A personal view of the Congo Wars
From Amazon
If you want a very recent book telling what's happening in all the corners of Congo, from a journalist's eyewitness perspective from 2003 to 2007, this is the book for you. Chapter 1 covers the war going on in the East, particularly in the Bunia area. It tells in chilling detail the factions involved, the fighting, and the suffering. The gold near Bunia is of course a major factor in bringing in a host of militias led by warlords who use the gold to purchase arms to control more territory to control more resources. You get the picture. The efforts of the UN forces there are also detailed.
Chapter 2 brings us to Kinshasa, although Mealer spends much of his time (on his own testimony) bar-hopping, getting drunk and boxing while also trying to get information on the eastern wars from the UN offices in Kinshasa. The tensions around the national elections, oft postponed, are described, as are the riots of June 2006 and the final vote. He also went back to Bunia to interview refugees--a source of information throughout the book.
Chapter 3 concerns mainly the battles in Uturi, the attempts by the UN to get rebel leaders like "Cobra" to surrender, and the massacres such as that horrible one in Nyankunde that we all learned about when it happened. Chapter 4 takes us on the inevitable riverboat trip (remember Conrad?), described in colorful detail. He and his two companions, one foreigner and one Congolese, had a luxury boat up to Mbandaka, rough life atop a barge to Ndobo, and an ordeal by bicycle from Bumba to Kisangani.
The final chapter begins at Lubumbashi, with an eventful and challenging train trip to Kongolo, then Kalemi, again beginning in a relatively luxurious living situation, then a declining one as time went by.
Mealer gives the historical background to the geographical locations he is narrating, so there is a lot of chronological forwarding and backtracking, sometimes a bit confusing, but in general accurate. He ends with good policy recommendations, and his prose is stylish and creative. In general he gives an accurate picture of the situation in Congo today, and had courageously lived outside the protective cocoon most foreigners live in, suffering the tough situations that most Congolese endure.
A beautiful darkness
From Amazon
One part travelogue and one of adventure, another of reporting and yet another of tortuous self discovery, 'All Things..." is all of these things, yet hostage to none of them. To step into this world is to fling onself into a forced march through a landscape of incomprehensible horrors and ineffable wonders. After I turned the last page and followed the last words into silence, I walked around for days marveling at what a thing of beauty this is.
Paul VanDevelder, author of Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation
Exceeds Expectations
From Amazon
Travel and the understanding of cultures different than our own should force the traveler, writer, reporter, painter, whatever, into a variety of situations and realities from which they can learn. If Mealer's book had remained a chronicle of the Congo wars, all of the rest of that experience would have been lost. Beyond that, it would have continued a tradition of looking at the "other" as some exotic beast that needs taming. The idea to show that in order to try and understand what had happened---hell, what is happening there----that Mealer had to release his own self and turn things over to chance and an open set of senses, was the best part of the book for me. It moved the book away from pure chronicling into something else, perhaps a truer form of journalism, of writing. By the end Mealer has built up so many vantage points, so many series of losses and gains it leaves the reader confounded as to the depth of Congo and your experience there. And confounding the reader isn't necessarily a bad thing. I tend to agree with William Styron when he said, "What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it." Mealer's book did that.
An incomplete, biased and unexamined account
From Amazon
Bryan Mealer has attempted to do the impossible: represent the suffering of a nation in the midst of war and for that I give him credit. However, as a White, Ameican middle class woman who lived in Eastern Congo in 2005-06, I find much of his book to be deeply problematic. This is not a historic account of the war; nor is it an attmept to unpack and examine the myriad factors that instigated the conflict and continue to cause unrest even now; rather, it seems to be one man's biased and often aggrandized account of his willingness to "risk his life" to bring us a litany of disconnected stories from "the heart of darkness." As a book, it is little more than a re-construction of Europeans as noble and technologcally-advanced and Congolese as savage and backward. This is an extremely dangerous myth to perpetuate via mainstream American media, a medium already saturated in representations of Africans as starving, disease-ridden and hopelessly corrupt. While the horror of the war is certainly a reality, Mealer ignores the complex political underpinnings which, if exposed in depth, would serve as a scathing indictment of countless Western governments, including our own. Gerard Prunier's seminal text on the Rwandan genocide is an example of what good war reporting can be. This book, on the other hand,is a sad reminder that the war in Congo DOES deserve press coverage. Just not the kind delivered here.
A good way to learn about a distant and strange country
From Amazon
Highly recommended. Reading this book I learned a lot about the history of Congo and the suffering of its people. Once you started reading you can't really put it down. But be warned: The stories about gunboys, militia and so on are really cruel and reading about their atrocities makes you want to throw the book against the wall or shout at somebody.