Kinshasa’s skyline, seen from The River
Rory MacLean has done me the honour of responding to my recent post, berating him for writing, in a review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River for The Guardian, that ‘there is little difference between the Congo seen by Stanley and by Butcher’, and suggesting that readers should weep for Congo but not go there. (See the original post and comments here.)
Rory wrote:
I am sorry if my review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River has upset some DRC residents. I am no Congo expert, but I understand that life in much of the country can be very grim. The Lancet reports that 1,200 people die in the Congo each day through civil unrest. By comparison, post-Saddam Iraq and post-Taliban Afghanistan do not even come close to 1,200 dead per day. As to...