In Koli Jean Bofane
Author of Congo Inc.: Bismarck's Testament
About the Author
Works by In Koli Jean Bofane
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1954-10-24
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Birthplace
- Mbandaka, Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Places of residence
- Brussels, Belgium
- Map Location
- Congo, Democratic Republic of the
Members
Reviews
This man can write. The plot did not always keep my attention -- maybe too many characters and storylines? -- but sharp writing. And so many truths. Un livre difficile à lire dans beaucoup d'endroits, surtout en ce qui concerne la description de la violence, physique et sexuelle, oui, mais aussi la violence de l'impérialisme. J'ai longtemps remarqué (dans les textes littéraires) les similarités entre Haiti et Congo-Brazza. Ce roman me révèle qu'en fait les similarités sont entre show more Haiti et Congo tout court. Hallucinant. show less
Brilliant, Profoundly Moving, Witty
At the beginning of this storyline we meet the main character twenty-six year old Isookanga from the Ekonda clan living in the vast resource-rich forest area in training under his uncle, the Chief, to be the heir and protector of the land. He is a Pygmy, who is ten centimeters (4 inches) taller than all Ekondas, as his father was not a Pygmy, and spends his time as one of the top player in online game, Raging Trade, where players compete to ruthlessly show more exploit natural resources.
As Isookanga clashes with the Chief on the future direction of the forested land, he leaves his village for Kinshasa to make his fortune as a “globalist.”
Here in the cast of characters quickly expands to highlight not only the present conditions of the citizens and foreigners harmed/displaced/exploited under the guise of globalization but how the legacy of colonialism has influenced the current direction of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Bofane conjures of the lives involved with wit and heart-breaking vividness.
The translation is fluent and the translator has kept the Congolese sayings where it makes sense with the translation as a footnote on the page. This did not disrupt my reading pleasure as the literal translation would often not seem to be in flow with the characters voices.
The Forward provides the necessary background information to help center the reader in keeping in the present and helped refresh my memory of the history of DRC.
While at times it was a disquieting read, it is the balance by the humor and resilience of the characters that makes this a very worthwhile book.
TW: There are graphic scenes of sexual violence. show less
At the beginning of this storyline we meet the main character twenty-six year old Isookanga from the Ekonda clan living in the vast resource-rich forest area in training under his uncle, the Chief, to be the heir and protector of the land. He is a Pygmy, who is ten centimeters (4 inches) taller than all Ekondas, as his father was not a Pygmy, and spends his time as one of the top player in online game, Raging Trade, where players compete to ruthlessly show more exploit natural resources.
As Isookanga clashes with the Chief on the future direction of the forested land, he leaves his village for Kinshasa to make his fortune as a “globalist.”
Here in the cast of characters quickly expands to highlight not only the present conditions of the citizens and foreigners harmed/displaced/exploited under the guise of globalization but how the legacy of colonialism has influenced the current direction of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Bofane conjures of the lives involved with wit and heart-breaking vividness.
The translation is fluent and the translator has kept the Congolese sayings where it makes sense with the translation as a footnote on the page. This did not disrupt my reading pleasure as the literal translation would often not seem to be in flow with the characters voices.
The Forward provides the necessary background information to help center the reader in keeping in the present and helped refresh my memory of the history of DRC.
While at times it was a disquieting read, it is the balance by the humor and resilience of the characters that makes this a very worthwhile book.
TW: There are graphic scenes of sexual violence. show less
One of those excellent, world-expanding novels that you know not enough people will read…once again I find myself struggling not to introduce a book about the Congo by means of a lengthy prelude on conflict minerals and geopolitics, the same way these books are always introduced in the LRB or the Literary Review. And you do feel the need to justify it, it's weird, I could see when I started talking to friends about this book that they'd mentally dismiss it as concerning some obscure show more African country which has nothing to do with them. In fact the Congo is much, much more important to your life than – I don't know – Italy, or Canada. Unless you're Italian or Canadian, I suppose. Maybe even then!
Although in one sense the country has had a disproportionately large place in literary history – from Conrad to Kingsolver, via André Gide and VS Naipaul – nevertheless actual Congolese people are often a distant presence in these works, and the country can easily find itself reduced to a general backdrop of ‘incomprehensible African chaos’. Unlike Chinua Achebe, I don't think there's anything wrong with that in itself – but it is definitely nice to see that there are now some (generally expatriate) Congolese authors being published globally who have their own, less alienated take on the situation there.
If you're a writer, it seems there's two ways you can go when you're trying to explain the Congo to people. Either you do what Fiston Mwanza Mujila did in Tram 83, and examine an EXTREME CLOSE-UP of a few individuals in one microcosmic bar – or, you do what In Koli Jean Bofane does in this book, which is to see the country as a vast panorama of different people and places participating in a truly global web of interrelations.
So the characters here include an Ekonda pygmy, a Lithuanian UN commander, an Italian diplomat in New York, a child prostitute, a Tutsi warlord, a Belgian ethnologist, a revivalist pastor and the Chongqing Chief of Police. It's an exhilarating cast list; it's also hugely ambitious and it takes, I think, a pretty confident author even to attempt this kind of top-level view of things.
The book's opening is characteristic of the way the novel plays with readers' preconceptions and stereotypes. We first meet the book's main protagonist, the young pygmy Isookanga, in what we take to be his natural habitat, catching caterpillars in the equatorial jungle. Within a few pages, though, Bofane whips the rug out from under us by having Isookanga run back home to swap his bark loincloth for a pair of Superdry jeans and a Snoop Dogg T-shirt, and boot up his laptop. This is just the first of a whole series of bait-and-switch scenes where you're never sure whether Bofane is going to show you the DRC as a kind of playground of atavistic lawlessness, or alternatively as the willing cornerstone of twenty-first-century globalisation.
Isookanga heads for the big city to follow his dream of becoming a globalist, and ends up living on the streets among Kinshasa's vast population of shégués, or street-children, who accept him because of his diminutive size. In his downtime he plays an online MMORPG called Raging Trade, in which players take the role of various military-industrial multinationals and compete for the control of the mineral resources of a fictional country, to which end they use any means at their disposal, including ‘heavy bombardments, ethnic cleansing, population movements, slavery…’.
The irony is not especially subtle, but it's powerful. Bofane's black humour and his flair for juxtaposition provide many similar examples – as for instance the extraordinary moment when a former child soldier finds a water-pistol at a market. The teenager turns the coloured toy around in the sunlight, examining the barrel, the trigger, and finally squirting himself in the face as his heart ‘swelled with an emotion that he was not able to identify’. Bofane tells us little else, but what he lets you infer – about the boy's past experience with guns, but also about his lack of experience with toys – made it one of the most beautiful scenes I've read in months.
At other times his writing is less reflective and more raw, even frenetic. This is not the case when he writes about the violence in the east of the country, where the narrative voice becomes very controlled (though the sexual violence is described in extremely challenging detail) – but, rather, it's in the moments of interpersonal negotiations and emotional upset that he becomes more experimental. One character, a visiting anthropologist, finds herself developing feelings for Isookanga – a physical attraction which for her as a Belgian is tinged with ‘un délicieux sentiment de culpabilité’. When the two of them finally have sex, Bofane's prose suddenly veers away from naturalistic description into something altogether more heated:
Arc-bouté sur ses cuisses, il ignorait que chaque coup de rein qu'il lui portait était – pour elle – comme le fouet que ses ancêtres avaient subi lors de l'esclavage ; que chaque assaut entre ses cuisses ouvertes était aussi impitoyable que la hache tranchant des mains, que la chicote infligée par Léopold II et ses descendants ; que chaque pénétration de son membre provoquait une turbulence digne d'une émeute pour indépendence ; que les “Han !” émis par sa bouche rappelaient ceux proférés par le Belge Gérard Soete pendant la découpe à la scie du corps de Patrice Lumumba ; que chaque secousse dans son ventre sensible résonnait comme les salves tirées par le néocolonialisme sauvage, comme les diktats du Fonds monétaire international, comme les résolutions de l'ONU, comme une réédition de Tintin au Congo, comme le discours à Dakar d'un président français mal informé, comme la propagation de propos racistes dans le twittosphère.
[Braced over her thighs, he was unaware that every thrust he made was, for her, like the lash that his ancestors had suffered during slavery; that every assault between her open legs was as pitiless as the axes that had chopped people's hands off, as the whip inflicted by Leopold II and his descendants; that every penetration of his member caused a frenzy worthy of a pro-independence riot; that every ‘Unggh!’ from his mouth recalled those made by the Belgian Gérard Soete as Patrice Lumumba's body was sawn into pieces; that every shudder of his sensitised abdomen reverberated like the salvos fired off by a wild neocolonialism, like the diktats of the International Monetary Fund, like UN resolutions, like a new edition of Tintin in the Congo, like the Dakar speech of an ill-informed French president, like the propagation of racist comments in the Twittersphere.]
Wow! What a passage. Bofane was raised by his Belgian stepfather and grew up on his coffee plantation, a fact which, he says, has given him a unique viewpoint on racial and postcolonial issues in the Congo. There is certainly a lot of that to get stuck into in this book, but it's also just a really great, ambitious attempt by a writer to put his country in its proper global context with scenes of violence and humour and transcendence that you're unlikely to see anywhere else. An English translation is apparently forthcoming from Indiana University Press, and I heartily recommend it to any Canadians, Italians, and other curious globalists. show less
Although in one sense the country has had a disproportionately large place in literary history – from Conrad to Kingsolver, via André Gide and VS Naipaul – nevertheless actual Congolese people are often a distant presence in these works, and the country can easily find itself reduced to a general backdrop of ‘incomprehensible African chaos’. Unlike Chinua Achebe, I don't think there's anything wrong with that in itself – but it is definitely nice to see that there are now some (generally expatriate) Congolese authors being published globally who have their own, less alienated take on the situation there.
If you're a writer, it seems there's two ways you can go when you're trying to explain the Congo to people. Either you do what Fiston Mwanza Mujila did in Tram 83, and examine an EXTREME CLOSE-UP of a few individuals in one microcosmic bar – or, you do what In Koli Jean Bofane does in this book, which is to see the country as a vast panorama of different people and places participating in a truly global web of interrelations.
So the characters here include an Ekonda pygmy, a Lithuanian UN commander, an Italian diplomat in New York, a child prostitute, a Tutsi warlord, a Belgian ethnologist, a revivalist pastor and the Chongqing Chief of Police. It's an exhilarating cast list; it's also hugely ambitious and it takes, I think, a pretty confident author even to attempt this kind of top-level view of things.
The book's opening is characteristic of the way the novel plays with readers' preconceptions and stereotypes. We first meet the book's main protagonist, the young pygmy Isookanga, in what we take to be his natural habitat, catching caterpillars in the equatorial jungle. Within a few pages, though, Bofane whips the rug out from under us by having Isookanga run back home to swap his bark loincloth for a pair of Superdry jeans and a Snoop Dogg T-shirt, and boot up his laptop. This is just the first of a whole series of bait-and-switch scenes where you're never sure whether Bofane is going to show you the DRC as a kind of playground of atavistic lawlessness, or alternatively as the willing cornerstone of twenty-first-century globalisation.
Isookanga heads for the big city to follow his dream of becoming a globalist, and ends up living on the streets among Kinshasa's vast population of shégués, or street-children, who accept him because of his diminutive size. In his downtime he plays an online MMORPG called Raging Trade, in which players take the role of various military-industrial multinationals and compete for the control of the mineral resources of a fictional country, to which end they use any means at their disposal, including ‘heavy bombardments, ethnic cleansing, population movements, slavery…’.
The irony is not especially subtle, but it's powerful. Bofane's black humour and his flair for juxtaposition provide many similar examples – as for instance the extraordinary moment when a former child soldier finds a water-pistol at a market. The teenager turns the coloured toy around in the sunlight, examining the barrel, the trigger, and finally squirting himself in the face as his heart ‘swelled with an emotion that he was not able to identify’. Bofane tells us little else, but what he lets you infer – about the boy's past experience with guns, but also about his lack of experience with toys – made it one of the most beautiful scenes I've read in months.
At other times his writing is less reflective and more raw, even frenetic. This is not the case when he writes about the violence in the east of the country, where the narrative voice becomes very controlled (though the sexual violence is described in extremely challenging detail) – but, rather, it's in the moments of interpersonal negotiations and emotional upset that he becomes more experimental. One character, a visiting anthropologist, finds herself developing feelings for Isookanga – a physical attraction which for her as a Belgian is tinged with ‘un délicieux sentiment de culpabilité’. When the two of them finally have sex, Bofane's prose suddenly veers away from naturalistic description into something altogether more heated:
Arc-bouté sur ses cuisses, il ignorait que chaque coup de rein qu'il lui portait était – pour elle – comme le fouet que ses ancêtres avaient subi lors de l'esclavage ; que chaque assaut entre ses cuisses ouvertes était aussi impitoyable que la hache tranchant des mains, que la chicote infligée par Léopold II et ses descendants ; que chaque pénétration de son membre provoquait une turbulence digne d'une émeute pour indépendence ; que les “Han !” émis par sa bouche rappelaient ceux proférés par le Belge Gérard Soete pendant la découpe à la scie du corps de Patrice Lumumba ; que chaque secousse dans son ventre sensible résonnait comme les salves tirées par le néocolonialisme sauvage, comme les diktats du Fonds monétaire international, comme les résolutions de l'ONU, comme une réédition de Tintin au Congo, comme le discours à Dakar d'un président français mal informé, comme la propagation de propos racistes dans le twittosphère.
[Braced over her thighs, he was unaware that every thrust he made was, for her, like the lash that his ancestors had suffered during slavery; that every assault between her open legs was as pitiless as the axes that had chopped people's hands off, as the whip inflicted by Leopold II and his descendants; that every penetration of his member caused a frenzy worthy of a pro-independence riot; that every ‘Unggh!’ from his mouth recalled those made by the Belgian Gérard Soete as Patrice Lumumba's body was sawn into pieces; that every shudder of his sensitised abdomen reverberated like the salvos fired off by a wild neocolonialism, like the diktats of the International Monetary Fund, like UN resolutions, like a new edition of Tintin in the Congo, like the Dakar speech of an ill-informed French president, like the propagation of racist comments in the Twittersphere.]
Wow! What a passage. Bofane was raised by his Belgian stepfather and grew up on his coffee plantation, a fact which, he says, has given him a unique viewpoint on racial and postcolonial issues in the Congo. There is certainly a lot of that to get stuck into in this book, but it's also just a really great, ambitious attempt by a writer to put his country in its proper global context with scenes of violence and humour and transcendence that you're unlikely to see anywhere else. An English translation is apparently forthcoming from Indiana University Press, and I heartily recommend it to any Canadians, Italians, and other curious globalists. show less
Author In Koli Jean Bofane appears in the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat with quotes from Congo Inc., which put this book on my radar. From the film, I had not realized that this book was a work of fiction, but it is one rooted in the very real atrocities of colonialism, imperialism, and corporate exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Africa. The grim satire follows the story of an Ekonda man Isookanga who leaves is village to make his fortune in the capital Kinshasa. Isookanga show more takes inspiration from an online video game in which participants take world's natural resources by any mean's necessary. Along the way he encounters various figures ranging from UN leaders to diplomats to warlords to street kids to a Chinese national. Bofane pulls no punches in his descriptions of violence, including sexual violence, depicted in this novel. It's not a pleasant book to read but an important one.
Favorite Passages:
Favorite Passages:
So this was it, the big city. And all that merchandise. What they used here in one day, in terms of textiles, kitchen utensils, hardware, stationery, tools, could have supplied his village for at least twenty years. And, the abundance notwithstanding, children were sleeping in the street; it was inhuman. Old Lomama didn’t get it. To go so far as to abandon a child? To what kind of extreme were people driven to reach this point?show less
The algorithm Congo Inc. had been created at the moment that Africa was being chopped up in Berlin between November 1884 and February 1885. Under Leopold II’s sharecropping, they had hastily developed it so they could supply the whole world with rubber from the equator, without which the industrial era wouldn’t have expanded as rapidly as it needed to at the time. Subsequently, its contribution to the First World War effort had been crucial, even if that war—most of it—could have been fought on horseback, without Congo, even if things had changed since the Germans had further developed synthetic rubber in 1914. The involvement of Congo Inc. in the Second World War proved decisive. The final point had come with the concept of putting the uranium of Shinkolobwe at the disposal of the United States of America, which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki once and for all, launching the theory of nuclear deterrence at the same time, and for all time. It contributed vastly to the devastation of Vietnam by allowing the Bell UH1-Huey helicopters, sides gaping wide, to spit millions of sprays of the copper from Likasi and Kolwezi from high in the sky over towns and countryside from Danang to Hanoi, via Huế, Vinh, Lao Cai, Lang Son, and the port of Haiphong. During the so-called Cold War, the algorithm had remained red-hot. The fuel that guaranteed proper functioning could also be made up of men. Warriors such as the Ngwaka, Mbunza, Luba, Basakata, and Lokele of Mobutu Sese Seko, like spearheads on Africa’s battlefields, went to shed their blood from Biafra to Aouzou, passing through the Front Line—in front of Angola and Cuba—through Rwanda on the Byumba end in 1990. Disposable humans could also participate in the dirty work and in coups d’état. Loyal to Bismarck’s testament,8 Congo Inc. more recently had been appointed as the accredited supplier of internationalism, responsible for the delivery of strategic minerals for the conquest of space, the manufacturing of sophisticated armaments, the oil industry, and the production of high-tech telecommunications material.
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- Works
- 9
- Members
- 158
- Popularity
- #133,025
- Rating
- 3.5
- Reviews
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