Bofane, In Koli Jean. Congo Inc.: Le testament de Bismarck. Actes Sud 2014
Review by Natalie Tarr
The novel Congo Inc. takes up many aspects that make the Democratic Republic of Congo part of an almost impenetrable network of global connections, entanglements, dependencies, actions and reactions. Fortunately, however, the much-quoted wrangling and tussle over Africa is not the focus of the story. Rather, the fates of individuals are shown, unvarnished, ironic, sometimes cynical and always with eloquent respect. Congo Inc. is multi-layered. Without falling into superficiality, In Koli Jean Bofane paints his readers a colorful picture with great sensitivity, in which almost inscrutable and often chaotic connections can be guessed at.
Bofane was late in his career as a writer and devoted himself wholeheartedly to developing his own language – he had no time or desire to do things half-heartedly, as he puts it. At the age of forty he wrote his first book, a children’s book (Pourquoi le lion n’est plus le roi des animaux, published by Gallimard Jeunesse in 1996), which deservedly won the “Prix de la Critique de la Communauté française de Belgique”. In it he dealt with his family’s escape from the Congo in 1991, when Mobutu’s regime began to be violently ended. He and his family have made a new home for themselves in Belgium. Bofane, who came to Belgium as a child – in 1960 to escape the unrest following the independence of the new state of Congo – studied communications there and returned to the Congo in 1983. When he was still able to express his opinion without being disturbed, he had built up a graphic and advertising business and now travels back and forth between Kinshasa and Brussels.
Among the many aspects that make Bofane’s Congo Inc. extremely rich, we find a confrontation with violence and arbitrariness by various actors – not least by self-appointed preachers who ruthlessly milk their followers. Bofane has found a language to depict violence, contempt, mutilation – in short, to depict the unspeakable, which goes to the edge of the tolerable without falling into voyeurism. It is necessary, he believes, to depict this violence because it has become part of everyday life in the Congo. Military personnel, rebels, preachers, employees of international organizations, or any of the countless profiteers of the chaos – they are all violent towards their fellow human beings in subtle or direct ways. Women are particularly affected, suffering, enduring and surviving rape, rape, mutilation and humiliation, as is the case in wartime. However, Congo Inc. does not present women who are simply victims of circumstances, as we are often portrayed by the media in the global north. On the contrary, here too Bofane shows us that women who have experienced unspeakable suffering imagine a future, fight for it and build it. Like Adeïto, the sex slave of a washed-up rebel, or Shasha, the street girl in Kinshasa…
Isookanga is tired of living in the village, having to listen to his uncle while the world and all its possibilities await him outside. He wants to globalize, move to the city and integrate himself into this larger world through work – he wants to become a globalizer, as he puts it. Thanks to a radio antenna sponsored by China, which is installed near his village, and a stolen laptop, Isookanga is already exploring this big, wide world virtually. Finally, he does just that and sets off for Kinshasa, the vibrant city with its seemingly endless possibilities. There he befriends a group of street children, whose stories are described sensitively and without embellishment. In this huge country, where the world’s major powers have been pursuing their own interests for centuries, the fates of individual children are like windfalls – things that happen and no one stops them.
Shasha became a street child and, like her friends, this was not a path she had chosen. Forced to do so by violence and war, Shasha had to invent a new life for herself and her younger brother far away from home. Her parents were literally slaughtered in one of the countless conflicts in the Kivu region when Shasha and her two brothers were looking for peanuts outside the village. Bofane describes, mercilessly and without sentimentality, how the 12-year-old girl and her siblings turned their backs on the horror and bravely went to the big city, on foot and with only what they were wearing. One brother died on the way.
When Isookanga arrives in Kinshasa, Shasha has already been established for a few years and is making a living as a child prostitute, like most female street children. Her regular customer is the head of the UN office in Kinshasa, who can live out his preference for pubescent children on her. Shasha expresses her disgust towards the UN man by preparing him poisoned food, which gives him inexplicable, insurmountable stomach pains. She and Isookanga become friends and thanks to his small stature, Isookanga is accepted by the street children, is allowed to set up with them in the central market in Kinshasa and even becomes their chosen spokesman. He is a (half) Ekonda, i.e. as an adult he is small like a child, and is therefore taken in by the street children. They call him “vieux Iso”. With the young Chinese Zhang Xia, whose fate is also part of this global struggle for wealth and resources in the Congo, Isookanga soon enters the business of selling chilled water on the street and has thus taken the first step towards his goal of globalization.
With irony and also gentle cynicism, Bofane portrays the self-proclaimed preacher of the Christian evangelical Pentecostal church Église de la multiplication divine, who pays attention to his wardrobe (Hugo Boss! J.M. Weston!) and likes to drive around in the latest SUV. The preacher Jonas Monkoya exploits his congregation with bottomless ruthlessness, but Bofane portrays his inventiveness with such eloquent irony that readers are inclined to feel a slight sense of admiration for Monkoya’s machinations. The man is true to himself, even to the point of introducing a divinely managed bank account into which his flock deposits their last, hard-earned money. Bofane’s biting humor is also ruthless here, as an exploiter can only function optimally if he finds those who allow themselves to be exploited. But it is left to the reader to find out why people fall for such obvious self-enrichment tactics and still feel saved, even chosen. Another facet of this devotion to religion can be guessed at in the treatment of Modogo, the witch child, by his family and their priest.
The way he lets readers think for themselves is one of Bofane’s great strengths. He paints a picture that is not completely pre-chewed and interpreted, but leaves it up to his readers to feel and understand connections. In Congo Inc., Bofane takes up topics that are highly topical. Evangelical movements have been flooding the African continent for some time and are growing rapidly. An irony of history, since it was the Christian religion that seems to be disappearing in an increasingly secular Europe, which served the colonial project in several ways. Today, Christianity is migrating back from Africa to Europe in a new, fervent form
– repackaged from south to north.
Congo Inc. also inevitably raises the (eternal) question of what an African author is? In Koli Jean Bofane answers this question elegantly and avoids reducing it to skin color: he is a Belgian author with African roots and rationality. The fact that the majority of Francophone literature in Africa represents the encounter between Africa and France or Belgium has led scholars to speak of the ongoing Francocentrism of African literature (1). But Congo Inc. breaks this cliché and not only includes China’s presence in the Congo in the narrative, but also follows Zhang Xia’s fate all the way home to his wife and son in Chonqing in Sichuan, China. There she sews plastic cowrie shells onto small leather squares to feed herself and her child – gadgets that tourists buy in Burkina Faso and Senegal. Her husband Zhang Xia ultimately becomes a pawn in the inscrutable eco-political relations between China and Congo and is deported back to China under a pretext. Bofane also takes his readers to New York to see Congo Inc., the UN headquarters, where the future of Congo is also being discussed and decided.
But the interested reader will find out about this and other highly topical, unexpected aspects when reading the book – currently in French, but very soon in German. The translation into German is in progress. Katja Meintel, who had already translated Bofane’s first novel Mathématiques congolaises (Actes Sud 2008) into German as Sinusbögen überm Kongo (Horlemann Verlag 2013), is expected to complete her work at the end of 2015.
Natalie Tarr is a doctoral student at the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel. As a linguistic ethnologist, her research focuses on the role of interpreters in today’s administration in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire. Her main interest is language ideologies and the way language is used to maintain hierarchies. African literature allows an additional perspective and is therefore central to her research.
Footnotes
- Christopher L. Miller deals with Francophone literature in his book chapter The Slave Trade, La Françafrique, and the Globalization of French, published in: McDonald, Christie and Susan Rubin Suleiman (eds.) 2010. French Global: A new Approach to Literary History. Columbia University Press: 240-256