Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I think the translation hindered this book. There were many things that just didn't flow or make much sense but at not fault to the author. Otherwise I learned a lot from this book about the history of the Congo

I'm waffling between 3 and 4 stars for In the Belly of the Congo. It was good; but not engaging. This could be because it was a translation; something often seems to get lost in the nuances and flow when it's translated to another language (from one to any language, not just English).
There are two POVs, 45 years apart, in this novel. The first one takes up about 70% of the novel and is, unfortunately, lackluster in comparison to the second. In fact it frustrated me that by the end of the novel you could tell the author had intentional written 'down' the first POV so it sounded less educated and made you think a certain way. While this may seem like brilliant writing (and it maybe is at an academic review level); it does not make this an enjoyable book to read, at least for me. The latter half of the book has an eloquence far above that of the first. With wonderful lines like this:
<i>"A woman who'll teacher her child that no one is a prison of her genes, that life is a far richer adventure and not just an endless trial against the gods and their plots."</I>

Even if the writing was only subpar for me; there is no doubt that In The Belly of the Congo tells a really important historical story that (I'm betting) most don't know. I certainly had no idea that in the World's Fair of 1958 (not that long ago!) there was an 'exhibit' of Congolese natives that was set-up like a zoo. It allowed visitors to the Fair to see the Congolese natives in their "natural form" by setting up a stage with bedding, food, cooking implements, etc. like they might have at home; and then those who had come to 'act' in the event were asked to show their culture.
This might sound like an interesting way, pre-video and Internet to show a culture; but in actual fact it was a cage to the Congolese actors. These people were put on display, for almost no compensation, to allow a bunch of white folks to gain money and notoriety. It's truly disgusting; and this is well conveyed by the end of the novel.

If nothing else I would encourage folks to learn about this awful exploitation; even if you don't chose to read the book.

Please note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an honest and unbiased review.

As a fan of multi-generational stories and a ongoing student of colonial history and reconciliation, I really looked forward to reading this one. As I was reading, it didn't take me long to realize what little I knew about the colonial history of the Belgium Congo. This put me at a disadvantage as I had no knowledge of the significance of the names, places and circumstances mentioned throughout the story. that being said, Ngala writes with beautiful prose and it is clear that he wrote this story with feeling and purpose. My recommendation: This is a powerful story that would be best appreciated if the reader has some understanding of the history of the Belgium Congo or is prepared to take the time to learn and do further research as they immerse themselves in this story.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with an advanced reader copy.

I started reading this book and then switched to audio. Then I gave up. Lots and lots of names and I just didn’t get where it was going and didn’t enjoy the writing style. Not the right type of book for me

In the Belly of the Congo was a very interesting read for me. It pointed out the problems that many African nations seem to have in self government and how the mentality of warring tribes colors how they have been reduced to being made slaves in their own country. It is a sad commentary on how the enlightened take advantage of those who live in different society types. It was disturbing for sure!

In the Belly of the Congo is a novel originally written in French and translated into English. Through two parts, It tells the story of an African princess who falls in love with a Belgian administrator and is taken from what is now the Republic of Congo to Brussels to be put on display in a human zoo at the World's Fair in 1958. She goes missing and 45 years later, her niece searches for answers about her aunt’s disappearance.

I was really excited to read this book, but unfortunately I didn't enjoy the writing and had a hard time getting into the story. There was a lot of good of information about the effects of colonialism in Africa (which I liked learning more about) but couldn't connect with the style of writing.

For me, it was 3 stars.

Thank you to Simon Schuster Canada and Netgalley for providing me with the advance copy in exchange for my honest opinions.

This was such an interesting take on this time in history. I love an intergenerational story, and this definitely satisfies that. I would highly recommend!

Read if you like: multigenerational stories
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A tale told in two parts, the book looks at the experiences of Tshala Nyota, who falls in love with a Belgian administrator and ends up being taken to Belgium for the 1958 World Expo and put on display. She then disappears.
Then, her niece goes to Brussels in 2003 to further her education and find her missing aunt.
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Overall the story was interesting but I found it hard to follow and it felt more like a nonfiction book. If you’re interested in learning colonial history and its impacts this is a great book!

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Loved this book, beautiful writing, very poignant. Just wow

3.5 Stars

This novel has two timelines, though events in both are connected to the 1958 World’s Fair hosted by Belgium. Trying to portray itself as a benevolent colonial power, the country, in its pavilion, included a mock village where Congolese people were put on daily display. This became known as the world’s last human zoo.

After her death in 1958, Princess Tshala Nyota, daughter of King Kena Kwete III of the Kuba people in Congo, recounts her life and the journey that brought her to Belgium after she fell in love with a white Belgian administrator and fled from her father’s rage. Her story, addressed directly to her niece, comprises the first part of the novel.

The second time period is 2005. Nyota Kwete, the princess’s niece, has returned to the Congo and is visiting her grandfather in a hospital. She spent the previous two years in Brussels where she had been sent for a university education and to discover what happened to her aunt who disappeared in 1958. In the second part of the novel, she speaks of her time in Belgium and how and what she learned about the fate of her namesake.

My knowledge of Congolese history is very limited so I appreciated the chronological historical overview of the former Belgian Congo at the beginning of the novel. Some of the historical figures mentioned in this introduction (e.g. Patrice Lumumba and Joseph-Désiré Mobutu) actually appear as characters in the novel.

I did not like the writing style. There is much too much telling and not enough showing. Then there are the unnecessary anecdotes and digressions. Nyota in her conversation with her grandfather describes a walk to a theater and names streets but then ends with, “’okay, don’t worry about all those street names, they really don’t matter.’” The same speaker says, “Versace is an Italian brand that some of our stars of the rumba scene have transformed into an urban totem. But really, that’s got nothing to do with our story. I should stop going off on tangents.” Then she tells the friend whom she has brought with her “to speak simply, without any unnecessary detours”!? Sometimes the dialogue just seems like an information dump: “Unilever (the company to which the state ceded half of our sacred forests at the start of the 1970s).”

The dialogue certainly doesn’t seem natural: “We headed toward the Bois de la Cambre, the sporadic clicking of his bicycle spokes setting the pace for our steps along the sidewalk, now wet from a little shower that had quickly come and gone. In the distance, towards Flagey, along the Ixelles Ponds where I would go every other Sunday or so to commune with a play by Maryse Condé or the poetry of the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, whose work my previous boyfriend had adored, the firefighters’ sirens wailed and their lights spun in a kaleidoscope of brilliant flashes.” Who speaks like this? Nyota stops to explain to her grandfather the meaning of words like stock market and psychologist but then makes geographic and literary references that would mean nothing to him?

There is little to differentiate the dialogue of aunt and niece. This is an example of the princess’s narration: “you lived in a city where a melody composed by an incorrigible seducer could make allies of men in cassocks and those with military decorations, each trying to determine the sex of the Angel of the Apocalypse. And that if you were that dark-skinned angel, you could follow the river’s flow toward exile, never knowing if it would ever end, or even leave you a voice so that you might still pretend you were a Black god at an ungodly bacchanal.”
The novel excels in depicting the human cost of colonialism. I definitely found similarities between the cultural genocide experienced by the Congolese and Indigenous Peoples in Canada. The princess is educated in a Christian school run by nuns and when she references a custom of her people, “The Belgian nun almost died laughing, stunned that I still held on to ‘those beliefs shared by Beelzebub’s children.’” Attitudes of colonizers are obvious in the unmarked graves of children found in residential schools in Canada and the keeping of “more than two hundred fetuses, skulls, and other African skeletal remains” by Belgian institutions.

And it is so sad that so much has not changed. The villagers in the World’s Fair display are subjected to racist comments and gestures: “some adolescents from a classical high school in Flemish Brabant tossed bananas over the fence around the village . . . [and] some visitors started to whoop like monkeys.” And Nyota witnesses a Congolese soccer player being subjected to insults, “’Monkey! Monkey! Go back to your jungle!’”

The message is that Belgium must critically confront its colonial legacy. A government minister in the novel states that “Belgium wasn’t yet ready to reopen that painful page from its past.” And recent events indicate this is true: In December 2022 there were plans for human remains, three skulls from the colonial era, to be exhibited and auctioned in Belgium (https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5466/Auction-house%E2%80%99s-offer-of-human-skulls-is-evidence-that-Belgium%E2%80%99s-colonial-past-is-also-its-present).

Despite the horrors depicted, the book does end on a positive note. Nyota’s grandfather, a former king, says, “’It’s not the wounds they inflict upon each other that matter the most once time finally lifts the veil from our illusions. What matters . . . is that the children who come after learn to build a less repugnant world than the one they inherited.’” He even goes on to tell a Belgian visitor how Belgians can create a better future: “’while you can do nothing more for my daughter, there in the land of your ancestors where she rests, day and night, season after season, tens of thousands of others are arriving . . . ‘” Another character earlier also mentions that immigration and “open borders were the solution and not the problem” for menopausal Europe where a declining birth rate may bring about a collapse of the workforce.

Its subject matter makes this book an essential read. It informs about Belgian’s colonial past and its devastating impact and serves as a mirror for the colonial history of other countries. Unfortunately, the writing style is not an asset. Anyone considering reading the book might want to play some background music by Wendo Kolosoy, the father of Congolese rumba, who makes an appearance in the novel.

Overall, I enjoyed the story and found the writing compelling in parts. As someone who doesn't know the history of the Congo or of the Belgiums role in Congo I appreciate the way this story wove in history and its lasting impact and how far it reaches. I love the idea of the dual timeline and how it connects to the World Expo.

What made me pause:
- given the story is told by two women MCs, sometimes the writing was a little odd and the perspective was hard to connect to when it's coming from a male writer. Men writing female MCs can often be a challenge and I found that held true at times.
- the translation may have impacted the writing and ability to effectively share the story as intended.
- at times I felt like I was reading more of a textbook or non-fiction recount of history rather than a story inspired by the events. Again, this may be a challenge due to the translation not capturing it as intended.

Not knowing much about the history of the Congo and the more recent Belgian influence on its history and people, I welcomed reading and reviewing this book. Apart from a somewhat jumbled writing style (due to the translation from the French perhaps?), the history and disappearance of Princess Tshala is poignant and ultimately tragic.

In 1958 (just two years before Congo’s independence), Belgium held the World’s Fair and the centrepiece of the host country’s pavillion was a “Congolese village” which included Congolese men and women there under questionable circumstances. While they may have thought it would demonstrate their country’s role as a benevolent colonial power, it led instead to shocking incidents of racism and made clear the continued utter dehumanization of the Congolese by the colonizers.

In the Belly of the Congo takes this event as a focal point to tell the story of one woman, Princess Tshala Nyota Moele, daughter of King Kena Kwete III of the Kuba people. Early in the book, Tshala, now dead, becomes our narrator as she tells her story to her niece and namesake Nyota, now a university student in 2005 in Belgium. Tshala recounts the events that led up to her finding herself as part of the exhibit beginning when she was in secondary school in Congo and fell in love with a Belgian. Then, the narrative skips ahead to 2005 and Nyota takes up the story, telling her father, Tshala’s brother, what she has discovered about what happened to his sister.

Ndala weaves this story of a fictional princess in and around real-life people and events. From Patrice Lumumba (independent Congo’s first leader) to dictator Joseph Mobutu, from Belgian King Baudoin to Congolese musician Wendo Kolosoy, real-life people wander in and out of Tshala’s story. With Tshala and Nyota as our eyes, we confront the many incidents of racism and othering. He shows how Congolese people, their art, and their country are seen as both “exotic” and “primitive”, something for the Belgians to consume rather than respect.

I found myself drawn into the stories of Tshala and her niece. As it focuses on two main time periods, the novel spotlights certain events, drawing parallels and connections and showing that in many ways, things haven’t changed. The scope of the book allows Ndala to include many different events and ideas and he effectively balances the fictional tale with exposition about historical events.

One of the reasons I love reading historical fiction is its ability to teach me about people, places, and events I knew little or nothing about. It has been quite some time since I read King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild about the history of colonization in the Congo and its focus was on earlier times, essentially, that led up to the events that take place in this book. But you don’t need to read that book (though you could, it’s very informative) because Ndala has provided a very helpful “Chronological Overview of the Former Belgian Congo (1885-2005)” as a prologue to In the Belly of the Congo.

Ndala now lives in Canada and in a recent Toronto Star article, he reflected on what he’d learned about the Truth and Reconciliation process here: “I knew very little about the colonial story in Canada, nothing about the schools and how children were treated,” he said. “I was really shocked about the similarities with the cultural genocide we faced in the Congo, and with how the majority of Canadians were ignorant because so much had been hidden, as our past had been hidden from us. It made me aware that we—the colonized—better take up our pens.” Ndala has indeed taken up his pen and we are fortunate that he has.

I wish to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review. I was very interested in reading this. I joined a small group tenting in the Congo in 1990 and learned a bit about the oppressive Belgian colonialism. There was violence and deaths, cultures destroyed, artifacts stolen, and natural resources mined for their wealth. I skimmed through much of the book. I regret that I had difficulty with the writing style and the structure of the book and failed to engage with the story.

I thought some of it read like a dull history text and was stilted in tone. The characters lacked depth. I was not feeling the human emotions, and the pacing seemed off to me. I thought the book contained unnecessary anecdotes, fables and, too many digressions, non-essential names of people and places. I kept trying but wasn't getting absorbed in the narrative, which I sometimes found flat and dull.

This is the first of the author Blaise Ndala's novels to be translated into English, and his French books have been highly praised and awarded literary prizes. He is a Canadian/Congolese lawyer who emigrated to Canada in 2007. His literary works won the Prix Koarouma (Switzerland) in 2021 and the Prix Ivoire for African Literature. In 2014 he won the Ottawa book award in French, and in 2019 won the Combat des Livres. I don't understand why I wasn't riveted by the story. Maybe the editing or translation didn't work for me.

Central to the story was the human cost of colonialism. In 1958, a World's Fair was held in Brussels. one of its seven pavilions was to showcase their success in the Congo. Congolese people were displayed in a 'human zoo' where racist crowds ridiculed them. One of the people put on display was princess Tshala, daughter of the king of the Kuba people. She vanished. Forty-five years later, her niece is in Brussels and on a mission to learn what happened to her. Human zoos seem so wrong by modern standards, and similar exhibitions displayed indigenous people in European countries and in North America. I must add that the cover is gorgeous.

It is evident that the author did a great deal of meticulous research, providing us with a history of the exploitation of the Congolese people and its country's rich resources.

A novel that transcends borders and brings you from Africa to Europe through the mystery of a missing princess. It speaks to the generational impact of colonization and leads you along the trail of an interesting mystery.

I enjoyed this novel but overall found it a bit anticlimactic. The first half that follows Tshala is most captivating, in my opinion, and as her niece's perspective enters the story, it slowed the pace for me and I did not find the second half as memorable.

Thank you Netgalley for my ARC edition.

The life and disappearance of Princess Tshala Nyota Moelo is the centre of "In the Belly of the Congo". Decades later, her niece of in search of answers to bring peace to her grandfather. This novel is important in bringing forth colonial history that may not be as well known to the average reader. The events happening can researched to find out more information, which gives the reader more knowledge into Belgiums colonial past. The incidents shown in Tshala's life help show how colonial powers believed themselves to have the ability to get away with things with no repercussions.

The only thing I wasn't a huge fan of in this novel was the writing style. I felt very lost in part one, only slightly understanding what was happening. Part two was better, using the information found in part one to elevate the narrative.

Blaise Ndala navigates with a poetic pen the troubled waters of the time of the Belgian Congo. This multigenerational novel explores the history and human cost of colonialism in the country. Through a series of events, the story takes place in Brussels and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1958 and in 2003.

Reading is not always easy and is enjoyable only at times. The author regularly uses the past tense which is not bad in itself. However annoying throughout this book is the writing style. The prose is a bit stilted and the tone very oral, I think it would have preferred to listen to it rather than reading it. So many narrative parentheses are opened by the author, that the strong moments are drowned in a rain of endless sentences and paraphrases, chronicles and anecdotes, fables and gossip. It is hard to connect to the story and the characters. Even with all the unnecessary detours we still learn a little about the history of the Belgian Congo but we get lost more than we find ourselves there.

I found this book hard to read and even more to review.

In the Belly of the Congo tells the story of the far reaching impact of Belgiums reign in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Canadian Congolese author Blaise Ndala tells a more recent history of Belgiums role in the Congo, with the 1958 World Expo.
Having read the non-fiction ‘King Leopolds Ghost’ by Adam Hothschild, I was really excited to read a more recent account by a Congolese author, and yet I found the writing just fell a little flat for me. This book is translated from French, so it may be a case of lost in translation, but I found the writing style rather dull, and it was challenging to absorb myself in the story as I found my mind was frequently wandering. I often struggle with male authors writing female characters, and I found a similar case with this book, being that it’s told from the point of view of 2 women, a lot of the dialogue and inner monologue was hard to relate to as a woman myself.

I do think that this is an important read. I think that what happened under King Leopolds reign in the Congo is vastly overlooked and underrepresented, and I really liked that this was a more recent interpretation of just how long and far Belgiums role in the Congo reaches. People think it was such a long time ago, and having family in Belgium myself, I know that it is still swept under the rug in schools what happened there, and to some degree what is still happening to this day.
It’s so embarrassing to think that In 1958, Belgium really thought it was a good idea to have a Congolese Village with real life black people, and the truth of it is horrific.

Overall I feel this is an important read for historical impact, and what happened in the Congo needs to be educated and more spoken about, however, I feel that some of the nuance of the book was lost in translation, as much of it fell flat in terms of pacing and attention grabbing and maintaining.

This is part mystery, part history of the political climate in Belgium and the Congo in the late 1950s. The stories weave around one another seamlessly. The first part of the story around Tshala and how she wound up in Belgium was fascinating and fast-paced. I did find the pace of later part of the story around Nyota slower as much more was recounting information that had already occured, rather than us being part of it as it took place. Even so, this was a gripping story that kept me engaged from beginning to end.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4

In the Belly of the Congo is a two timeline story that takes place in Brussels and in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1958 and in 2003. Through a series of events in 1958, an African princess ends up travelling from Kinshasa to Brussels and goes missing during the World"s Fair where a group of people from the 'Belgian Congo' had been put on display in a "village" - essentially a human zoo where they were tormented by racist crowds. Her family never hears from her again and forty-five years later her niece arrives in Brussels to try to find any information she can about what happened to her aunt.

I found this to be a very difficult book to review. The soon-to-be-published English translation of the award-winning French novel by Congolese-Canadian author, Blaise Ndala, is very strong on relaying historical facts about the Democratic Republic of the Congo and showing the tragic human costs of colonialism in Africa. The prose, however, is a bit stilted (possibly because of translation) which makes it a little harder to connect to the story and the characters. An interesting story and a worthwhile read for the historical context alone.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.