Journalist and human rights activist Jason Stearns has attempted what is perhaps the impossible in trying to decipher the trials that have overtaken the Congo the past several decades, and remain in the world headlines even this week. His book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is a compilation of over a decade of research, interviewing victim and perpetrator, discovering that many of the people he has spoken with – from key people to bystanders – are both.
The time period covered includes the civil war in neighboring Rwanda with the accompanying and mind-numbing genocide that spilled over into the east Congo, then known as Zaire; a multi-national war on the scale of World War I which overthrew the post-colonial Mobuto regime, a subsequent civil war in the Congo; with “side stories” of endless independence movements in Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe coming into play. These wars have to date claimed an estimated 5 million victims through direct violence and the indirect aftermath of nonfunctioning governments without the organizational wherewithal to provide road building, rather on public healthcare. This can be best recapped with a quote about Joseph Kabila, the current leader of the Congo, by the President of Tanzania:
Throughout the book I kept longing for the chapter titled Conclusion, hoping that it would condense this insanity into something understandable. Stearns did all he could, providing detail after horrifying detail, and succeeded somewhat in outlining the politics of inflaming ethnic hatred that resulted in circular genocide; but it will take legions of psychologists to provide understanding.
What is clear throughout however is that most -- not all, but most -- of these wars have been proxy in nature, with the backstage combatants being the Belgians, the French, the English, the Americans, the Portuguese, the Chinese, and even a cameo appearance by Cuba’s famed Che Guevara. Yet, on the stage itself the fatalities have been provided by Africans.
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