Customer Reviews

The Rebels' Hour

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This book is as well-written as it is essential reading for an understanding of chaotic central African belligerence and bloody-minded tribal cunning, happening right now, and for decades past, in the Congo. The book closely follows the career of an in-every-way remarkable soldier the author has named Assani, a cowherd turned rebel, made a general in the Congolese army.
He moves cautiously, ever on the alert for an ambush. The word jungle never appears, but that is where, perforce a rebel's hunted existence, he has been forced to kill. Appointed a general as part of a peace deal, he is flatteringly welcomed back in the capital Kinshasa from the bush by men who five years before would have lynched him. He drives as if still in the bush; he keeps up the same speed and people crossing the street in the city center have to jump back.
The author, seemingly acting on inside information, maps out the intricacy of Assani's life of firefights, retreat, reprisals, new alliances and old, by use of time-shifts that each time serve further to illuminate this elusive bush fighter. From time to time he mulls over his late-night doubts with a woman bar owner in Lubumbashi on one of his cell phones.
I was drawn to this book by the immediacy of the writing. If you open it at any page it will immediately hook you. The writing is tight but chatty, dead sure but wary, sudden, momentarily confessional. I haven't read a better book all year.

Want to learn about the war in Eastern Congo from the perspective of one of the rebel leaders? This is the third book in recent years about Congo by this Belgian woman, Lieve Joris, and she has done a great deal of research to give authenticity and accuracy to her fictional tale. She begins with the birth of "Assani" in Eastern Congo in 1967, and concludes in 2004 with his integration as a general into the transitional government following the Sun City and Pretoria peace accords. Her flashback organization is not a successful as she planned, taking the last chronological half of the book and sprinkling it by alternate chapters among the first half, so I would suggest reading the book chronologically, which is easy to do as all the chapters have year headings. But she fleshes out the issues at stake in this horrendous conflict quite well, and personalizes them through her protagonists. It is well written, and will carry you along dynamically. If you have been there, you can verify its credibility through the several scenes in Kinshasa

This book is 'literary reportage,' i.e. the author reports on real-life events through literary means. It does not mean that she has invented the story -- on the contrary, this tragic history is very true -- but that she tells it through a narrative of characters that she has met and at times fills in gaps in their lives and thoughts from her own imagination.
The book tells the story of a rebel from eastern Congo and his rise from a 'Tutsi' villager to a leadership position through the First War (1996) and the Second War (1998) ending in the signing of the fragile peace accords (2002) and the transitional government. Although I regularly follow events in Africa, I have never been able to fully keep track of the complex conflicts and their intricate roots in Congo and the wider Great Lakes region -- until I read Lieve Joris' masterful work!

A little hard to follow, but a fascinating account of what is really happening in the Congo. For anyone interested in current events in Central Africa, this is a must read.