The Rape of a Nation - New Book
The Rape of a Nation - New Book
And finally, however painful it may be for us delicate souls, and however intractable the Congo’s ills may appear, and however drained of compassion we may feel in the face of Darfur and other hells, we must never turn away our gaze. Indeed, we have a moral duty to look, which is what this book is telling us. To observe pain only through the prisms of the boardroom and the computer screen is to sever the vital artery between compassion and action.
The continuing human tragedy of Congo is not a statistic. It is a continuing human tragedy. It is fourteen hundred and fifty tragedies every day. It is countless more than that if you include the orphaned, the bereaved, the widowed, and all the ripples of truncated lives that spread from a single death. It is you and me and our children and our parents, if we had had the bad luck to be born into the world this book portrays.
But Congo has one secret that is hard to pass on if you haven’t learned it at first hand. Look carefully and you will find it in these pages: a gaiety of spirit and a love of life that, even in the worst of times, leave the pampered Westerner moved and humbled beyond words. - John le Carre
One Hundred Years of Darkness
One Hundred Years of Darkness
Twenty years after first reading Heart of Darkness I found myself sitting on the banks of the Congo River revisiting Joseph Conrad's words.
Waiting in Brazzaville for my first ferry to Kinshasa, I looked up from the page. Drunken police and soldiers were whipping travellers who strayed out of line with the chicotte, a legacy of the Belgian Colonial rule; Rifle butts found a home in the backs and temples of a group of suspected looters, later hauled screaming into jail. Chickens squawked and polio victims shouted as they dragged themselves along the ground toward the ferry for their free trip to Kinshasa, their capital of Hell.
During that first trip up the river Congo I was struck by the enduring accuracy of the images Conrad described. With every step I took and every boat I travelled on I could hear his words. It is in the shadows of cells, of hospitals and of riverbanks where I began to witness Congo's true horror. The Congolese leadership has assumed the guises of their colonial predecessors and life for the Congolese people is as desperate and dire as it was in the time of Kurtz.
Now, I've spent five years following, not Conrad, but the Congolese. Seeing their shadows as he first saw them, recording with each frame their anonymous lives, witnessing through the lens of Conrad the imprint of One Hundred Years of Darkness.