Noah M. Mintz is a translator, a former bookseller, and a PhD student at Columbia University.

by In Koli Jean Bofane, translated from the French by Marjolijn de Jager (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indiana University Press)

In his take on the BTBA longlist, Chad Post put Congo Inc. in the category of “surprises.” “There are always a few surprises, which, in the end, turn round to be pretty damn good books—just ones that flew under the radar of Translation Twitter. I love that!” This squarely describes my experience with this book, as well as my reaction to it. As a denizen of “Translation Twitter” (as I think anyone reading this must be), I can’t believe that In Koli Jean Bofane’s book quietly existed in the Anglophone world for several months without my hearing or reading a word about it, without even catching a glimpse of the cover. And as a reader, I am so glad that it made the cut.

Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament is a global novel. This is not to say that it fits into the quaint genre of “world literature;” Bofane is certainly critical of the kind of book that neatly packages a culture in exotic trappings and distributes it for consumption around the world. No, this is not world literature, this is literature about the world in all of its bloody, stinking, glitchy, glittering mess. It’s a novel about the paradoxes of globalization, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo at its rotting, beating heart.

At the center of all of this is a young man named Isookanga, a Pygmy from the Ekonda clan, who is supposed to replace his uncle as the chief of his village in remote, forested Équateur Province. Ten centimeters taller than the rest of his clan because his mother conceived him with an outsider, he doesn’t fit into the narrow mold of village life. He would rather wear JPN Superdry jeans and a Snoop Dogg t-shirt than the tree-bark shorts he wears while hunting caterpillars—an activity he isn’t too keen on, either.

“Fuckin’ caterpillars!”

For more than an hour the exasperation the innocent little bugs had been causing Isookanga had stimulated his senses, enabling him to make his way more quickly through the forest, avoiding low branches, creating gaps in the foliage with the same determination as an icebreaker’s bow at a time of global warming.

These are the opening lines of the book, and they hint at a lot of what the book contends with: the local and the global, subsistence and profit, international exchange of uranium (the icebreaker), and climate change. It should also be said that Bofane’s prose is often this densely packed, and is often peppered with plays on words and whole sentences in Lingala—challenges that translator Marjolijn de Jager handles deftly, occasionally adding her own helpful footnotes to Bofane’s original ones.

Rather than caterpillar gathering, then, Isookanga prefers to spend his time playing an online game (on a laptop he stole from a Belgian ethnologist) called Raging Trade, which is a sort of hyper-modern, ultra-intricate, violent Settlers of Catan. Acting as multinational corporations, players compete for the resources of “Gondavanaland”—composed of South America, Africa, India, Australia—in order to gain global dominance, by any means necessary. These means happen to be nuclear missiles, stealth planes, guerilla warfare, and even genocide. (The connection to the real world here is not a subtle one.)

So naturally, Isookanga sets out for Kinshasa to seek his fortune as a “globalist.” He vaguely, but adamantly, wants to “be in the mainstream, get involved in high technology, communicate with the world, be in trading, stuff like that.” He takes a riverboat to the city, and quickly finds himself among a group of ����é����é��, street kids. Of course, he doesn’t fit in here, either: at 25, he’s a good ten years older than most of them, even if he is somewhat shorter. They nickname him Old One. Everyone else in Kinshasa calls him Little One. The cast of characters here quickly expands to include refugees from the decades of bloody conflict in the DRC, a former child soldier, a runaway who speaks in curses that turn out to be lines from American horror movies (Yo waa nnexx! Oo mag hhöd! Yo mothas ining in heïl!), a UN Peacekeeper from Lithuania, the Belgian researcher he stole the computer from (one of the most troubling relationships in the book—we won’t get into it here), a reverend operating a pyramid scheme out of his church, a former warlord who now acts as a national park administrator, and a young Chinese man named Zhang Xia who got left behind when his shady company left Congo in a hurry.

Each of the characters stands for an inherent contradiction. Zhang Xia, once at the height of globalization, now makes his living selling packets of water on the street and spends his free time teaching the ����é����é�� about Maoist revolutionary philosophy. The Belgian woman feels immense guilt for the harm and strife that her country has caused in Isookanga’s—the subtitular testament of Bismarck—but that guilt manifests in exoticism and racism. The child soldier deserted his unit only accidentally, getting left behind while playing with a plastic water gun in the market. The warlord is a Tutsi born in Rwanda, who fled persecution as a child and returned in 1994 to fight as part of the international Operation Turquoise that ended the genocide, and yet he goes on to employ many of the same horrific, violent, and genocidal tactics that the Hutu used against his own people, in an effort to gain access to precious minerals in Kivu. (It’s worth noting here that the Indiana University Press Global African Voices series also includes Murambi: the Book of Bones by Boubacar Boris Diop, and Harvest of Skulls by Abdourahman A. Waberi, both of which are based on a trip the authors took, along with 8 other African writers, to Rwanda in 2000. Series editor Dominic Thomas, who also wrote the foreword, has done an excellent job of curating a list of books that speak to each other across national, cultural, ethic, and linguistic boundaries.)

I don’t want to dwell on too many of these other characters, because it’s much more satisfying to let Bofane unveil these tensions and oppositions in the headlong pace of the novel. But the most ambivalent character is perhaps Isookanga himself. He is far from ignorant of the damage that has been wrought on his own country by globalization, but rather than renounce it, he wants to fight fire with fire. “You’re totally irresponsible,” he tells his uncle, “you’re running the risk of completely missing out on the twenty-first century.” For him, globalization is an opportunity, and he doesn’t want to Congo to let it pass. “I’m an internationalist who aspires to becoming a globalizer.” In fact he’s out for reparations: when he steals the laptop from the Belgian woman, he tells his friend, “My act counts as a refund for the colonial debt!”

Bofane spares no one, and in Congo Inc., as in Raging Trade, globalization is a brutal game with no clear winners.

There is so much more to say about this book (I took about eight pages of notes), but it doesn’t need to be said by me. In electric prose, which de Jager translates with life and humor, Congo Inc. has no trouble getting its point across. This book should win so that everyone will read it, and then I’ll have plenty of people to talk about it with. Either way, it was a fantastic surprise to discover on the longlist.

First off is a that’s related to her book Why Translation Matters:

The dearth of translated literature in the English-speaking world represents a new kind of iron curtain we have constructed around ourselves. We are choosing to block off access to the writing of a large and significant portion of the world, including movements and societies whose potentially dreadful political impact on us is made even more menacing by our general lack of familiarity with them. Our stubborn and willful ignorance could have—and arguably, already has had—dangerous consequences. The problem starts in the Anglophone publishing industry, where translated books are not only avoided but actively discouraged. [. . .]

Publishers have their excuses, of course. A persistent but not very convincing explanation is that English-language readers are, for some reason, put off by translations. This is nothing but a publishing shibboleth that leads to a chicken-and-egg conundrum: Is a limited readership for translations the reason so few are published in the Anglophone world? Or is that readership limited because English-language publishers provide their readers with so few translations?

To supplement this piece though (which is pretty much lifted from Edie’s aforementioned book), Britt put together a very cool feature called featuring nine translated pieces from around the world:

“I write in a language that has little to do with tulips, windmills, or silly snowmen with carrot noses, a language honed to denote Africa in all its harshness, cruelty, and beauty,” Thomas Dreyer writes in his essay “Not Our Leguaan.” It’s also a language, Afrikaans, that is rarely translated into English—like most languages, in fact, as literary translator Edith Grossman elaborated in her article for our May/June issue, “A New Great Wall.” But Dreyer’s piece, grappling with the complexities of creating art out of the language that once created apartheid, offers a crucial perspective for understanding the affairs of his country, and so do the eight other pieces in our first-ever Foreign Policy translation project.

Here’s the complete list of translated pieces with links to each one:

• A South African essayist considers the ugly history of his native tongue. By Thomas Dreyer; translated by Dreyer from the Afrikaans.

• What if you went to Mecca — and hated it? A story from a Hindi novelist. By Manzoor Ahtesham; translated by Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark from the Hindi.

• A young “quota refugee” from Russia adjusts to life in Germany, from pizza to making new friends, in this first novel by a rising German talent. By Lena Gorelik; translated by Michael Ritterson from the German.

• Why people from Shanghai are so crazy, by one of China’s great environmental historians. By Yang Dongping; translated by Andrea Lingenfelter from the Mandarin.

• The slow realization that everything is wrong, told by one of Rwanda’s most promising young novelists. By Gilbert Gatore; translated by Marjolijn de Jager from the French.

• A great Hebrew novelist tells the tale of a young boy with grandiose — and confused — aspirations to join the political sub-classes. By Benjamin Tammuz; translated by Jessica Cohen from the Hebrew.

• Entries from the journal of a well-connected French economist, written during the Vichy years in Paris. By Charles Rist; translated by Michele Aynesworth from the French.

• A mother’s struggle with the legacy of Agent Orange, from a Vietnamese journalist’s account. By Minh Chuyen; translated by Huy Lien and Charles Waugh from the Vietnamese.

• The day Tito died, as witnessed by a young Croatian girl. By Marica Bodrožic; translated by Gerald Chapple from the German.

Very cool, and hopefully this isn’t just a one-off . . . It would be great if FP could run some translated works of nonfiction every so often . . .