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Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
At the heart of Africa is Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal and unstaunchable war in which millions have died. And yet, despite its epic proportions, it has received little sustained media attention. In this deeply reported book, Jason Stearns vividly tells the story of this misunderstood conflict through the experiences of those who engineered and perpetrated it. He depicts village pastors who survived massacres, the child soldier assassin of President Kabila, a female Hutu activist who relives the hunting and methodical extermination of fellow refugees, and key architects of the war that became as great a disaster as--and was a direct consequence of--the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Through their stories, he tries to understand why such mass violence made sense, and why stability has been so elusive.
Through their voices, and an astonishing wealth of knowledge and research, Stearns chronicles the political, social, and moral decay of the Congolese State.
Through their voices, and an astonishing wealth of knowledge and research, Stearns chronicles the political, social, and moral decay of the Congolese State.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published March 29, 2010
About the author
Jason K. Stearns
11 books22 followersJason K. Stearns is an American writer who worked for ten years in the Congo, including three years during the Second Congo War. He first traveled to the Congo in 2001 to work for a local human rights organization, Héritiers de la Justice, in Bukavu. He went on to work for the United Nations peacekeeping mission (MONUC). In 2008 Stearns was named by the UN Secretary General to lead a special UN investigation into the violence in the country.
Stearns is the author of the book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, and the blog, Congo Siasa
Stearns is the author of the book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, and the blog, Congo Siasa
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August 5, 2016
It's often claimed that the Congo Wars are too confusing for outsiders to understand. Pshaw.
It's really quite simple. The RFP pushed into DRC in the guise of the AFDL, originally pursuing ex-FAR. Naturally with UNITA and FLEC in the area Angola had an interest in getting involved and Uganda was wrestling with the WNBLF, UMLA, the ADM and of course the NALU; the Burundians, meanwhile, were contending with the FDD and FNL, all of whom were laden with RPGs and AKs. OK? After Kabila père turned on them, Rwanda backed the RCD, until it splintered at which point the RCD-A and RCD-O went one way while the RCD-N won support from Kampala on the QT. Bemba, who was running the MLC like an IPO, was in the middle. The UN and EU were not sure who to help and the ICRC, IMF and NGOs like MSF were reporting widespread FUBAR leading most commentators to conclude simply WTF.
Jason Stearns, a journalist who worked for a decade in the Congo, including for the UN and various human rights organisations, is only moderately successful in unpicking the tangle of the two conflicts which between 1996 and 2003 killed around five million people. He is much stronger, though, in making the general point that the violence in the Congo, however complex, does in fact result from comprehensible social and political conditions and that these need to be examined; it must not be left to the ascription of some inexplicable African capacity for evil or savagery, which is the implication that lies behind much coverage of the wars.
So let me have another run at summarising what happened.
The Congo Wars began as a sequel to the genocide in Rwanda, when thousands of Hutu refugees fled over the border into eastern Zaire (as it was then called). Because perpetrators of the genocide were among these refugees, the Rwandans crossed the border to hunt them down and the international community, feeling somewhat guilty about having done so little during the Rwandan genocide, mostly let them do it.
Seeking to give this incursion more legitimacy, the Rwandans (along with Uganda, who had their own motives for getting involved) now picked from obscurity a minor Congolese rebel, then living in exile, called Laurent Kabila, and made him the head of a new rebel group called the AFDL. This was presented as a home-grown rebellion against President Mobutu, but really it was an elaborate fig-leaf for Rwandan and Ugandan invasion. With this foreign support, Kabila made it to Kinshasa, deposed Mobutu, and became president, having paused en route to slaughter all the Hutu refugees in the country.
The international community, starting to lose track of who was supposed to be the goodies and baddies in this story, again did very little.
Kabila was a fairly weak president, since he'd come to power with little local support. Whipping up some nationalist fervour, he now ordered all foreign powers out of the country and turned his guns on the Rwandans and Ugandans who had brought him to power. They were annoyed. Apart from anything else, they had been profiting handsomely from the eastern Congo's mineral wealth. So they simply invaded again, and began busily supporting whatever local rebellions they could find. To make matters more confusing, Rwanda and Uganda also fell out with each other, which meant they were both funding different rebel groups which now fought against each other as well as against the Congolese army, and all of these groups were framing their arguments in divisively ethnic terms.
What becomes abundantly clear, reading through the details of these messy conflicts, is the absence of any functioning state in the Congo. The Economist once commented that it wasn't a country but rather a ‘Zaire-shaped hole in the middle of Africa’, and you soon start realising that the comparisons are not with other countries around the world now but with the Italian states familiar to Machiavelli, or with seventeenth-century Germany. Nothing that a state needs to do is done. There are, for instance, only two thousand miles of paved road in what is the world's twelfth-largest country. The tax system is not designed to finance the state, but is set deliberately high to encourage bribes to local officials (a World Bank report found that if you actually paid all your taxes in DRC you would be shelling out 230 percent of your profits); so the entire economy is shifted into the informal sector. But most of all, the Congo is not able to assume the monopoly on violence that we expect from a nation-state, and local militia and foreign proxies fill the vacuum in their dozens.
This background is important. When lazy articles boil DRC down to a series of shock images – violent gang-rapes, women forced to eat their dead babies and so on – these things happen, but they are not the result of evil monsters but the result, quite predictable, of generations of intertribal violence and state weakness. Reading about such scenes – and Stearns, without being gratuitous, does not shy away from some extremely upsetting close-ups – I realised that I had been reading about exactly the same thing in a European context a few months ago when I was boning up on the Thirty Years' War.
Sometimes in here we can almost catch the cycle taking place in front of us. One of Stearns's interviewees, a young man who ran off to join a local AFDL unit – little more than a group of armed kids in the forest – describes the horrific brutalisation that new recruits were put through, something that in a way represents the brutalisation of all young men in a society so regularly at war: the hazing, the beating, the constant reinforcement of the duty to kill and beyond that to exercise cruelty. This is drummed into you. Every weakness is penalised and every misdemeanour exploited:
A few weeks later, at graduation, they were made to slit the throats of some captured prisoners. Then they were soldiers, and real men.
Those who go on to be responsible for atrocities or massacres here justify themselves in much the same way as we've seen in Cambodia or Nazi Germany or anywhere else: they were professionals who followed the orders they were given. One RPF officer, discussing the mass slaughter of Hutu refugees, quite cheerfully explains how he went about it:
But trying to ascribe blame in this plexus of revenge and counter-counterinsurgency is, even in individual cases, almost impossible. Even the victims, asked to address the matter of responsibility, are overwhelmed.
How western countries and international agencies should insert themselves into this situation is a complicated question. Stearns is sceptical about aid, seeing it too often as a way of assuaging guilt without dealing with problems at the root level, which is to say in terms of political structures. ‘All development,’ he points out, I think rightly, ‘is deeply political. By taking over the financing of most public services, donors take pressure off the Congolese government to respond to the needs of its citizens.’ He cannot find any really new solutions, but he does point to tighter regulation of international business as one area that could easily make a difference: at the moment, too many companies can turn a blind eye to the source of their coltan or copper, and industry guidelines about how such minerals are produced are just not very firmly enforced.
The Congo's problems will only start to turn around through new relationships between the people, the politicians, and businesses, and outside elements need to think carefully about how they are affecting this process instead of just chucking money into the whirlpool. Ultimately, he thinks: ‘We simply do not care enough.’
He does care, and for those who want to understand the region better his book makes a good starting-point. By focusing on the war, the book unfortunately does nothing to deconstruct the constant harmful equation between the Congo and conflict – but at least you come away from it feeling a little more informed, and a little less like the whole thing is just an inexplicable bloody mess.
It's really quite simple. The RFP pushed into DRC in the guise of the AFDL, originally pursuing ex-FAR. Naturally with UNITA and FLEC in the area Angola had an interest in getting involved and Uganda was wrestling with the WNBLF, UMLA, the ADM and of course the NALU; the Burundians, meanwhile, were contending with the FDD and FNL, all of whom were laden with RPGs and AKs. OK? After Kabila père turned on them, Rwanda backed the RCD, until it splintered at which point the RCD-A and RCD-O went one way while the RCD-N won support from Kampala on the QT. Bemba, who was running the MLC like an IPO, was in the middle. The UN and EU were not sure who to help and the ICRC, IMF and NGOs like MSF were reporting widespread FUBAR leading most commentators to conclude simply WTF.
Jason Stearns, a journalist who worked for a decade in the Congo, including for the UN and various human rights organisations, is only moderately successful in unpicking the tangle of the two conflicts which between 1996 and 2003 killed around five million people. He is much stronger, though, in making the general point that the violence in the Congo, however complex, does in fact result from comprehensible social and political conditions and that these need to be examined; it must not be left to the ascription of some inexplicable African capacity for evil or savagery, which is the implication that lies behind much coverage of the wars.
They are not alien; they are not evil; they are not beyond our comprehension. […] The principal actors are far from just savages, mindlessly killing and being killed, but thinking, breathing Homines sapientes, whose actions, however abhorrent, are underpinned by political rationales and motives.
So let me have another run at summarising what happened.
The Congo Wars began as a sequel to the genocide in Rwanda, when thousands of Hutu refugees fled over the border into eastern Zaire (as it was then called). Because perpetrators of the genocide were among these refugees, the Rwandans crossed the border to hunt them down and the international community, feeling somewhat guilty about having done so little during the Rwandan genocide, mostly let them do it.
Seeking to give this incursion more legitimacy, the Rwandans (along with Uganda, who had their own motives for getting involved) now picked from obscurity a minor Congolese rebel, then living in exile, called Laurent Kabila, and made him the head of a new rebel group called the AFDL. This was presented as a home-grown rebellion against President Mobutu, but really it was an elaborate fig-leaf for Rwandan and Ugandan invasion. With this foreign support, Kabila made it to Kinshasa, deposed Mobutu, and became president, having paused en route to slaughter all the Hutu refugees in the country.
The international community, starting to lose track of who was supposed to be the goodies and baddies in this story, again did very little.
Kabila was a fairly weak president, since he'd come to power with little local support. Whipping up some nationalist fervour, he now ordered all foreign powers out of the country and turned his guns on the Rwandans and Ugandans who had brought him to power. They were annoyed. Apart from anything else, they had been profiting handsomely from the eastern Congo's mineral wealth. So they simply invaded again, and began busily supporting whatever local rebellions they could find. To make matters more confusing, Rwanda and Uganda also fell out with each other, which meant they were both funding different rebel groups which now fought against each other as well as against the Congolese army, and all of these groups were framing their arguments in divisively ethnic terms.
What becomes abundantly clear, reading through the details of these messy conflicts, is the absence of any functioning state in the Congo. The Economist once commented that it wasn't a country but rather a ‘Zaire-shaped hole in the middle of Africa’, and you soon start realising that the comparisons are not with other countries around the world now but with the Italian states familiar to Machiavelli, or with seventeenth-century Germany. Nothing that a state needs to do is done. There are, for instance, only two thousand miles of paved road in what is the world's twelfth-largest country. The tax system is not designed to finance the state, but is set deliberately high to encourage bribes to local officials (a World Bank report found that if you actually paid all your taxes in DRC you would be shelling out 230 percent of your profits); so the entire economy is shifted into the informal sector. But most of all, the Congo is not able to assume the monopoly on violence that we expect from a nation-state, and local militia and foreign proxies fill the vacuum in their dozens.
This background is important. When lazy articles boil DRC down to a series of shock images – violent gang-rapes, women forced to eat their dead babies and so on – these things happen, but they are not the result of evil monsters but the result, quite predictable, of generations of intertribal violence and state weakness. Reading about such scenes – and Stearns, without being gratuitous, does not shy away from some extremely upsetting close-ups – I realised that I had been reading about exactly the same thing in a European context a few months ago when I was boning up on the Thirty Years' War.
Sometimes in here we can almost catch the cycle taking place in front of us. One of Stearns's interviewees, a young man who ran off to join a local AFDL unit – little more than a group of armed kids in the forest – describes the horrific brutalisation that new recruits were put through, something that in a way represents the brutalisation of all young men in a society so regularly at war: the hazing, the beating, the constant reinforcement of the duty to kill and beyond that to exercise cruelty. This is drummed into you. Every weakness is penalised and every misdemeanour exploited:
After committing a minor infraction, Kizito was told to step in front of his fellow recruits and dig a small hole in the pitch. ““This is your vagina,’ the commander said. ‘Take out your dick and fuck it!’” Kizito told me, blushing and looking down. In front of all of his fellow recruits, he was forced to hump the hole until he ejaculated. “In front of all those people, it was almost impossible,” he muttered. At sixteen, he was still a virgin.
A few weeks later, at graduation, they were made to slit the throats of some captured prisoners. Then they were soldiers, and real men.
Those who go on to be responsible for atrocities or massacres here justify themselves in much the same way as we've seen in Cambodia or Nazi Germany or anywhere else: they were professionals who followed the orders they were given. One RPF officer, discussing the mass slaughter of Hutu refugees, quite cheerfully explains how he went about it:
“We could do over a hundred a day,” Papy told me. I had a hard time believing him; it seemed so outrageous. “We used ropes, it was the fastest way and we didn't spill blood. Two of us would place a guy on the ground, wrap a rope around his neck once, then pull hard.” It would break the victim's windpipe and then strangle him to death. There was little noise or fuss.
But trying to ascribe blame in this plexus of revenge and counter-counterinsurgency is, even in individual cases, almost impossible. Even the victims, asked to address the matter of responsibility, are overwhelmed.
I asked him whom he blamed for their deaths. He shrugged. “There are too many people to blame. Mobutu for ruining our country. Rwanda and Uganda for invading it. Ourselves for letting them do so. None of that will help bring my children back.”
How western countries and international agencies should insert themselves into this situation is a complicated question. Stearns is sceptical about aid, seeing it too often as a way of assuaging guilt without dealing with problems at the root level, which is to say in terms of political structures. ‘All development,’ he points out, I think rightly, ‘is deeply political. By taking over the financing of most public services, donors take pressure off the Congolese government to respond to the needs of its citizens.’ He cannot find any really new solutions, but he does point to tighter regulation of international business as one area that could easily make a difference: at the moment, too many companies can turn a blind eye to the source of their coltan or copper, and industry guidelines about how such minerals are produced are just not very firmly enforced.
The Congo's problems will only start to turn around through new relationships between the people, the politicians, and businesses, and outside elements need to think carefully about how they are affecting this process instead of just chucking money into the whirlpool. Ultimately, he thinks: ‘We simply do not care enough.’
He does care, and for those who want to understand the region better his book makes a good starting-point. By focusing on the war, the book unfortunately does nothing to deconstruct the constant harmful equation between the Congo and conflict – but at least you come away from it feeling a little more informed, and a little less like the whole thing is just an inexplicable bloody mess.
May 9, 2011
If you want to understand the tragedy that is the Congo, put aside the mythology and read Dancing In The Glory of Monsters. Jason Stearns has untangled the snarling mess that is the history of this sad nation.
As someone who's researched and written about the Congo myself (Heart of Diamonds: A Novel of Scandal, Love and Death in the Congo), I found new insights into the interminable conflicts that have wracked the country for it's entire modern history. Stearns delineates the players, putting them into context and showing how they interacted to make the Congo what it is today. He clearly explains the role of Rwanda's Paul Kagame and other outsiders in the turmoil, but also delineates the power hunger and shortcomings of the Congo's own leaders, including current President Joseph Kabila.
Most importantly, Stearns demonstrates that there is no one single cause of the Congo's troubles. He calmly shows how tribal rivalries fuel the strife just as much as the struggle to control the country's mineral wealth. He explains how the internal politics of Zimbabwe, Uganda, Angola, and other countries in addition to Rwanda led to their deep involvement in the DRC's wars. While he rightfully deplores the epidemic of rape in the Congo, he puts it in context and doesn't dwell on it--not because it's not important, but because there's more to the story.
I found it refreshing that Stearns resists the impulse to blame rapacious multinational corporations for much of anything except trying to find a way to do business in the Congo. He doesn't ignore the many shortcomings of most of the deals to exploit the Congo's riches, but correctly points out that most of them were struck by Congolese leaders eager to fund their own ambitions. He leaves the conspiracy theories to other, less informed writers.
Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters is an objective, clear-eyed look at one of the greatest ongoing tragedies in modern history.
As someone who's researched and written about the Congo myself (Heart of Diamonds: A Novel of Scandal, Love and Death in the Congo), I found new insights into the interminable conflicts that have wracked the country for it's entire modern history. Stearns delineates the players, putting them into context and showing how they interacted to make the Congo what it is today. He clearly explains the role of Rwanda's Paul Kagame and other outsiders in the turmoil, but also delineates the power hunger and shortcomings of the Congo's own leaders, including current President Joseph Kabila.
Most importantly, Stearns demonstrates that there is no one single cause of the Congo's troubles. He calmly shows how tribal rivalries fuel the strife just as much as the struggle to control the country's mineral wealth. He explains how the internal politics of Zimbabwe, Uganda, Angola, and other countries in addition to Rwanda led to their deep involvement in the DRC's wars. While he rightfully deplores the epidemic of rape in the Congo, he puts it in context and doesn't dwell on it--not because it's not important, but because there's more to the story.
I found it refreshing that Stearns resists the impulse to blame rapacious multinational corporations for much of anything except trying to find a way to do business in the Congo. He doesn't ignore the many shortcomings of most of the deals to exploit the Congo's riches, but correctly points out that most of them were struck by Congolese leaders eager to fund their own ambitions. He leaves the conspiracy theories to other, less informed writers.
Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters is an objective, clear-eyed look at one of the greatest ongoing tragedies in modern history.
August 26, 2012
This book has been called the "best" current nonfiction about the violence in the DRC - which I think says far more about the dearth of good books on the subject than on this one's merits.
While the book is a useful primer on the facts and political history of the violence in the DRC, I frankly disagree with most reviewers (and the author himself) that it somehow manages to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the country, the actors, or their motivations.
Stearns claims to be weary of the Congo-as-Heart-of-Darkness motif, but routinely resorts to shorthand that he chides others for. One example: "Sometimes it seems that by crossing the border into the Congo one abandons any sort of Archimedean perspective on truth…"
Moreover, I simply disagree that this book lays bare the motivations of actors in the violence. Numerous chapters end, after having barraged the reader with 10,000 words of rebel movements, acronyms, and alliances, with exceedingly superficial analysis of higher-order questions. A typical paragraph might read like this: What would prompt someone to do x, y, and z awful things? . . . Well I don't know, but what I can say is that it is not because they are evil. Obviously true and worth repeating, but this is really only the beginning of the analysis, whereas Stearns generally feels content making it the end.
What's perhaps most disappointing is the author's failure to translate the enormous quantity of interviews he has conducted into a truly human perspective on the violence. Perhaps it is simply because Stearns is a rather dry and uninventive writer, but none of the protagonists in this violence ever became human for me. Ironically, their depictions in this book tended to reinforce, rather than overturn, the stereotypes I had of opportunistic, morally bankrupt leaders.
Finally, there is a concluding chapter full of lazy policy recommendations like "strengthening institutions" and "thinking about incentives" and "recognizing our moral debt to the Congo" - without even a token effort at delving into specifics.
Everyone else loved this book - I just don't get the hype.
While the book is a useful primer on the facts and political history of the violence in the DRC, I frankly disagree with most reviewers (and the author himself) that it somehow manages to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the country, the actors, or their motivations.
Stearns claims to be weary of the Congo-as-Heart-of-Darkness motif, but routinely resorts to shorthand that he chides others for. One example: "Sometimes it seems that by crossing the border into the Congo one abandons any sort of Archimedean perspective on truth…"
Moreover, I simply disagree that this book lays bare the motivations of actors in the violence. Numerous chapters end, after having barraged the reader with 10,000 words of rebel movements, acronyms, and alliances, with exceedingly superficial analysis of higher-order questions. A typical paragraph might read like this: What would prompt someone to do x, y, and z awful things? . . . Well I don't know, but what I can say is that it is not because they are evil. Obviously true and worth repeating, but this is really only the beginning of the analysis, whereas Stearns generally feels content making it the end.
What's perhaps most disappointing is the author's failure to translate the enormous quantity of interviews he has conducted into a truly human perspective on the violence. Perhaps it is simply because Stearns is a rather dry and uninventive writer, but none of the protagonists in this violence ever became human for me. Ironically, their depictions in this book tended to reinforce, rather than overturn, the stereotypes I had of opportunistic, morally bankrupt leaders.
Finally, there is a concluding chapter full of lazy policy recommendations like "strengthening institutions" and "thinking about incentives" and "recognizing our moral debt to the Congo" - without even a token effort at delving into specifics.
Everyone else loved this book - I just don't get the hype.
June 14, 2013
This book provides clarity to the quagmire of wars that have been happening in the Congo since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Mr. Stearns explains well the personalities involved and also brings us face to face with the brutality undergone by ordinary people in the many shattered villages and cities. The Tutsi-Hutu animosities are a recurring theme – but in the Congo, nothing is so simple and Mr. Stearns always qualifies his explanations.
The Congo is a land blessed with many natural resources. It is also surrounded by states that quickly recognize and exploit weakness. The author uses the apt analogy of a small country like Japan dominating and invading China during the 1930’s – and similarly the super-powers of the time looked on with little interest. In the Congo’s case there are several states participating in this invasion – Rwanda, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe. Also the long and corrupt reign of Mobutu came to an end during this time. Mobutu did little to develop or maintain any of the infrastructures of his country – for instance the army became a ragtag group of competing forces that were unable to stop the invasion of its much smaller neighbours. The Congo was inundated with Hutu refugees after the Rwandan genocide. After the Rwandan invasion of 1996 these hundreds of thousands of people literally kept walking westward through the Congo to seek sanctuary – often they did not find it.
The author weaves us through the complexities of problems. Another persistent theme is that of “omission”. Most of us (including myself) know little of the Congo. More people died (and most died of curable diseases) than in Darfur. But yet the devastation and the arduous journeys of the refugees hardly made air time on major news outlets. As Romeo Dallaire wrote in his book “Shake Hands with the Devil” it would appear that the life of an African is worth little to the West.
The only quibble I have is at the beginning, where Mr. Stearns cites as a reference point Hannah Arendt’s famous quote on the “banality of evil” which is an outlook I have strong reservations on – particularly with regards to the violence that the Congolese people experienced. Fortunately this viewpoint does not unduly influence the author’s writing.
The future for the Congo, even with the signing of a peace accord of the countries involved in this long war, is still rather grim. Are there the makings of another “strong man” in Joseph Kabila? This is definitely a worthwhile book that does much to disentangle the recent history of this tortured country.
Mr. Stearns explains well the personalities involved and also brings us face to face with the brutality undergone by ordinary people in the many shattered villages and cities. The Tutsi-Hutu animosities are a recurring theme – but in the Congo, nothing is so simple and Mr. Stearns always qualifies his explanations.
The Congo is a land blessed with many natural resources. It is also surrounded by states that quickly recognize and exploit weakness. The author uses the apt analogy of a small country like Japan dominating and invading China during the 1930’s – and similarly the super-powers of the time looked on with little interest. In the Congo’s case there are several states participating in this invasion – Rwanda, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe. Also the long and corrupt reign of Mobutu came to an end during this time. Mobutu did little to develop or maintain any of the infrastructures of his country – for instance the army became a ragtag group of competing forces that were unable to stop the invasion of its much smaller neighbours. The Congo was inundated with Hutu refugees after the Rwandan genocide. After the Rwandan invasion of 1996 these hundreds of thousands of people literally kept walking westward through the Congo to seek sanctuary – often they did not find it.
The author weaves us through the complexities of problems. Another persistent theme is that of “omission”. Most of us (including myself) know little of the Congo. More people died (and most died of curable diseases) than in Darfur. But yet the devastation and the arduous journeys of the refugees hardly made air time on major news outlets. As Romeo Dallaire wrote in his book “Shake Hands with the Devil” it would appear that the life of an African is worth little to the West.
The only quibble I have is at the beginning, where Mr. Stearns cites as a reference point Hannah Arendt’s famous quote on the “banality of evil” which is an outlook I have strong reservations on – particularly with regards to the violence that the Congolese people experienced. Fortunately this viewpoint does not unduly influence the author’s writing.
The future for the Congo, even with the signing of a peace accord of the countries involved in this long war, is still rather grim. Are there the makings of another “strong man” in Joseph Kabila? This is definitely a worthwhile book that does much to disentangle the recent history of this tortured country.
June 4, 2021
In the hundred years of bloodshed that was the 20th century, the Congo War is a tragedy that has mostly been ignored by the West, and forgotten by history. Something like five million people died, placing the Congo War as the the 6th largest mass killing in the 20th century, the deadliest event since the Second World War, and the 27th largest in recorded history, according to The Great Big Book of Horrible Things. And there is a reason for this, beyond Western dismissals of Africa in general. As Stearns puts it in his introduction, "How do you cover a war that involves at least twenty different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective?"
He does his best, using his skills as an investigative journalist to move through the key players in a rolling series of conflicts that started with the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, and linger today, despite a peace conference in 2002. While no one can speak for all the dead, Stearns lets the survivors of genocidal attacks, epidemic ridden refugee camps, death marches, mass rape, and induction into armies of child soldiers tell their own stories. It is impossible not to be moved.
On the broader political front, Stearns has a lot to say about the failures of institutions. The Congo was systematically hollowed out, first by the colonial slave trade, then the nightmare of King Leopold's Free State, and then by the decades long rule of Mobutu Sésé Seko, who turned divide and rule into an art, leaving a military that was incapable of conducting a coup against him, but also incapable of mounting any sort of defense against the innumerable rebel groups, foreign armies, and bandit gangs who rose up in the power vacuum. When the Rwandan government sought vengeance on Hutu génocidaires who had fled to the Congo with millions of refugee/hostages and were planning a return, the Congo was unable to resist. Rebel leader and new President Laurent Kabila had barely a year in office before the international coalition that installed him tried to oust him. This aggression, undoubtedly Tutsi lead, inspired retaliation against the Tutsi minority inside the Congo, and instigated a spiral of ethnic violence. It's impossible to blame people for turning to their primary loyalties, their family and ethnic group, and also impossible not to see the political exacerbation of ethnic tension as a major driver of violence. Whatever one's affiliation, it is too easy to see people with differently shaped noses as vermin to be exterminated.
There's also plenty of military daring and horrific absurdity to go around. Rwandan military plans involved marching 1,000 miles from the border to Kinshasa, about the same distance as Moscow to Berlin, except this time it is through practically trackless jungle. Congolese soldiers deserted in droves, their armor-heavy columns cut to shreds by motivated guerrilla bands of child soldiers. Laurent Kabila's authoritarian regime imposed taxes which would come to 230% of profits, if anyone ever payed. At one of the collapses of the government, the minister of finance announced "Gentlemen, I have taken the precaution of emptying the treasury. It is in bags in trucks outside. You each get $22,000. Do the best that you can."
As I write this, President Joseph Kabila is planning to step down after elections in December 2018, after unconstitutionally extending his rule for two years, and the country may be slipping into war again. It's hard to fault the international community for not doing more, in a country with such terrible infrastructure, and without a clear moral narrative to support. There's always money to be made in turmoil, with the Congo's mineral wealth available to the daring and unscrupulous. The people of the Congo deserve better. If not justice, they at least deserve a memorial for their dead.
He does his best, using his skills as an investigative journalist to move through the key players in a rolling series of conflicts that started with the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, and linger today, despite a peace conference in 2002. While no one can speak for all the dead, Stearns lets the survivors of genocidal attacks, epidemic ridden refugee camps, death marches, mass rape, and induction into armies of child soldiers tell their own stories. It is impossible not to be moved.
On the broader political front, Stearns has a lot to say about the failures of institutions. The Congo was systematically hollowed out, first by the colonial slave trade, then the nightmare of King Leopold's Free State, and then by the decades long rule of Mobutu Sésé Seko, who turned divide and rule into an art, leaving a military that was incapable of conducting a coup against him, but also incapable of mounting any sort of defense against the innumerable rebel groups, foreign armies, and bandit gangs who rose up in the power vacuum. When the Rwandan government sought vengeance on Hutu génocidaires who had fled to the Congo with millions of refugee/hostages and were planning a return, the Congo was unable to resist. Rebel leader and new President Laurent Kabila had barely a year in office before the international coalition that installed him tried to oust him. This aggression, undoubtedly Tutsi lead, inspired retaliation against the Tutsi minority inside the Congo, and instigated a spiral of ethnic violence. It's impossible to blame people for turning to their primary loyalties, their family and ethnic group, and also impossible not to see the political exacerbation of ethnic tension as a major driver of violence. Whatever one's affiliation, it is too easy to see people with differently shaped noses as vermin to be exterminated.
There's also plenty of military daring and horrific absurdity to go around. Rwandan military plans involved marching 1,000 miles from the border to Kinshasa, about the same distance as Moscow to Berlin, except this time it is through practically trackless jungle. Congolese soldiers deserted in droves, their armor-heavy columns cut to shreds by motivated guerrilla bands of child soldiers. Laurent Kabila's authoritarian regime imposed taxes which would come to 230% of profits, if anyone ever payed. At one of the collapses of the government, the minister of finance announced "Gentlemen, I have taken the precaution of emptying the treasury. It is in bags in trucks outside. You each get $22,000. Do the best that you can."
As I write this, President Joseph Kabila is planning to step down after elections in December 2018, after unconstitutionally extending his rule for two years, and the country may be slipping into war again. It's hard to fault the international community for not doing more, in a country with such terrible infrastructure, and without a clear moral narrative to support. There's always money to be made in turmoil, with the Congo's mineral wealth available to the daring and unscrupulous. The people of the Congo deserve better. If not justice, they at least deserve a memorial for their dead.
August 10, 2019
People remember Somalia because of the dead soldiers and Rwanda because the size and brutality of the massacre. But the Congo massacres, many times more lethal than either, largely escaped notice in the Western world, perhaps because of the complexity, perhaps because of the conflicts were labelled wars, perhaps because of incredulity that tiny Rwanda and less-tiny Uganda were defeating the massive Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and certainly because a practiced indifference to Central Africa.
Doing refugee work in Texas, I started to meet Congolese in the late nineties. I worked with refugees from lots of places--Nepal, Uzbekistan, Russian Muslims, Iraq. Each group was interesting in its own way--I was with the Uzbekis on the anniversary of the date on which they were basically run out of their country, and yet their were unfailingly generous and quite funny. The Congolese stood out for their quiet dignity. In particular, I remember a mother who had travelled through refugee camps in four countries with her son and daughter, teaching herself to use computers along the way.
Jason Stearns explains much of what happened in the DRC, perhaps as well as it can be explained in book form. He disentangles the various ethnicities and regional rivalries, untangles the web of corruption (and not just of the government but on an international scale), covers some of the massacres in heart-rending detail. He shows how the subordination of a nation and its (in this case) weak institutions corrodes everything, including the military. He explains what I found incomprehensible, how the Rwandans, fresh from their own explosion of violence and death, decided to create one next door. (An all-too-frequent cocktail of revenge-minded anger and fear of militants among the refugees). Perhaps most illuminating (if not enlightening) is his explanation of how the Congo is the victim of its own resources and size: plenty of raw materials for a cash-strapped and corrupt government to sell on the cheap, and many neighbors with their own security concerns. Rwandans, Burundians, Ugandans, Angolans, Zimbabweans, and Namibians fought each other in the DRC.
I am still encountering Congolese seeking asylum. (Not everyone who tries to seek asylum at the U.S' southern border is Central American--including Nicaragua--or Mexican. In recent years have seen people from Russia, Georgia, Albania, Ethiopia, Ghana, China, Angola, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba.... Let me only add that they come to the United States because they believe that this country is what it says is: a place of law and safety, where rights are respected. At times I think they have greater faith in those ideals than many of the citizens.
Doing refugee work in Texas, I started to meet Congolese in the late nineties. I worked with refugees from lots of places--Nepal, Uzbekistan, Russian Muslims, Iraq. Each group was interesting in its own way--I was with the Uzbekis on the anniversary of the date on which they were basically run out of their country, and yet their were unfailingly generous and quite funny. The Congolese stood out for their quiet dignity. In particular, I remember a mother who had travelled through refugee camps in four countries with her son and daughter, teaching herself to use computers along the way.
Jason Stearns explains much of what happened in the DRC, perhaps as well as it can be explained in book form. He disentangles the various ethnicities and regional rivalries, untangles the web of corruption (and not just of the government but on an international scale), covers some of the massacres in heart-rending detail. He shows how the subordination of a nation and its (in this case) weak institutions corrodes everything, including the military. He explains what I found incomprehensible, how the Rwandans, fresh from their own explosion of violence and death, decided to create one next door. (An all-too-frequent cocktail of revenge-minded anger and fear of militants among the refugees). Perhaps most illuminating (if not enlightening) is his explanation of how the Congo is the victim of its own resources and size: plenty of raw materials for a cash-strapped and corrupt government to sell on the cheap, and many neighbors with their own security concerns. Rwandans, Burundians, Ugandans, Angolans, Zimbabweans, and Namibians fought each other in the DRC.
I am still encountering Congolese seeking asylum. (Not everyone who tries to seek asylum at the U.S' southern border is Central American--including Nicaragua--or Mexican. In recent years have seen people from Russia, Georgia, Albania, Ethiopia, Ghana, China, Angola, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba.... Let me only add that they come to the United States because they believe that this country is what it says is: a place of law and safety, where rights are respected. At times I think they have greater faith in those ideals than many of the citizens.
July 2, 2017
Mass violence does not just affect the families of the dead. It tears at the fabric of society and lodges in the minds of the witnesses and perpetrators alike. A decade after the violence, it seemed the villagers were still living in its aftershocks. They had all fled after the massacre; no one wanted to stay in town. They fled deep into the jungles, where they crossed the strong currents of the Luindi River. It was only on the other side that they felt safe. They lived in clearings, where they built grass huts. There was no place to start farming, and no one had the energy to cut down the brush and trees to start planting cassava and beans, so they ate what they could find: wild yams, caterpillars, forest mushrooms, and even monkeys when they could catch them. Exposed to the cold at night and deprived of adequate nutrition, many newborns and old people died. A scabies infestation ravaged their makeshift camps, and they couldn't even find the most rudimentary medicine for their various afflictions. They would sometimes visit their homes along the main road, but they would do so like burglars, at night and quickly, for fear of detection.
Some of them had radios, and they gave the nickname "Kosovo" to their hometown of Kasika after they heard of the war and massacres in the Balkans. The main difference, of course, was that the press was giving the small Balkan region, barely a sixth the size of South Kivu Province, nonstop coverage, while no foreign journalist visited Kasika for a decade.
Social life was deeply affected as well. The death of their traditional chief, along with the only priest, left the community without any leaders. "They killed our father and our mother," one villager told me. The church closed down, and the chief's family was embroiled in a succession battle that the RCD [Congolese Rally for Democracy] finally put an end to by imposing someone of their choice, much to the chagrin of many community members. Again and again, the villagers told me how the chief's death had affected them much more than anything else. The well-being of the community was vested in the chief; he presided over harvest ceremonies, gave out land, and blessed weddings. Who would call for salongo, the weekly communal labor, to be performed? Who would reconcile feuding families and solve land conflicts?
The community felt orphaned in other ways too. After the massacre, not a single national politician came to visit them and hear their grievances. While Kasika featured in thousands of speeches that lambasted Rwanda and the RCD, no investigation was ever launched, and no compensation was ever offered for any of the victims. The lack of justice had allowed the villagers to stew in their resentment and had made their anger fester into more hatred.
"I hate the Tutsi," Patrice told me. "If I see a Tutsi face, I feel fear."
I ask them if they could ever forgive the soldiers for what they did.
"Forgive whom? We don't even know who did it," someone outside Patrice's house said.
4 1/2 stars
Some of them had radios, and they gave the nickname "Kosovo" to their hometown of Kasika after they heard of the war and massacres in the Balkans. The main difference, of course, was that the press was giving the small Balkan region, barely a sixth the size of South Kivu Province, nonstop coverage, while no foreign journalist visited Kasika for a decade.
Social life was deeply affected as well. The death of their traditional chief, along with the only priest, left the community without any leaders. "They killed our father and our mother," one villager told me. The church closed down, and the chief's family was embroiled in a succession battle that the RCD [Congolese Rally for Democracy] finally put an end to by imposing someone of their choice, much to the chagrin of many community members. Again and again, the villagers told me how the chief's death had affected them much more than anything else. The well-being of the community was vested in the chief; he presided over harvest ceremonies, gave out land, and blessed weddings. Who would call for salongo, the weekly communal labor, to be performed? Who would reconcile feuding families and solve land conflicts?
The community felt orphaned in other ways too. After the massacre, not a single national politician came to visit them and hear their grievances. While Kasika featured in thousands of speeches that lambasted Rwanda and the RCD, no investigation was ever launched, and no compensation was ever offered for any of the victims. The lack of justice had allowed the villagers to stew in their resentment and had made their anger fester into more hatred.
"I hate the Tutsi," Patrice told me. "If I see a Tutsi face, I feel fear."
I ask them if they could ever forgive the soldiers for what they did.
"Forgive whom? We don't even know who did it," someone outside Patrice's house said.
4 1/2 stars
October 4, 2011
Easy recommendation to the govt. put this author in charge somewhere in how western govt money is spent in the area.
1st read the last chapter. then set aside an evening to read the whole thing. then give it to a friend to read.
why?
because people matter. their pain and suffering matter. killing people is wrong, killing lots of people is evil and must to fought.
it's first an examination of the history of the rwandan tutsi genocide and it's effects on the congo from 1990 to the present. it's second a journalist interviews and talks to people involved, telling their stories and putting it all together into a narrative that the rest of us can identify with. lastly it's a call to the world to engage with the issues because the world has a hand in causing and continuing the suffering there.
cons:
the first part is confusing. mostly because we need to get the names and background straight. my advice to the author is a few pictures of the major participants so we can see them as they are discussing.
how to integrate stories with historical narrative, it's generally well done, introducing the people through the interview process and then telling their stories is a good technic.
pros:
how to motivate people to care and to get involved? i don't know, but this book is potentially a good answer to the question. thanks.
1st read the last chapter. then set aside an evening to read the whole thing. then give it to a friend to read.
why?
because people matter. their pain and suffering matter. killing people is wrong, killing lots of people is evil and must to fought.
it's first an examination of the history of the rwandan tutsi genocide and it's effects on the congo from 1990 to the present. it's second a journalist interviews and talks to people involved, telling their stories and putting it all together into a narrative that the rest of us can identify with. lastly it's a call to the world to engage with the issues because the world has a hand in causing and continuing the suffering there.
cons:
the first part is confusing. mostly because we need to get the names and background straight. my advice to the author is a few pictures of the major participants so we can see them as they are discussing.
how to integrate stories with historical narrative, it's generally well done, introducing the people through the interview process and then telling their stories is a good technic.
pros:
how to motivate people to care and to get involved? i don't know, but this book is potentially a good answer to the question. thanks.
August 17, 2014
This is a great book, very captivating and also thoroughly researched over 10 years the author spent working in the Congo. While its nearly impossible to distil this conflict into one simple narrative, he does a good job of explaining the various forces that helped to trigger it and have continued to fuel it intermittently over the years.
In many ways the war in the Congo was a continuation of the violence unleashed by the Rwandan Genocide - at least initially - as the conflict in that country was continued over the remnants of the Congolese state. From there it has devolved into proxy wars fought by its neighbors, local ethnic conflicts, warlordism, economic profiteering and internal power struggles between various armed militias. In short the state - which since colonial times has always been both predatory and ineffectual - has more or less never existed except as a vehicle for the enrichment of a tiny political elite.
While the war in the Congo has been horrible this book is written with great thoughtfulness and humanity. Its not simply the recounting of a ticker tape of crimes but an insightful deconstruction of the conflict which eschews simple explanations but nevertheless makes the narrative possible to grasp. Additionally it is engagingly written and often pretty captivating, definitely recommended.
In many ways the war in the Congo was a continuation of the violence unleashed by the Rwandan Genocide - at least initially - as the conflict in that country was continued over the remnants of the Congolese state. From there it has devolved into proxy wars fought by its neighbors, local ethnic conflicts, warlordism, economic profiteering and internal power struggles between various armed militias. In short the state - which since colonial times has always been both predatory and ineffectual - has more or less never existed except as a vehicle for the enrichment of a tiny political elite.
While the war in the Congo has been horrible this book is written with great thoughtfulness and humanity. Its not simply the recounting of a ticker tape of crimes but an insightful deconstruction of the conflict which eschews simple explanations but nevertheless makes the narrative possible to grasp. Additionally it is engagingly written and often pretty captivating, definitely recommended.
March 23, 2017
Jason Stearns set a formidable task for himself in the Introduction to his excellent “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters”, taking Hannah Arendt memorable “the banality of evil” as the starting point for his investigation into the decades long war in the Congo. He doesn’t personalize the murderous violence and the evil behind it but tries to define the political system that allowed or encouraged such perversions of “normal” humanity. Instead of the faceless bureaucratic machine of the Third Reich he compares the Congo to seventeenth century Europe during the Thirty Years War in which marauding armies fought back and forth across what is now Germany leaving privation, disease and death in their wake.
“Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” is a brilliant combination of reporting, current history, political advocacy and ethnography. Jason Stearns has spent much of the past decade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has met many of the key actors in Africa’s Great War and has seen the horror they have wreaked on the people and land in the Congo. A keen analyst of the politico-military affairs of the region—the DRC and the nine nations surrounding it, particularly Rwanda and Uganda—he looks at the political elites and militia commanders of the area (often the same people) to try and figure out why the war happened, if it “had” to happen and why the conflict has been so unrelenting and merciless.
He compares the situation in central Africa since 1996 to the Thirty Years War, a continent wide cataclysm of death, disease, destruction and collapse of society brought on the by the constant marching and countermarching of mercenary armies deployed from the nations that surround what is now Germany and finds a parallel between Adolph Eichmann, as described by Hannah Arendt, and Paul Rwarakabije, a general in the Rwandan Army whose forces operated in what was then Zaire as well as Rwanda. Eichmann was an important cog in a machine while Rwarakabije was a policy maker (to the extent anyone could be called that) but both were convinced of the inevitability of mass slaughter.
The Thirty Years War and the Holocaust are among the defining events of modern Europe. Both caused insupportable suffering; the Holocaust is the closest thing to absolute and incomparable evil that I can think of—those who might need a refresher on its horrors would want to consult “The Third Reich at War” by Richard Evans—it is an astonishing book but one I was too daunted by its sweep and detail to finish.
Stearns accomplishes the daunting challenge of making sense of what seems to be senseless activity, giving the reader a real (and horrifying) sense of what life was like for internal displaced persons, conscripted soldiers and refugees from Rwanda and Burundi. “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” captures the everydayness, the granularity of life in the Congo during what must seem to be an endless war. Although he concentrates largely on the perpetrators of violence one of the real strengths of the book is Stearns’ refusal to make permanent categories of good or bad, oppressors or oppressed since many of his sources have been both during the past ten years.
The best example of this might be Paul Rwarakabije, mentioned above; he fled from Rwanda with nothing, saved most of his family, and was stuck in a refugee camp, subject to the whims of his guards/captors. Later after political exoneration he led a unit of the Rwandan armed forces in the DRC. Another is the way the AFDL (Laurent Kabila’s improvised army) that was welcomed as liberators in the first Congo war even though they slaughtered Hutu refugees since they didn’t kill any Congolese.
It is a cliché to say there are no simple answers in the Congo since there are no simple answers anywhere but Strearns illustrates the complexity of the situation while showing the human side of (almost) all the players.
“Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” is a brilliant combination of reporting, current history, political advocacy and ethnography. Jason Stearns has spent much of the past decade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has met many of the key actors in Africa’s Great War and has seen the horror they have wreaked on the people and land in the Congo. A keen analyst of the politico-military affairs of the region—the DRC and the nine nations surrounding it, particularly Rwanda and Uganda—he looks at the political elites and militia commanders of the area (often the same people) to try and figure out why the war happened, if it “had” to happen and why the conflict has been so unrelenting and merciless.
He compares the situation in central Africa since 1996 to the Thirty Years War, a continent wide cataclysm of death, disease, destruction and collapse of society brought on the by the constant marching and countermarching of mercenary armies deployed from the nations that surround what is now Germany and finds a parallel between Adolph Eichmann, as described by Hannah Arendt, and Paul Rwarakabije, a general in the Rwandan Army whose forces operated in what was then Zaire as well as Rwanda. Eichmann was an important cog in a machine while Rwarakabije was a policy maker (to the extent anyone could be called that) but both were convinced of the inevitability of mass slaughter.
The Thirty Years War and the Holocaust are among the defining events of modern Europe. Both caused insupportable suffering; the Holocaust is the closest thing to absolute and incomparable evil that I can think of—those who might need a refresher on its horrors would want to consult “The Third Reich at War” by Richard Evans—it is an astonishing book but one I was too daunted by its sweep and detail to finish.
Stearns accomplishes the daunting challenge of making sense of what seems to be senseless activity, giving the reader a real (and horrifying) sense of what life was like for internal displaced persons, conscripted soldiers and refugees from Rwanda and Burundi. “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” captures the everydayness, the granularity of life in the Congo during what must seem to be an endless war. Although he concentrates largely on the perpetrators of violence one of the real strengths of the book is Stearns’ refusal to make permanent categories of good or bad, oppressors or oppressed since many of his sources have been both during the past ten years.
The best example of this might be Paul Rwarakabije, mentioned above; he fled from Rwanda with nothing, saved most of his family, and was stuck in a refugee camp, subject to the whims of his guards/captors. Later after political exoneration he led a unit of the Rwandan armed forces in the DRC. Another is the way the AFDL (Laurent Kabila’s improvised army) that was welcomed as liberators in the first Congo war even though they slaughtered Hutu refugees since they didn’t kill any Congolese.
It is a cliché to say there are no simple answers in the Congo since there are no simple answers anywhere but Strearns illustrates the complexity of the situation while showing the human side of (almost) all the players.
March 18, 2016
This is the book I chose for the 2016 world literature challenge. March - Sub-Sahara.
5 stars
Very interesting book. Also very enlightening. Don't really hear what is happening in Africa.
"... 'They didn't make any sense,' Nabyolwa remembered. 'First they accused me of deserting-which was strange coming from a bunch of deserters. Then they said I wanted to kill them by going back. Finally, an officer said, 'We think you are a traitor. Every time you send us into battle, we get attacked!'
'But that's what war is about!'
'You are a sadist!'
Faced with this kind of logic, all Nabyolwa could do was to persuade them that, instead of killing him, it would be wiser to arrest him and take him to their commanding officer." (pg 120)
Would recommend for anyone who wants to know about what is happening in Africa. Very good book. Little bit disgusting at times too.
5 stars
Very interesting book. Also very enlightening. Don't really hear what is happening in Africa.
"... 'They didn't make any sense,' Nabyolwa remembered. 'First they accused me of deserting-which was strange coming from a bunch of deserters. Then they said I wanted to kill them by going back. Finally, an officer said, 'We think you are a traitor. Every time you send us into battle, we get attacked!'
'But that's what war is about!'
'You are a sadist!'
Faced with this kind of logic, all Nabyolwa could do was to persuade them that, instead of killing him, it would be wiser to arrest him and take him to their commanding officer." (pg 120)
Would recommend for anyone who wants to know about what is happening in Africa. Very good book. Little bit disgusting at times too.
November 1, 2021
I've always been fascinated by African politics since seeing Hotel Rwanda and following it up with the BBC World Service's excellent reporting on the podcast Africa Today. This book is incredible. It is so much more than just the Hutus and the Tutsis, it also shows the depth and complexity of the issues. It also shows that the people there have the same worries as we do. They are not savages. And after January 6 and the pandemic none of us should be complacent. An excellent read with comprehensive footnotes.
October 15, 2023
I read this book for the first time some ten years ago and at the time it was probably one of the best, most nuanced and insightful books on the Congo/Great Lakes War/Civil War - because it was thoughtful and careful and did not look for simple good guy bad guy storylines. If you don't know anything about what happened then this book is still good - but really it is now out-of-date, most books on the Congo Great Lakes Wars are because to many took the line of Tutsi good, Hutu bad, and applied simplistic 'lessons learned' that were not relevant and not really learnt but manufactured and used in places and situations were they did not make sense, often did not apply, and to often had less to do with Africa and its needs and realities and more to do with providing feel good stories for Westerners to consume.
I hate to say don't read a book - particularly one that is good - but you would be better reading Michela Wrong's 'Do Not Disturb' to understand what has happened and what is happening in this part of Africa.
I hate to say don't read a book - particularly one that is good - but you would be better reading Michela Wrong's 'Do Not Disturb' to understand what has happened and what is happening in this part of Africa.
December 14, 2022
I thought this was solid, and I learned a good amount about a conflict I knew almost nothing about. Stearns brings a journalistic approach to the conflict, having clearly spend a lot of time in the Congo. He interviews tons of people, from ordinary folks caught up in the conflict to high-level people, many of whom had a lot of blood on their hands. This war was in some ways a product of the Rwandan Genocide: after the RPF swept into Rwanda to clear out the interahamwe and other Hutu forces, they and millions of refugees retreated into the Congo. Mobutu's corruption and his harboring of various rebel groups led to a coalition of neighboring states, led by little Rwanda, to launch the first part of this war against him. He was overthrown and replaced with Laurent Kabiyla, who was almost equally corrupt and brutal. He failed to keep this coalition together, and tensions erupted into full-scale war over security and spoils in the region. Dozens of factions formed and transformed the Congo into a hellscape, leading to the deaths of a shocking 5 millions people.
The big question in this book is why Congo just can't get its act together, and why no matter who rules the country, there is brutality and corruption. His answer is that colonialism and slave-raiding eroded institutions in society, and that the Belgians left basically no native elite behind that could actually govern the country. Add that to the fact that "Congolese" identity was largely a modern creation, and that as dictators like Mobutu eroded institutions that could possibly threaten his rule and sucked resources out of the country, people fell back on tribal/ethnic identities, which dominated the civil war. I thought this was a pretty good explanation that pushes back against both racist viewpoints and the idea that it's all about Congolese cultural deficiencies. Stearns nonetheless did a good job showing that this conflict was not an imperialist conspiracy but something started, fought, and finished by African peoples.
Still, my big problem with the book is its structure. Stearns says up front he is trying to draw attention to a conflict that is largely ignored in the Western world despite its enormous scope. But he does the history and politics of the Congo is such a haphazard way; a little here, a little there, interspersed with stories about people on the ground. That kind of color is great for these books, but I think this book really would have benefited from a chronological approach, given that most of its readers (including me) were starting from pretty much square one on Congolese, history, politics, etc. In that sense, this book isn't as good as books like PHillip Gourevitch's account of the Rwandan genocide, which is both better written and organized.
The big question in this book is why Congo just can't get its act together, and why no matter who rules the country, there is brutality and corruption. His answer is that colonialism and slave-raiding eroded institutions in society, and that the Belgians left basically no native elite behind that could actually govern the country. Add that to the fact that "Congolese" identity was largely a modern creation, and that as dictators like Mobutu eroded institutions that could possibly threaten his rule and sucked resources out of the country, people fell back on tribal/ethnic identities, which dominated the civil war. I thought this was a pretty good explanation that pushes back against both racist viewpoints and the idea that it's all about Congolese cultural deficiencies. Stearns nonetheless did a good job showing that this conflict was not an imperialist conspiracy but something started, fought, and finished by African peoples.
Still, my big problem with the book is its structure. Stearns says up front he is trying to draw attention to a conflict that is largely ignored in the Western world despite its enormous scope. But he does the history and politics of the Congo is such a haphazard way; a little here, a little there, interspersed with stories about people on the ground. That kind of color is great for these books, but I think this book really would have benefited from a chronological approach, given that most of its readers (including me) were starting from pretty much square one on Congolese, history, politics, etc. In that sense, this book isn't as good as books like PHillip Gourevitch's account of the Rwandan genocide, which is both better written and organized.
May 2, 2023
Started with this book to overcome the low-key antipathy I had towards Africa, owing to its complex history and politics. Glad that I picked this one to understand one of the deadliest conflicts. The book is informative as well as provocative, leaving you angry at colonial mischiefs as well as dejected at the plight of the civilians. A special mention to the way the book has been structured, with each chapter picking up one of the many threads that weave Congo, its collapse, and the wars it witnessed.
April 3, 2012
Le livre de Jason Stearns a reçu des critiques élogieuses de la presse américaine (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs …) Elles sont amplement méritées. Il constitue probablement l'ouvrage le plus complet, et surtout le plus captivant, jamais écrit sur le conflit congolais et ses avatars. Un conflit qui, sur un territoire grand comme l'Europe de l'Ouest, opposa pendant près de six ans pas moins de neuf Etats et causa environ 5 millions de morts.
Le succès de ce livre tient à sa qualité d'écriture. Selon une recette typiquement américaine, Jason Stearns entremêle à des analyses politiques classiques des pages quasi documentaires où il décrit le contexte dans lequel ses interviews se sont déroulées. Cette pratique est bannie en France où l'on apprend au jeune doctorant à s'effacer derrière son sujet. Les auteurs américains ne s'embarrassent pas de telles prescriptions et n'hésitent pas à écrire à la première personne. Ils tangentent parfois avec le récit de voyage. Ainsi du livre de Jason Stearns qui évoque immanquablement les récits de Lieve Joris, tels Danse du léopard (2001) ou L'heure des rebelles (2006), remarquables descriptions, pleines de finesses et d'humour, de la tragédie congolaise. On pense aussi à la trilogie de Jean Hatfeld sur le génocide rwandais .
Sous la plume de Jason Stearns, les guerres congolaises s'incarnent. Les anecdotes qu'ils rapportent sur Laurent Kabila (il avait transféré les réserves de la banque centrale dans ses propres toilettes) révèlent un dirigeant falstaffien qui ne sut jamais troquer le treillis de chef de guerre contre le costume de chef d'Etat. Son fils, Joseph, lui est en tous points dissemblable – au point que sa filiation soit périodiquement mise en doute. Passionné de jeux vidéo (l'ambassadeur de France l'avait affublé du sobriquet de « Nintendo ») et de voitures de course, timide jusqu'au mutisme, il a pourtant réussi, grâce à l'appui de la communauté internationale, à restaurer la paix ardemment désirée par ses compatriotes.
« Comme les pelures d'un oignon, la guerre du Congo se subdivise en plusieurs guerres » (p. 69). Gérard Prunier nous les racontait avec son ébouriffante érudition, au risque de nous y perdre . le livre de Jason Stearns n'est pas seulement une succession de vignettes sympathiques mais éclaire les ressorts et les rebondissements des deux guerres que connut successivement le Congo. La première débute en novembre 1996 lorsque les forces rwandaises arment la rébellion dirigée par Laurent-Désiré Kabila, vident les camps de réfugiés hutus agglutinés à la frontière des Kivus et provoque l'écroulement du régime honni du maréchal Mobutu huit mois plus tard. La seconde débute en août 1998 lorsque le nouveau chef d'Etat congolais décide de se débarrasser de son trop encombrant parrain rwandais et doit au soutien de ses alliés zimbabwéens et angolais de ne pas être renversé.
En bon Américain qu'il est, Jason Stearns ne se satisfait pas du fatalisme qui entoure souvent les études congolaises depuis Au cœur des ténèbres de Joseph Conrad. Plutôt que d'accumuler les vignettes macabres, il veut trouver « une explication rationnelle à un conflit chaotique ». La carence de l'Etat, mise en avant par l'auteur, en est peut-être une. Les tueries aux Kivus renvoient à un stade pré-leviathanesque où « l'homme est un loup pour l'homme ». Ils évoquent plus la Guerre de Trente Ans que la Seconde guerre mondiale. Or, la création d'un Etat hobbesien prend du temps. le Congo en construira-t-il un rapidement ? L'absence d'esprit civique chez les dirigeants congolais, plus préoccupés par leur survie à court terme que par le bien-être de leurs administrés, augure mal de l'avenir.
Le succès de ce livre tient à sa qualité d'écriture. Selon une recette typiquement américaine, Jason Stearns entremêle à des analyses politiques classiques des pages quasi documentaires où il décrit le contexte dans lequel ses interviews se sont déroulées. Cette pratique est bannie en France où l'on apprend au jeune doctorant à s'effacer derrière son sujet. Les auteurs américains ne s'embarrassent pas de telles prescriptions et n'hésitent pas à écrire à la première personne. Ils tangentent parfois avec le récit de voyage. Ainsi du livre de Jason Stearns qui évoque immanquablement les récits de Lieve Joris, tels Danse du léopard (2001) ou L'heure des rebelles (2006), remarquables descriptions, pleines de finesses et d'humour, de la tragédie congolaise. On pense aussi à la trilogie de Jean Hatfeld sur le génocide rwandais .
Sous la plume de Jason Stearns, les guerres congolaises s'incarnent. Les anecdotes qu'ils rapportent sur Laurent Kabila (il avait transféré les réserves de la banque centrale dans ses propres toilettes) révèlent un dirigeant falstaffien qui ne sut jamais troquer le treillis de chef de guerre contre le costume de chef d'Etat. Son fils, Joseph, lui est en tous points dissemblable – au point que sa filiation soit périodiquement mise en doute. Passionné de jeux vidéo (l'ambassadeur de France l'avait affublé du sobriquet de « Nintendo ») et de voitures de course, timide jusqu'au mutisme, il a pourtant réussi, grâce à l'appui de la communauté internationale, à restaurer la paix ardemment désirée par ses compatriotes.
« Comme les pelures d'un oignon, la guerre du Congo se subdivise en plusieurs guerres » (p. 69). Gérard Prunier nous les racontait avec son ébouriffante érudition, au risque de nous y perdre . le livre de Jason Stearns n'est pas seulement une succession de vignettes sympathiques mais éclaire les ressorts et les rebondissements des deux guerres que connut successivement le Congo. La première débute en novembre 1996 lorsque les forces rwandaises arment la rébellion dirigée par Laurent-Désiré Kabila, vident les camps de réfugiés hutus agglutinés à la frontière des Kivus et provoque l'écroulement du régime honni du maréchal Mobutu huit mois plus tard. La seconde débute en août 1998 lorsque le nouveau chef d'Etat congolais décide de se débarrasser de son trop encombrant parrain rwandais et doit au soutien de ses alliés zimbabwéens et angolais de ne pas être renversé.
En bon Américain qu'il est, Jason Stearns ne se satisfait pas du fatalisme qui entoure souvent les études congolaises depuis Au cœur des ténèbres de Joseph Conrad. Plutôt que d'accumuler les vignettes macabres, il veut trouver « une explication rationnelle à un conflit chaotique ». La carence de l'Etat, mise en avant par l'auteur, en est peut-être une. Les tueries aux Kivus renvoient à un stade pré-leviathanesque où « l'homme est un loup pour l'homme ». Ils évoquent plus la Guerre de Trente Ans que la Seconde guerre mondiale. Or, la création d'un Etat hobbesien prend du temps. le Congo en construira-t-il un rapidement ? L'absence d'esprit civique chez les dirigeants congolais, plus préoccupés par leur survie à court terme que par le bien-être de leurs administrés, augure mal de l'avenir.
December 5, 2013
SO disappointing. I tried to give it 'zero' star but it didn't work. Here's the why:
1) the book doesn't seem to be evidence-based or thoroughly researched but rather it is a compilation of testimonies, sometimes first hand, sometimes not.
2) there is no real story line and this makes the book boring. At the same time, Stearns tries to have some sort of story line but then drops it on the way which have you wonder throughout the book: is this a novel? An academic piece? What is this book? Frustrating.
3) there's one strength: the topic Stearns chose to write about: DR Congo, this alone would make any book interesting. There's so little on the subject that it is easy for anyone to stand out, no matter how mediocre and poorly researched the book is. This is the context from which this book probably profited because I am sure that if there were more books on the subject, this one would have been ignored by all.
I didn't finish the book. I went more than half way through the book and I couldn't take it anymore. It taught me little, very different from King Leopold's Ghost which in its field manages to teach you much more. What you think you're learning while reading this book, you're not even sure you can trust! It turns out to be a very poor reading experience.
You want a book on Congo? DON'T pick this one. Try Leopold's Ghost, Congo Wars, you will at least learn something, unless you can't put Congo on a map, then read Stearns, it will at least teach you this and some superficial details about the eastern conflict, but a Wikipedia search would teach you the same, with the same reliability issue as this book except that it would save you time and money!
1) the book doesn't seem to be evidence-based or thoroughly researched but rather it is a compilation of testimonies, sometimes first hand, sometimes not.
2) there is no real story line and this makes the book boring. At the same time, Stearns tries to have some sort of story line but then drops it on the way which have you wonder throughout the book: is this a novel? An academic piece? What is this book? Frustrating.
3) there's one strength: the topic Stearns chose to write about: DR Congo, this alone would make any book interesting. There's so little on the subject that it is easy for anyone to stand out, no matter how mediocre and poorly researched the book is. This is the context from which this book probably profited because I am sure that if there were more books on the subject, this one would have been ignored by all.
I didn't finish the book. I went more than half way through the book and I couldn't take it anymore. It taught me little, very different from King Leopold's Ghost which in its field manages to teach you much more. What you think you're learning while reading this book, you're not even sure you can trust! It turns out to be a very poor reading experience.
You want a book on Congo? DON'T pick this one. Try Leopold's Ghost, Congo Wars, you will at least learn something, unless you can't put Congo on a map, then read Stearns, it will at least teach you this and some superficial details about the eastern conflict, but a Wikipedia search would teach you the same, with the same reliability issue as this book except that it would save you time and money!
April 13, 2013
About 10 years ago, Philip Gourevitch wrote "We Regret to Inform You ..." about the Rwandan massacre. You read it and are filled with moral outrage about the horrible acts of the Hutus and the relatively innocent victims Tutsis. This is the next chapter in that story and it is much a harder and more complicated read, as the Rwanda massacre turned into a proxy war in Congo killing 5 million in which there are no heroes, every side has committed horrible atrocities, and it is hard to see anyone as "right" and "victims" anymore. Stearns' book tries to unpick a complicated mess that defies easy explanation and is a tragedy the US hasn't cared much about, but should. A difficult read, but one that I would highly recommend because it lends context to such a significant event in our world today.
April 1, 2016
African history is something that we hear of very rarely from our news sources. For most of us Africa is like a closed unknown box. Neither do we know anything, nor do we care to know. In fact a continent which is ten times the size of India, with a billion people rarely enters the mind of rest of humanity.
It is that world that this book reveals to us. The world of civil wars, ethnic rivalries, abject poverty and an absolute lack of humaneness. The magnitude of suffering that the people of Africa have gone through is massive.
Anyone who has heard of the Congolese civil war usually approach the whole problem with a prejudiced mind. We tend to see the whole issue in very simplistic terms. We tend to blame the entire issue on ethnical divisions and corrupt dictators. But the problem that Congo faced is not that simple. This is where the author helps us come up with a complete understanding of the problems. The roots of the problems also lie in the problems that its neighbours face. The Rwandan massacre, the rivalry between the Tutsi and Hutus, the savage colonial rule of Belgium, the rivalries that developed during the Cold War, the desire of dictators and power players to manipulate and many others.
What is truly sad about the entire Congolese civil war is the fact that the true suffering of people gets lost in the mind boggling numbers of people who have died and suffered. When someone tells you that 800,000 people were massacred in Rwanda, there is very little that you really can comprehend about the entire episode. When you read that there were 3.4 million Congolese out of a population of 60 million who were forced to flee their homes for years, there is very little that stays in your mind. Hence the world simply does not care. When the best armies from NATO gets involved in Bosnia and Kosovo, it is mostly ill equipped UN troops who are asked to go into wars in Africa where wars are of 100 times greater magnitude than what happens in Europe in terms of causalities.
The author in this book brings out the truly violent nature of the entire episode. The macabre nature of the war is expressed in this passage:
“The way the victims were killed said as much as the number of dead; they displayed a macabre fascination with human anatomy. The survivors said the chief’s heart had been cut out and his wife’s genitals were gone. The soldiers had taken them. It wasn’t enough to kill their victims; they disfigured and played with the bodies. They disemboweled one woman by cutting her open between her anus and vagina, then propped up the dead body on all fours and left her with her buttocks facing upwards. Another corpse was given two slits on either side of his belly, where his hands were inserted. “Anavaa koti—they made him look like he was wearing a suit,” the villagers told me. Another man had his mouth slit open to his ears, was put in a chair and had a cigarette dangling from his lips when he was found. The killers wanted to show the villagers that this would be the consequence of any resistance. There were no limits to their revenge—they would kill the priests, rape the nuns, rip babies from their mothers’ wombs, and twist the corpses into origami figures. We had seen people killed before,” Patrice told me. “But this was worse than killing. It was like they killed them, and then killed them again. And again.”
Another thing that I really appreciate about the author is the fact that he has stayed relatively objective in reporting the Civil War. Although there are strands of idealism sprinkled throughout the book, you tend to appreciate the effort that the author puts in to give us the entire picture. There are no villains or heroes in the entire book. There is Mobutu, who earns the wrath of his countrymen and his neighbours by completely neglecting the country's development and giving shelter to rebels. There is the Rwandan Patriotic Front who were responsible for hundreds of massacres during the rebellion, yet bought the Rwandan civil war to an end. There is the UN who do provide relief, even though they cannot absolve themselves of their responsibilities since it is their inaction that led to one of the worse episodes of violence in modern history. There are no heroes in this book. Maybe you can call them monsters. But what would you have done if you were put into their shoes?
A few characters do stay in your mind when you finish reading the book. The corrupt strongman of Congo - Mobutu. The idealist turn dictator Kabila. The seemingly recluse Joseph Kabila who turns the entire administration of Congo on its head. The determined, disciplined Paul Kagame who leads Rwanda out of the civil war and straight into another war in Congo.
Let me just give you an example of a person that you meet in this book:
“Rwanda’s unquestionable ruler was Paul Kagame. Officially, the thirty-seven-year-old was vice president and minister of defense, but he had led the RPF since the early days of the rebellion and had firm control over the government. A gaunt, bony man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a methodical style of speaking, Kagame left an impression on people. He didn’t smoke, drink, or have much time for expensive clothes or beautiful women. He wasn’t given to flowery speech or elaborate protocol. His wardrobe apparently only contained drab, double-breasted suits that hung loosely from his thin frame, plain polo shirts, and combat fatigues. The only entertainment he apparently indulged in was tennis, which he played at the Sports Club with RPF colleagues and diplomats. Passersby would be alarmed by the soldiers standing guard with machine guns.
Kagame’s obsessions were order and discipline. He personally expropriated his ministers’ vehicles when he thought those public funds could have been used for a better purpose. He exuded ambition, browbeating his ministers when they didn’t live up to his expectations.He complained to a journalist: “In the people here, there is something I cannot reconcile with. It’s people taking their time when they should be moving fast, people tolerating mediocrity when things could be done better. I feel they are not bothered, not feeling the pressure of wanting to be far ahead of where we are. That runs my whole system.”
This asceticism had been forged in the harsh conditions of exile. Kagame’s first memories were of houses burning on the hills and his panicked mother scrambling into a car as a local mob ran after them. ”
Another thing that stands out in their entire book, is Africa's cultural diversity. With a thousand languages and thousands of ethnicities it is the most diverse place on earth. A place where humanity has existed for the longest period of time. A place teeming with life, activity and culture. When you truly appreciate the beauty of Africa, the entire episode of Congo and the failure of the Congolese state makes you feel sick and sad.
The absurdity of the story of the Congolese Civil War can be known from passages like the one below. You will gape in the wonder at the state of dilapidation of the Congolese state.
“According to Bugera, a delegation of military officials from various southern African countries was visiting Kinshasa to see how the formation of the new army was proceeding. Many countries had invested in this project by sending officers to help train the new recruits and integrate Congo’s fractured militias. During a long meeting with Kabila, a Tanzanian commander excused himself, saying he had to use the toilet. Kabila looked around sheepishly and finally ordered a bodyguard to find the key for the toilet. The bodyguard ran about, but was unable to come up with the key. Finally, the Tanzanian was taken to a toilet in another building much further away. After their meeting was finished, Kabila reprimanded his bodyguard with a laugh, fishing a key out of his pocket: “You idiot! I had the key the whole time! All my money is stored in that toilet—I couldn’t let him in there!”
- He is talking about the entire money that the State of Congo has at its disposal.
This book was a great read. Something that opened my mind to a new world. A sad world. A world that could have been one of great beauty and richness, but is not. But it has kindled a desire in me to know more about Africa. To know more about this people. To know more about their suffering. And a desire for a better future.
It is that world that this book reveals to us. The world of civil wars, ethnic rivalries, abject poverty and an absolute lack of humaneness. The magnitude of suffering that the people of Africa have gone through is massive.
Anyone who has heard of the Congolese civil war usually approach the whole problem with a prejudiced mind. We tend to see the whole issue in very simplistic terms. We tend to blame the entire issue on ethnical divisions and corrupt dictators. But the problem that Congo faced is not that simple. This is where the author helps us come up with a complete understanding of the problems. The roots of the problems also lie in the problems that its neighbours face. The Rwandan massacre, the rivalry between the Tutsi and Hutus, the savage colonial rule of Belgium, the rivalries that developed during the Cold War, the desire of dictators and power players to manipulate and many others.
What is truly sad about the entire Congolese civil war is the fact that the true suffering of people gets lost in the mind boggling numbers of people who have died and suffered. When someone tells you that 800,000 people were massacred in Rwanda, there is very little that you really can comprehend about the entire episode. When you read that there were 3.4 million Congolese out of a population of 60 million who were forced to flee their homes for years, there is very little that stays in your mind. Hence the world simply does not care. When the best armies from NATO gets involved in Bosnia and Kosovo, it is mostly ill equipped UN troops who are asked to go into wars in Africa where wars are of 100 times greater magnitude than what happens in Europe in terms of causalities.
The author in this book brings out the truly violent nature of the entire episode. The macabre nature of the war is expressed in this passage:
“The way the victims were killed said as much as the number of dead; they displayed a macabre fascination with human anatomy. The survivors said the chief’s heart had been cut out and his wife’s genitals were gone. The soldiers had taken them. It wasn’t enough to kill their victims; they disfigured and played with the bodies. They disemboweled one woman by cutting her open between her anus and vagina, then propped up the dead body on all fours and left her with her buttocks facing upwards. Another corpse was given two slits on either side of his belly, where his hands were inserted. “Anavaa koti—they made him look like he was wearing a suit,” the villagers told me. Another man had his mouth slit open to his ears, was put in a chair and had a cigarette dangling from his lips when he was found. The killers wanted to show the villagers that this would be the consequence of any resistance. There were no limits to their revenge—they would kill the priests, rape the nuns, rip babies from their mothers’ wombs, and twist the corpses into origami figures. We had seen people killed before,” Patrice told me. “But this was worse than killing. It was like they killed them, and then killed them again. And again.”
Another thing that I really appreciate about the author is the fact that he has stayed relatively objective in reporting the Civil War. Although there are strands of idealism sprinkled throughout the book, you tend to appreciate the effort that the author puts in to give us the entire picture. There are no villains or heroes in the entire book. There is Mobutu, who earns the wrath of his countrymen and his neighbours by completely neglecting the country's development and giving shelter to rebels. There is the Rwandan Patriotic Front who were responsible for hundreds of massacres during the rebellion, yet bought the Rwandan civil war to an end. There is the UN who do provide relief, even though they cannot absolve themselves of their responsibilities since it is their inaction that led to one of the worse episodes of violence in modern history. There are no heroes in this book. Maybe you can call them monsters. But what would you have done if you were put into their shoes?
A few characters do stay in your mind when you finish reading the book. The corrupt strongman of Congo - Mobutu. The idealist turn dictator Kabila. The seemingly recluse Joseph Kabila who turns the entire administration of Congo on its head. The determined, disciplined Paul Kagame who leads Rwanda out of the civil war and straight into another war in Congo.
Let me just give you an example of a person that you meet in this book:
“Rwanda’s unquestionable ruler was Paul Kagame. Officially, the thirty-seven-year-old was vice president and minister of defense, but he had led the RPF since the early days of the rebellion and had firm control over the government. A gaunt, bony man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a methodical style of speaking, Kagame left an impression on people. He didn’t smoke, drink, or have much time for expensive clothes or beautiful women. He wasn’t given to flowery speech or elaborate protocol. His wardrobe apparently only contained drab, double-breasted suits that hung loosely from his thin frame, plain polo shirts, and combat fatigues. The only entertainment he apparently indulged in was tennis, which he played at the Sports Club with RPF colleagues and diplomats. Passersby would be alarmed by the soldiers standing guard with machine guns.
Kagame’s obsessions were order and discipline. He personally expropriated his ministers’ vehicles when he thought those public funds could have been used for a better purpose. He exuded ambition, browbeating his ministers when they didn’t live up to his expectations.He complained to a journalist: “In the people here, there is something I cannot reconcile with. It’s people taking their time when they should be moving fast, people tolerating mediocrity when things could be done better. I feel they are not bothered, not feeling the pressure of wanting to be far ahead of where we are. That runs my whole system.”
This asceticism had been forged in the harsh conditions of exile. Kagame’s first memories were of houses burning on the hills and his panicked mother scrambling into a car as a local mob ran after them. ”
Another thing that stands out in their entire book, is Africa's cultural diversity. With a thousand languages and thousands of ethnicities it is the most diverse place on earth. A place where humanity has existed for the longest period of time. A place teeming with life, activity and culture. When you truly appreciate the beauty of Africa, the entire episode of Congo and the failure of the Congolese state makes you feel sick and sad.
The absurdity of the story of the Congolese Civil War can be known from passages like the one below. You will gape in the wonder at the state of dilapidation of the Congolese state.
“According to Bugera, a delegation of military officials from various southern African countries was visiting Kinshasa to see how the formation of the new army was proceeding. Many countries had invested in this project by sending officers to help train the new recruits and integrate Congo’s fractured militias. During a long meeting with Kabila, a Tanzanian commander excused himself, saying he had to use the toilet. Kabila looked around sheepishly and finally ordered a bodyguard to find the key for the toilet. The bodyguard ran about, but was unable to come up with the key. Finally, the Tanzanian was taken to a toilet in another building much further away. After their meeting was finished, Kabila reprimanded his bodyguard with a laugh, fishing a key out of his pocket: “You idiot! I had the key the whole time! All my money is stored in that toilet—I couldn’t let him in there!”
- He is talking about the entire money that the State of Congo has at its disposal.
This book was a great read. Something that opened my mind to a new world. A sad world. A world that could have been one of great beauty and richness, but is not. But it has kindled a desire in me to know more about Africa. To know more about this people. To know more about their suffering. And a desire for a better future.
February 24, 2023
在读这本书之前，我对刚果战争所知甚少。所以，在把刚果战争这场复杂到难以为旁人所理解的地区冲突解释清楚上，作者无疑是比较成功的，但在最后剖析原因和提出粗略的解决方案上，恐怕又太流于表面了。这应该是本书最显著的长处和短板了。
关于这块短板，保罗·科利尔的《战争、枪炮与选票》肯定是极佳的补充阅读书目。读完本书之后，对保罗·科利尔关于在有效建立问责制政府或广泛的国民身份认同之前，匆忙引入选举制度是错误的，甚至也是危险的，以及这些失败国家根本不存在国家主权，有的只是总统主权等等观察和结论，才有了更加具体而鲜活的理解。虽然保罗·科利尔提出的解决方案很可能会为��多人所不喜，但毋庸置疑的是，这两本书合在一起，就形成了背景案例和深度分析之间的一个绝妙组合。
关于这块短板，保罗·科利尔的《战争、枪炮与选票》肯定是极佳的补充阅读书目。读完本书之后，对保罗·科利尔关于在有效建立问责制政府或广泛的国民身份认同之前，匆忙引入选举制度是错误的，甚至也是危险的，以及这些失败国家根本不存在国家主权，有的只是总统主权等等观察和结论，才有了更加具体而鲜活的理解。虽然保罗·科利尔提出的解决方案很可能会为��多人所不喜，但毋庸置疑的是，这两本书合在一起，就形成了背景案例和深度分析之间的一个绝妙组合。
April 27, 2019
A really important and well-written book covering a conflict that is relatively unknown in North America. Stearns takes a complex, multi-faceted conflict and it possible for readers to follow a narrative thread throughout. Cannot recommend highly enough.
May 6, 2020
"Oh Congo, it hurts to look and listen. It hurts to turn away".
The Democratic republic of Congo is a massive country the size of western Europe blessed with all kinds of natural resources, but since 1998 DRC has been suffering from wars and endless conflicts.
In this book Jason Stearns unveils the curtain from this deeply misunderstood and misjudged conflict, and reminds the readers of the historical and political precedents that led to this tragedy.
The Democratic republic of Congo is a massive country the size of western Europe blessed with all kinds of natural resources, but since 1998 DRC has been suffering from wars and endless conflicts.
In this book Jason Stearns unveils the curtain from this deeply misunderstood and misjudged conflict, and reminds the readers of the historical and political precedents that led to this tragedy.
May 2, 2020
An excellent and thoroughly researched history of the war(s) in Congo from just after the Rwandan genocide in 1994 to 2010. Over five million people perished during this period and governments throughout the region and around the world all had a part to play. The author handles a very difficult and confusing subject well, and includes personal insights from victims of violence, witnesses, soldiers, commanders and politicians on all sides of the shape-shifting conflicts. The roots of the various enmities are followed far back into colonial and pre-colonial times as well, giving context to the whole work.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is at times dense and difficult reading but it is hard to imagine how much could be done to further simplify such a tangled human tragedy. I remember years ago learning of the great death toll among refugees and civilians with great sadness, though I was ignorant of Congo's ancient or recent history. Now, I know more of its past and understand the causes of current conflicts far better, but the sadness remains deeper entrenched.
Highly recommend read.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is at times dense and difficult reading but it is hard to imagine how much could be done to further simplify such a tangled human tragedy. I remember years ago learning of the great death toll among refugees and civilians with great sadness, though I was ignorant of Congo's ancient or recent history. Now, I know more of its past and understand the causes of current conflicts far better, but the sadness remains deeper entrenched.
Highly recommend read.
April 5, 2022
Difficult read for someone with no background knowledge, so it requires some focus, but I think that this exactly reflects the situation in the Congo. I imagine the Congolese have a hard time keeping up with the shifting regimes or people in power, so it comes as no surprise that I couldn’t follow everything easily. Well documented and bilateral in its analyses.
October 20, 2022
I know next to nothing about war in Congo.
This book is an eye opener for me.
It may not be perfect, as for a beginner it was very useful.
This book is an eye opener for me.
It may not be perfect, as for a beginner it was very useful.
January 17, 2016
A superbly comprehensive overview of the conflicts in the Congo following the Rwandan genocide, which eventually spilled over into the DRC.
The author himself points out the the successive wars in the Congo from the mid nineties onwards can not be boiled down to a simple narrative. And indeed, summing up the author's book would really result in another book that's only marginally thinner than the original.
Stearns triess to get behind the 'why' of the conflicts and the horrors committed, as opposed to 'just' collecting atrocities. Which is for the better, as the few atrocities he does describe are horrid.
However, though Stearns describes the events and the causes that flow into each other very well, the one thing he does fail to do is explain why much of the conflict was so extremely violent. Perhaps that is just too much to ask.
Stearns confirms that Kagame and Museveni attended the same high school, but my earlier understanding that one of the Kabilas also attended the same school is not confirmed and seems unlikely, as Museveni introduced Laurent Kabila, the father, to Kagame, after Kagame and Museveni were looking for a Congolese leader to lend native credibility to their plan of invading the eastern DRC. Kabila, at the time, was based in Dar Es Salaam.
Earlier, Kagame, while still in the service of Museveni when trying to remove Idi Amin from power, received training in Tanzania, Cuba and the United States. Then, before making the move of trying to overthrow the government of his native country, Kagame was the head of Ugandan Military Intelligence.
Interestingly, Stearns paints the coalition's invasion of Zaire, that is, the first Congolese war, as an ideological move. Not only as a direct consequence of Rwanda's safety concerns with a resurgent government in exile just across the border hiding within the many refugee camps, but also riding on a wave of nationalist African Renaissance; South Africa just having shaken off the shackles of apartheid and several countries, Eritrea, Ethiopia as well as Rwanda, just having gotten rid of long ruling dictators.
But, as the author admits, the very big men this coalition was fighting in 1996 was exactly what it's leaders became only years later. Painfully, Kagame announcing his run for a third term on January 1 2016 only reinforces this sad development.
Stearns also points out that no real evidence exists of western conglomerates instigating any of the series of conflicts in the Congo, perhaps with the objective of obtaining access to the country's natural resources. Though opportunist, they acted reactively, were not instigators. And, as pointed out above, though eventually specifically Uganda, Rwanda and Zimbabwe were in it for the money, initially they were not.
An interesting quote on Zaire, typical for the ramshackle autocracies of the third world: "Before the fall of Zaire, during the last years of Mobutu, the state was everywhere and oppressive but defunct and dysfunctional."
The author published the book around the time of the previous presidential elections in the Congo. At that time, with Joseph Kabila as incumbent, he paints Kabila as being cut of the same cloth as both his father, the assassinated Laurent Kabila, and Zaire's former dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, if somewhat more competent and somewhat more balanced. However, looking at his achievements now, one election cycle later, the differences seem rather smaller than greater.
Perhaps most interesting is the comparison between the conflicts in the Congo with europe's Thirty Years' war, which ran from 1618 to 1648. Then, too, many small nations were fighting each other for supremacy, with often horrible consequences for the populace. Sadly, the consequences, with the much more effective killing machines and much deeper pockets, the negative consequences, now, are much greater.
The author himself points out the the successive wars in the Congo from the mid nineties onwards can not be boiled down to a simple narrative. And indeed, summing up the author's book would really result in another book that's only marginally thinner than the original.
Stearns triess to get behind the 'why' of the conflicts and the horrors committed, as opposed to 'just' collecting atrocities. Which is for the better, as the few atrocities he does describe are horrid.
However, though Stearns describes the events and the causes that flow into each other very well, the one thing he does fail to do is explain why much of the conflict was so extremely violent. Perhaps that is just too much to ask.
Stearns confirms that Kagame and Museveni attended the same high school, but my earlier understanding that one of the Kabilas also attended the same school is not confirmed and seems unlikely, as Museveni introduced Laurent Kabila, the father, to Kagame, after Kagame and Museveni were looking for a Congolese leader to lend native credibility to their plan of invading the eastern DRC. Kabila, at the time, was based in Dar Es Salaam.
Earlier, Kagame, while still in the service of Museveni when trying to remove Idi Amin from power, received training in Tanzania, Cuba and the United States. Then, before making the move of trying to overthrow the government of his native country, Kagame was the head of Ugandan Military Intelligence.
Interestingly, Stearns paints the coalition's invasion of Zaire, that is, the first Congolese war, as an ideological move. Not only as a direct consequence of Rwanda's safety concerns with a resurgent government in exile just across the border hiding within the many refugee camps, but also riding on a wave of nationalist African Renaissance; South Africa just having shaken off the shackles of apartheid and several countries, Eritrea, Ethiopia as well as Rwanda, just having gotten rid of long ruling dictators.
But, as the author admits, the very big men this coalition was fighting in 1996 was exactly what it's leaders became only years later. Painfully, Kagame announcing his run for a third term on January 1 2016 only reinforces this sad development.
Stearns also points out that no real evidence exists of western conglomerates instigating any of the series of conflicts in the Congo, perhaps with the objective of obtaining access to the country's natural resources. Though opportunist, they acted reactively, were not instigators. And, as pointed out above, though eventually specifically Uganda, Rwanda and Zimbabwe were in it for the money, initially they were not.
An interesting quote on Zaire, typical for the ramshackle autocracies of the third world: "Before the fall of Zaire, during the last years of Mobutu, the state was everywhere and oppressive but defunct and dysfunctional."
The author published the book around the time of the previous presidential elections in the Congo. At that time, with Joseph Kabila as incumbent, he paints Kabila as being cut of the same cloth as both his father, the assassinated Laurent Kabila, and Zaire's former dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, if somewhat more competent and somewhat more balanced. However, looking at his achievements now, one election cycle later, the differences seem rather smaller than greater.
Perhaps most interesting is the comparison between the conflicts in the Congo with europe's Thirty Years' war, which ran from 1618 to 1648. Then, too, many small nations were fighting each other for supremacy, with often horrible consequences for the populace. Sadly, the consequences, with the much more effective killing machines and much deeper pockets, the negative consequences, now, are much greater.
August 21, 2019
The book is definitely amazing.
May 25, 2019
This history begins at the end of the Rwanda genocide, right where global public consciousness leaves off. Stearns tells the political story of the men in charge-- these men, distanced by thousands of miles and impossible luxury from the total muck of jungle warfare and grotesque atrocities for which they were both responsible and totally abstracted. Stearns names them.
He tells the story of the civilians, the refugees and host communities, the collectively punished, the fleeing, those who joined in. The story of the refugee of the Great Congo War is immense, and this book just looks dead-on at the immensity and tries to tell the story. Tells that story. Narrates, from interviews, in their words, individual paths and loops them gently together into the whole. It's very good.
Finally, Stearns does the formidable work of contextualizing an impossible morass of motives and actors into threads that, if not untangled, are at least mostly distinguishable. One begins to understand the shorthand that ethnic stereotypes stand in for, how it becomes impossible to stay removed from these shorthanded hatreds because access, resources, political power, land, survival, and violence all get dished out based on these easy symbols that simplify and mask the structures and intrigue that are too damn complex and too unreachable anyway to bother with.
I am ignorant, so I can't evaluate the content or conclusions, but the methods, the breadth, the centering of impacted people narrating their own story, the sprinkling of that totally fucking bizarre kind of anecdote that only seems to happen in DRC, all makes for a very good book. Feels important.
He tells the story of the civilians, the refugees and host communities, the collectively punished, the fleeing, those who joined in. The story of the refugee of the Great Congo War is immense, and this book just looks dead-on at the immensity and tries to tell the story. Tells that story. Narrates, from interviews, in their words, individual paths and loops them gently together into the whole. It's very good.
Finally, Stearns does the formidable work of contextualizing an impossible morass of motives and actors into threads that, if not untangled, are at least mostly distinguishable. One begins to understand the shorthand that ethnic stereotypes stand in for, how it becomes impossible to stay removed from these shorthanded hatreds because access, resources, political power, land, survival, and violence all get dished out based on these easy symbols that simplify and mask the structures and intrigue that are too damn complex and too unreachable anyway to bother with.
I am ignorant, so I can't evaluate the content or conclusions, but the methods, the breadth, the centering of impacted people narrating their own story, the sprinkling of that totally fucking bizarre kind of anecdote that only seems to happen in DRC, all makes for a very good book. Feels important.
May 28, 2013
I am fascinated by the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is just so... huge, and confusing and mysterious. I don't profess to know much about it, even though I have read a book or two dealing with various aspects of it. But in all my previous readings, I have come away with a feeling of 'It is all a mess and I am no closer to understand a thing about it'.
Until I read this book. For the first time, I have found a book that makes some sense out of it all. The (political and humanitarian) situation in the DRC is complex, but the author manages to logically partition the interwoven stories to help the reader understand the different aspects of the whole.
To me, probably the most valuable quality of the book is how the author incorporates real-life stories of specific people throughout, making it possible to link a name (and an imagined face) to some of the happenings and atrocities that unfolded over the years. Even though it wasn't always an easy, straightforward read (with a subject as heavy as that, it was never meant to be easy) I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even though I still don't understand as much about the DRC as I would like, at least now I feel that I have some sort of grasp on why things are the way they are.
If you are at all interested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, its people or its political situation, do yourself a favour and read Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. It is an important and relevant read for anybody living in Africa or anybody interested in the continent.
My compliments to Mr Stearns for an excellent piece of work.
Until I read this book. For the first time, I have found a book that makes some sense out of it all. The (political and humanitarian) situation in the DRC is complex, but the author manages to logically partition the interwoven stories to help the reader understand the different aspects of the whole.
To me, probably the most valuable quality of the book is how the author incorporates real-life stories of specific people throughout, making it possible to link a name (and an imagined face) to some of the happenings and atrocities that unfolded over the years. Even though it wasn't always an easy, straightforward read (with a subject as heavy as that, it was never meant to be easy) I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even though I still don't understand as much about the DRC as I would like, at least now I feel that I have some sort of grasp on why things are the way they are.
If you are at all interested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, its people or its political situation, do yourself a favour and read Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. It is an important and relevant read for anybody living in Africa or anybody interested in the continent.
My compliments to Mr Stearns for an excellent piece of work.
January 4, 2018
This is a super important topic and maybe my opinion is added by reading it over several months on a kindle app on my phone, which is never a great reading experience for me. But it was so disjointed and didn’t really follow a chronological narrative—and I know the author did this on purpose and I know the subject is really complicated. But part of the job of a good writer is to take a complex subject and try to make it clear—not simple at all—just clear. I wasn’t clear on who people were or how significant they were for much of the time. Still I appreciated the humanizing of the various actors, even ones I might have traditionally seen as the “bad guys”. I do think I now see the Congo war(s) in larger context as African wars and know more about the roles of other countries nearby, which is vital. I also caught as small sense of how rich Congo is in mineral and other wealth and therefore how doubly sad it is that it doesn’t have the resources needed for its own people. The conclusion gave a good “so what” for the book which I appreciated. Still, there have to be more clear books written on this situation, hopefully?
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