FictionThatMatters.org

Nonfiction, translated from the Dutch by Liz Walters
Grove Press, 2008. 296p.

A sign of a great author is the ability to represent the viewpoints of good guys and bad guys alike. A lesser author, the reasoning goes, would be unable to delve into the characters and would bring out a one-sided work. The journalist Lieve Joris is certainly of the first camp. The Rebels’ Hour painstakingly depicts general Assani, a troubled rebel leader from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo who leaves his life as a high plains cattle herder to become Vice President of a country the size of Western Europe.

An estimated 4,000,000 million people have been killed in the DRC in the last decade. Most of these deaths occurred in the eastern hot zone where Assani is raised, a border region of lush ecological forests, dry high plains, active volcanoes, and clear lakes. Growing up fatherless, Assani considers himself a victim from an early age, and relies on this wound to both promote and destroy himself. He becomes an ally of the Rwandan army in its drive to oust Mobutu from power in 1997, but then falls victim to the new President Laurent Kabila’s own intrigues and is forced out of the country as a Rwandan sympathizer. Yet as a banyamulenge – or Congolese Tutsi – he has lived his entire life in the Congo and does not feel a strong bond with Rwandan Tutsis. This precarious limbo provokes him to fight both former génocidaires from Rwanda and the Mai Mai in the Congo, who use their own peculiar mix of forest warrior mythology involving everything from ritual mutilation to railroad engineering.

The general’s own actions are not beyond reproach, but the author strives to avoid labeling him. “I never use the term ‘child soldiers’,” Joris has stated. “You will not find it in the book.” The thought of a pre-adolescent child firing automatic weapons is instantly repulsive to most people. But in the Eastern Congo, the kadogos, or ‘little ones’, achieve a strategic and spiritual purpose. Many kadogos are reared from a young age to attend to their military leaders’ every whim, and the leaders in turn feel vulnerable without them. Assani keeps them beside him whenever possible, showing a surprisingly paternal instinct and faith in their ability to fight like men when the bullets begin to fly:

Boni survived, but I lost two boys… I miss them… It’s strange; the sense of loss doesn’t go away. They’re children, but when you’re on a military operation with them they’re not children any more.

The use of child soldiers is a war crime, but Assani shows us that it is an exceedingly rational practice. Child soldiers are more loyal in his view than any grown man can be, and eradicating their use will require, somehow, reconciling this fact.

Joris’ accomplished portrayal of Assani is also a terrifying one. We begin to feel the brutal power of military objectives when they combine with the emotions of revenge and loss. Assani seems to dread massacres not so much because of the gang rapes and mutilations, but because of the clean-up duties involved. He fears that the human rights reports may hurt his objectives – which change from day to day – more than the violations themselves.

If a translated book is, as André Brink has called it, “a Flemish tapestry seen from behind,” then so too is The Rebels’ Hour. The Flemish Joris originally penned the work in Dutch, and the translation can stutter in parts. The overall effect of the shorter sentences, however, is a very quick and captivating read.

Joris has been visiting the Congo for over twenty years, first tracing the footsteps of her missionary uncle, and later as an investigative reporter. What emerges is a balanced view that seeks to understand the issues confronting contemporary Congo. But the central drawback to the book is that Joris herself is lacking in the text. Assani’s persistent whining and notable silences about his own specific actions leave the book feeling unfinished. The most knowledgeable person about Assani is Joris herself, and if the work merits comparison to Ryszard Kapuscinski, as the cover suggests, it would benefit from her own viewpoint, as Kapusciniski himself would do. She may have left herself out of the story because she would not wish to overshadow Assani, but if that was the aim then there is a need for much more supplementary information. How did this Belgian woman follow Assani through the forest, and further, what moved her to continue visiting after Belgium’s own colonial history? The sections at the close of the book certainly help orient the text, but without the tale of Joris it can’t be fully complete.

Since Joris’s story is not present in the text, Assani is the one who steals the show. One emerges with competing senses of pity for the man, horror at his violence, and disgust at his self-perceived lack of control. The best summary of his character is captured by a UN worker:

[P]eople like Assani were damaged for life. You couldn’t tell by looking, but it was as if parts of them had grown numb. Unable to trust anybody, they became afraid of their own shadows. Someone might know a certain thing about them, another person something else, but only they themselves knew the whole truth. Their secrets oppressed them and made them fearful.

Lieve Joris at the PEN World Voices Festival (second from left)

The Rebels’ Hour provides a glimpse into these secrets, into the truths that are revealed piecemeal by a rebel soldier on the front lines of genocide. Having personally worked with both victims and perpetrators alike from the Eastern DRC, I can’t stress enough how vital the book is. At the time of this writing, the country remains unstable and the East still suffers from conflict. Moving towards a sustainable solution will require reckoning with the many unspoken forces that Joris has so convincingly identified in this work.

–Deji Olukotun