Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

by Jason K. Stearns

Lies come up in the elevator; the truth takes the stairs but gets here eventually.

Until the eighteenth century, for example, ethnicity was less important than class and clan-based identities, which themselves coexisted alongside several layers of regional and social identities.

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”

Relations between the Hutu and Tutsi only started to sour with the eruption of civil war in Rwanda in 1990.

“There’s nothing like having your own country. Il fallait tupate adresse. We needed to have our own address.”

“A tree trunk does not turn itself into a crocodile because it has spent some time in the water. In the same way, a Tutsi will forever remain a Tutsi, with his or her perfidy, craftiness and dishonesty.”

By 1996, the country had been through seven years of economic contraction. Zairians earned just over half of what they had been making in 1990. According to the United Nations, a full 27 million people, or 60 percent of the population, were undernourished. Even when people were paid, the money was worth little: Inflation soared to 5,000 percent in 1996.

A central reason, therefore, for the lack of visionary leadership in the Congo is because its political system rewards ruthless behavior and marginalizes scrupulous leaders. It privileges loyalty over competence, wealth and power over moral character.