Book Review: Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, by Anjan Sundaram

Abstract

Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo. Anjan Sundaram. New York, New York: Doubleday, 2014. 265 pp. $25.95 hbk. $15.95 pbk. $9.99 ebk.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 naive, 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 wartorn 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. …