A few weeks ago… several overseas Congolese writers were back in Brazzaville. So were a hundred or so Parisian intellectuals, Belgian essayists, hip Nigerian authors, South African slam poets, and writers and filmmakers from across Africa, especially its French-speaking countries. A special overseas edition of Etonnants Voyageurs, a major French literature and film festival, had landed in Brazzaville like a U.F.O., disgorging these characters into the city, along with a substantial, mostly French, press corps, and assorted international lit-fest habitués. The festival had held previous African editions in Bamako, Mali, but decided to change venue even before the current conflict flared up there, and Mabanckou, its co-director, helped steer it to Brazzaville. TheFrancophonieorganization of French-speaking countries provided support, as did Congo’s government, in part channelled through the semi-official media house that publishes the country’s only daily newspaper,Les Dépêches de Brazzaville.

Etonnants Voyageurs means “surprising travellers.” Perhaps those most surprised in Brazzaville were members of the local hardscrabble writers’ community, who operate with no publishing infrastructure or institutional support, as they watched the festival apparatus spread across the city, with its workshops, readings, screenings, concerts, and parties…

Continue reading Siddhartha Mitter’s dispatch from a Congo literary festival: http://nyr.kr/13FmvNW

Photograph by Gaël Le Ny.

A New Yorker reading list on Congo —its conflicts, but also its people, culture, and environment: http://nyr.kr/TmoxKf

So impress this upon your leaders there, in the West there. What they have done to us! After slavery, there was colonization. After colonization there was neo-colonialism instead of independence. We never had independence here—not yet. And now again, you impose Kabila on us with this democracy of complacency. So it’s neo-slavery. We continue to suffer. Go inform your leaders there: if they continue to place at the head of this country these idiots, these imbeciles, these political homosexuals, we’re going to create Al Qaeda à l’Africaine here. That’s what we’ll become.

- Salvador Muhindo

Philip Gourevitch reports from Goma, where, as the violence continues to spread, some Congolese blame the larger international community: http://nyr.kr/TjSzy9

Photograph by Phil Moore/AFP/Getty.