Imperialism 2.0? Review of Howard French’s ‘China’s Second Continent: How A Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire in Africa’

Imperialism 2.0? Review of Howard French’s ‘China’s Second Continent: How A Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire in Africa’ 

By Michael Deibert  

Posted on July 9, 2014 by AfricanArgumentsEditor

(Read the original article here)

When, midway through the American journalist Howard French’s new book, a Zambian politician tells him dejectedly that “we are not a poor people but we have crowned ourselves with poverty,” the phrase resonates with the experience of many countries is modern-day Africa. Resource rich but often misgoverned by autocrats who refuse to leave office – and whose depredations have been bankrolled by Western governments – Africa, despite some bright spots, remains a continent of unrealised hopes and unfulfilled potential. It is that potential, French demonstrates in his new book, that the Chinese have arrived to tap.

Between 2003 and 2013, China’s investment in Africa grew from $77 million to $2.9 billion, and the ostensible “million migrants” from China (a figure that, after reading the book, seems wildly conservative) arrived in Africa with their government’s blessing to continue their country’s transformation, in French’s words “from being a vessel” of globalization “to becoming an increasingly transformative actor in its own right.”

French, a former New York Times bureau chief in both West Africa and China, brings a nuanced and familiar understanding of both regions to this tale. The book is scrupulously even-handed to its subjects and steers well-clear of anything smacking of jingoism.

The author meets many people, including a foul-mouthed farmer from Henan dreaming of building an empire in Mozambique, a factory owner from the ancient city of Chengdu in Senegal, and a Francophile construction company official in Mali. Almost all appear casually racist about the inhabitants of their new homes in a way that one might have thought had largely disappeared from public discourse (if not private thought).

With a middle class larger than that of India, the African continent is not simply a repository for much-needed natural resources to fuel Chinese economic expansion, but also as a market for the country’s exports. Africa’s population is expected to double over the next 40 years, taking us to just about the time that newly-discovered mineral reserves are expected to run out.

As French writes, “the continent’s rapidly rising population means lots of new mouths to feed, lots more people to be clothed, devices and appliances and goods of all kinds to be sold.”

The Chinese were aided in their quest to expand in Africa by a US government which, during the critical juncture in the early-mid first decade of the millennium, was led by George W. Bush, a man completely uncurious about the world except in the most broad terms, and whose diplomats seemed equally taken by surprise by the rapid expansion that many on the ground had seen coming for some time.

In truth, for nearly a decade before Bush – at least since the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia during which 18 US servicemen were killed by Somali militias – America had put Africa on the back burner. This has changed somewhat during the presidency of Barack Obama, but not dramatically so.

The picture that French paints of China venturing forth into Africa is not a pretty one, and despite banal slogans of a “win-win” relationship, the Chinese he meets seem surprisingly unaware of how often the ground they have entered has been trod before.

The reader is treated to a vivid account of a short-sighted policy of non-transparent deal-making in Guinea, the rebuffing or insulting of civil society in various countries (generating no small reservoir of ill will) and engagement in the payment of starvation (and often illegally low) wages and non-existent workplace safety.

For the government of China, Africa is just one backdrop among many where new opportunities lie and where much money can be made. But by the end of the book it is hard to argue with French’s conclusion that “here [are] the beginnings of an empire, a haphazard empire, perhaps, but an empire nonetheless”

There are a few unexplored strands of this story that one wishes French had also included. The Chinese presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of Africa’s most iconic and tragic countries (and one that French knows well, having devoted a large part of his 2005 book to it) goes unexamined. But perhaps this was a conscious decision on the author’s part to highlight some of the rather less-known corners of the continent, such as the aforementioned Zambia, Mozambique and Namibia.

Towards the end of his book, French quotes the historian Peter Duus’ history of Japan’s colonial project in Korea: “[imperialism] requires an available victim – a weaker, less organized or advanced society or state unable to defend itself against outside intrusion.”

Africa, bedeviled as it may be by misrule, today has a more vibrant civil society than at any time in its history. One that robustly confronts the excesses of local governments and also the intrigues of outsiders of many nationalities and political persuasions – all linked by their desire to profit from the continent’s wealth.

Who will prevail in this David versus Goliath battle is unclear, as is whether the democratic gains made in countries like Ghana and Senegal will create the space needed for this side of the debate to succeed. As French clearly recognises, this remains one of the more pressing questions in Africa today.

Michael Deibert is the author of In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press), The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books) and Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).

Spied by a friend...

...In the window of a bookstore in Lusaka, Zambia...

The Horror, the Horror

Posted on Feb 28, 2014

The Horror, the Horror 

A review of The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, a book by Michael Deibert

By Nomi Prins  

Truthdig

(Please read the original article here)

“The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair” by Michael Deibert is a grim and difficult book to read, despite the author’s masterful reporting. It is painful because of the visceral attention and emotion his work demands. The tragic and depressing tale of Congo is steeped in the gruesome brutality and avarice of elite leaders-cum-plunderers. It is a story we must know.

Deibert spares readers no detail of the horrors inflicted on a population whose only crime is one of location. It is agonizing material to absorb. After yet another killing, another raid and another rape, you want the book to end. Only there is no end. Not for the Congolese. That Deibert can so compassionately balance their predicament against the voracity of their leaders and pillagers speaks volumes about his skill as an on-the-ground journalist.

He expertly untangles the myriad political and ethnic factions, their acronyms (for which he helpfully provides a glossary), and the leaders who dwell in Congo and the surrounding countries of Rwanda, Zaire, Uganda, Angola and the Central African Republic.

Today, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Congo’s Joseph Kabila and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame flit between competing and collaborating on a long-standing mission: gaining control over Congo’s abundant natural resources. Meanwhile, the world does precious little, beyond lip service, to defend Congo’s inhabitants. Indeed, world political and economic powers are not only complicit through passive acquiescence, but also actively encourage and facilitate the monstrous pillage of Congo.

Deibert begins with his exploration of the remote Eastern part of Congo, which he traverses with a driver and a translator. He ushers us “over windswept green hills from the dusty, dilapidated provincial capital of Bunia” to Ituri, “a patchwork of ethnic groups and subgroups”—broadly, the “Hema” and “Lendu.” Stemming from these divisions are “a panoply of other armed groups, each with its own competing, overlapping and colliding agendas, and a civilian population, including a substantial number of Mbuti pygmies, made to suffer the consequences of the mad scramble for power and riches.” He explains how slaughters in Ituri, as for Congo, trace back to Uganda and Rwanda. Such is the entwinement of Africa’s power elite.

Deibert examines U.S. support for the colonization of Congo, how American President Chester Arthur came “to recognize [Belgium King] Leopold’s claim to Congo in early 1884,” and the Berlin Conference that “entrusted an expanse the size of Western Europe to the whims of a king who had never set foot there.”

Echoing Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost,” Deibert writes, “the 1885 to 1908 existence of the Congo Free State was and remains one of history’s great crimes, but at the time the rape and pillage of the prostrate land continued with much approbation from the world at large.” At the time, plundering another country’s resources did not raise eyebrows among the powerful. Sadly, the only change has been the perpetrators, as Deibert elucidates throughout the book.

After decades of struggle, Congo declared itself independent on June 30, 1960. Seven months later, foreshadowing the corruption and violence that would escalate for decades, “[Patrice] Lumumba, the figure that more than any other single person symbolized Congo’s independence and its refutation of foreign domination,” was killed.

Deibert then depicts the rise of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who after launching two coups, declared himself president in November 1965. Ruling for 32 years, he infused Congo with a “cult of personality to rival anything Africa had seen before or since.” He despotically centralized state control over Congo’s provinces, reducing their number from 21 to eight within eight months in 1966, instigating massacres along the way.

Deibert broadens the story of Congo’s ongoing conflict with its neighbors, bluntly recounting their genocidal actions. “The opening shot in the Rwandan genocide was fired,” Deibert explains, “around 8 p.m. on the evening of 6 April 1994.” Hutu military and militia went on to kill nearly 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus within 100 days.

As Deibert fumes, based on voluminous evidence, “It is hard to overstate the immorality that characterized the response of Western governments during the crisis. … In the case of US President Bill Clinton, it meant a policy of feckless, narcissistic self-interest, as the administration … spearheaded efforts to remove UNAMIR troops from Rwanda, refused to use US technological know-how to block genocidaire radio transmissions and avoided any public use of the word ‘genocide’ for fear that it somehow might be compelled to act.”

After further violence through the 1990s, Deibert presents Congo’s young current leader, Kabila, taking the helm of a nation crippled by decades of corruption and half a decade of war. Sworn in as president on Jan. 25, 2001, Kabila sought international favor through a whirlwind tour of world capitals, including visits with French President Jacques Chirac, a prayer breakfast with President George W. Bush and Rwanda leader Kagame, and a meeting with Belgium Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. Deibert illuminates the swath of atrocities since Kabila’s reign began, as factions within and beyond Congo fought Kabila’s power and he fought theirs. The civilian populations were the casualties.

In stark contrast to these embattled, impoverished and powerless citizens are Congo’s vast resources. Their pillaging is an “armed robbery of epic proportions,” in which “Congolese officials, their neighbors in Africa and the international community were all complicit.”
It is these resources—and the host of ethnic groups vying for control over them—that lie at the crux of the violence. Congo contains more than 1,100 mineral substances, including 25 percent of the total known diamond reserves in the world in terms of carats, and 64 percent of the world’s known reserve of coltan, a metallic ore used in electronics. The province of Orientale is “studded with vast deposits of gold.” Those resources represent large, tantalizing profits to its leaders, neighbors and mining speculators from Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and China.

None of the spoils from these resources make it to the average Congolese citizen. As Deibert points out, “Congo should stride across the continent as an economic and political powerhouse; however, for the first half of the twentieth century the country was little more than an open cupboard of baubles to be looted by the Belgiums, and for the second half as a personal, seemingly bottomless bank account for its kleptocratic rulers.”

Indeed, official estimates from 2006 (the last ones available) cite 71 percent of the country living in poverty, and the 2012 per capita GDP at $400 per year. Congo ranks lowest on the International Human Development Indicators at 186, tied with Niger.

There exists no great plan to alter these abysmal statistics. Much as government officials in the U.S. cycle through the private sector and vice versa, Congo appoints “some of the country’s worst human rights abusers into senior positions” in the government. Meanwhile, as Deibert bemoans, “the international community’s refusal to hold the Kabila government to account for its more flagrant human rights abuses” (and there are many) only emboldens Congo’s government “in its belief that the path it had chosen was the correct one, and one that would bear very few negative consequences.” This attitude also allows regional and international predators to keep circling their prey.

“The Democratic Republic of Congo” will captivate readers already familiar with the blood-soaked, resource-intense country, as well as those being introduced to the struggles facing the Congolese. Deibert provides a relentless list of brutality; women are raped; children are killed; young men are dismembered; and political party leaders, supporters and journalists are routinely murdered. There seems to be no reason for optimism about the country’s future.

And yet, the book ends with a ray of hope emanating from the people themselves. “Despite what might seem like overwhelming odds,” Deibert writes, “the Congolese continue. They persevere.” I was amazed by this sentiment, so I decided to ask Deibert what he really thought:

“Michael, you penned the book ‘Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti’ and now, this one. You’ve spent years living in, and reporting on, torn countries as the bodies pile up. What keeps you going?” I asked him. “Telling these stories? Are you hopeful about the future? Or is Congo much closer to despair than hope?”

He responded, “Given the role that is often played by politically and economically powerful countries in the difficulties experienced by less powerful ones, I think that it is important that journalists bring back to readers in places such as the United States and Europe the impact that the measures being enacted in their name—by their politicians, their private sector actors and their institutions—have on the lives of people who are often so removed from the levers of that power. Hopefully, by doing so, by afflicting the conscience of the privileged, this will help affect a move towards less wantonly destructive, more humane policies.”

And it is for this very reason that everyone should read “The Democratic Republic of Congo.” If the Congolese can maintain their hope in such horrific circumstances, and journalists like Michael Deibert can literally risk their lives to bring us the stories of the voiceless, then it is our moral and human obligation to read them.

Book Review: The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair

17 January 2014  

Book Review: The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despai 
  
LSE’s Jonathan Silver calls Michael Deibert’s book an “essential read” for those interested in wider postcolonial worlds.
 
(Read the original review here)

Early in 2003 when the world’s attention was focused on the unfolding calamity of the Iraq invasion, another deadly conflict was occurring in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I was in south west Uganda watching with trepidation as a constant flow of Ugandan army vehicles streamed across the border from Ituri province after the strategically important town of Bunia had been captured a few months earlier by the Uganda’s People’s Defense Force. Along with the ubiquitous UN white trucks of the UN’s MONUSCO, the amounts of transportation of men, goods and weaponry gave just an inkling of the epic scale of conflict and resource extraction that was taking place at the time in eastern DRC and I was somewhat ashamed about how little I knew about such a devastating episode in Africa’s history. That feeling stayed with me through the last months of the Second Congo War (1998-2003) and the subsequent low-intensity series of ongoing conflicts, disputes, peace deals and oscillating tensions culminating in the recent emergence of the Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23) militia. Anyone who, like me, is looking to gain a better understanding of this part of central Africa would do well to read journalist Michael Deibert’s passionate dissection of the geographies of war and peace in the DRC.

The book is divided into ten chapters which provide a contemporary account of the country anchored in historical detail, following the country from pre-colonial times through to the postcolonial era and the rule of Mobutu as the country fragmented, revealing in excruciating detail the suppression and all-out civil conflict that have characterised the country. Deibert begins the book with a prologue that takes the reader directly into Ituri province and what he describes as the “killing fields” as he walks through the “chest-high grass” of this region, documenting the terrorisation of ordinary Congolese in Bogoro in February 2003. This opening is both haunting and moving, as he chooses not to begin with the assorted political actors in the country but rather with the harrowing experiences of farmers such as Mathieu Nyakufa, as over 200 civilians were murdered by the Forces de Resistance Patriotique d’Ituri (FRPI).

The main part of the book opens with a short but interesting snapshot of pre-colonial society, particularly the Kingdom of Kongo where Mwene Kongo ruled a highly centralised state and many other “state-like entities” that extended across the vast territory now known as the DRC. So often the history of this huge country and its many grand and noble traditions (as well as African states more generally) begins with the arrival of Europeans, as if hundreds of years of civilisation meant nothing until the missionaries, slave traders and imperial explorers landed on the shore. Although Deibert provides this brief introduction, the book soon moves to the moment the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao arrived in 1482 and as such seems to reflect these wider traditions of writing Africa.

Familiar history is covered in the form of explorer Henry Morton Stanley as he finds a European King in Leopold of Belgium, desperate to create his own empire (and the plunder that would go with it). Deibert shows how Stanley set about the brutal suppression of the Congo and establishing natural resource extraction on a scale that continues to the present day in various forms. As the author notes, this “remains one of history’s great crimes” (page 14).  Interestingly he hints at the pathological nature of Leopold through him being “the product of an ice-cold relationship with his mother and father” Such horrors would not only draw denunciations by Victorian reformers (Doyle, 1909) but, as the author makes clear, Leopold’s rule would set a precedent that would continue far into the future. His way of governing would certainly be mirrored in the 32-year rule of Congo by Joseph-Desire Mobutu after his 1965 coup. His attempts to draw in both Communist and Western backers, his divide and rule governance and “a cult of personality to rival anything Africa had seen before or since” are brought to the attention of the reader as further causes of the contemporary conflicts that have divided the country and its people.

After the brief (at under 50 pages) but comprehensive history of the country up to the beginning of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the remaining chapters of the book focus on the recent history of DRC, the Great Congo Wars and the echoes that continue to reverberate across the region from these momentous events. It is these seven chapters that perhaps offer the greatest contribution to understanding the country. In these pages the author provides a tour de force of detailed journalistic analysis, revealing the multiple causes of the conflicts that began with the fleeing genocidaires and subsequent actions of the Rwandan leader Paul Kagame in destroying Hutu camps and undertaking an invasion. Setting in train a brutal war that would draw in not just Rwanda but neighbouring Uganda (and later various African states) newly formed militias were supported to fight proxy conflicts and steal the abundant resources of the area to fund these escapades. It is during this time that the author reveals the acquiescence of the West through figures such as Madeline Albright (Clinton’s Secretary of State at the time) who praised “Africa’s best new leaders” and thus condemning eastern Congo to continued foreign and catastrophic influence. The author shows how DRC has been cynically used by its neighbours. The authoritarian leaderships of neighbouring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda are clearly implicated in Deibert’s dissection of competing powers. As the author shows, this has been central to the problems of the eastern DRC over the last 20 years during which  the country has been plundered by several surrounding countries, using vast territories as a space to project expansionist inclinations, make a corrupt set of autocratic governments rich and hinder any chance of lasting peace. The role of older powers such as France and Belgium together with new international actors such as China reveals that huge reserves of diamonds, gold, timber continue to draw the attention of foreign governments near and far who are prepared to ignore the human rights of the Congolese people in order to secure these natural resources.

The analysis of the role of the then young president Joseph Kabila, who took power in 2001 is another key contribution of the book. The author offers a balanced and comprehensive analysis of Kabila’s role in both struggling to contain, yet also contributing to the continuing fracturing of eastern DRC into a diverse geography of various bands of foreign and domestically funded armed forces that he terms in chapter 10 ‘rebellion after rebellion’. Deibert’s forensic investigation reveals Kabila’s increasingly authoritarian rule since coming to power. Such an analysis shows the problems posed by governing such a huge geographic space and the competing interests that criss-cross the country. As later chapters reveal, these areas have often been governed or taken over by leaders indicted by the ICC, such as Bosco Ntaganda and Jean-Pierre Bembawho have been prepared to use brutal strategies of force to challenge Kabila’s grip on the country and its resources. Indeed the list of abbreviations of different groups at the beginning of the book reflect this staggering mosaic of actors and groups across the country.

The book does well in steering clear of the Conradian echoes of travels into the heart of darkness which characterise many contemporary and not so contemporary Western accounts (Burton, 1961, Stanley 1878, 1890) of the country that have perpetuated representations of the Congo, drawing rightful scorn from postcolonial scholars (Mbembe, 1978, Mudimbe, 1988). As Jarosz (1992:106) argues, “the metaphor of the Dark Continent has shown remarkable tenacity in a variety of Western idioms spanning the last hundred years of human geography in the Western tradition”. Heroic accounts of Euro-American travels into these spaces, seemingly off the map of civilisation, offer little for readers seeking to learn more about the DRC without being able to speak French and therefore unable to read the Congolese view of their own history. As a result, Deibert’s exhaustive documentation of the complex and shifting relationships between politicians, warlords, donors, vulnerable communities, neighbouring states and a plethora of shifting actors provide an important and timely contribution in which to understand the political geography of DRC. Yet the reader would do well to note that even such an impressive account is open to Chatterjee’s (1994: 216) insistence that, ‘‘Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also our anti-colonial resistance and post-colonial misery”. While this reflection should not stop readers opening the pages to this fantastic text, it should be something to consider as the reader progresses through the book.

This is not just a book about the DRC or even contemporary Africa as the cover purports. Instead it is an essential read for those of us interested in wider postcolonial worlds and the historical fragments of local, regional and global contexts that intersect and link huge parts of the planet together. The book makes clear the role of the West in cynically using the country, the exploitation of the almost unparalleled natural resources by fellow African countries, global corporations and conniving governments. Such analysis should not prompt us to recoil in horror or paralysis about the scale of crimes that continue to take place across eastern DRC, or brush aside as another episode in the seemingly chaotic and cruel post-independence period of many former colonies. Instead as he travels across DRC, Deibert’s work brings to light the often disabling hangover of colonialism and the issues of governance, war and peace that unfold in countries such as DRC as a result. Mbembe (2001:102) argues for the need to reflect on “the political, cultural and economic realities of societies living with the legacies and in the aftermath of colonialism” and the book can certainly be praised for such a task, showing us how we can follow the threads of colonial rule into contemporary accounts.
Deibert succeeds in documenting the travails of the ordinary people of the DRC and the impact that these conflicts have had on them, not just through numbers of dead, displaced or raped but through the stories of individuals, allowing the voices of those most affected to speak directly to the reader. Such writing should be a reminder to those of us who write about postcolonial worlds to focus beyond the dominant characters and the big men (and it is nearly always men) of history to uncover how these wider political forces unfold across the everyday lives of populations. Considering the subtitle of the book, ‘Between hope and despair’ I found the book to be a little disappointing in Deibert’s treatment of hope and the ways the Congolese people have managed to not just get by but get on, navigate the shifting complexities of life and dream of a better future in the face of often almost insurmountable odds. Given the complexity of the DRC’s political geography and the extraordinary achievement in mapping these endless and shifting configurations, perhaps this was not the book in which to explore these everyday tales with which I have become familiar through urban accounts of Kinshasa by Frank De Boeck (2004, 2011). Still, as Deibert suggests, these ordinary Congolese “carry within themselves the idea of a nation, a nation stitched together out of a patchwork of tribal kingdoms that was never meant to be one but that has persisted” and which offers a vestige of hope in the future of the nation.

The book makes clear that describing contemporary DRC merely as nothing more than a modern heart of darkness is inadequate and anchored in colonial representations of Africa. It therefore joins a number of important recent texts such as Hochschilds (2012), Prunier (2011) and Stearns (2011) that help us better understand this colossal country without recourse to crude representations, instead relying on extensive research, understanding and empathy. This powerful account forces scholars and other readers to stare sombrely into the postcolonial mirror and reflect not just on the role of our countries in such tragedy but our own ways of writing, knowing and representing the continent that can inform research far beyond the borders of the DRC.

Over the course of early December the M23 was militarily defeated with the leaders and 1500 soldiers crossing over the Ugandan border to surrender after the Congolese army, and crucially a change in the rules of engagement for the MONUSCO intervention force shifted the military balance. Yet with the far from magnanimous Kinshasa government and the M23 agreeing a shaky peace agreement, signed on 12 December, together with reports of activities by other militias, including the M-18, there is still much caution about whether this can be a comprehensive peace for which many in the region are now hoping. Given the history of eastern DRC dissected so well in this book I, like the author and the millions of people in Ituri, the Kivus and the wider DRC can only draw hope for the future.

References

Burton R.E (1860): The Lake Regions of Central Africa. Kindle file

De Boeck, F., and Plissart, M-F. (2004) Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Antwerp:Ludon

De Boeck, F (2011) Spectral Kinshasa: building the city through an architecture of words 311- 128 in

Edsenor, T and Jayne, M (eds) (2011) Urban theory beyond the West: A world of cities. Routlegde. London

Doyle, A (1909) The Crime of the Congo. Kindle file

Hochschild, A (2012) King Leopold’s Ghost: A stroy of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa. Mariner Books, New York,

Jarosz, L (1992) Constructing the Dark Continent: Metaphor as Geographic Representation of Africa. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 74, No. 2 (1992), pp. 105-115

Mbembe, C (1978) Research in African Literatures, Vol. 9, No. 1, Special Issue on Literary Criticism. (Spring, 1978), pp. 1-15.

Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Mudimbe, V. Y.  (1988) The invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. James Currey, London

Prunier, G (2011) Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan genocide and the making of a continental catastrophe. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Stanley, H,M. (1878): Through the Dark Continent or The Sources of the Nile Around the Great Lakes of Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean. Kindle file

Stanley, H,M. (1890): In Darkest Africa, or the Quest, Rescue and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria. Kindle file

Stearns, J (2011) Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The collapse of the Congo and the great war of Africa. Public Affairs, New York

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert – review

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert – review 

Rory Carroll on a valuable, angry account of Congo's difficulties

The Guardian, Thursday 2 January 2014 07.00 EST 

(Please read the original article here)

The cover of Michael Deibert's examination of Congo bears a striking image of a young woman in flip-flops playing the cello in a bleak, grubby yard surrounded by a bleak, grubby city. She focuses on the notes on a sheet music stand, seemingly oblivious to the potholes and grime and rain-bellied clouds overhead.

It is an apt illustration for a book subtitled "Between Hope and Despair", and invites us to wonder if harmony will finally prevail in a country eviscerated by two decades of conflict and chaos.
This ought to be one of the great, burning questions of international diplomacy. The carnage has caused 5.4m deaths, by some estimates, and the toll continues to climb. Fighting in the east last year spilled into Rwanda.

Yet central Africa seldom commands outside attention. Its torments play second fiddle to Afghanistan and the Middle East. This is understandable – there are no Islamist or nuclear perils here to frighten the west – but still shameful. Europe and the US bear partial responsibility for Congo's plight, a legacy of enslavement, looting and meddling dating back centuries.

Deibert's book is a scrupulously researched reminder of how this corner of the world became so wretched, and of the multiple actors responsible: Congolese politicians and warlords, predatory neighbours, hypocritical western governments and a hapless UN. "Though far from a paradise before the advent of Europe's colonial adventure there," he writes, "Congo became a place as deeply scarred and deformed by colonialism as any in Africa, and the bloodshed that has befallen the country since then is not the result of some sort of indigenous, irresistible, immemorial bloodlust on the part of the Congolese, but rather has been a tool used by individuals and governments to advance their own political and economic goals."

A vast land stretching from the Atlantic across jungles and savannah to Lake Tanganyika, touching nine countries, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (as opposed to the smaller Congo-Brazzaville to the west) abounds in timber, minerals and precious stones. These riches have been a curse, drawing parasitic interlopers who ravaged and impoverished Congo under various names: the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, DRC.

The depredations have long inspired and appalled chroniclers. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Roger Casement's diaries exposed King Leopold's vampiric tyranny. More recently Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost), Michela Wrong (In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz) and Tim Butcher (Blood River) have delved into the moral murk and returned with literary gems. Mario Vargas Llosa visited Congo to research The Dream of the Celt, a fictionalised account of Casement's life published in 2012.

Deibert's book eschews literary pretensions. A globetrotting American freelancer who specialises in development issues in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, he has written a solid, journalistic account detailing Congo's tailspin since 1994. Early chapters briskly dispatch the history – Portuguese slavers, Belgian hand-cutters, Mobutu Sese Seko's decaying rule – leaving the book to focus on what happened after Rwanda's vengeful Tutsi forces pursued Hutu genocidaires across the border of its giant neighbour.

Drawing on reports from Global Witness and Human Rights Watch, among others, Deibert details how Rwanda's proxy warlord, Laurent Kabila, swept aside Mobutu's ramshackle regime and installed himself in the presidential palace in Kinshasa.

Bill Clinton, shamed by his inaction during Rwanda's genocide, compensated by turning a blind eye to atrocities committed by forces loyal to Kabila and his Rwandan puppet-master Paul Kagame. That set a trend for western coddling of Kagame that lasted two decades despite repression in Rwanda and catastrophic tampering in Congo.

As the Guardian's Africa correspondent from 2002 until 2006 I would interview massacre survivors in Goma and Bukavu, then interview western diplomats in Kigali and Kinshasa who would nod and sigh and mumble excuses. A complex situation. Multiple variables. Powder keg. Better Kagame's iron fist than anarchy.

But it was anarchy. After Kabila turned against his patron, Rwanda invaded again. A metastasising conflict drew in Angola, Burundi, Uganda and Zimbabwe, all chasing plunder, and spawned dozens of proxy local militias and rebel groups, unleashing rape, pillage and slaughter on civilians.

Deibert makes a few fleeting appearances in the text such as when he encounters "bones still bleaching in the sun" in Bogoro, five years after a massacre, or visits the assassinated Kabila's tomb, built by his son and successor, Joseph Kabila. Mostly the author keeps himself out of it, a restraint alien to the I-swam-the-crocodile-river school of Congo reportage, and sticks to the facts, layering the narrative with details about which group or sub-group committed which killings.

The cumulative effect is numbing. Here is the RCD-N killing and raping this ethnic group. Now it's the UPC killing and raping that ethnic group. Then it's the turn of the APC. Then the FRPI, the FNI, the RCD-G. Even with footnotes it can become bewildering. Which lot are they again?

Congo's horrors have arguably inspired too much lyrical prose at the expense of factual accounts giving you straight analysis, and here lies the value of this book, an up to date synopsis which should adorn the shelf of policymakers and analysts. But as acronym bleeds into acronym the general reader will yearn for some storytelling, for some characters to humanise the statistics and give a flash of Congolese culture, humour and music. Too bad, too, that we are left guessing the motivations and personalities of players such as Kagame, a PR-savvy manipulator, or Joseph Kabila, the callow princeling turned smooth, ruthless autocrat.

These are surprising omissions as this is, quite rightly, an angry book. From his writings elsewhere Deibert is in the mould of James Cameron. Compassion impels his curiosity.

He castigates Clinton ("feckless, narcissistic self-interest") and the UN's peacekeeping force Monusco ("ludicrously understaffed … at times more interested in the perpetuation of the mission itself than the protection of the near-defenceless Congolese people"), not to make partisan points but because he has seen, first-hand, the tragic consequences.

The US and some European countries have belatedly recognised Kagame's duplicity but Deibert offers scant reason for the hope in his book's title. He doubts the international criminal court's prosecution of a few warlords at the Hague will deter others. For kleptocrats and meddlers, Congo, alas, remains open for business.

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert – Reviewed by Kris Berwouts

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert

Reviewed by Kris Berwouts 

Posted on December 10, 2013 by AfricanArgumentsEditor

(Please read the original review here)

Joséphine Mpongo Nsimba has a difficult life but despite this, she tries to enjoy it. She wakes up before dawn and leaves the house to sell omelets at Kinshasa’s main market. Her income is hardly enough to make a living for herself and her children – prices have fallen recently because cheap eggs coming from outside the continent spoiled the market.  After work, she rehearses.

Josephine plays cello in a symphonic orchestra of gifted amateur musicians, determined and passionate to perform music together in one of the most chaotic cities in the world.  The Film ‘Kinshasa Symphony’ shows how a group of Congolese citizens has managed to forge a system as complex as a symphonic orchestra in a town as complicated as Congo’s capital. The movie is deeply human, intensely real, it paints scenes of extreme grimness as well as portraits of people determined to follow their dreams. Ther are people who continue to believe that, one day, the future will be better despite current indications to the contrary.

Josephine is also pictured on the cover of Michael Deibert new African Arguments book ‘The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair’, a groundbreaking examination of one of Africa’s most iconic and tragic countries and  a must-read for people interested in contemporary African politics in general and the Great Lakes Region in particular. Deibert is a journalist and author who has written for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique. He has also been a featured commentator on international affairs for the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, WNYC New York Public Radio and many others. He is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (2005).

Congo and Central Africa have been shaped by complex regional dynamics, through which local cleavages and national conflicts have spilled over national borders. Each country in the region has a complex internal situation and a violent recent history, where local contradictions have become polarized and entangled with those of neighbouring countries. Following the end of the Cold War and throughout the 1990s these regional dynamics developed into an avalanche of killing and destruction. During the two wars in the DRC (1996-1997 and 1998-2002) which followed the genocide in Rwanda, the Congo and particularly its eastern provinces became the battlefield of “Africa’s First World War”.

In the book, Michael Deibert has connected thousands of threads to weave into a variegated and subtle tapestry which paints Congo’s history from the dark days of Belgian conquest and tyranny to the modern day atrocities carried out by warring militias and their legions of child soldiers.

Between Hope and Despair closely examines the Congolese state – the result of half a century of post-colonial history and a country that faced its first threat of implosion only days after it achieved independence, became a major pawn on the chess board of the cold war and developed under Mobutu a system for which the word ‘kleptocracy’ had to be invented. Deibert describes how this state was shaped by the long-term involvement of the United States and Europe in supporting and arming many of the belligerents in Congo’s conflicts, the ongoing murky role played by foreign interests in exporting mineral resources linked to the country’s  continuing instability and Congo’s own tortuous political and ethnic legacies.

His judgment is hard: “Drifting and myopic policies drawn up by a succession of international leaders were most often forged in the context of imagined grand geo-politics rather than the realities on the ground, allowing both Kabila and Congo’s neighbor to operate with brutality and impunity. Predatory and unscrupulous foreign business practitioners stepped into the void left by corruption and nepotism and continue to bleed the country dry of its mineral riches.”

Michael Deibert takes us with him on his journey down Congo’s muddy roads from the war-torn hills in the Kivus to the chaotic, pulsing capital of Kinshasa, presenting us the  Congolese polyphony  from impoverished gold prospectors and market women to government officials. His heart is with the communities and his book blames the world leaders who’ve either turned a blind eye to or directly fomented the misery of the Congolese people.

“… the bloodshed that has befallen the country (…) is not the result of some sort of indigenous, irresistible, immemorial blood lust on the part of the Congolese, but rather has been a tool used by individuals and governments  to advance their own political and economic goals throughout the territory Congo occupies, a state of affairs that has been true for the last 140 years.”

I don’t think I will put Deibert’s work back on the bookshelf. I will keep it within reach on my desk. Apart from an empathic narrative of hope and despair and a solid holistic analysis grounded in history, it is also a very practical mini-encyclopedia on Congo’s devastating conflicts and the many attempts to end them. If something happens tomorrow – the death of a key player of the last two decades, the outbreak of new violence in Ituri or the province of Bas-Congo, a new arrest warrant issued by the ICC -  it would only take me a few minutes to freshen up with the necessary background knowledge from Deibert’s book, allowing me to fully understand any new development.

Kris Berwouts has, over the last 25 years, worked for a number of different Belgian and international NGOs focused on building peace, reconciliation, security and democratic processes. Until recently, he was the Director of EurAc, the network of European NGOs working for advocacy on Central Africa. He now works as an independent expert on Central Africa.

Why, look what the postman brought...

Support Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair on Kickstarter

Photo © Hilary Wallis

Dear all,

I am attempting to raise funds via Kickstarter to enable me to complete a final round of research interviews in Central Africa for my book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, to be published by Zed Books next year. The goal to be reached over the next 30 days is $3,500, which will cover airfare and accommodation between the United States and Africa. Nearly $1,000 has been raised thus far.

Published in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council and Justice Africa, the book will closely examine the Congolese state as it exists now under the rule of President Joseph Kabila, and how that state was shaped by the long-term involvement of the United States and Europe in supporting and arming many of the belligerents in Congo’s conflicts, the ongoing murky role played by foreign interests in exporting mineral resources linked to the country’s continuing instability and Congo’s own tortuous political and ethnic legacies.

Please consider donating what you can on the project's page on Kickstarter here, and please consider spreading the news of it to those who you feel might support this important new look at recent events in Central Africa.

Many thanks for your time and your support.

Best regards,

Michael Deibert