By: Petra Chase, Editor-in-Chief
Content warning: brief mentions of slavery, child soldiers, and war.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the second largest country in Africa, yet its rich, enduring history is often overlooked. Postcards from Congo is an easy-to-digest graphic novel and entry point into everything from the Bantu migrations of 500 BCE to the COVID-19 pandemic. It exposes the violent legacy of colonialism, which persists to this day. It is also a testament to the pride and hope Black and African histories offer through countless stories of resilience, ingenuity, joy, and self-determination.
DRC is often confused with the Republic of Congo. In an introductory map, we see the two countries are connected with the vast Congo River and Rainforest they both touch, as well as the pre-colonial Kingdom of Kongo. While both countries go by the Congo shorthand, Postcards from Congo and this article are solely about DRC, sometimes referred as Congo (Kinshasa), after the capital city, or Zaire, one of its post-independence names.
Knowing African history is often omitted in popular education and culture, Edmund Trueman, a European settler, was inspired to create this novel after learning in depth about Congo’s history. This is while the world is largely ignorant that their technology — like phones and laptops — use coltan, a mineral extracted from Eastern Congo. A country with ongoing corruption and war after a brutal colonial history, the situation is exacerbated by greed for natural resources by western and global superpowers and technology giants. Apple, Tesla, Dell, Google, and Microsoft deny responsibility while continuing to profit off Congolese lives.
Trueman’s art is based on careful study of Congolese visual sources, translating in vignette paneling. Each chapter of history starts with a two-page introduction to the time period, followed by a collection of “postcards” with short descriptions focusing on a specific event, person, movement, community, or place. This pacing, which lets you pause and take in the still drawings after learning the context behind them, makes the book easy to follow, despite covering so much ground.
In style and content, Trueman also critiques the well-known Belgian cartoonist Hergé, creator of the children’s Adventures of Tin Tin comic series. With this series, Hergé invented ligne claire, the pleasant cartoon style Trueman uses, characterized by simple lines and a lack of shading. Tin Tin au Congo (1930), Tin Tin’s patronizing second book, sent the “adventurer” to Belgian Congo to game hunt. It depicted the Congolese through a dehumanizing and colonial gaze of needing to be “civilized.” Postcards from Congo flips the narrative on its head. There are multiple scenes where Congolese fight back. In one postcard, a Tin Tin lookalike, a Belgian soldier with a gun, gets killed in a revolt by a member of the Pende Indigenous tribe.
The smooth, bright colours of ligne claire also make depictions of Congolese culture, urban life, and natural landscapes especially vibrant in the novel. This is a fitting representation for underrepresented Indigenous tribes, including the Mbuti, who traded and shared skills with the pre-colonial Bantu civilization, and have maintained a complex hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the rainforest. We learn that recently, they fought for their right to stay on part of their ancestral lands of Itombwe, and are working with conservationists to protect it.
“The smooth, bright colours of ligne claire also make depictions of Congolese culture, urban life, and natural landscapes especially vibrant in the novel.”
Lively tapestry-like illustrations feature the spirit of Congolese rumba music and dance, joyful jazz clubs, art, and “évolués” — Black, educated middle-class men in Congo who learned fluent French and conformed to western culture in hopes of achieving equality. However, they continued to be treated as the rest of the Congolese, segregated from whites, barred for high-skilled positions, and heavily controlled while Belgians lived in luxury. Soon these men and the country began rallying the cry for independence.
As Central African historian Didier Gondola writes in the novel’s foreword, “Colonization afforded [the Congolese] opportunities to carve out agency in a context of a state of violence and white supremacy.” One of the most well-known exemplifiers of this was évolué Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese man who climbed the ranks at a postal office, wrote in local newspapers, and eventually stepped up to achieve equality and basic rights. He founded his own political party and wrote compelling speeches that resounded across ethnic lines, calling for unified, free Congo.
Belgium reluctantly handed over power in 1960, making Lumumba the first prime minister. However, in the concession ceremony, Belgian King Baudouin commended the “humanitarian” work of his late King Leopold II. Lumumba, who was not scheduled to speak, took to the podium to deliver a powerful speech that has immortalized him as a hero. He called attention to Belgium’s violent mistreatment of the Congolese for 75 years, including a dark period in which gruesome acts of violence and coercion were used to extract valuable rubber to fuel Belgian wealth, which the King tried to hide from the world. Lumumba also made sure everyone listening knew that independence was achieved by the demand of the Congolese, who persevered through these hardships. Too powerful a figure for the US empire during the Cold War, Lumumba was assassinated by the CIA a year later, but he will always be remembered for his courage.
Since then, the country has seen a slew of corrupt leaders and civil wars, propped up by colonial powers. Ever since the country’s borders were drawn up by Belgian settlers in 1885, without consideration for the hundreds of ethnic groups that existed there, Congo has endured crisis after crisis. In some areas, child soldiers grow up in rebel groups, institutionalized into violence. China has not yet fulfilled its promise of improving the country’s infrastructure in exchange for heaps of coltan and cobalt which it owns and profits from, extracted through slave labour. From rubber to minerals, oppression and greed continues to decide the fate of the population of 100 million.
Meanwhile, the people of Congo are resilient and take agency, and the book features countless postcards of Congolese inventors, activists, and humanitarians. We learn about heroes like Balezi Bagunda, a former child soldier who became a boxer and advocated for boys’ rights. Congolese continue to resist and advocate for change, and support and awareness are needed. In one of Congo’s darkest periods, the 19th century, the international community put an end to the violence of the rubber trade when they found out about Belgium’s crimes against humanity and protested. This is one example of history acting as a blueprint for the future.
Trueman ends the novel with a depiction of a bar in Goma, a city which has survived volcanic eruptions, Ebola outbreaks, and has lived amid rebel wars for three decades. Despite these conditions, they continue to live life, finding culture and joy, commodities which cannot be stolen from them.
Get a copy of Postcards from Congo from an independent bookstore.
To learn more about Lumumba’s legacy, watch the moving spoken word poem, “The Rise of Patrice Lumumba | What REALLY Happened?” by George the Poet on YouTube.
