Adventure Story in the Congo

By: Anthony Stidolpd, Natal Witness, 13 June 2007

LOOSELY structured as an old fashioned adventure story, this novel – as it somewhat cursory title indicates – is set in a newly independent Congo, at a time when the country was threatening to descend into political turmoil.

Its plot line is fairly simple. Raised by his grandparents on a farm in the Natal midlands, Donovan ‘Mac’ Mackay is unjustly expelled from school. With few choices left open to him he decides to take a job as a mercenary, working as guard at a logging camp. After a crash course in basic military tactics he finds himself pitched into a situation for which he is not particularly well prepared, up against a enemy who remains largely unseen and who knows the environment much better than he does. Trying to make sense of it all he eventually winds up becoming one of the hunted.
A one time resident of the midlands himself, author J.A. Dunbar has written a book that contains no big surprises but manages to recreate the violent, topsy-turvy atmosphere of this former Belgian colony at a time when it was one of the biggest news stories in the world.

There are the odd gaps and loose fittings in the storyline itself (I feel, for example, that he could have done more to place his tale in its wider political context) and the novel lacks the vertical take-off it might have benefited from but, after a slow start, does develop momentum, particularly during the scenes in which Mac and his colleagues are sent into the jungle to rescue a group of nuns.

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By Lynne Wacther, Books and Leisure June – August 2007

Set predominantly against the backdrop of the Congo in the 1960’s, Congo ’63 could have been written in the 21st century – as the problems of ethnic violence and the greed of the western world for Africa’s minerals have changed little.
Our hero, Mac, leads a lonely, yet happy life on a farm in Kwa-Zulu Natal. His grandparents and their trusted Zulu farm-hand play an important role in shaping Mac’s life. Driven only by the need for money to rescue his beloved farm, he accepts an offer to become a mercenary in the Congo for six months. Mac leaves behind his first love, and it is only her letters and the belief that he’ll return home that keep him going through the horrors of brutality among the mercenaries, and keeps him alive in an unreal world, where white men kill the tribal members who want to protect their forest from deforestation.
The significance of the opening chapter of Congo ’63 only becomes apparent in the last chapters of the book. In between, we journey with Mac from his beloved farm in Natal, to the horrors of mercenary life in the Congo, to Ireland and to France. The atrocities of ethnic violence, the greed of the Western world for Africa’s minerals and even the export of the Congo’s exotic birds made me relies that very little has changed in over 40 years.
A bond develops between Mac and a novice missionary nun, Lily, to whom he entrusts extremely valuable jewelry. When Mac returns home and discovers his grandfather has squandered all the money he had sent home to save the farm, he sets out to find Lily and together they make a far-reaching decision that seems to contradictory to Mac’s nature. In a surprise and disturbing twist at the end we realize the tremendous impact mercenary life has had on Mac.
Despite the brutality, this is an easy, absorbing read that left may questions in my mind as I found the ending to be unexpected and unresolved.