The Villain's Dance

January 29, 2024
The precarity of late-1990s Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of Congo) and the scramble amid the country’s collapse in the wake of the Rwandan genocide shape the freewheeling and inventive latest from Mujila (Tram 83). In Lubumbashi, adolescent Sanza falls into a glue-huffing street gang and is later recruited by intelligence agent Monsieur Guillame to spy on various citizens at the city’s popular rumba bars. A parallel narrative set across the border in Angola follows Tshiamuena, a woman claiming to be centuries old and simultaneously living in Japan, who offers spiritual guidance to Zairians lured by Angola’s diamond mines. She conscripts a young Austrian man named Franz Baumgartner to write her memoirs, but he’s unable to make sense of her shifting stories and eventually flees to Lubumbashi, where he spends nights at the rumba bars, catching the attention of Guillame. As rebels successfully topple president Mobuto Sese Seko’s regime and move toward Lubumbashi, the characters take desperate measures to survive. Mujila’s virtuosic narrative shifts, feverish magical realism, and dizzying chronological leaps make for an intoxicating reading experience. This complex tale bears exquisite fruit.