In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo: Amazon.ca: Michela Wrong: Books

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22 Reviews

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4.2 out of 5 stars (22 customer reviews)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Its all about perception, Mar 4 2007

By

scout (Toronto, ON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In The Footsteps Of Mr Kurtz (Paperback)

I found this book to be too subjective, and rely too much on personal experience and anecdote. Perhaps I was biased by having recently read King Leopold's Ghost and was hoping for an equally informative and academic look at the reign of Mobutu. However, after reading In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz I felt that, although I may have a loose idea of life in Kinshasa, I did not understand how Mobutu had grabbed or maintained power for 30 year, beyond loose generalizations and vague theories of divide and conquer. I didn't even have a particularly clear understanding of the chronology of his reign.

It is a good read but I did not feel it provided a deeper understanding of Mobutu's rule in Zaire.

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5.0 out of 5 stars What do Congolese citizens want for their country?, April 4 2002

By

David Fick "Author: Africa: Continent of Econ... (Overland Park, Kansas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

Michela Wrong's book In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz tells about living on the brink of disaster in Mobutu's Congo. The DR Congo possesses an enormous cornucopia of natural resources - rubber, timber, gold, diamonds, uranium, copper, cobalt, manganese, tin, and zinc - which should have made it one of the richest nations in Africa. Instead, thanks to Mobutu's comprehensive looting, it became one of the poorest on earth. Its population was forced to endure wretched standards of living, huge urban unemployment, impossibly low wages, hyperinflation, a crumbling infrastructure, non-existent health and education services and endemic corruption. Adept at intimidation, manipulation, coercion and outright bribery, Mobutu was able to entrench his rule over a population of forty million Congolese with a seemingly supernatural ability. Wrong calls on the Congolese, who have previously been able to set their sights little higher than survival, to learn to take responsibility for their own destiny. The question must be what do Congolese citizens want for their country and what can they do for their country to make it happen.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Written with rigor and sensitivity to the Congolese cause, Mar 30 2002

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Saleem Ali (Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

After visiting Kinshasa earlier this year, I gained a better appreciation for this book and how skillfully the author has revealed the multiple causality behind Congo's present predicament. This is not just a journalistic travelogue -- it is a carefully crafted poltical analysis which is written in an accessible style that may lead some cursory readers to be cynical about the author's journalistic credentials. However, I wish we had more journalists like Michela Wrong covering the world -- who are willing to spend extended peeriods of time in a difficult location rather than flying in and out on assignments. It is true that the book has an urban flavor and does not cover life in the villages that some readers may be yearning for -- but the aim of this book is not to romanticize a battered land but rather the reveal the creation of a despot and how he was enabled to ravage a truly enchanting part of the planet. The following quotation from one of her chapters sums up the treatise of the book and shows how brilliantly the author can express complex sentiments and concerns about the way in which ostinsible national stability was guarded at the expense of a economic and social decline:

"Deprived of the chance to learn the lessons of its own history, Zaire's population was kept in a state of infantilism by a more insidious form of colonialism. Instead of the roller-coaster of war, destruction and eventual rebirth, the intervention of the U.S., France and Belgium, of the World Bank and the IMF, locked the society into one slow motion economic collapse. Balked of expression, unable to advance, mindsets froze over somewhere in the 1960s, leaving the country's leadership at the turn of the century stuck in an ideolgical time warp." (p. 215).

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A tale of woe in Mobuto's Congo/Zaire
This book expertly details the litany of woes which have long afflicted the African nation of Congo/Zaire. Read more

Published on Mar 29 2002 by James F. Anderson III

1.0 out of 5 stars Did Jacques deFarge Ever Meet Mr. Kurtz?
In reading this book and recalling Ms. Wrong's interview in 2000 (with Tom Ashbrooke, who himself was interviewing for Host of "The Connection" show on National Public Radio; and... Read more

Published on Mar 27 2002 by E'Lauralyn Jackson Terrelonje