Review: Intrigue and wonder in a surreal Zaire
The Villian's Dance, a dive into DRC’s lost days, leaves you wanting more.
Jacqueline Nyathi
Zaire, as the Democratic Republic of Congo was known for a time, loomed large in the imagination: a place of excess, rumba and untold riches in the centre of Africa. Its larger than life leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, was always in the news in his leopardskin hat. Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s story is set in those heady days.
When civil war broke out in neighbouring Angola, Zaireans flocked to harvest – and smuggle – diamonds from the wild and ungoverned north. Few would become rich themselves; all chased the dream that they might.
At the centre of Mujila’s narrative is the Madonna, Tshiamuena, a mysterious and possibly omniscient figure who mothers the miners who cross her path, and who has a million tales about her past and “parallel lives” (including in Japan, where her name was Fumie Ogawa).
Other narrators include young men who start out on the streets of Lubumbashi, and who take fantastical life journeys. There’s also the mysterious man who catches them up in his net; to our relief, he turns out to be a shadowy political figure, a mere mortal in the end. And then there’s a hanger-on, the hapless Austrian writer, Franz, who falls in love with the mystery, intrigue and exoticism of that time and place.
Potent in its vivid descriptions of a lost time, The Villain’s Dance will live in your head for a long while. It does the tremendous work of telling the story of a people, place and time that are rarely visualised in Anglophone African literature except in as for wars and coups.
We would have liked to read much more about the mysterious Madonna. Perhaps she’ll appear in a novel of her own, to explain all of those past lives.