Blaise Ndala's novel In the Belly of the Congo looks at the human cost of colonization in the Congo
CBC Books | Posted: November 15, 2022 1:25 PM | Last Updated: November 15, 2022
In the Belly of the Congo will be published on Feb. 21, 2023.
In the Belly of the Congo is the latest novel by Blaise Ndala, and his first book in English, translated by Amy B. Reid.
In the Belly of the Congo is a multi-generational novel that delves into the history of European colonization in the Congo.
The year is 1958. The upcoming Brussels World Fair is the biggest international event since the end of the Second World War. Giving into pressure from the royal palace, subcommissioner Robert Dumont decides to put Africans on display in a "Congolese village" in one of the pavilions.
Among the women on display in the "human zoo" is Princess Tshala Nyota, daughter of King Kena Kwete III of the Kuba people in Congo.
While away at a Catholic school run by nuns, the young princess falls madly in love with a Belgian administrator. When her father finds out, Tshala's lover sends her to Léopoldville, the capital of the Belgian colony of Congo. There, the princess is immersed in a world full of youth, sex and hope for an independent republic.
Blaise Ndala is the Ottawa-based Congolese Canadian author of the novels J'irai danser sur la tombe de Senghor, which won the Ottawa Book Prize in the French Fiction category and Sans capote ni kalachnikov, winner of the 2019 edition of the Combat national des livres.
In the Belly of the Congo will be published on Feb. 21, 2023. You can read an excerpt below.
If I really want you, Nyota my niece, my brother's youngest daughter, to understand, I must go back to the very beginning.
First, to our shared destiny, which is ordinary only because it is now cloaked in the anonymity that usually conceals misery in Belgium, where you found me. Then to the great patriarchal figures who are the source of my fall, those remarkable men to whom I offer, despite everything, the respect dictated by our centuries-old traditions.
Lastly, and only then, will I bare my heart and speak of the only man I ever loved — how he burst into my life and how others took advantage of his long silence.
Yes, I will tell you about those shadowy figures, what they said and did. You've already heard bits and pieces of their confessions, words that led you here to me.
Lastly, and only then, will I bare my heart and speak of the only man I ever loved — how he burst into my life and how others took advantage of his long silence.
Speaking of paths, you are convinced in your heart of hearts that it is just by chance, a stroke of luck, that you met that friend who brought you here this Sunday morning to the cemetery in Laeken.
But could that accomplice you call "chance" have made your friend's father, once known as the bow-tied banker, a man to whom life refused so little in his native Belgium, lie here now, sharing this silent haven with a perfect stranger from the savannas of central Congo?
No, providence's powers are not without limits, my niece. You are here because at this moment in the sun's march, in the galloping passage of time, you are ready to learn that you are not just a girl from Congo like so many others. You are
Nyota, "the star of whom the river asks its way," as they say among your people.
Nyota, "the star of whom the river asks its way," as they say among your people.
You are my Ndoyi, my namesake — you share the name I was given at birth. That was a choice your father made because he wanted to keep me close, following a tradition as old as the dynasty of which you and I are the shadow-bearers.
You are my Ndoyi, my namesake — you share the name I was given at birth.
Now here you are in the presence of your aunt Tshala Nyota Moelo, a princess whose exile was not foretold in the dreams that came to my late mother as she impatiently awaited the birth of her first daughter.
Once I've taken you back to the root of the drama, after leading you across valleys, plains, streams, and rivers, to the shores of the seas my soul crossed before I melded into the darkness here in Belgium, you will once again stand tall and proud.
Ready to face your true destiny.
You will finally be able to set down the burden that's been weighing on your shoulders, the one the oracle reserved for all the Nyotas who came before you. An oracle whose voice was heard long before the emergence of the land that Léopold II would baptize the Congo Free State.
Excerpted from In the Belly of the Congo by Blaise Ndala. Published by Scribner Canada. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.