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The Rebels' Hour | 
 enlarge | Author: Lieve Joris
Creator: Liz Waters
Publisher: Grove Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy Used: $5.50
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 650934
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.3
ISBN: 0802118682
Dewey Decimal Number: 967.51034
EAN: 9780802118684
ASIN: 0802118682
Publication Date: April 10, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Lieve Joris has long been considered "one of the best journalists in the world . . . following in the footsteps of Herodotus as well as Ibn Khaldoun or Ryszard Kapuaecinski" (Liberation, France). In The Rebels' Hour, she illuminates the dark heart of contemporary Congo through the prism of one dangerous and complicated man-a rebel leader named Assani who eventually becomes a high-ranking general in the Congolese army.
When Assani, a young cowherd, leaves his remote eastern village to pursue his studies in the city, he learns for the first time that he is ethnically Tutsi; though uninterested in politics or military life, he is forced to take sides in the bloody conflict rocking the Congo in the wake of the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Strong, clever, and trusting of no one, he becomes a fearsome rebel leader. With his expanding cadre of kadogos--child soldiers--he traverses the war-ravaged country, repeatedly dodging death at the hands of competing rebel factions in the bush, angry mobs in the capital city of Kinshasa, or even the rebel-turned-dictator Laurent Kabila himself.
The Rebels' Hour thrusts us into Assani's world, forcing us to navigate the chaos of a lawless country alongside him, compelled by an instinct to survive in a place where human life has been stripped of value. Though pathologically evasive, Assani--in Lieve Joris' horrifying and brilliant zoom lens portrait--stands out in relief as a man who is both monstrous and sympathetic, perpetrator and victim.
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| Customer Reviews:
Ever Alert For an Ambush July 4, 2008
Saltpan bookman (Sydney Australia)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is as well-written as it is essential reading for an understanding of chaotic central African belligerence and bloody-minded tribal cunning, happening right now, and for decades past, in the Congo. The book closely follows the career of an in-every-way remarkable soldier the author has named Assani, a cowherd turned rebel, made a general in the Congolese army.
He moves cautiously, ever on the alert for an ambush. The word jungle never appears, but that is where, perforce a rebel's hunted existence, he has been forced to kill. Appointed a general as part of a peace deal, he is flatteringly welcomed back in the capital Kinshasa from the bush by men who five years before would have lynched him. He drives as if still in the bush; he keeps up the same speed and people crossing the street in the city center have to jump back.
The author, seemingly acting on inside information, maps out the intricacy of Assani's life of firefights, retreat, reprisals, new alliances and old, by use of time-shifts that each time serve further to illuminate this elusive bush fighter. From time to time he mulls over his late-night doubts with a woman bar owner in Lubumbashi on one of his cell phones.
I was drawn to this book by the immediacy of the writing. If you open it at any page it will immediately hook you. The writing is tight but chatty, dead sure but wary, sudden, momentarily confessional. I haven't read a better book all year.
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