Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

Such is the human being: when he is afraid, he sees enemies everywhere and thinks the only chance to stay alive is to exterminate them.

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

As so often happens in politics, what appears to be politically expedient for those in power rarely overlaps with the public interest. The lesser evils of the regime become entrenched, while the greater good is never realized.

Mobutu’s kleptocracy had reversed the flow of time in the town, as buildings crumbled and the jungle reclaimed land. The novelist V. S. Naipaul portrayed the demoralizing aura of the city in his 1979 book, A Bend in the River: The big lawns and gardens had returned to bush; the streets had disappeared; vine and creepers had grown over broken, bleached walls of concrete or hollow clay brick. . . . But the civilization wasn’t dead. It was the civilization I existed in and worked towards. And that could make for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time sense unsettled. You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life.

I will not make any predictions. If the past is anything to judge by, Congolese politics will continue to surprise and bewilder, frustrate and inspire.

In this context Mugabe was eager to maintain the loyalty of key allies, particularly in the security services. As the economy at home shrunk, so did opportunities for domestic patronage. The Congo war provided the opportunity he needed to keep his collaborators happy and busy elsewhere. This explains the urgency with which the Congolese and Zimbabweans set up their joint ventures and how easily Zimbabwean officials

birthday. Step out of a car in many areas of the eastern Congo during the war, and you were often confronted with children suffering from kwashikor, or clinical malnutrition. It was a bizarre sight to see such listless children surrounded by lush hills. Congo is not Niger or Somalia, where famine and malnutrition are closely linked to drought. Here,

The number of deaths is so immense that it becomes incomprehensible and anonymous, and yet the dying was not spectacular. Violence only directly caused 2 percent of the reported deaths. Most often, it was easily treatable diseases, such as malaria, typhoid fever, and diarrhea, that killed. There was, however, a strong correlation between conflict areas and high mortality rates. As fighting broke out, people were displaced to areas where they had no shelter, clean water, or access to health care and succumbed easily to disease. Health staff shuttered up their hospitals and clinics to flee the violence, leaving the sick to fend for themselves

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.

Swahili saying: Shukrani ya punda ni teke (The gratitude of a donkey is a kick).

The population heeded the call. They pounced on a dozen people they suspected were rebels, looped tires around their necks, doused them in gasoline, and made them into human torches.

We saw you all dancing in the glory of the monster.

You have guns; you don’t need a salary.

(The gratitude of a donkey is a kick).

In the Congo, in order to survive, we all have to be a bit corrupt, a bit ruthless. That’s the system here.

Koffi Olomide sang: Lokuta eyaka na ascenseur, kasi vérité eyei na escalier mpe ekomi. Lies come up in the elevator; the truth takes the stairs but gets here eventually.

This is, in part, due to a structural deficit; institutions that could dig deep and scrutinize information—such as a free press, an independent judiciary, and an inquisitive parliament—do not exist.

in 2004, the charity estimated that 3.8 million had died because of the war since 1998.

As in much of central and western Africa, Lebanese traders had cornered the diamond trade, taking advantage of transnational family networks that reach from Africa to the Middle East and Belgium.

Even when a man with pristine political and ethical credentials tries to effect change, the results are poor.

Once again, leaders had resorted to ethnic diatribe to rally the population behind them.

No matter how hard you throw a dead fish in the water, it still won’t swim. —CONGOLESE SAYING

No other sentiment has justified as much violence in the Congo as anti-Tutsi ideology.

No other image plagues the Congolese imagination as much as that of the Tutsi aggressor.

And I am not claiming that the salvation of the Congo lies in foreign hands; it doesn’t.