Placeholder text

Go to cart

In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz

By Michela Wrong

In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz Politics & Society

In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz

0 - Used - good
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
Binding:
Paperback
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
336
Release Date:
2025-09-11
Publication Date:
2001-07-02
Publisher:
HarperCollins Publishers
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
1841154229
ISBN13:
9781841154220
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
252 g
Height:
129 cm
Width:
197 cm
Thickness:
24 cm
Currently sold out