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 young Ekonda Pygmy from the equatorial forest near Mbandaka. Educated in a mission school and obsessed with a video game called Global Capitalist, he travels to Kinshasa to participate in the global economy — and discovers that the economy was designed specifically to exclude him. Bofane's mode is satirical grotesque: Kinshasa rendered as a city of extraordinary energy and extraordinary degradation, where the informal economy constitutes a kind of genius systematically exploited by warlords, NGOs, mining corporations, and the IMF in equal measure. The novel names the system. That is its achievement and its purpose.
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 street traders of the Marché Central who track margins with the acuity of Wall Street traders. 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 Pygmy dimension adds a layer of marginalisation within marginalisation. The Pygmy peoples of the Congo basin have been the most systematically excluded population in the DRC, subjected to discrimination by both Bantu-speaking Congolese and every colonial and post-colonial power. Isookanga's journey from the equatorial forest to Kinshasa is a journey from one form of exclusion to another, and his naivety — his belief that a video game has taught him how the world works — is the novel's sharpest satirical instrument. He has learned the rules of a game that was never designed to include him as a player.
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 Pygmy boy playing a video game in the equatorial forest?
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
The Forest
Isookanga lives in the equatorial forest with his uncle Moleskine, among the Ekonda Pygmies of the Congo basin — the people who have inhabited the great forest for millennia and who have been systematically marginalised by every wave of power that has passed through: the precolonial Bantu kingdoms, the Arab slavers, the Belgians, the Zaïrean state, and now the global extractive economy, which has no use for people but considerable use for the timber, minerals, and carbon credits their territory contains.
What distinguishes Isookanga from his community is his education — he attended the mission school in the nearest town and absorbed its lessons with the particular intensity of someone who understands that literacy is a weapon — and his obsession with the video game Global Capitalist, which he plays on a borrowed console and which has taught him that the world is organised as a market and that success requires the correct strategic moves. He has studied the game with care. He believes he understands how the system functions. In the game, a player selects a region, extracts resources, manages supply chains, negotiates with rival players, and accumulates capital. Isookanga is good at the game. He can anticipate opposing moves, optimise his extraction rates, position himself advantageously in a commodity downturn. The game, he is certain, is a faithful model of reality. The gap between the game's promise and reality's architecture is something he has not yet been asked to measure.
His decision to leave for Kinshasa is not impulsive. The forest is being logged. French companies, Chinese companies, Malaysian companies — the nationality changes but the chainsaws do not. The traditional Ekonda way of life is ending whether or not Isookanga participates in the forces ending it. If the old world is disappearing, he reasons, he should position himself in the new one. His uncle Moleskine watches him pack with the expression of a man who knows something his nephew does not but lacks the vocabulary to say it. Moleskine has spent his life in the forest. He understands extraction at the level of the body — the ache in the back from carrying loads that belong to someone else, the particular silence that follows a section of forest after the logging crews have passed through. The silence is not peace. It is absence. It is the sound of a place that has been emptied of value and left standing, like a building after the copper wiring has been stripped. Moleskine does not play video games. He does not need to.
The forest itself is a character. The great Congo basin rainforest, the second largest tropical forest in the world, two million square kilometres of canopy so dense that the floor exists in permanent twilight, a biome so complex that Western science has catalogued only a fraction of its species. To the Ekonda, it is not a biome. It is home. It is the source of food, medicine, shelter, spiritual orientation, and the stories by which the community understands itself. To the logging companies it is board feet. To the carbon credit brokers it is sequestration potential. To the mining prospectors it is what sits on top of the minerals. Each of these framings is accurate. None of them is compatible with any of the others. The forest accommodates all of them by dying slowly.
Kinshasa
The city overwhelms description, and no attempt is made to contain it. Ten million people. Fourteen million. The number changes depending on who is counting and why, and in any case the number is less important than what it signifies: a density of human life that has outgrown every system designed to manage it and has replaced those systems with improvisations of staggering ingenuity.
At independence in 1960, this was Léopoldville — four hundred thousand people, a colonial administrative centre designed to serve Belgian interests and staffed by Congolese clerks who were educated enough to process paperwork and not educated enough to ask why the paperwork always moved resources in one direction. Now the colonial grid has been swallowed. The city has grown beyond its infrastructure the way a tree grows through a fence: the structure is still there, embedded, but the living thing has made it irrelevant. Roads built for colonial traffic carry loads they were never designed to bear. Electrical grids that served the European quarter now serve neighbourhoods that stretch to the horizon in every direction. Water systems designed for a population a fraction of the current one deliver water to some and not to others, and the ones who receive nothing have developed their own solutions, which work, and which no one in any planning ministry has authorised or mapped.
The Marché Central is the engine. Traders tracking margins on mobile phones that contain coltan mined three provinces to the east by men and boys working with hand tools in open pits. The irony is structural and no one remarks on it because irony requires distance and there is no distance in the Marché Central; there is only proximity, the press of bodies and goods and voices, the smell of grilled plantain and diesel exhaust and the particular chemical sweetness of Chinese-manufactured plastic goods, the sound of Congolese rumba from a hundred radios tuned to a hundred stations all playing the same three songs because Franco and Papa Wemba and Tabu Ley Rochereau are the city's patrimony, evidence that Kinshasa can produce beauty as well as chaos, though the music's profits, like everything else, flow outward through labels based in Paris and Brussels.
Isookanga attaches himself to a network of street traders. He is small — the Pygmy body marks him in a city of taller people, marks him in ways that are not subtle and not kind — and he is naive, but he is not stupid. The discrimination his people face is not limited to the colonial apparatus; it operates at every level of Congolese society. The Bantu-speaking population treats the Pygmy peoples with a casual contempt that echoes — and in some cases predates — the contempt the Europeans directed at all Congolese. Isookanga is too short, too dark, too obviously from the forest; his accent marks him, his body marks him, his ignorance of urban conventions marks him. He absorbs the discrimination with the particular patience of someone who has been absorbing it all his life, and he applies the lessons of the game: identify the market's gaps, find the margins no one else is exploiting, position yourself where the competition is lowest.
What the game did not teach him is that in the real economy, someone has already decided which players are allowed to sit at the table, and the decision was made in 1884 by men who had never set foot on the continent whose future they were dividing among themselves.
The System
The encounters accumulate like evidence in a dossier that no tribunal will ever read. A representative of a Chinese mineral extraction company: polite, businesslike, uninterested in anything except tonnage. His contract echoes the rubber quota systems of the Leopold era — different nationality, different century, identical logic. The quotas Leopold imposed were measured in baskets of rubber; the Chinese company's are measured in tonnes of cobalt. The Congolese men who failed to meet Leopold's quotas had their hands cut off. The Congolese men who fail to meet the Chinese company's quotas are simply replaced. This is called progress.
A Belgian development consultant: earnest, well-intentioned, organisationally incapable of understanding why his projects fail. He produces reports in a language of empowerment that describes outcomes of dependency without recognising the contradiction. His project cycle runs on a three-year funding horizon. The problems he is addressing have been running for a hundred and thirty years. The mismatch is structural, but it is not discussed in the reports, because the reports are written for donors, and donors prefer problems that can be solved in three years.
An armed group commander from the eastern provinces: practical, brutal, operating within a rational economic framework. He controls territory that produces minerals that enter supply chains that produce products that appear in shopping malls in Tokyo and Munich. He provides security, in the sense that a protection racket provides security. His soldiers are paid in access to the mines. The minerals they extract are sold to intermediaries who ask no questions about provenance. The intermediaries sell to exporters who maintain the paperwork. The exporters sell to refineries that certify the product as conflict-free. The refineries sell to electronics manufacturers whose sustainability reports are available on their websites in multiple languages.
The chain is unbroken and traceable. No one traces it.
The coltan mines of eastern Congo — the source of the tantalum that makes every mobile phone, every laptop, every gaming console possible — are the contemporary expression of the extractive logic the title names. The mining is artisanal: men and boys in open pits with hand tools, processing ore in primitive facilities, selling to intermediaries who sell to exporters who sell to refineries who sell to electronics manufacturers whose products are used by consumers who have never heard of Kivu or Katanga. The supply chain is long enough that no one at the consumer end feels responsible for conditions at the producer end. This is not a design flaw. It is the design.
The NGOs deserve their own chapter, and they receive one. The Land Cruisers with their organisational logos, white and immaculate, navigating the same potholed roads as the matatus packed with commuters. The compound offices behind security walls. The expatriate staff earning in a month what their Congolese counterparts earn in a year, living in houses with generators and filtered water and satellite television, their children attending the French school or the Belgian school or the American school, their contracts renewable annually subject to the continuation of the crisis. The development industry in the Congo is itself an industry — it employs people, generates reports, produces conferences, manages budgets — and its perpetuation as an industry requires the continuation of the conditions it claims to be addressing. This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural incentive, and it is visible to everyone in Kinshasa except the people inside the Land Cruisers.
The Women, the Church, the Children
The women of Kinshasa run the city. The mamas who control the markets, who rise before dawn and work until dark, who manage supply chains that stretch from the provinces to the capital with nothing but mobile phones and personal networks and a capacity for mental arithmetic that would be the envy of any logistics firm. The businesswomen who manage the informal economy with an acuity that would be celebrated on the cover of a business magazine if they operated in a country whose economy the business magazines took seriously. The young women navigating the city's sexual economy with pragmatic intelligence, calculating risks and returns with the same precision the traders apply to their margins, because in a city where formal employment for women is scarce and informal employment is exhausting and the gap between survival and destitution is measured in days rather than months, pragmatism is not a moral failure but a survival strategy.
They are not victims and they are not heroes. They are the people who actually make the city function, whose labour — economic, domestic, emotional — is the invisible infrastructure on which everything depends. Isookanga encounters women who are smarter than he is and more capable and who operate within constraints that make their intelligence and capability insufficient to change their conditions. The capacity is there, the genius is there, the system is designed to prevent it from mattering.
The church — specifically the proliferation of charismatic Christian congregations that have become one of the defining features of Kinshasa's social landscape — receives the satirical attention it merits. Pastors promising prosperity in exchange for donations. Congregations filling warehouse buildings every Sunday with singing and prayer and the specific hope that God will provide what the government and the economy and the international community have failed to provide. The pastors drive Mercedes-Benz vehicles. Their congregants walk. The theology of prosperity — give and you shall receive, sow and you shall reap — is an extraction mechanism dressed in biblical language. Another system that takes from the population and enriches those who have positioned themselves as intermediaries between the people and their salvation. Bismarck would have recognised the structure. Leopold certainly would have.
The shégués — the street children who constitute one of the city's most visible and most disturbing populations — are the ultimate product of every system failure. Children expelled from their families, often on accusations of sorcery by evangelical pastors who profit from the exorcism industry, who charge fees to deliver children from demons and who create the demand they supply. Children living on the streets by whatever means are available — begging, theft, casual labour, the exchange of small services for food or shelter, the formation of groups that provide mutual protection in the absence of every other form of protection. They are the human residue of the state's failure, the economy's failure, the family's failure, the international community's failure. Isookanga encounters them with the recognition of a fellow outcast. His solidarity with them is limited, practical, insufficient. It promises nothing. That is why it is real.
The Return
The River Congo flows past the city that bears its name — one of the great rivers of the world, the artery connecting the country's interior to the sea, four thousand seven hundred kilometres of water draining a basin that covers nearly four million square kilometres. Everything that leaves the Congo passes through this river or along the roads that parallel it. The rubber passed this way. The ivory passed this way. The copper, the diamonds, the uranium that was refined into the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The coltan passes this way now. The river is simultaneously the country's most magnificent natural feature and the route by which its wealth has been extracted for five hundred years. It does not judge. It carries.
Isookanga's education is complete. He has learned everything and gained almost nothing. The lessons he has absorbed are not the ones that would allow him to participate in the global economy as a player. They are the lessons that reveal why the global economy was never designed to allow people like him to participate as players. He is always labour, never capital. He is always the object of others' plans, never the subject of his own. The game taught him the rules. Reality taught him that the rules apply differently depending on which side of the table you were born on, and that the table was built in Berlin in 1884, and that no one who was born on his side of it has ever been invited to redesign it.
He returns to the forest. The forest is still being cut. Moleskine is still there, carrying in his body a knowledge that does not translate into any language the global economy recognises — the knowledge of which roots are medicine and which are poison, which bird calls signal rain and which signal the presence of a leopard, which paths lead to water and which lead to places the Ekonda do not go because the spirits there are not friendly. This knowledge has no market value. It has no GDP contribution. It does not appear in any development report. It is, nevertheless, the accumulated intelligence of a people who have lived in this forest for longer than Belgium has existed as a country.
A new version of Global Capitalist has been released. The graphics are better. The resource extraction algorithms have been refined. Somewhere in Kinshasa, in Brussels, in Beijing, the game continues, and Isookanga's people are not players in it.
They are resources. They are background. They are what the game is played on.
The video game's interface glows in the darkness of the equatorial forest, and the distance between the screen's promise and the morning's reality is the distance between the rhetoric of globalisation — anyone can participate, the market is open, development is possible — and the reality of globalisation as experienced from the Congo: the market is open but the terms are set elsewhere, development is possible but the profits flow outward, anyone can participate but participation means being the one whose resources are extracted, whose forest is cut, whose minerals are dug from the earth by hand and shipped to a factory where they are assembled into the device on which the next version of Global Capitalist will be played.
Bismarck would have understood the game immediately. He designed 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 captures Bofane's cool satirical register with precision. The French original, published by Actes Sud (2014), is the definitive edition for readers comfortable in French — Bofane's prose carries rhythms from Lingala and Lomongo that the translation can gesture toward but cannot fully reproduce.
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.
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