Bookends of Horror

“The last battle of the colonized against the colonizer will often be the fight of the colonized against each other.” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost and Gerard Prunier’s Africa’s World War are in too many ways bookends to the horrors that plagued the Congo (i.e. Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, DRC, etc.) over the last century. Starting in the late 1800s, Hochschild’s book recounts King Leopold II of Belgium’s greedy quest for a colony; his cunningness in carving out a Belgium colony in the heart of Africa that was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined; and finally, after a trail of terror as long and as unforgiving as the Congo River, the King watched over a genocide that killed over 10 million people. Prunier’s book catches up with this story in 1996, when in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, regional tensions boiled over to spark a continental war – Africa’s World War. Prunier examines this bloodbath – which curdled for over six years – by untangling the ethnic dimensions of the conflict and the numberless atrocities that accompanied it.

I am about two-thirds the way through King Leopold’s Ghost and I can’t help thinking that the brutal system of colonization in the Congo, where hands and heads were cut off as souvenirs (the impetus for Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz), built the exposition phase of the story told in Africa’s World War.

Both authors are historians and analysts, storytellers and novelists, bringing forgotten history to life. Yet, both have different styles and points of view. Hochschild is more of an activist, but one who can’t help but build a narrative: “But those who condemned it were unaware that, compared with the bloodshed beginning just then in central Africa, it was only a sideshow.”

Punier, on the other hand, is a French (always French) philosopher-analyst: “And the situation in the Great Lakes is so horribly complex, so contradictory that one does not have to be American to fall victim to the syndrome of desperately wanting to find "good guys" and "bad guys" who could restore meaning and clarity to such moral gloom.” Yet he too has the novelist’s touch: “Thus the best image one can give of what happened is that of geographical hollow, the Congo Basin, entirely surrounded by a chain of otherwise unconnected storm clouds which were all drawn toward the low-pressure zone that had suddenly developed.”

As I conclude this rather cathartic experience, my hope is that these two books do represent bookends to the long history of conflict in the Congo. And may peace be found.