Book Review - Consuming the Congo

A tour de force of anger, frustration, hurt and survival and those working tirelessly to bring together the many pieces and pictures.

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - An incredible force of questions, asking each of us to take responsibility for how and who we choose to give voice and power. Who do we listen, what do we ask and how do end the worst human catastrophe since World War II. Why do we allow such atrocity to continue and why do we ignore the voices of millions and forget to hold a government accountable to its people. Real solutions to these problems must come from within DR Congo but it cannot come without the support of everyone.

“Eastern Congo defies comparison. The loss of life far exceeds deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Yet this in not some distant tragedy, not just another African horror story. The lives and deaths of these millions of Congolese are linked to us all. The mines that scar the verdant hills and mountains of eastern Congo produce a very small but very bloody portion of the tin and coltan metal that is critical to our modern lives. Each time we use a mobile phone, use a video game console, or open a tin can, we hold the lives and deaths of the eastern Congolese in our hands.”

Giving a voice to those that must be heard, Peter Eichstaedt travels the “no man’s land”, the border towns of DRC, into the villages and mining areas. He listens, bringing forward the faces of those that have been tragically and incomprehensibly ignored.

“I marvel at how a tragedy of this magnitude could have been so thoroughly ignored. This tsunami of mortality has not been random killing at the hands of a few renegades. It has been the result of a vicious civil war that started in 1996, then erupted again in 1998, and involved at least five other African countries. It has flared continuously ever since.”

his is text book information pulled together with the faces and words of the Congolese; relationships forged from respect and trust. Peter’s writing brings the face and the numbers together, the problems facing everyday living and those that continue to haunt both an entire village and one women. The reader is wrapped in dust, knocked along a road of questions, sleeping with the responsibility and destruction of a country and generations of people.

A tour de force of anger, frustration, hurt and survival and those working tirelessly to bring together the many pieces and pictures. A common thread throughout, why are those in power not held accountable, who chooses and why? The voices, I am not being heard, why? No Justice, Why?

The reader is introspective and the center of both the solutions and problems of Eastern Congo. If we are to listen, walk on ground, dig deep not only with our compassion, but also with our sweat and utilize our resources, together, than progress forward can be made but only if it is with, the Congolese people. “One needs to experience to understand it. No one can come away untouched or unchanged. …no man is an island, each one of us is connected in many ways to everything else on the planet. The realization can be humbling. It makes one pause in the pursuit of personal ends to ask if we are mindlessly ignoring the world, or are we mindful that our daily actions and decisions connect us with the rest of the planet?”

Formerly senior editor for Uganda Radio Network and Africa editor for the Institute of War and Peace, Reporting in The Hague. Peter Eichstaedt has traveled extensively throughout Africa to cover war crimes and trials. He is dedicated to revealing the stories behind human rights abuses and won the 2010 Colorado Book Award for history for his book First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army. He is the author of If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans and Pirate State: Inside Somalia’s Terrorism at Sea. His home is near Denver, Colorado.