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Mastery: Dancing with Cannibals, Book 2
Mastery—Dancing with Cannibals, Book 2, Dicho Ilunga
“Everything was strange, but everything was for the taking.”
Writing with scope, sympathy, and perception, Ilunga’s novel is a suspenseful story of travel, adventure, action, and love.
In Dicho Ilunga’s epic historical novel, the Congo is as dangerous for the predatory Belgians as the Belgians are for the tribes that live in the region.
Young, impulsive Jean Turken finds himself thrust into prison in Brussels for a prank. In 1898 the Belgian king, Leopold II, realizes that he is falling behind the other European powers in seizing the vast resources of central Africa. To gain the manpower for his land grab King Leopold empties the prisons of Belgium into the Congo. He forces the prisoners to serve as colonial agents. Leopold II demands ruthlessness from his new agents.
Given limitless military support and the power of life and death over the indigenous people, an army of ruthless criminals sets out to fulfill the ambitions of an amoral despot. With one year left of his sentence, Jean Turken is reluctantly transported to Africa to make his fortune; the alternative is life in prison. He soon finds that all is not as it seems. Jean is faced with desperately trying to hold on to his humanity in a world where nothing is outlawed and every taboo must be confronted in the heart and in the soul. Jean must quickly learn to survive in a world without mercy.
Dicho Ilunga’s Dancing with Cannibals brings an African perspective the looting of a troubled continent. The novel seems to be influenced by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Dicho Ilunga has not read either of those books. His writing is absent a European context. Ilunga describes his literary training as coming from the Zairian writers that he read in school and from two novels by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho who Ilunga says has an African style.
The source of Dicho Ilunga’s considerable literary power is his conviction that he should write what he knows. Dancing with Cannibals takes its origin in Ilunga’s acquaintance with individuals who have personally confronted cannibalism, a practice that not only exists in central Africa but that may be increasing due to the chaotic conditions that currently prevail there.
Dicho Ilunga is the author of several accomplished, unpublished novels. Born in Zaire, Dicho Ilunga fled to Rwanda as a political refugee only to become embroiled in the Rwandan genocide through his marriage to a Tutsi woman. Dicho Ilunga now lives in South Africa.
“Everything was strange, but everything was for the taking.”
Writing with scope, sympathy, and perception, Ilunga’s novel is a suspenseful story of travel, adventure, action, and love.
In Dicho Ilunga’s epic historical novel, the Congo is as dangerous for the predatory Belgians as the Belgians are for the tribes that live in the region.
Young, impulsive Jean Turken finds himself thrust into prison in Brussels for a prank. In 1898 the Belgian king, Leopold II, realizes that he is falling behind the other European powers in seizing the vast resources of central Africa. To gain the manpower for his land grab King Leopold empties the prisons of Belgium into the Congo. He forces the prisoners to serve as colonial agents. Leopold II demands ruthlessness from his new agents.
Given limitless military support and the power of life and death over the indigenous people, an army of ruthless criminals sets out to fulfill the ambitions of an amoral despot. With one year left of his sentence, Jean Turken is reluctantly transported to Africa to make his fortune; the alternative is life in prison. He soon finds that all is not as it seems. Jean is faced with desperately trying to hold on to his humanity in a world where nothing is outlawed and every taboo must be confronted in the heart and in the soul. Jean must quickly learn to survive in a world without mercy.
Dicho Ilunga’s Dancing with Cannibals brings an African perspective the looting of a troubled continent. The novel seems to be influenced by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Dicho Ilunga has not read either of those books. His writing is absent a European context. Ilunga describes his literary training as coming from the Zairian writers that he read in school and from two novels by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho who Ilunga says has an African style.
The source of Dicho Ilunga’s considerable literary power is his conviction that he should write what he knows. Dancing with Cannibals takes its origin in Ilunga’s acquaintance with individuals who have personally confronted cannibalism, a practice that not only exists in central Africa but that may be increasing due to the chaotic conditions that currently prevail there.
Dicho Ilunga is the author of several accomplished, unpublished novels. Born in Zaire, Dicho Ilunga fled to Rwanda as a political refugee only to become embroiled in the Rwandan genocide through his marriage to a Tutsi woman. Dicho Ilunga now lives in South Africa.
178 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 10, 2015
2 people want to read
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