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A review by sannereadstheworld
Congo: een geschiedenis by David Van Reybrouck
3.0
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I learned an awful lot about Congolese history. What I really liked is how this overview put the little tidbits I did know in a larger context, and filled up some glaring gaps. And Van Reybrouck knows how to write: he sets the scene wonderfully and really knows how to create beautiful sentences.
I especially enjoyed the parts in which Van Reybrouck delves into oral history and the perspective of common Congolese people. In his attempt to write a non-westerncentric history of Congo, he interviewed a lot of regular Congolese people. It gives some really great personal insights in the various historical events. Some chapters in the second half of the novel had less of these personal anecdotes and I found those more difficult to get through.
However, I do have one gripe with Van Reybrouck’s approach, and I felt that was a loss for the first half of the novel, which deals with the colonial period. Van Reybrouck's oral history of the colonial era is a male one. Women are talked about, but only rarely given a voice.
The end result means an imbalanced narrative: of several colonial experiences, the male ones - of being a boy or a soldier in the colonial army - are given ample room. The Congolese perspective of that other colonial experience, the women who were the sexual companion of white men, is not given. If you talk about these women, and quote some white men on that phenomenon but not address the perspective of the women, you do fail in your objective of creating a non-eurocentric history of Congo (a goal Van Reybrouck sets for himself in his introduction).
Social climbing in colonial Congo is also measured by male standards: the church and politics were solely reserved for men once it was opened up to the Congolese. What did women do to gain social standing? We learn that some women held jobs, but we don’t hear from them. For example, the nurses could have provided an interesting insiders perspective on the tension between western and traditional medicine.
Furthermore, I’m really curious about the perspective of women on the colonial busybody politics of trying to implement monogamy. What changed for them? Did these social changes bring change to their economic or social status? What happened to those women who were the second, third, fourth wife and were abandoned when their husband was convinced to become monogamous? This is exemplary for the way in which Van Reybrouck treats the women in his oral history of the colony: they sometimes come into view in the male experience and we learn a little bit about them, but he doesn’t follow up with what happens to these women once they disappear from it. That is a loss to this otherwise really great introduction. The first half of the novel feels unbalanced in its objective to tell the history from the Congolese perspective - a perspective should include women. Van Reybrouck does show that he can do that in the second half of the novel, where there is more room for the experiences of women.
I especially enjoyed the parts in which Van Reybrouck delves into oral history and the perspective of common Congolese people. In his attempt to write a non-westerncentric history of Congo, he interviewed a lot of regular Congolese people. It gives some really great personal insights in the various historical events. Some chapters in the second half of the novel had less of these personal anecdotes and I found those more difficult to get through.
However, I do have one gripe with Van Reybrouck’s approach, and I felt that was a loss for the first half of the novel, which deals with the colonial period. Van Reybrouck's oral history of the colonial era is a male one. Women are talked about, but only rarely given a voice.
The end result means an imbalanced narrative: of several colonial experiences, the male ones - of being a boy or a soldier in the colonial army - are given ample room. The Congolese perspective of that other colonial experience, the women who were the sexual companion of white men, is not given. If you talk about these women, and quote some white men on that phenomenon but not address the perspective of the women, you do fail in your objective of creating a non-eurocentric history of Congo (a goal Van Reybrouck sets for himself in his introduction).
Social climbing in colonial Congo is also measured by male standards: the church and politics were solely reserved for men once it was opened up to the Congolese. What did women do to gain social standing? We learn that some women held jobs, but we don’t hear from them. For example, the nurses could have provided an interesting insiders perspective on the tension between western and traditional medicine.
Furthermore, I’m really curious about the perspective of women on the colonial busybody politics of trying to implement monogamy. What changed for them? Did these social changes bring change to their economic or social status? What happened to those women who were the second, third, fourth wife and were abandoned when their husband was convinced to become monogamous? This is exemplary for the way in which Van Reybrouck treats the women in his oral history of the colony: they sometimes come into view in the male experience and we learn a little bit about them, but he doesn’t follow up with what happens to these women once they disappear from it. That is a loss to this otherwise really great introduction. The first half of the novel feels unbalanced in its objective to tell the history from the Congolese perspective - a perspective should include women. Van Reybrouck does show that he can do that in the second half of the novel, where there is more room for the experiences of women.