world: congo brazzaville | From the Heart of Europe

The Republic of Congo, often referred to as Congo-Brazzaville to avoid confusion with its much larger neighbor the Democratic Republic of Congo (aka Congo-Kinshasa), is on the western coast of Africa, straddling the equator. Its northern neighbors are Cameroon and the Central African Republic; the Democratic Republic of Congo borders it to the east and south, along with the Cabinda enclave of Angola also to the south; to the west are the Atlantic Ocean and Gabon.

Its history since independence from France in 1960 has been a dismaying sequence of single-party Communist-leaning regimes punctuated by military coups, with two full-blown civil wars in 1993-94 and 1997-99. At the end of the second civil war, President Dennis Sassou, who claimed to have won the 1997 elections, was installed in power with help from the Angolan army, and has stayed there ever since.

In 2016 I actually got to know the then main opposition leader, Guy Brice Parfait Kolélas; he stood in the 2021 presidential election, and came second but got less than 9% of the total vote. It did not matter to him, because tragically he died of COVID on the day of the election, while on a plane flying to France for medical treatment.

These days the Republic of Congo’s economy depends on oil exports. There are untapped mineral resources which will no doubt become more important as the developed world searches for critical raw materials. 70% of the population lives in one of the two big cities in the south, Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville, or along the railway line connecting them; the north and centre are very sparsely inhabited. The official languages are French, Kituba and Lingala, these last two being local languages of the Bantu family.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of the Republic of Congo.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Black Moses	Alain Mabanckou	2,324	246	446
Broken Glass	Alain Mabanckou	2,085	279	339
No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo	Redmond O’Hanlon	1,825	749	92
African Psycho	Alain Mabanckou	1,211	186	325
Memoirs of a Porcupine	Alain Mabanckou	1,243	205	188
Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty	Alain Mabanckou	710	93	80
Johnny Mad Dog	Emmanuel Dongala	454	112	63
The Death of Comrade President	Alain Mabanckou	618	60	74

There was a fair amount of confusion with the Democratic Republic of Congo this week, but I think I successfully sifted for the books set on the northwestern side of the river.

One writer dominates here, Alain Mabanckou, born in Pointe-Noire in 1966, and now teaching literature at UCLA. Most of his books are explicitly set in the Republic of Congo.

This week’s overall winner, also on Goodreads and StoryGraph, is Black Moses (original title Petit Piment, “Little Pepper”) which is an Oliver Twist-like story of a lad making good in Pointe-Noire in the 1980s and 1990s.

Broken Glass is about the lives and travels of the patrons of a Congolese pub; I am taking a chance that more of it is set in-country than not.

African Psycho is about a man who calls on the spirit of a dead murderer to plan his own crime.

Memoirs of a Porcupine is told by a porcupine which has a mystical spiritual link with a human.

Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty is a more frankly autobiographical novel drawing on Mabanckou’s own childhood.

The Death of Comrade President (original title Les cigognes sont immortelles, “Storks are Immortal”) is about a boy growing up in Pointe-Noire who has to protect his family when the president of the country, to whom they are related, is assassinated.

Two other writers feature this week. Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo, originally published just as Congo Journey, is this week’s LibraryThing winner (by quite some way). It is about a journey through the jungle to find a mysterious dinosaur-like creature. I checked, and it’s quite clear that it’s set on the Brazzaville side of the river.

Johnny Mad Dog is by Congo’s other well known writer, Emmanuel Dongala, and is about a child soldier in an African civil war of the 1990s. English Wikipedia thinks it is set in Rwanda or Liberia, and the film adaptation is definitely set in Liberia, but French Wikipedia and the other sources I have consulted in French are fairly sure that the original book is set in the Republic of Congo.

Including the StoryGraph numbers didn’t change the top eight, but did move Redmond O’Hanlon down from the top spot to third place.

As noted above, I scratched my head about a couple of the books included on the list; the one I excluded at the last moment was Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd, where although the framing narrative is set near Brazzaville, the core of the novel is set on a chimpanzee reserve in an unnamed country which is probably Angola and definitely speaks Portuguese rather than French. Otherwise it would have easily topped this week’s table.

It’s an all-male list this week. The top women writers from the Republic of Congo who I found on Goodreads and LibraryThing are Mambou Aimée Gnali (best known work set in Congo: L’or des femmes) and Adèle Caby-Livannah (best known work set in Congo: Les contes de la Pleine Lune: Congo), but with rather low numbers in each case. I did not find any books by women writers from the Republic of Congo on StoryGraph.

I have no books on my own shelves relating to the Republic of Congo.

Across the Atlantic next for El Salvador; then back to Europe for Denmark; then over to the far side of Asia for Singapore; then back west for Lebanon.

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The best known books set in each country: Republic of Congo