Crime and the City: Kinshasa and the DRC

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Kinshasa – capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Formerly Léopoldville under the bad days of Belgian colonialism, now one of the fastest growing megacities in the world with 16 million citizens and rising quickly – the most populous city in Africa, ahead of Lagos and Cairo. Diamonds, and rare earths all feature now as key sectors of the Congo’s economy and essential to our modern lives but susceptible to the instability of the DRC. And a long history of featuring in crime writing…

Let’s start with Joseph Conrad and the classic Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad was briefly a steamboat captain in the Belgian Congo in the 1890s and the place and the actions of the European colonialists there scarred him. So he wrote what’s been called the biggest short book of all time – Heart of Darkness. Steamer captain Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has “gone native” and is the object of Marlow’s expedition. The crime – colonialism, racism, the creation of a society where moral compasses go crazy. Of course it influenced Coppola’s Apocalypse Now later.  You must have read it – but if you haven’t, stop reading now and go and buy a copy. 

Also now, not classically a crime novel but a writer who features in Crime and the City regularly, Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case (1961). A Congo leper colony, an architect hiding from his own celebrity. Again the theme is that in the Congo former certainties fall away. Similar themes, but with more obvert crime, coalesce in French crime writing legend Georges Simenon’s African Trio (1979) – in order: Talatala, Tropic Moon and Aboard the Aquitaine. Talatala, is a love triangle in the Belgian Congo that goes wrong; Tropic Moon is the story of Timar, an expatriate Frenchman who falls for another expat, Adele, who is accused of murder; Aboard the Aquitaine follows a French ocean liner returning from the Congo to Europe and the odd characters abroad.

And there’s a random Congo connection to Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle who was so appalled by the condition in the so-called Congo Free State, controlled by Belgium, and labelled a “rubber regime” by Conan Doyle that he wanted to use his fame to expose the human rights abuses in the country. The Crime of the Congo (1909) was described by the British press at the time as ‘the most powerful indictment yet launched against the Belgian rulers of this bloodstained colony.’

Conrad, Greene, Simenon, Conan Doyle – all big names. But we also must include some more recent Kinshasa/DRC set novels. 

American writer Tamar Myers was born and raised among Christian missionaries in the Congo and that’s where she has set her Belgian Congo Mystery Series. Though Myers is better known for her recipe based cosy mysteries and also books about the Pennsylvania Amish community, this is an all-Africa-set series of four books. The books all feature Amanda, an American missionary who arrives in the Belgian Congo to run a missionary guest house. The first book in the series is The Witch Doctor’s Wife (2009) followed by The Head Hunter’s Daughter (2011), The Boy Who Stole the Leopard’s Spots (2012) and finally The Girl Who Married an Eagle (2022).

Moving from the Belgian Congo to the independence era, William G Collins’s Murder in the Congo (2017) is set in 1966 and tells the story of Pete, one of President Mobutu’s guards, the controversial Congolese politician and military officer who was the president of Zaire (was the name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997). Pete makes a discovery in the Congo River which forces him to flee to Kinshasa.

James Rollins’s Kingdom of Bones (2022) is a book in the author’s Sigma Force, scientific warriors, series – in fact the sixteenth of 17 books! Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force is called in after a United Nations relief team find a Congolese village full of catatonic residents. Sigma Force must battle the changes in nature as well as finding out who is messing with ecology in the Congo. 

The late Michael Crichton was another writer that wrote about so many places, including the DRC. In Congo (1980) it’s all about the country’s controversial diamond mines and a mythical city – and an American expedition led by Karen Ross, who’s desperate to find her husband and recover the data he found before he disappeared. But there are other teams trying to get there first, and the way is strewn with life-threatening dangers – plane crashes, civil wars and a dormant volcano awoken by dormant explosives. More Rider Haggard perhaps than a crime novel but certainly a thriller and became a Hollywood movie in 1995. 

Matthew Palmer’s The American Mission (2014) is billed as a diplomatic thriller. Alex Gaines has been involved in Africa for years but is broken by witnessing a massacre in a Darfur refugee camp. Now, it’s 2009 and he is US consul in Conakry, Guinea and considering retirement until he’s offered the post of Political Counselor at the American embassy in the DRC. There he becomes involved in a conspiracy by a US-based conglomerate, Consolidated Mining, enmeshed in the violence-ridden minerals trade in the Eastern Congo. Shades of corporate espionage meets the world of Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2006 movie Blood Diamond. 

Peter Lewenstein’s Bukavu Blues (2022) is the first in what may well be a new series featuring human rights defender Patrice Le Congo. Le Congo is tired of the constant violence he sees in Kinshasa life. When schoolteacher, Aurélia Mukunda, turns to him for help after a mutilated body is found in a village, he can’t say no. Lawless tin mines and dangerous encounters with rebel groups and renegade army units along with a series of gruesome murders in Bakavu (a city in eastern DRC) soon follow. Gritty, but a great character we’re sure to hear more of. 

And finally, a graphic crime thriller. Everybody knows the legendary 1974 Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match. Belgian author Thierry Bellefroid’s and Congolese cartoonist Baruti Kandolo Lilela, (aka Barly Baruti) have produced Chaos in Kinshasa (2023) where a Harlem gangster takes a trip to Central Africa, gets involved in a plot to murder Mobutu and ends up trawling through the seedy underground of Zaire. A Cold-War-era thriller set against the backdrop of a landmark moment in sports history. Kinshasa-based Baruti is the co-founder of the Atelier de Création et de l’Initiation à l’Art (Creative Workshop for an Initiation to Art) to encourage talented youth in Kinshasa. Bellefroid works for the Belgian television company, RTB, where he presents every week Sous Couverture, the RTB literary magazine.

–Featured image: Kinshasa, by Johnnathan Tshibangu

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