A few posts back, I linked to a blogger who was protesting an author’s grim characterization of the DRC. The author responded, and the two have had an interesting exchange. Says the author (Rory) of the original book review:
I am sorry if my review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River has upset some DRC residents. I am no Congo expert, but I understand that life in much of the country can be very grim. The Lancet reports that 1,200 people die in the Congo each day through civil unrest. By comparison, post-Saddam Iraq and post-Taliban Afghanistan do not even come close to 1,200 dead per day. As to whether DRC is as grim today as it was at the time of Stanley, this seems to me to be a question that is worth considering — given these and other statistics.
I have no doubt that there are many positive sides to the Congo, and I am sure Kinshasa is safe for expatriates. (But weren’t upwards of 300 people — Congolese, not expats — killed in a gun battle on a main street?) I hope that readers will not misinterpret my closing line. I do not say that it’s not worth going to the Congo, rather I state quite clearly — within the context of the review — that travellers should not visit unless they can deal with the dangers. Consider my last line to be the equivalent of a health warning on a pack of cigarettes!
The blogger (Fred)’s response:
Dear Rory,
Thank you for taking the time to reply.
I assure you I am not upset. It’s true that Congo’s mortality rates are still very high, but this has more to do with poverty and a health infrastructure ruined by years war and mismanagement than direct violence. Much of the country is relatively stable now, apart from a small but very populous area in the east, where fighting continues.
In fact, as recent posts on this blog show, I have no wish to play down the fact that bad things continue to happen in the Congo. A ‘health warning’ is probably appropriate. But living here, I have developed a sensitivity to the endless perpetration of what I might as well call the Heart of Darkness myth. That novel was of course inspired by grim fact, being set in the era of ruthless exploitation that killed millions of Congolese and was ushered in by Stanley’s reporting, as it happens. (I strongly recommend King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, for a truly gripping account of that history.) But such was the impact of Heart of Darkness that to this day it seems automatically to trigger a knee-jerk set of misleading ideas about this part of the world.
If I were Congolese, I would wish that Conrad had had more courage of a conviction he hints at: that European civilisation was built on ’savage’ inhumanity to man. (Arguably, that was the intolerable secret that destroyed Kurtz, and was ‘too dark’ for Marlow to tell Kurtz’s fiancée at the end.)
But because Conrad was deliberately ambiguous, more interested in psychology than history, and probably a little racist like his most of his contemporaries, what sticks in the mind - and the popular imagination - is the forbidding atmosphere which he so successfully conjures up, distorting the scenery by looking at it through fearful European eyes. His narrator, Marlow, thinks it is the “corrupt”, “impenetrable” wilderness that drove Kurtz mad by awakening his “forgotten, brutal instincts”. So in the end, as if by a trick of the light, it is the Congo’s bountiful, beautiful landscape which is indelibly associated with the terrifying, unknown heart of darkness, and not the greed that drove King Leopold’s monstrous rubber and ivory racket.
I’d rather not quote so extensively (the excerpts above are the bulk of Fred’s post), but it the whole exchange was so interesting.
