|
| book details |
In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo (Text Only)
By (author) Michela Wrong
|
This book is currently unavailable. Enquire to check if we can source a used copy
|
| book description |
‘Joyous … a book that makes other journalists weep with envy’ The Economist 'Provocative, touching, and sensitively written … an eloquent, brilliantly researched account’ Sunday Times One of The Economist’s best books by foreign correspondents. A story of grim comedy amid the apocalypse and a celebration of the sheer indestructibility of the human spirit in a nation run riot: Michela Wrong’s vision of Congo/Zaire during the Mobutu years is incisive, ironic and revelatory. Mr Kurtz, the colonial white master, brought evil to the remote upper reaches of the Congo River. A century after Conrad’s 'Heart of Darkness' was first published, Michela Wrong revisits the Congo as the era of Mobutu Sese Seko collapses into absurdity, anarchy and corruption. Hers is a brilliant portrait of the grotesque as confusion takes over: pink lipsticked rebel soldiers mingle with tracksuited secret policemen in hotels where fin de siecle dinner parties are ploughing through hotel wine cellars rather than see bottles lost to the new regime. Congo, Africa’s richest country in terms of its natural resources, has institutionalised kleptomania: everyone is on the take. In a country where the minimum wage has dropped to below $150 a year, the government over twenty-five years spent $250 million providing courtesy cars. Congo has a vanity nuclear reactor built on a subsiding slope and one of its uranium rods is missing… The Mobutu reign, successor to Belgium’s failed imperial experiment in Africa, was fed by World Bank dollars and IMF loans. Having presided over unprecedented looting of the country’s wealth, Mobutu, like Kurtz, retreated deep within the jungle to his absurdly overwrought palace of marble floors and gold taps. A century on, nothing seems to have changed at the heart of Africa: it is lawless, graceless and it slaughters its own.
| product details |
Normally shipped |
Publisher | HarperCollins Publishers
Published date | 10 Jul 2012
Language |
Format | Digital download
Pages | 336
Dimensions | 0 x 0 x 0mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 0g
ISBN | 978-0-0073-8209-5
Readership Age |
BISAC | history / africa / central
| other options |
|
|
To view the items in your trolley please sign in.
| sign in |
|
|
|
| specials |
|
|
Amal El-Mohtar
Paperback / softback
208 pages
was: R 385.95
now: R 338.95
|
WINNER OF THE HUGO AND NEBULA AWARDS: Two time-travelling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters - and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
|
Charles, the latest in robo-butler technology, has accidentally murdered his master.
|
|
Ray Nayler
Paperback / softback
464 pages
was: R 315.95
now: R 277.95
|
David Mitchell meets Arrival in a breathlessly entertaining and awards-shortlised literary thriller exploring men's fraught relationship with nature.
|
|
|
|
