{"id":10807,"date":"2025-05-19T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10807"},"modified":"2025-05-18T17:50:35","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T21:50:35","slug":"congo-inc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/19\/congo-inc\/","title":{"rendered":"Congo, Inc."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I hadn\u2019t heard of the Congolese author In Koli Jean Bofane before seeing the Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d\u2019Etat<\/a><\/em> this spring, which featured Bofane and mentioned that he was an novelist. Two of his novels have been translated into English, the second of which, Congo, Inc.: Bismarck\u2019s Testament<\/a><\/em>, marries satire with hysterical realism in an insane and sometimes inscrutable story of life in the D.R. Congo today, with its endless corruption and continued meddling from colonial interests. It does not work, ultimately, although it\u2019s an entertaining read anyway for its madness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isookanga is a young Pygmy living in a village where his uncle is the chief and life is reasonably prosperous by local standards, spending much of his time playing a 4X video game called \u201cRaging Trade\u201d which, frankly, sounds pretty badass. He\u2019s learned that the path to riches in the game is through violence and intimidation, though, rather than innovation, research, or hard work, and apparently you can buy all sorts of weaponry and target your opponents with incredible precision. This encourages him to set off for the nation\u2019s capital, Kinshasa, to make his fortune, rather than to live a comfortable if boring life in the hinterlands. His narrative brings him into contact with corrupt politicians, do-gooder diplomats, even more corrupt UN peacekeepers, a Chinese merchant who has been abandoned by a corrupt partner, and so much more that it\u2019s often unclear how any of these even connects back to Isookanga, who just wants to make money \u2013 like everyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bofane\u2019s worldbuilding here is by far the best part of the book. He sends up modern Congo with a series of characters who are all drawn ten percent more sharply than is realistic, just enough of an edge to keep it satirical rather than ridiculous; the video game is the only part of Congo, Inc. <\/em>that seems to defy realism, and that\u2019s an easy thing to forgive. No one is above the corruption, although different people seem to want different things \u2013 the researcher who comes to study Congolese people is after something different than the UN envoy in New York who is after something different than the crooked clan leader and so on. There\u2019s a sort of symmetry in the resolution here, and Bofane does manage to tie up most of the loose ends in a satisfying and often comical way, although the whole is less than the sum of the novel\u2019s parts because of how quickly some of those subplots reach their denouements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n