, he was bored by economic concepts and ignored what his policies did to the country.
Wrong covers all the areas in this tragedy. Those who had thriving businesses but were not African had their properties confiscated. Aid meant for refugees was diverted, and by the time Mobutu left, the average life expectency had fallen to the mid-fifties and diseases that had been reined in were once again rampent. Trade with other countries had dried up, as no one could count on contracts being honored. One of the richest countries in resources was left with a crumbling infrastructure and everyday services such as phones or electricity worked on a hit-or-miss basis.

This was an interesting book. I found the history itself interesting, as well as the blame that could be apportioned to international agencies like the IMF, which continued to give huge loans to Zaire when it was evident they would not be repaid, or the governments of Belgium, France and the U.S., which provided help to Mobutu regardless of his actions under the theory of "better the devil you know". This book is recommended for those interested in the history of Africa, or in reading how the best of plans often go astray.

Thought-provoking, moving, tragic.
A moving and tragic book, engagingly and often beautifully written.

Ms Wrong offers a host of hair-raising details about life in a country in which the rule of law has evaporated.The protections that most Westerners take for granted are totally absent; the local people, of course, never had these protections.Those in power (colonial, national, international, politicians, corporations) have many motives for their actions, but none of these motives seem to include improving the quality of life of the population.

What a great case study in self delusion!Mobutu and his associates never see the change in themselves as they pass from hopeful idealism to a sense of entitlement to outright corruption.As Mobutu deprives Congo's impoverished citizens of education and medical care in favor of spending the country's riches on foolish personal extravagance, he can't understand why he is not beloved as the savior of his people.What is wrong with them? Why are they so ungrateful?

To me, as an aside, this goes beyond "power corrupts"and calls out for an analysis from the perspective of the recent studies in the neurophysiology of memory!

One of the most memorable books I have read.

Mobutu Sese Seko - incompetence looking for somewhere to happen.
We've all heard the tale told so many times it's boring. How a local strongman poorly equipped for political or economic leadership manages via brutality and cunning to circumvent whatever the political process of the day is in order to install himself as totalitarian dictator of an otherwise impoverished nation. And it's perhaps that rolling of the eyes many of us get when hearing of it happening yet again, that deep breath as you try to stifle some politically incorrect utterance that makes this such an important book. Because I feel it is. I was a total layman in respect to this Mobuto chap, I only bought the book because it was reviewed in a travel magazine I was reading. Yet the author has walked the fine line between boring me to tears with too much detail and making me feel cheated by not including enough.

The overall situation of the country is discussed, the rise of Mobutu is talked about, the guy is to a certain extent humanised by the authors assertion that he can and should at times be viewed through the prism of a traditional African tribal strong man looking after his followers. Or lackeys. The chronology of the descent into economic madness and Mobotus' inability to grasp that he had no clue and to at least instal economically competent people into the corrct positions of authority is laid bare for all to see. The seemingly inevitable fracturing of society and support - usually based (drum roll please) on tribal affiliations if not at least geographic ones is also shown and the reader is left to experience a taste of the exasperation that must of been the lot of any foreign company trying to do business with such a mixture of volatile politics and seemingly wilful stupidity.

I found this book from the title down to be an interesting proposition. Literary yet not condescending, straight forward yet brimming with detail and the authors enthusiasm for her subject did come through. For those fascinated with post colonial Africa or anyone likely to be posted there for work this would be an illuminating read.

Should be required reading...
Just finished reading this.Wow.It should be required reading for anyone wanting to learn about the Congo/Zaire.

Dead Leopard
This is a mostly fascinating on-the-ground report of the waning years and immediate aftermath of Mobutu Sese Seko's incompetent dictatorship in Zaire (Congo). Michela Wrong offers a well-rounded journalistic report that digs into the bizarre depths of kleptocracy, as the potentially prosperous Zaire was bled dry while Mobutu and his ever-shifting gang of cronies and yes-men lived in ridiculous luxury, oblivious as their subjects suffered some of the worst poverty and hardship on Earth. Wrong gains plenty of insight into Mobutu's style of governance, as he spread favors around egregiously and played other powers off each other in an increasingly paranoid effort to maintain his own influence, stealing or blowing away untold billions of dollars in the process. Wrong also reports on the aftermath of Mobutu's pathetic downfall, as a convoluted series of atrocities related to the genocide in tiny Rwanda eventually led to the replacement of Mobutu's kleptocracy with Kabila's thugocracy.

There is a running theme, which Wrong could have dwelled upon more, about how the ugly history of European colonialism and exploitation has forever wrecked the ability of Africa's peoples to build their own functioning societies, while Zaire suffered the tragic fate of a home-grown dictator who ruined his people as badly as the colonialists did. Cold War politics and shifting loyalties in endless proxy wars added to the misery. The tail end of the book gets a bit messy as well, degenerating into disconnected chapters on various items of interest, as Wrong's writing takes on some of the disjointed chaos that plagued the country itself during Mobutu's downfall. The British slang and grammatical patterns of Wrong's writing style can also lead to some confusion for American readers. But despite missed opportunities to dwell on some crucial historical lessons, here we get an engaging history of a dictator who is fascinating in his ineptitude and corruption. [~doomsdayer520~] ... Read more

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