Rating: 
Summary: Sadly Evocative of a Long Linear Lament
Review: It's instructive to view Wrong's wonderful work in the context of her choice--Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"--and of another work she omits to cite but that is nevertheless the linear descendant of Conrad's great story--namely, Naipaul's A Bend in the River. It is, I suppose, a sad commentary on Congo that it is so readily recognizable in all three books, as the host for a succession of extractive, exploitative regimes, colonial and African. Wrong takes the litany of this inhuman expropriation to the present moment (and, if you read the headlines, you'll know the death of Laurent Kabila has resolved nothing...). Happily, many, if not most, of Wrong's human subjects preserve, in her sympathetic account, their humanity. The struggle in so arduous an environment is to do precisely that, and it is the ultimate triumph of humanity that seeps out of the tale of how Congolese survived Mobutuism and, by extension, how Africans under a variety of authoritarian regimes endure from day to day. Not that they are assisted in any serious way by international institutions--Wrong's chapter on the IMF contains among the most damning stories in the book--and Congo's foreign "relations." Wrong is a brilliant, witty observer, who tastefully disrupts the continual tale of woe with telling, often humorous, anecdotes on the theme of coping in the Congo. Several very fine books on Africa have been published in the past several months, and this, plus Kapuscinski's Shadow of the Sun, are the best.
Rating: 
Summary: Another Africa "hotel memoir" by a journalist... who cares?
Review: Let's hope this is the last book by a journalist in Africa who writes about what they saw happen outside their hotel window. This book is not uninteresting, but I'm tired of reading about journalists' relationships with their hotel receptionists and their taxi drivers. Are we supposed to think they are so special because they drank beers at hotel bars, and saw bad men drive by outside? Do we really need constant descriptions of their expatriate friends and colleagues? Wrong is the latest journalist to suffer the delusion that her experience is more interesting than those of the people in the townships and villages. The real stories of the Congo are a long walk from Ms Wrong's comfort zone... too bad we don't get to read much about them in this book.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for understanding modern African politics
Review: Michela Wrong gives a detailed account of Mobutu's kleptocracy, with vivid examples of life in the Belgian Congo/Zaire.
The book is highly informative, easy to read and entertaining.
Go for it, you won't regret it
Rating:
Summary: What do Congolese citizens want for their country?
Review: Michela Wrong's book In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz tells about living on the brink of disaster in Mobutu's Congo. The DR Congo possesses an enormous cornucopia of natural resources - rubber, timber, gold, diamonds, uranium, copper, cobalt, manganese, tin, and zinc - which should have made it one of the richest nations in Africa. Instead, thanks to Mobutu's comprehensive looting, it became one of the poorest on earth. Its population was forced to endure wretched standards of living, huge urban unemployment, impossibly low wages, hyperinflation, a crumbling infrastructure, non-existent health and education services and endemic corruption. Adept at intimidation, manipulation, coercion and outright bribery, Mobutu was able to entrench his rule over a population of forty million Congolese with a seemingly supernatural ability. Wrong calls on the Congolese, who have previously been able to set their sights little higher than survival, to learn to take responsibility for their own destiny. The question must be what do Congolese citizens want for their country and what can they do for their country to make it happen.
Rating:
Summary: The Reverberating Effects of Colonialism
Review: Michela Wrong's In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz is the perfect companion piece for the amazing and horrifying King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild (itself a historical look at the setting of Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness). Wrong takes the story into the present by covering the recent years in the Congo after the Belgians abruptly leave their colony, after providing a brief, succint look at its colonial background, to show the rise and fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, taking down the rich natural resources and the economy of his country with him through his time in government. The author is very effective at showing the Congo as a piece on the Cold War checkerboard using this position to gain support from the United States and money from the IMF and the World Bank allowing a corrupt system to remain in place and the corruption to grow to enormous scale. The complete absurdity of this situation is made quite clear in the journalistic approach the author takes to this book. The end of the Cold War ended this system and helped bring down Mobutu, too late to help his country. The author is quite good at placing the blame and the Western nations come in for their fair share as colonialism left the Congo only to be replaced by a Western backed form of economic imperialism. A horrifying and often sadly humourous read that opens one's eyes to the situation in Africa.
Rating: 
Summary: Well Researched but Poorly Written
Review: Ms. Wrong clearly has first-hand knowledge of the history of Mobutu's destruction of Zaire, and the tragic events that resulted in the nation's demise. However, her editor must have been asleep when reviewing this book; there can't be any other explanation for publishing a work loaded with irritating typos and lacking flow . The book starts off with her arrival in Zaire, and suddenly it fast-forwards to the end of Mobutu's reign, then her looting of Mobutu's home with her colleagues. It then backtracks to his childhood, and so on. It is easily one of the most frustrating books I have ever read, and aside from the wealth of research Ms. Wrong undertook for this book, I found no cause to recommend it to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Well Researched but Poorly Written
Review: Ms. Wrong clearly has first-hand knowledge of the history of Mobutu's destruction of Zaire, and the tragic events that resulted in the nation's demise. However, her editor must have been asleep when reviewing this book; there can't be any other explanation for publishing a work loaded with irritating typos and lacking flow . The book starts off with her arrival in Zaire, and suddenly it fast-forwards to the end of Mobutu's reign, then her looting of Mobutu's home with her colleagues. It then backtracks to his childhood, and so on. It is easily one of the most frustrating books I have ever read, and aside from the wealth of research Ms. Wrong undertook for this book, I found no cause to recommend it to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: A three dimensional portrait of a tinpot klepto thug!
Review: Much like some of Robert Kaplan's best writings about sweaty, Third World climes, this work provides a street urchin's eye view of Kinshasa during the Mobutu years. Included here are memorable portraits of cripples running cross-river smuggling rackets, bizarre black-Jesus cults, and over-the-top pink champange swilling elites who robbed the country blind in their never-ending efforts to acquire tacky Euro-fashions and German luxury cars. Also present in this book are numerous laugh-out-loud postcards from the edge that was Zaire -- for instance, the 500,000Z hyperinflated note locals referred to as the "prostate" in honor of their leader's cancerous organ. Through it all, however, shines a nuanced portrait of "President" Mobutu. A thief, certainly. A thug, yup. A man who bears some responsibility for turning a potentially wealthy country into a cesspool, sure. But the Mobutu that emerges here is also a talented politician who brought a measure of order to Congo's post-colonial chaos. Once on top, however, he had to loot the national treasury in order to pay off rapacious underlings who would settle for nothing less than chartered Concordes and Mirage fighters. As she relates how Mobutu's obscenely opulant Versailles-in-the-jungle is rapidly being reabsorbed by the forest, one truly grasps the meaning of Ozymandius. All in all, one hell of a lesson in the perils of being a strongman.
Rating: 
Summary: Wrong has got it right
Review: Starting off with a discussion about Belgian King Leopold II and his rapacious rule in the former Belgian Congo, Michela Wrong pretty quickly lets you know what she thinks are the primary causes of the problems facing Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) - interfering, self-interested Western powers. This book is however not a polemic against the west, nor a diatribe about colonialism and imperialism. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR KUTZ is a very balanced account. The author points her finger at the west for its exploitative policies with sole interest in the vast natural wealth (diamonds, gold, uranium, copper, tungsten) in the Congo and for our myopic cold war policies which viewed everthing through a "with us or against us" lens. Nevertheless she is very clear in stating that the principal agent for the rot that now grips the failed nation state of the DRC is very much home grown. Mobuto Sese Seko was the ultimate ruler of Zaire for 32 years from 1965 until a rebel army chased the aged and ailing despot to Morocco in 1997 (he died of prostate cancer within a few months). Beginning as a simple army sargeant his rise to power was at the expense of his former friend and commander-in-chief, the democratically elected (but communist leaning?) first prime minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Mobutu was adroit at political gamesmanship on the international stage, playing one western power against another. Domestically he was no dunce either, manipulating tribal interests and influences to his own benefit. All this is carefully laid out by the author and highlighted by using some of the more bizarre and extravagant examples of his excesses. The referrence to Mr Kurtz in the title is of course Joseph Conrad's character from THE HEART OF DARKNESS. The connection is more than the setting in Congo. Wrong quotes Conrad - Kurtz at the end of the novel is dying; drifting down river he says "the horror, the horror." This book extends "the horror" to the disastrous juxtaposition of both domestic and foreign greed, corruption, ineptitude and self interest as demonstrated by individuals and agencies of government, that have conspired to make the DRC what it is today - "a paradoy of a functioning state."
Rating:
Summary: Interesting subject matter -- not well written or organized
Review: The book has its weaknesses, notably that it's not especially well-written. And her analysis of the West's role in Zaire, especially the IMF, is very shallow. But it is an eyewitness account of a fascinating and tragic story, and that compensates for a lot..
|
