Back to the Congo

The niece of a missionary in Africa recounts her travels in the Belgian Congo, capturing the remnants of Zaire's colonial past, the mission station where her uncle worked, the white expatriate community, and the realities of modern Zaire.

"I didn't come here to find fault with Mobutu's regime, or to justify it. I wanted to explore life behind the newspaper headlines," explains this adventurous Flemish journalist, indignant and frightened when she is taken into custody with a photographer friend by Zairean police merely for plying a camera and talking with the locals. A childhood vision of the country, evoked by the tales of her missionary uncle, led to Joris's desire to see the Congo. She finds guides and friends amongst those who remember her uncle, and also through her own gregarious and empathetic nature. She gets deep into the country through bush, forest, villages and cities, dances all night in a local dive, takes a boat up the river, encounters pygmies, befriends depressed European-educated intellectuals and cynical bureaucrats, sleeps in native hotels, and observes the unresolved struggles of a country on the far peripheries of the Western world whose intrusion has left its superficial imprint on traditional ways without a synthesis. Not the country her uncle described, the Congo--both people and land-- becomes palpable in Joris's engaging and disturbing report.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When she was a child, Joris's missionary uncle traveled to the Belgian Congo and returned bearing gifts and telling wonderful stories. As an adult, Joris traveled to contemporary Zaire in order to see what her uncle had seen. She found a persistent memory of colonization and of the "other," finally making the colonial past and its consequences the main motifs of her book. The boat to Zaire, the urban areas and Kinshasa, the "bush" and interior--all are described in a clear personal voice, with a journey on the Zaire river to the town of Kisangani the high point of her adventure. The people she met, rather than any view of nature, motivates her writing. Because this travel book has a particular vision--it is especially concerned with the Belgian version of Africa--it will appeal to a select audience.
- Gene Shaw, Elmwood Park Lib.,
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.