Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo.
Mr Kurtz, the colonial white master, brought evil to the remote upper reaches of the Congo River. This book is a brilliant portrait of the grotesque as confusion takes over, as the era of Mobutu Sese Seko collapses into absurdity, anarchy and corruption. Pink-lipsticked rebel soldiers mingle with tracksuited secret policemen in hotels where fin-de-siecle dinner parties are ploughing through hotel wine cellars rather than see bottles lost to the new regime.
Congo, Africa's richest country in terms of its natural resources, has institutionalised kleptomania: everyone is on the take. In a country where the minimum wage has dropped to below $150 a year, the government, over 25 years, spent $250 million providing courtesy cars. Congo has a vanity nuclear reactor built on a subsiding slope and one of its uranium rods is missing . . .
Having presided over unprecedented looting of the country's wealth, Mobutu, like Kurtz, retreated deep within the jungle to his absurdly overwrought palace of marble floors and gold taps. A century on, nothing seems to have changed at the heart of Africa: it is lawless, graceless and it slaughters its own.
But this is a story of grim comedy amid the apocalypse and a celebration of the sheer indestructibility of the human spirit in a nation run riot.
