The Mission Song

by John Le Carre. Hodder & Stoughton, 2006.
Cover photograph: Tim FLach/Getty Images.

John Le Carre excels at packaging revelations about corporate and political corruption in an entertaining thriller. He researches his subjects more thoroughly than most current affairs reporters.

His latest book, The Mission Song, is about the East Congo, part of The Democratic Republic of the Congo, where elections just took place on October 29. Conservative estimates claim that around 4 million have been killed in wars and massacres in the Congo since 1998. The East Congo is beautiful and mineral rich. One of these mineral is coltan, short for columbite-tantalite, “If you were unwise enough to dismantle your cellphone, you would find an essential speck of it among the debris.”

A group calling themselves ‘The Syndicate’, plan a coup, a ‘humanitarian’ coup to deliver democracy from the barrel of a gun. The story is told in the first person by Salvo, son of an Irish missionary and an East Congo woman, who is fluent in major and minor African languages. Called a ‘zebra’ by one of the players, he must decide where his allegiance lies – with his white strip or his black one – when he discovers the Syndicate’s real agenda.

Funnily enough (!) in 2004 Mark Thatcher (yes, son of Margaret) was arrested in South Africa with a cache of weapons and charged with planning an assault on Equatorial Guinea. The idea was to overthrow the ruler-tyrant and install a puppet president, who would then turn over a large slice of the country's considerable oil revenues to what was known as "the Syndicate".
If you want to know more about how The Congo was sabotaged from the beginning of its independence, then borrow the DVD in our collection, Lumumba.

- Ines