Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters: The Collapse Of The Congo And The Great War Of Africa
By Jason K. Stearns | PublicAffairs Review by Jack Litster
Whether or not you believe that Joseph Kabila was democratically re-elected president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in late 2011, it is hard to dispute that DRC has had a tumultuous and often tragic history over the past several hundred years. Jason Stearns has written a book about the recent
history of the country entitled Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, published in 2011 by PublicAffairs. Jason Stearns’ book is engaging right from the beginning, describing personal histories of people involved in DRC’s conflict which has grinded away for the past 15 years at various levels of intensity, costing the lives of some five million people. If you ever wondered how the post-genocide
Rwandan refugee camps in eastern DRC contributed to the eventual war in DRC and the overthrow of Mobutu, Stearns explains in ample detail.
If you were curious about how Laurent Kabila and
then his son Joseph Kabila came to dominate power in DRC, Stearns gives you the full blow-by-blow account. If the role of diamonds and other precious minerals
in the DRC conflict is of particular interest to you, this book will give you some insight. And if you always wanted to better comprehend the
diversity of actors in the DRC conflict, including Angola, Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and over a dozen rebel groups, then this is the book to read. Most insightful of all, this book seeks to uncover
how a context is created in which ordinary people can become mass killers. As one of the militia commanders interviewed in this
book crudely explains, “Where elephants fight, the grass is trampled.” Dancing in the glory of monsters.
Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World
By Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte | University of Minnesota Press Review by Angela Wallace
Brand Aid critically analyses the celebritization of global
aid provision in the age of public-private partnerships. ‘Compassionate consumers’ are increasingly engaged in ‘causumerism’, defined as shopping for a better world. Richey and Ponte focus on the case study of Product (RED). It’s a consumer campaign with multinational corporations, such as The Gap that sells products with default donations for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. To date, a portion of the proceeds from (RED) purchases have provided $180 million in private donations for the Global Fund. The Global Fund grants this money to organizations engaged in the provision of Anti-Retroviral Treatment in Africa. (RED) is the brainchild of three aid celebrities: U2
frontman Bono, the economist Jeffrey Sachs and the pro-poor doctor Paul Farmer. The authors reserve
their harshest criticism for Bono’s personal efforts to tackle HIV/AIDS, as a rich, white, non-expert, ‘the rock man’s burden’ and the illegitimacy of aid-celebrity in international development. The authors deconstruct the marketing of the (RED)
campaign because it oversimplifies complex global issues and aid challenges. They argue that the inherently unethical purchase of luxury products to save distant others in Africa, reduces global suffering to a contest of purchasing power between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Importantly, and ironically, Richey and Ponte miss an opportunity to appeal to the millions of people who have purchased (RED) products. Brand Aid is a dense, scholarly work that is unlikely to gain attention outside of the academic and practitioner circles of global development.
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