Fear and loathing in the Congo

Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia.

Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia. When the UN peacekeepers made contact — and there was always a risk they would run into Rwandan rebels with very different priorities — his job was to persuade twitchy, traumatised child fighters to down their weapons.

Arguably, what he attempts to do in this book is even braver. Confronted with a story as complex as the Democratic Republic of Congo’s, most writers would be tempted to either pitch a tale of personal derring-do or play the atrocity card, the better to win the sympathy vote. God knows that the country formerly known as Zaire suffers no shortage of stomach-churning events.

Refreshingly, Stearns does neither. He is not interested in telling us how he felt interviewing a gang-rape victim, whether he feared for his life walking down Kivu’s ochre tracks or how many times he caught malaria. And while we are not spared many accounts of gruesome bloodletting, there is no gratuitous titillation here.

Rather, by establishing a precise chronology of violence, he seeks to demonstrate cause and effect — the logical links too often omitted from accounts of Congo’s crisis. Stearns’ ambition is to demolish the strange spell the DRC has cast over the world’s imagination since well before Joseph Conrad made a life-changing trip up river.