Abstract
In his debut, Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, journalist Anjan Sundaram opens with action. The author is running through the streets of Kinshasa, trying to catch the child-thief who has snatched his cellphone. It is a moment of confusion that’s perfect for a book as preoccupied with the narrator’s disorientation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as it is with the tangled politics of one of the world’s most troubled states.
What follows is a worthy addition to the nonfiction canon on central Africa and a memoir that provides a critical examination of modern journalism. As Sundaram notes, the scale of suffering in Congo—more than five million killed in a festering war replete with child soldiers, massacres by machete, and reports of cannibalism—is so unfathomable that it creates a perversely high threshold for press attention. One death is nothing; the global media demands slaughter from Congo before it is news.
Readers might expect these horror stories to dominate Stringer, but Sundaram is not writing a battlefield narrative. In fact, he does not get near a rebel until halfway through the book. Instead, Sundaram begins by chronicling everyday life—that of the average Congolese and of his own struggles to make it as a journalist—in the pulsing capital of Kinshasa. He is earnest and naïve, having cast aside his mathematics doctoral studies at Yale and a job offer at Goldman Sachs in search of “experience.”
True to this aim, Sundaram shuns the expatriate neighborhood and rooms with a local family. Cultural immersion gives him proximity to his subjects but little immediate understanding. He sees only a broken society: “intellectually stagnant, half emerged from its history and only reluctantly moving forward.” The book’s main shortcoming is in declarations like these. Despite Sundaram’s quest for understanding, he sometimes views the country through the eyes of a highly educated and impatient foreigner.
But there is more fair observation than hasty judgment in Stringer. Much of the Congolese’s daily life—and Sundaram’s—involves being stolen from, whether through outright thievery or more subtle bribery. Sundaram is baffled by the extortion; even family members undermine each other:
The poor now steal not from the Rawjis (a wealthy Gujarati merchant family) and politicians but from the most vulnerable: other poor, and modest middle-class people. It is why the Congolese to the outsider appear as mere bandits, and why their greed often seems as unscrupulous, incomprehensible and immoral as that of the moneyed.
He eventually connects the pattern to the region’s sorry past. Congo is not only war-torn but historically looted: first by Belgian colonizers who committed genocide in the 1800s as they ransacked the jungle for rubber, later by ruthless dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, and now by a rapacious global capitalism that plunders Congo for tin and tantalum, a metal used in cell phones.
The material is bleak, but Sundaram’s sharp prose compels. His descriptions of life with a Congolese family, encounters with street children, and his own electric anxiety are immersive. The fine writing paired with Stringer’s setting invites comparisons with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—especially once Sundaram leaves the city for a river journey into the jungle. The comparison also works because, even as Sundaram starts writing for the Associated Press and gains confidence traveling in Congo, much of the culture, people, and place remain impenetrable.
In Bunia, a refugee-packed northeastern town situated amid some of the worst of the country’s violence, Sundaram accompanies a trash collector walking through a shantytown. They pass a bar:
Youths crowded the entrance, pressing against each other. They surged inside. The pressure built. And like bottled fizz they spilled out. The man lit a cigarette. That was when Bunia’s quiet fear struck. The sudden gayness, the flashing lights, I found them corrupt, unsettling.
These observations can feel unfair to the Congolese—more othering than illuminating. But in most instances, Sundaram uses his fear and judgment as an intentional narrative device, recounting his flawed perceptions so that he can later knock them down. For example, he ponders the ways in which “it seemed the Congolese willed their own demise,” only to report a few chapters later how illiterate villagers walked for days to cast votes in the 2006 national election. Turnout for the contest between presidential favorites Joseph Kabila, the incumbent, and Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former warlord, was 80%. There is truth in the observation that Congolese society is crippled, but Stringer shows that it is not the only truth.
The election finally gives Sundaram a taste of the action war correspondents seek. Kinshasa exploded in violence following Kabila’s victory, and Sundaram is one of the only correspondents in the city, holed up in an immigrant-owned factory complex near Bemba’s residence, where much of the violence smoldered. He survives with little help from those he writes for. His editor scolds him for lacking a flak jacket or a helmet, yet the news agencies happily profit from Sundaram’s personal risk: his byline lands in the New York Times, and the Associated Press offers him permanent work. But he is exhausted—by the misery of Congo and by the freelance hustle—and ready to leave.
And there lies the modern stringer’s tragedy: at the height of his knowledge and skill, when he was best equipped to tell the world what he was witnessing in Congo and why we should care, he was too used up to carry on.