Title: Congo Inc.: Bismarck's Testament Author: In Koli Jean Bofane Creation Date: 2014 Location: Democratic Republic of Congo / Belgium Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Congo Inc.: Le testament de Bismarck was published by Actes Sud in 2014 and appeared in English translation by Marjolijn de Jager in 2018. Its author, In Koli Jean Bofane, was born in 1954 in Mbandaka, in the equatorial province of what was then Zaire, and has lived in Brussels since 1993. He is the most significant novelist writing about the contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo and one of the major figures of African Francophone literature.
The title carries the novel's entire argument. The 1884–85 Berlin Conference, presided over by Otto von Bismarck, carved Africa into European possessions. The Congo was handed to Leopold II of Belgium as his personal property. Bismarck's "testament" to the Congo is the entire architecture of extraction: the arbitrary borders, the rubber terror, the Belgian colonial administration, Mobutu's kleptocracy, the wars that have killed millions since 1996, and the global mineral supply chains that continue to extract coltan and cobalt from the country's east while its population survives on ingenuity alone.
The protagonist is Isookanga, a twenty-five-year-old Ekonda from the equatorial forest around Salonga National Park, heir to his uncle's chieftaincy and entirely uninterested in inheriting it. He plays an online resource-war game called Raging Trade on a laptop stolen from a Belgian anthropologist, describes himself as an internationalist who aspires to become a globalizer, and leaves for Kinshasa to make that ambition real. Bofane's mode is satirical grotesque: Kinshasa rendered as a city of extraordinary energy and extraordinary degradation, where street children, an abandoned Chinese water vendor, a warlord installed as a national park administrator, a Pentecostal pyramid scheme and a UN mission all operate on the same logic at different scales. The novel's achievement is that it refuses to make its hero a victim. Isookanga wants in.
The National Voice
Congo Inc. captures the Congolese experience as a condition of being acted upon — of being the object of other people's economic calculations, strategic plans, and ideological projects — while insisting on a refusal to accept that condition as final. The texture is the texture of Kinshasa: vast, teeming, ungovernable, a city whose population exploded from roughly four hundred thousand at independence in 1960 to over fourteen million by the time of writing, a city the formal infrastructure long since ceased to serve and that continues to function through the sheer inventiveness of its inhabitants.
Bofane writes Kinshasa with the precision of a satirist and the affection of someone who recognises genius even in desperate circumstances. The traders of the Grand Marché who track margins with the acuity of a commodities desk. The mechanics who keep thirty-year-old vehicles running with improvised parts. The musicians who made Congolese rumba one of the most important popular music traditions on the planet. The women who manage households on resources that would not sustain a European pet. All of these are rendered with admiration that never patronises because it is accompanied by fury at the system that makes such ingenuity necessary.
The Ekonda dimension adds a layer of marginalisation within marginalisation. The forest peoples of the Congo basin have been the most systematically excluded population in the DRC, subjected to contempt by Bantu-speaking Congolese and by every colonial and post-colonial power in turn. Bofane's move is to make his Ekonda protagonist an aspiring predator rather than an emblem of that exclusion. Isookanga arrives in Kinshasa wanting to prospect, licence and dig his own forest, and the satire runs through him rather than around him: his conviction that Raging Trade is an accurate model of the world turns out to be broadly correct, which is the joke and also the indictment. The novel's sharpest instrument is that it declines to let the reader pity him.
The Historical Ground
The DRC's history is a history of extraction — the systematic removal of value by external powers, beginning with the Arab slave trade, intensified beyond comprehension by Leopold II's Congo Free State, continued under Belgian colonial administration, and perpetuated through the post-independence period by arrangements that changed the nationality of the extractors without changing the structure of extraction.
Leopold's rubber terror — forced labour, hostage-taking, mutilation — killed an estimated ten million Congolese between 1885 and 1908 and established the template that the novel traces through every subsequent era. The Belgian colonial administration that replaced Leopold's personal rule was less spectacularly violent but organised around the same extractive logic: copper, diamonds, cobalt, and uranium flowed outward through Belgian companies while the Congolese population received education calibrated to produce labourers rather than citizens. At independence in 1960, the entire country had fewer than thirty university graduates.
Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister, was assassinated in January 1961 with the complicity of Belgian intelligence, the CIA, and local political rivals. Mobutu seized power in 1965 and ruled for thirty-two years as a personal kleptocracy backed by Western powers who valued his anti-communist alignment. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 triggered the First Congo War, which brought Laurent-Désiré Kabila to power, and the Second Congo War (1998–2003), involving nine African nations and killing an estimated five million people — the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. The novel arrives after all of this and asks: what is the operating system that connects Bismarck's conference table to a young Ekonda man playing an online resource-war game on a stolen laptop in the equatorial forest, and why does he find its rules so familiar?
The Literary Landscape
Congolese literature in French has developed in the shadow of the country's political catastrophes. The first generation emerged in the 1950s and 1960s — Antoine-Roger Bolamba, Paul Lomami-Tshibamba — writing in the cultural space opened by the Négritude movement and anticolonial intellectual currents. V.Y. Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa (1988) is the most internationally significant work of Congolese intellectual production, though it belongs to philosophy and cultural criticism rather than fiction.
The novelistic tradition has been shaped by the difficulty of writing about a country whose reality exceeds the resources of conventional narrative. Sony Labou Tansi, born in the neighbouring Republic of Congo but claimed by the broader Congolese tradition, produced in Life and a Half (1979) a novel of hallucinatory political satire that is one of the founding texts of African postcolonial fiction. His method — the grotesque, the satirical, the surreal deployed against the absurdity of postcolonial dictatorship — is the tradition within which Bofane works, though Bofane's satire is cooler and more precisely targeted than Sony Labou Tansi's baroque excess.
The strongest alternative is Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 (2014), published the same year — a fever-dream portrait of a mining city in Katanga that shares Bofane's satirical energy but is more formally experimental and less narratively grounded. Alain Mabanckou, often mentioned in discussions of Francophone African fiction, belongs to the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), not the DRC. Choosing Congo Inc. is choosing a novel that does what the DRC most needs its literature to do: name the system that has been operating since a group of European men sat around a table in Berlin and drew lines on a map of a continent none of them had visited.
The Reading
Isookanga was hunting caterpillars, and it was beneath him.
The basket was a quarter full after two hours. There were fewer caterpillars every season and everyone in the village had a theory about it, none of which interested him. What interested him was that somewhere above the canopy the atmosphere was warming, the rains were arriving at the wrong time, and the market for this information was enormous. He was twenty-five years old. He was Ekonda, which in Kinshasa means a person the size of a child, except that his father had been somebody else and nobody said who, and the result was a young man a good ten centimetres taller than the tallest man in his village and still short enough to be called Little One by every stranger he would ever meet. He had finished secondary school. He had come home from it with headphones and a certain way of looking at his uncle, and in time with a t-shirt bearing the face of Snoop Dogg, which Lomama identified correctly as a smoker of hemp and held against him for years. Jeans by Superdry JPN. A chain around his neck with the letters NY on it. Sunglasses that said Dolce & Gabbana on the arm. None of it had been bought new and all of it had crossed three continents to reach a village where the nearest road was a day away, which was the point, and which nobody else in the village found remarkable enough to discuss.
The uncle was Old Lomama, chief of the village, keeper of the forest around the Salonga — hundreds of kilometres of equatorial rainforest that the government had declared a national park and then forgotten, leaving it in the hands of a man who had never been paid, never been appointed and never once been tempted. Lomama knew which roots stopped bleeding and which bird meant rain within the hour. He had decided long ago that Isookanga, his sister's son, would succeed him. Isookanga had decided long ago that he would not.
That season, China Networks had come to the village and put up a mast. It stood above the trees on four steel legs and the elders discussed what it would do to the ancestors. Isookanga was in favour. Ancestors were not a growth sector. He plugged his laptop into the base of the thing while the ceremony was still going on, and once the battery took a charge he was no longer in the forest at all. He was in Gondavanaland.
The laptop had belonged to Aude Martin, a Belgian social anthropologist in her late twenties who had come to study the Ekonda and had gone away with one bag lighter. Isookanga had explained the theft to a friend at the time. My act counts as a refund for the colonial debt. He said it without heat. It was accounting.
In Gondavanaland he traded as Congo Bololo. The territory was continental, the minerals were under everything, and the competition consisted of American Diggers, Skulls and Bones, Uranium et Société, the Goldberg & Gils Atomic Project and Hiroshima-Naga, all of whom wanted what he wanted and none of whom had scruples he needed to work around. Raging Trade permitted diplomacy. It permitted tariffs, embargoes, mercenaries, forced labour and the removal of populations, and it charged nothing for any of it. Prospecting licences, government taxes, wages, roads, the whole apparatus that makes digging things out of the ground expensive — the game skipped all that and went to the tonnage. Isookanga was good at it. When a position became inextricable he went looking on the internet for cheats and found them, and the cheats worked, and he filed that away too.
He came out of the game at dusk with the basket still a quarter full and his uncle waiting.
They had the argument they always had. Lomama said the forest was changing. Isookanga said the forest was an asset with no owner of record. Lomama said a chief does not sell the thing he is chief of. Isookanga said, You're totally irresponsible. You're running the risk of completely missing out on the twenty-first century. He wanted the survey, the licence, the excavator. He was not ignorant of what globalisation had done to his country. His conclusion was that his country had played badly and that he would play better, and he intended to go to Kinshasa and start.
Then Lomama found the leopard.
Nkoi Mobali had ruled that part of the forest for as long as anyone could count, and he was lying in a clearing with his coat unmarked and his eyes open, killed by warthogs. Warthogs, in that place, at that hour, taking on that animal and winning. Lomama crouched and read the ground for a long time and then said what he had come to say, which was that something was happening in the ecosystem, that the parameters were changing radically, and that people would know now that the end of the world was near. He was not being poetic. He was the only qualified observer for three hundred kilometres and he had just filed his report to an audience of one, and the one got on a riverboat the following week and went downstream to make his fortune.
Kinshasa took him without ceremony. Ten million people, or fourteen, depending on who was counting and what the number was for. At independence in 1960 the place had been Léopoldville and had held four hundred thousand, an administrative town of Belgian offices and Congolese clerks educated exactly enough to move the paperwork and not enough to ask why the paperwork only ever moved in one direction. The grid was still under there. The city had grown through it the way a tree grows through a fence.
He came ashore with the laptop and no plan beyond the word he had been repeating to himself for a year. I came to experience high technology and globalisation. Within a fortnight he was sleeping at the Grand Marché among the shégués.
The shégués were the children of the streets and there were tens of thousands of them. Shasha, called La Jactance — the Haughty One — was fourteen and ran the group by the simple authority of having survived more than the others. Her parents had been slaughtered in the Kivu, in the east, while she and her two brothers were outside the village looking for peanuts; she had walked to Kinshasa and arrived with one brother. Modogo had been put out of his family as a witch child after a pastor identified the demon and charged for the identification. Omari had been a soldier at eleven and had deserted by accident, left behind in a market while playing with a plastic water pistol. Their motto was Chance, eloko pamba. Luck counts for nothing. It meant that nobody was coming, that the thing in your hand was the thing you had, and that a girl of fourteen who wanted to eat on Thursday had better have arranged it on Tuesday. They slept in the arcades when the stalls shut and worked the aisles when they opened, and they held territory the way anyone holds territory, which is by being harder to move than it is worth. They took Isookanga in because he was close enough to their size to pass, worked out that he was a decade older than any of them, and settled on calling him vieux Iso, Old One.
Then the police shot Omari over nothing, and the market went up, and it was Isookanga who stood on a crate in the smoke and negotiated with the officers and the man from the ministry while a television camera pushed in from the left. He was calm and he was short and he was extremely quotable. The city watched him do it on the evening news.
Zhang Xia had been watching too, from behind a handcart. He was Chinese, twenty-eight or so, and he had been left in Kinshasa by his employer, Mr Liu Kaï, when the company folded itself up overnight and went home, and he did not have the money for a ticket. He sold sachets of drinking water in the street. In the evenings he explained Mao Zedong to the shégués, who listened with great seriousness. Isookanga looked at the cooler chest and the sachets and the margin and identified the problem immediately, which was branding. Within a month the water was going out under a Swiss label, and because the local mouth turns the French u into an i, Pure Swiss Water reached the customer as Eau Pire Suisse — Worst Swiss Water — and sold at a premium, and neither of them corrected it. Swiss was Swiss. The country's cobalt went out under that flag too and came back as watches.
Aude Martin surfaced again in the capital and asked him out on her last evening before Brussels. Over the drinks she said something warm and terrible about the African capacity for enduring suffering, and Isookanga stopped being charming. What happened in the hotel room afterwards, she arranged in her own mind while it was happening as a penance owed for the chicotte and the severed hands and Leopold, and she took it in that spirit, at volume. The other guests broke the door down. He went out the window and across the city, and she told them she had been raped, and lay there afterwards enjoying a delicious sense of guilt.
Meanwhile the state had made an appointment. Kiro Bizimungu, a Tutsi born in Rwanda, driven out as a child, back in 1994 with the men who ended the genocide and then five years in the eastern forests running his own militia under the name Commandant Kobra Zulu, doing to the villages of the Kivu what had been done to his own people, so as to control the coltan — Bizimungu had been brought into the peace as part of the settlement, given a car, an office and a title. He was Chief Administrator of the Office for the Conservation of the Salonga National Park. He had never seen the Salonga. He intended to log it, and to find out what lay under it, and he had no idea that the old man who actually guarded it had a nephew in town.
Then he saw the nephew on television and learned where the nephew came from, and sent for him.
Around them the city ran on the same arrangement at every scale. Waldemar Mirnas, a Lithuanian officer with the United Nations stabilisation mission, bought Shasha two or three times a week and considered himself discreet. Chiara Argento, an Italian investigator with the same organisation, was quietly assembling the file that would put Bizimungu in front of the court at The Hague for six peacekeepers killed in the east. In New York the future of the country was discussed by people in good coats who would never smell it. And in a warehouse in Kinshasa the Reverend Jonas Monkaya of the Church of Divine Multiplication, in Hugo Boss and J.M. Weston shoes, with a four-wheel drive at the door, ran a scheme called Paradizo Limited in which the faithful deposited their money into an account he described as divinely administered, and the returns were paid out of the deposits of the next cohort, and the singing on Sundays was magnificent.
Congo Inc. had been trading since 1885 and had never once missed a delivery. Rubber for the bicycle tyres of Europe, and the hands of the men who came up short. Copper. Diamonds. The uranium out of Shinkolobwe that went into the two bombs. Cobalt for the batteries, coltan for the telephones. Accredited supplier to internationalism, incorporated in Berlin at a conference chaired by a German chancellor over a territory none of the men in the room had ever seen, and still solvent.
Zhang Xia had a compact disc. On it was a Chinese geological survey of the entire country: every seam, every deposit, mapped and gridded, the whole of the Congo rendered as inventory. He showed it to Isookanga, who told him not to dream — You're like everybody else, you need the Congo to develop — and then proposed the obvious trade. Bizimungu wanted the Salonga. Bizimungu had money and an office and a state vehicle. Zhang Xia wanted a ticket to Sichuan, where his wife was assembling plastic cowrie shells for tourists to buy in Ouagadougou and Dakar. They would sell the disc.
They were in the corridor outside the office when it came apart. Mirnas had tipped Bizimungu off about the warrant, and Bizimungu ran, taking Adeïto Kalisayi with him.
Adeïto had been taken from her village during the raids and had been his wife ever since in the way that word can be made to mean. She had waited five years for a door to be open at the same moment he was frightened. In the street she broke away from him and ran for Monkaya's church screaming that this man had raped her, and Kinshasa did what Kinshasa does with a man identified in a crowd. They put a tyre over his shoulders. He burned at the roadside within sight of the church, and Adeïto did not look away, and the file at The Hague was closed for want of an accused.
Shasha finished her own business more slowly. For months she had been cooking for Mirnas before he took what he had paid for, and putting something in the food each time, a little and then a little, so that the officer of the stabilisation mission went from doctor to doctor across two continents with a pain nobody could name.
The police found Isookanga and Zhang Xia near the burning and arrested them both. Isookanga was released because he was somebody now, a face from the television. Zhang Xia was handed to his own embassy and flown to China to answer for documents forged by a company called Eternal Dragon that he had never run, and the penalty for that, at home, could be death.
Old Lomama arrived in the capital not long after. He had come down the river to tell the authorities what he had found in the forest and had discovered what the authorities were, and so he did the other thing he had come for. He found his nephew and told him the ecosystem was changing, the parameters were shifting radically, and the village needed its chief.
They went upriver together on a barge loaded past its marks, among the sacks and the chickens and the families bedded down on the cargo. Isookanga had agreed to the circumcision and the marriage and everything that came after, having concluded that the city was a den of thieves and that he had seen the inside of it. He stood at the rail with his arm straight up over his head, holding his telephone at the sky, trying to hold a signal long enough to send the proof that Zhang Xia had been in Kinshasa on the dates the prosecutors in China said he had been somewhere else. The bars dropped as the mast fell behind. The water went on ahead of them, pale and enormous, four thousand seven hundred kilometres of it, the road out for the rubber and the ivory and the copper and everything since.
In the waistband of his jeans, in its clear sleeve, he still had the disc with the minerals on it.
This post is part of the One Book Per Country series — 195 countries, one defining book each, working through the literary map of the world.
The English translation by Marjolijn de Jager, published by Indiana University Press in their Global African Voices series (2018), is the only English edition and carries the cool satirical register with precision. The French original, published by Actes Sud (2014), is the definitive edition for readers comfortable in French — the prose carries rhythms from Lingala and Lomongo that the translation can gesture toward but cannot fully reproduce. The game, the multinationals and the chapter titles are already in English and Chinese in the French text; that multilingualism is the author's own, and de Jager preserves it.
Marjolijn de Jager's English translation. The Global African Voices series, which also publishes Alain Mabanckou and Boubacar Boris Diop.
The French original. Actes Sud, one of France's most important independent publishers.
Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
