In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo

(Paperback)

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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 during the turbulent era of Mobutu Sese Seko. From the heart of Africa comes grotesque confusion: pink-lipsticked rebel soldiers mingle with track-suited secret policemen in hotels where fin de siecle dinner parties are ploughing through vintage wines rather than leave them to the new regime. Congo, the African country richest in natural resources, has institutionalised kleptomania. Everyone is one the take. Someone has even swiped one of the uranium rods from the country's only nuclear reactor. Having presided over unprecedented looting of the country's wealth, Mobutu, like Kurtz, retreated deep within the jungle to his palace of marble floors and gold taps. A hundred years on and nothing has changed.

Reviews

A brilliant account of Africas most extraordinary dictator told with wry wit and delicious irony this book will become a classic The Economist

Provocative, touching, and sensitively written an eloquent, brilliantly researched account and a remarkably sympathetic study of a tragic land Sunday Times

Michela Wrong made the so-called Heart of Darkness' much less opaque to me when I visited the Congo. She can do the same for you if you read this brave and witty book Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great

Michela Wrong nimbly balances absurdity and outrage in her portrait of Mobutu Sese Seko and the wreckage he visited with steady Western sponsorship on the country he called Zaire. Her book is charged with pity and terror, and with the sort of sustaining humour that she rightly admires in Mobutus former subjects Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed With Our Families

Author Bio

Michela Wrong is a distinguished international journalist, and has worked as a foreign correspondent covering events across the African continent for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. Based on her experiences in Africa, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, her first book, won the PEN James Sterne Prize for non-fiction. Her book I Didnt Do It for You (2006) builds upon her shocking experiences, and focuses on the African nation of Eritrea. In 2015, she published Borderlines, her first novel. Michela Wrong is based in London.