Review of IN THE BELLY OF THE CONGO by Blaise Ndala (New Release)

 3.5 Stars

This novel has two timelines, though events in both are connected to the 1958 World’s Fair hosted by Belgium.  Trying to portray itself as a benevolent colonial power, the country, in its pavilion, included a mock village where Congolese people were put on daily display.  This became known as the world’s last human zoo.   

After her death in 1958, Princess Tshala Nyota, daughter of King Kena Kwete III of the Kuba people in Congo, recounts her life and the journey that brought her to Belgium after she fell in love with a white Belgian administrator and fled from her father’s rage.  Her story, addressed directly to her niece, comprises the first part of the novel. 

The second time period is 2005.  Nyota Kwete, the princess’s niece, has returned to the Congo and is visiting her grandfather in a hospital.  She spent the previous two years in Brussels where she had been sent for a university education and to discover what happened to her aunt who disappeared in 1958. In the second part of the novel, she speaks of her time in Belgium and how and what she learned about the fate of her namesake.   

My knowledge of Congolese history is very limited so I appreciated the chronological historical overview of the former Belgian Congo at the beginning of the novel.  Some of the historical figures mentioned in this introduction (e.g. Patrice Lumumba and Joseph-Désiré Mobutu) actually appear as characters in the novel.

I did not like the writing style.  There is much too much telling and not enough showing.  Then there are the unnecessary anecdotes and digressions.  Nyota in her conversation with her grandfather describes a walk to a theater and names streets but then ends with, “’okay, don’t worry about all those street names, they really don’t matter.’”  The same speaker says, “Versace is an Italian brand that some of our stars of the rumba scene have transformed into an urban totem.  But really, that’s got nothing to do with our story.  I should stop going off on tangents.”  Then she tells the friend whom she has brought with her “to speak simply, without any unnecessary detours”!?  Sometimes the dialogue just seems like an information dump:  “Unilever (the company to which the state ceded half of our sacred forests at the start of the 1970s).” 

The dialogue certainly doesn’t seem natural:  “We headed toward the Bois de la Cambre, the sporadic clicking of his bicycle spokes setting the pace for our steps along the sidewalk, now wet from a little shower that had quickly come and gone.  In the distance, towards Flagey, along the Ixelles Ponds where I would go every other Sunday or so to commune with a play by Maryse Condé or the poetry of the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, whose work my previous boyfriend had adored, the firefighters’ sirens wailed and their lights spun in a kaleidoscope of brilliant flashes.”  Who speaks like this?  Nyota stops to explain to her grandfather the meaning of words like stock market and psychologist but then makes geographic and literary references that would mean nothing to him?

There is little to differentiate the dialogue of aunt and niece.  This is an example of the princess’s narration:  “you lived in a city where a melody composed by an incorrigible seducer could make allies of men in cassocks and those with military decorations, each trying to determine the sex of the Angel of the Apocalypse.  And that if you were that dark-skinned angel, you could follow the river’s flow toward exile, never knowing if it would ever end, or even leave you a voice so that you might still pretend you were a Black god at an ungodly bacchanal.” 

The novel excels in depicting the human cost of colonialism.  I definitely found similarities between the cultural genocide experienced by the Congolese and Indigenous Peoples in Canada.  The princess is educated in a Christian school run by nuns and when she references a custom of her people, “The Belgian nun almost died laughing, stunned that I still held on to ‘those beliefs shared by Beelzebub’s children.’”  Attitudes of colonizers are obvious in the unmarked graves of children found in residential schools in Canada and the keeping of “more than two hundred fetuses, skulls, and other African skeletal remains” by Belgian institutions. 

And it is so sad that so much has not changed.  The villagers in the World’s Fair display are subjected to racist comments and gestures:  “some adolescents from a classical high school in Flemish Brabant tossed bananas over the fence around the village . . . [and] some visitors started to whoop like monkeys.”  And Nyota witnesses a Congolese soccer player being subjected to insults, “’Monkey!  Monkey!  Go back to your jungle!’”

The message is that Belgium must critically confront its colonial legacy.  A government minister in the novel states that “Belgium wasn’t yet ready to reopen that painful page from its past.”  And recent events indicate this is true:  In December 2022 there were plans for human remains, three skulls from the colonial era, to be exhibited and auctioned in Belgium (https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5466/Auction-house%E2%80%99s-offer-of-human-skulls-is-evidence-that-Belgium%E2%80%99s-colonial-past-is-also-its-present).

Despite the horrors depicted, the book does end on a positive note.  Nyota’s grandfather, a former king, says, “’It’s not the wounds they inflict upon each other that matter the most once time finally lifts the veil from our illusions.  What matters . . . is that the children who come after learn to build a less repugnant world than the one they inherited.’”  He even goes on to tell a Belgian visitor how Belgians can create a better future:  “’while you can do nothing more for my daughter, there in the land of your ancestors  where she rests, day and night, season after season, tens of thousands of others are arriving . . . ‘”  Another character earlier also mentions that immigration and “open borders were the solution and not the problem” for menopausal Europe where a declining birth rate may bring about a collapse of the workforce.

Its subject matter makes this book an essential read.  It informs about Belgian’s colonial past and its devastating impact and serves as a mirror for the colonial history of other countries.  Unfortunately, the writing style is not an asset.  Anyone considering reading the book might want to play some background music by Wendo Kolosoy, the father of Congolese rumba, who makes an appearance in the novel. 

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.