ADAM SHATZ
Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck, Fourth Estate, 656 pp, £25.00
Africa, it’s said, is the mother of modern civilisation, but it’s probably more accurate to say that Congo is. Consider your mobile phone. Before it was assembled in a Chinese factory, the coltan in its capacitors may have been dug by miners in the Eastern Congo, where millions have died in a series of wars over ‘conflict minerals’, though we give this no more thought than previous generations of Westerners gave to the Congolese origins of the ivory in their piano keys, the rubber in their tyres, the copper in their bullet casings or the uranium in their bombs. The mobile phones and computers that connect us to the world also conceal our relationship to it. Some would say that’s just as well. ‘The conquest of the earth,’ Conrad wrote, ‘is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’
Today Congo – which was described as a ‘geological scandal’ after copper was discovered in Katanga in 1892 – accounts for less than 1 per cent of the world’s minerals in terms of value. The Democratic Republic of Congo (its latest incarnation) suffers from Western indifference as much as from Western exploitation. Prospectors for minerals are more likely to be African – or Chinese – than European. Yet our image of Congo hasn’t evolved a great deal since Conrad’s time. The river itself is a flowing signifier for colonial greed, rapacity and, of course, horror. As Michela Wrong wrote in her memorable book about Mobutu, any Westerner who journeys to Congo follows ‘in the footsteps of Mr Kurtz’.
London Review of Books for more