Congo Dawn by Katherine Scholes

This 600-page novel has everything. There’s a young Australian woman summoned to Africa in the mid-1960s by her dying estranged father, a volatile uprising in the Congo, mercenaries recruited from around the world, and a hunter with memories of a long-lost daughter.

Add to the mix a missionary doctor and his family living in the jungle and ministering to sick Africans (including lepers), a wealthy American woman with mysterious links to the fighting, and support for opposing sides in the Congo from Western and Eastern powers.

Katherine Scholes was born in Tanzania, the daughter of a missionary doctor and an artist. The family left Africa when she was 10, eventually settling in Australia, where she still lives. She has since become a successful author, setting several of her novels in Africa.

This book confronts the dark side of Belgian colonialism and lays bare the appalling genocide during that time, particularly when King Leopold II of Belgium regarded the Congo as his personal fiefdom.

The rebels, known as Simbas, start off with high ideals in their efforts to unseat the pro-Western government after the murder of the Congo’s first prime minister, the pro-socialist Patrice Lumumba, but the troops on the ground were soon out of control. The savagery with which many Simbas treated any Europeans they encountered, and even their own Congolese, is sickening, but it’s based on actual events.

The author has skilfully portrayed the characters of the mercenaries, brought in by the West to defeat the rebels, while witchdoctors lead and influence the Simbas.

Scholes’s accounts of the nkisi, power figures usually kept in sacred huts but stolen by colonial collectors, are chilling but authentic; Congolese artefacts are known to have influenced European artists such as Picasso.

It’s a ripping yarn based on hideous historical events in the Congo, which even now is not at peace.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville