Flight into danger: Freight Dogs, by Giles Foden, reviewed

Flying has always attracted chancers and characters to Africa. Wilbur Smith’s father so loved aviation he named his son to honour the Wright Brothers. ‘I am forever grateful he didn’t go for Orville,’ the Zambian-born author once confided. Smith father and son may well have approved of Giles Foden’s romping novel, which has African bush pilots at its core, and a style not dissimilar to that of an airport thriller.

School-age dreamer Emmanuel ‘Manu’ Kwizera comes from the implausibly beautiful hill country of eastern Congo. Green though the land is, its recent history is anything but pleasant: a plunge pool of horrific violence, backwash from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Foden skilfully uses the grim fate of the Kwizera family — too Tutsi to be Congolese, not Tutsi enough to be Rwandan — to set the scene, as hyena-like rebel groups pull the crumbling dictatorship of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu to pieces.

Exposition is not for the fainthearted when dealing with the Great Lakes region of central Africa. Some readers may have a grasp of Tutsi; far fewer will of Banyamulenge, let alone Munyamulenge. Still, Foden goes at it bravely and is to be commended.

This novel is not for the squeamish: father choked to death, raped mother burned alive, sister shot in the back, family’s beloved cow Joséphine — named to mock the kleptocrat of Kinshasa — stolen for the pot. Manu emerges as a rootless orphan, press-ganged into acts of ruthlessness by murderous rebels.

But acting like a traumatised knight errant, he manages to escape, falling in with an unofficial mess of plane-for-hire pilots based at Uganda’s Entebbe airport, the one made famous by the Israeli raid two decades earlier. Taught how to fly by these so-called ‘freight dogs’, Manu slips not just the surly bonds of Earth but morality too.