"Buisine now led the simple life of a river rat," Mealer tells us, "making his run six or seven times a year," pointing out "whirlpools roiling in the deep spots, crocodiles camouflaged in the mud, or, along a wooded island, a tree whose leaves cured hemorrhoids."
Harper's never mentions the agents of repression in such places, because the American public is all too happy with the vainglorious version of the beleaguered white hero challenging the savagery in the heart of darkness. How many stories about Congo involve a River and a Great White Hero challenging the savagery and darkness of the forest?
Harper's tells us nothing about Congo: it is the usual racist nonsense meant to displace the truth. The story is "good" reading, but it is fiction, a mirror reflecting our whiteness back to us. The author even claims that the natives communicate by drums so that villages along the river know the boat is coming before Buisine and the heroic white journalist arrive upstream.
This is the falsification of American consciousness.
To cap the Harper's silly whitewash, the photographer that traveled up river with Mealer is based in Kigali, Rwanda, and everyone in the region knows that you cannot work in and out of Rwanda today and still be telling the truth. Finally, Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur is described by his magazine company as a "tireless advocate for human rights."
And that is why we have more than 10 million dead in Congo since 1996, and millions more in Uganda and Rwanda. These nightmare numbers are the products of the Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations, a contiguous unfolding of fascism in America.
I traveled on this river more than once: in 2007 I also swam two-thirds of the way across it (at Lukutu, where I hit an island and turned back); I also swam across the tributary Lomami (2007) and Lopori (2006) rivers. The Harper's production mirrors the obliviousness of white men in Congo and the even greater obliviousness of white editors, and it is all to satisfy the voracious obliviousness of increasingly stupefied readers.
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