Power Is Eaten Whole: On Jason Stearns and the Five Million Dead

Four hundred and sixty highlights. I have never highlighted a book this heavily. Not Taleb, not Fanon, not any of the dense theoretical texts that demand you underline every third sentence just to keep up. This book demanded something different. It demanded witness. Every few paragraphs, Stearns delivers a fact, a scene, a piece of testimony so specific and so terrible that to pass over it without marking it felt like complicity. Four hundred and sixty times I pressed the button, and four hundred and sixty times it was not enough.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is about the Congo wars — the deadliest conflict since World War II, responsible for over five million deaths between 1996 and 2003. But to call it a book “about war” is to miss the point the way calling the Congo “a failed state” misses the point. This is a book about systems. About the long, patient, multi-generational construction of conditions under which five million people could die without the world summoning the will to notice. It is a book about what happens when colonialism erodes every institution, when the Cold War props up a dictator for three decades, when a genocide spills across a border into a country-shaped vacuum, and when nine foreign armies and forty rebel groups fight over the wreckage. It is a book about the opposite of conspiracy: the banality of catastrophe.

The Opposite of Occam’s Razor

Stearns opens with a methodological confession that doubles as a warning. He is not going to simplify. He will not give you a clean narrative with heroes and villains. He will give you the grime:

At the height of the war, there were upwards of forty Congolese armed groups in the eastern Congo alone, while nine different African states deployed troops. This complexity has thwarted journalists and diplomats alike, but the book suggests: beware of oversimplification; it will get you into trouble. In this sense, I recommend the opposite of William of Occam’s famous razor: We should not always try to simplify for the sake of theoretical clarity. Get into the grime and grit of the story, rub up against its intricacy.

This is the thesis. Not a political argument but an epistemological one: that the Congo resists the narratives we impose on it, and that the narratives themselves — “ethnic conflict,” “failed state,” “African tragedy” — are part of the machinery that allows the killing to continue. Even Nicholas Kristof, the Times columnist who campaigns for humanitarian crises, initially used the confusion as justification for looking away:

Darfur is a case of genocide, while Congo is a tragedy of war and poverty… . We all have within us a moral compass, and that is moved partly by the level of human suffering. I grant that the suffering is greater in Congo. But our compass is also moved by human evil, and that is greater in Darfur. There’s no greater crime than genocide, and that is Sudan’s specialty.

Stearns treats this reasoning as symptomatic. The Congo does not fit our categories, so we downgrade it. The violence is too diffuse, too multi-causal, too resistant to a single villain. And so five million dead become, in the moral calculus of the newspaper op-ed page, less worthy of attention than two hundred thousand.

The Banality of Catastrophe

Stearns takes Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil as his starting point, but inverts it. The Congo is not the story of a brutal bureaucratic machine. It is the story of the opposite — a country where the state has been so thoroughly eroded that violence becomes everyone’s private initiative:

Instead of being a story of a brutal bureaucratic machine, the Congo is a story of the opposite: a country in which the state has been eroded over centuries and where once the fighting began, each community seemed to have its own militia, fighting brutal insurgencies and counterinsurgencies with each other. It was more like seventeenth-century Europe and the Thirty Years’ War than Nazi Germany.

The implications are devastating. Without a central machine to dismantle, there is no single lever to pull. Without a Fuhrer to capture, there is no clean ending. The violence reproduces itself at every level of society, from the presidential palace to the village roadblock, because the conditions that produce it — poverty, impunity, institutional collapse, ethnic manipulation — are everywhere.

Howard French’s A Continent for the Taking describes a similar dynamic from the journalist’s vantage point — the way the international press corps descended on each crisis and then left, never connecting the episodes into a single story. Stearns does what French could not from outside: he connects the episodes. He shows the system.

A System You Would Join

One of the most quietly devastating passages in the book is a conversation with a Congolese parliamentarian that reads like a thesis statement for the entire catastrophe:

“In the Congo, in order to survive, we all have to be a bit corrupt, a bit ruthless. That’s the system here. That’s just the reality of things. If you don’t bribe a bit and play to people’s prejudices, someone else who does will replace you.” He winked and added, “Even you, if you were thrown into this system, you would do the same. Or sink.”

This is the point at which Stearns departs from most writing about Africa. He is not interested in condemning individuals. He is interested in the system that makes individual choices almost irrelevant. Che Guevara spent a year in the Congo and left, malnourished and depressed, concluding the people “weren’t ready for the revolution.” The Congo, Stearns writes, “has always defied the idealists.” But Stearns is not an idealist. He is something more useful: a systems analyst of human suffering.

The same logic applies to the perpetrators. When Stearns asks a former death squad member why he killed, the answer is not ideology or hatred but the weight of accumulated history:

“You know, you can’t really explain these things. For us soldiers, killing comes easy. It has become part of our lives. I have lost five members of my family during the war. You have to understand that. You have to understand the history of my family — how we were persecuted, then favored by Mobutu, how we were denied citizenship and laughed at at school. How they spat in my face. Then you can judge me.”

The book is full of these moments — men who became killers not through exceptional malice but through the accumulated pressure of a system that offered no other path. This is what Stearns means by dancing in the glory of monsters: the system does not merely tolerate violence. It selects for it.

The Fabrication of Tribes

The ethnic identities that fueled the genocide and the Congo wars were, Stearns shows, largely colonial fabrications hardened into fate. Belgian administrators with rulers and measuring tape went about “rigidifying with physical measurements the previously more fluid boundaries between Tutsi and Hutu identities”:

They drew up hit lists and manned roadblocks, checking identity cards for ethnic identity or just looking for stereotypical Tutsi features: a slender frame, high cheekbones, an aquiline nose. It mattered little that the Hutu and Tutsi identities themselves were historically as much class-based as morphological and that a rich, cattle-owning Hutu could be promoted to become a Tutsi.

Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson documents a parallel process in South Africa — the bureaucratic manufacture of racial categories that then took on lives of their own, becoming the very ground on which people stood to fight. In the Congo, Stearns shows how these imposed categories were internalized by both sides and weaponized across generations. A Tutsi officer, having seized a village, “was asked by one of the few Hutu who had stayed to lift up his shirt so the villagers could see if he had a tail, so sure were they that he was a devil.” Morphology became destiny. In Congolese French, Stearns notes, the word morphologie is known to illiterate farmers — “it connoted a vulnerability, a danger. ‘His morphology is suspicious,’ one sometimes heard people saying when they suspected someone of being Tutsi. As if you could tell someone’s subversion by his bone structure.”

The consequence is a vicious cycle that Stearns identifies as the central dynamic of the region:

It is amazing to what extent the ethnic stereotypes and conflicts that were born in Rwanda have contaminated the rest of the region. No other image plagues the Congolese imagination as much as that of the Tutsi aggressor. No other sentiment has justified as much violence in the Congo as anti-Tutsi ideology.

Pilato

Paul Kagame is the most complex figure in the book — guerrilla genius, authoritarian reformer, and architect of interventions that killed tens of thousands. Stearns sketches him with a precision that avoids both hagiography and demonization. The portrait of the young Kagame writing on his thigh with dry grass in a refugee camp school is one of the book’s most indelible images:

When we started primary school, we used to study under a tree. We used to write on our thighs with a piece of dry grass, and the teacher would come over and look at your thigh, and write his mark with another piece of dry grass. You develop some sense of questioning, some sense of justice, saying, “Why do I live like this? Why should anybody live like this?”

The boy who wrote on his thigh grew into a man of ferocious discipline. His nickname was “Pilato” — Pontius Pilate — “because of the harsh way he dealt with any violation of the military code.” American generals studied his tactics and praised him as one of the best guerrilla leaders in decades. But Kagame’s obsession with order and control also meant that the systematic killing of Hutu refugees in the Congo — tens of thousands, mostly with hatchets and ropes — could not have happened without orders from the top. A Belgian missionary observed of the soldiers: “They acted as if they were just doing their job, following orders. They didn’t seem out of control.”

Michela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb picks up this thread and follows it for hundreds of pages, documenting how Kagame’s control apparatus extended to the assassination of dissidents abroad. But Stearns was here first, laying the groundwork by showing how the genocide created a moral framework in which almost anything could be justified. “If 80,000 refugees died in the Congo, that may be terrible but nonetheless minor compared with the 800,000 in Rwanda,” he writes, describing the logic that paralyzed international response. The American defense attache in Kigali put it with obscene clarity: “The 2,000 deaths were tragic; on the Rwandan scene the killings were hardly a major roadblock to further progress. Compared to the 800,000 dead in the genocide, the 2,000 dead was but a speed bump.”

Where Elephants Fight

The most common excuse Stearns encounters, from commanders on every side, is an old Congolese proverb:

“Where elephants fight, the grass is trampled.” It was a convenient metaphor. Almost every commander I met in the region used it when I asked them about abuses against civilians.

The proverb naturalizes the killing. It turns mass murder into weather. Stearns refuses the metaphor at every turn, insisting on the human decisions behind each atrocity. But he also shows how the system makes the metaphor feel true to the people inside it — how the structures of power are so vast and so entrenched that individual choice becomes vanishingly small. A Congolese friend describes this as “the reverse Midas effect”:

“Anything touched by politics in the Congo turns to shit. It doesn’t matter if the Holy Father himself decides to run for president, he will inevitably come out corrupt, power-hungry, and guilty of breaking all ten of the holy commandments.”

This is not cynicism. This is an accurate description of a system that has been designed, across centuries of colonial extraction and Cold War manipulation and post-independence kleptocracy, to corrupt everything it touches. The lack of responsible politics, Stearns insists, “is not due to some genetic defect in Congolese DNA, a missing ‘virtue gene,’ or even something about Congolese culture. Instead, it is deeply rooted in the country’s political history.”

A Zaire-Shaped Hole

Mobutu’s state was not merely weak. It was deliberately hollowed out by its own ruler, who understood that functional institutions would produce rivals. Stearns describes the army Mobutu created — or rather, uncreated:

Over the past twenty years, Mobutu had cannibalized his own state, particularly his army. Not surprisingly for a leader who had taken power through a coup, Mobutu feared his own officers the most, and he made sure that they would not have the wherewithal to contest his power. He gutted his regular army, depriving it of resources and salaries, while he invested millions in separate, paramilitary units — the presidential guard and the garde civile — which he then pitted against each other.

The result was an army that existed in name only. Soldiers became known as katanyama — “meat cutters” — because they would seize choice cuts from butchers at the market. Mobutu himself acknowledged it with characteristic brazenness: “You have guns; you don’t need a salary.” The Economist coined the definitive epitaph: “They call it a country. In fact it is just a Zaire-shaped hole in the middle of Africa.”

This is the context that made the Congo wars possible. Rwanda did not invade a functioning state. It invaded a vacuum — and the vacuum did not resist because it had been engineered not to. When Kabila’s forces finally reached Kinshasa, one of their first stops was the Central Bank:

The future vice governor of the bank had the honor of opening the vaults, only to find the huge cement chambers empty. A lonely fifty French franc note was left in one of the drawers, “as an insult.”

Lies Come Up in the Elevator

Kabila — the first one, Laurent, the rebel who became president — is the book’s most tragicomic figure. Che Guevara assessed him decades before his rise to power with devastating accuracy:

The only man who has genuine qualities of a mass leader is, in my view, Kabila. The purest of revolutionaries cannot lead a revolution unless he has certain qualities of a leader, but a man who has qualities of a leader cannot, simply for that reason, carry a revolution forward. It is essential to have revolutionary seriousness, an ideology that can guide action, a spirit of sacrifice that accompanies one’s actions. Up to now, Kabila has not shown that he possesses any of these qualities.

The Rwandans chose him precisely because he was weak. Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s intelligence chief, was blunt: “We weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.” And so the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire was born — “a grandiose name for a group that initially had little political or military significance other than providing a smoke screen for Rwandan and Ugandan involvement.”

When Kabila finally met Mobutu for negotiations on a boat, the scene reads like something from Garcia Marquez. Mobutu was so weak he could not climb thirty-one steps; his limousine had to be driven aboard on a plank. Kabila refused to look him in the eyes, “afraid that the Old Leopard still had enough magical power left to curse him with his stare.” After fighting Mobutu for thirty-two years, the rebel had little to say to his foe. Hand over power, he told him. Mobutu limped off, “refusing to strike a deal. Mandela, seventy-eight himself, had to prop him up as he walked to his car.”

Five Million Dead in Ones and Twos

The most important thing about the Congo wars’ death toll is its mechanism. There was no industrial architecture of genocide. The majority died of hunger, disease, and displacement — what Stearns calls “side effects of the conflict”:

How do you cover a war that involves at least twenty different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective? How do you put a human face on a figure like “four million” when most of the casualties perish unsensationally, as a result of disease, far away from television cameras?

This question haunts every page. Stearns answers it the only way possible: one story at a time. Beatrice, the Hutu woman who walked 250 miles through the jungle, seeing “flurries of white and blue butterflies alight on fresh corpses, feeding off their salt and moisture.” A woman forced to bite through her own umbilical cord and keep walking. A minister in Kisangani who watched his neighbor’s child bleed to death in a wheelbarrow: “I buried him in my compound, right next to Sophie. There was no time for a proper funeral. Actually, you can find hundreds of bodies buried in people’s gardens around the city for the same reason. We are living on top of our dead.”

A Rwandan survivor put the moral question with a clarity that no diplomat or editorialist has matched:

“Why do they have to measure one injustice in terms of another? Was the massacre of thousands of innocent people somehow more acceptable because hundreds of thousands had been killed in Rwanda?”

The War Sucked the Life Out of Me

Stearns meets dozens of people whose biographies are the biography of the conflict. One of the most memorable is Papy, a young Tutsi soldier whose body is a map of the wars:

He told the story of the wars by way of scars on his body — a shiny splotch on the back of his head from a piece of Zimbabwean shrapnel in 1999, a long thick scar that bunched up the flesh on his lower thigh from an ex-FAR bullet in 1996. He lifted up his T-shirt to show me a welt on his ribcage where a bullet had perforated his lung. Still, he smoked. “I’m not going to live long anyway, no need talking to me about cancer.”

Papy had killed over a hundred people a day with a rope, strangling refugees on orders from Rwandan intelligence. He told Stearns this calmly, in a steady monotone. “The war sucked the life out of me,” he said. And then, with devastating self-awareness about his own community’s predicament:

“There are also manipulators in the Tutsi community, who will use that fear in their own interest. ‘Oh, we must fight or the Hutu will kill us! Oh, take up your guns or Kabila will exterminate us!’ But you discover later that it isn’t true. We can’t spend the rest of our lives fearing other communities. We have to make that first step.” Then he shook his head. “But the stupid thing is that the Congolese government doesn’t seem to want us. There, too, there are opportunists who use the Tutsi threat to mobilize people. So we are stuck in the middle, between extremists.”

This is the trap. Every community is caught between its own demagogues and the demagogues on the other side, each feeding the other, each proving the other right. Julius Nyerere, the former Tanzanian president, captured it in a metaphor about the Tutsi minority in Burundi that applies to every armed group in the region: “Those who are in power, the minority, they are like one riding on the back of a tiger. And they really want almost a water-tight assurance before they get off the back of the tiger because they feel if they get off the back of the tiger, it will eat them.”

We Have Nowhere to Mourn Our Dead

The massacres at Kasika achieved “mythical status” in the Congo — cited in speeches, taught in schools, invoked at the International Court of Justice. But when Stearns visits the site, he finds something worse than the killing itself. He finds the absence of any reckoning:

Not a single national politician came to visit them and hear their grievances. While Kasika featured in thousands of speeches that lambasted Rwanda and the RCD, no investigation was ever launched, and no compensation was ever offered for any of the victims.

This is the final cruelty of the system: the dead are instrumentalized but never honored. Politicians invoke massacre sites to drum up support and then abandon the survivors to their grief. A Banyamulenge commander told Stearns: “If you go to the high plateau, you won’t see a cemetery. But every family there has lost at least one child, if not more, to the war. Our dead are buried across the Congo. We have nowhere to go and mourn for them.” A survivor at Kasika said the same thing: “They killed any male refugee over the age of twelve. They slit their throats.” When Stearns asked the survivors of a church massacre about Banyamulenge victims, they looked surprised. “Banyamulenge? No. Never.” Each community’s suffering is invisible to every other. The dead are not shared. The grief is not shared. The system ensures that no one’s pain leads to anyone else’s understanding.

The Criminals of Yesterday Become the Recidivists of Tomorrow

Near the end, Stearns delivers a sentence that functions as the book’s bitter epitaph for every peace process, every amnesty, every pragmatic decision to let war criminals go free in the name of stability:

Unfortunately, the impunity has thus far brought little peace, and the criminals of yesterday become the recidivists of tomorrow.

The Congolese are not naive about this. One politician reminded Stearns: “Didn’t General Ulysses Grant give an amnesty for Confederate soldiers after the American Civil War? Didn’t the Spanish do the same for crimes committed under Franco? Why should it be different for us?” The question is sharp. The answer is that it should not be different — but also that amnesty without institutional reform is not peace. It is a pause.

The book ends, fittingly, not with resolution but with a Congolese proverb from the singer Koffi Olomide:

Lokuta eyaka na ascenseur, kasi verite eyei na escalier mpe ekomi. Lies come up in the elevator; the truth takes the stairs but gets here eventually.

Coda

I return to the number. Four hundred and sixty highlights. What does it mean to highlight a passage about a woman biting through her own umbilical cord? What does it mean to press a button on a device while reading about a man who killed a hundred people a day with a rope? It means, at minimum, that you refuse to let your eyes slide past. It means you are trying, however inadequately, to register.

This is what Stearns asks of his reader. Not to solve the Congo. Not to assign blame in a way that satisfies. Not even to fully understand — he is honest that full understanding may be impossible. He asks you to stay in the room. To resist the impulse to simplify, to look away, to measure one injustice against another and thereby diminish both. To hold in your mind, at the same time, that 200,000 people participated in the Rwandan genocide with machetes and that the survivors’ army then killed tens of thousands of refugees with ropes and hatchets, and that both of these facts are true, and that neither cancels the other, and that the system that produced both is still running.

Five million people died. Most of them died of disease and hunger, unsensationally, far from cameras. They died in ones and twos, in villages whose names you will never learn, mourned by families who have nowhere to visit their graves. They died inside a system that was built across centuries by Belgian administrators with measuring tapes, Cold War strategists with checkbooks, and local strongmen with machetes. They died, and the system that killed them called it complexity, and the world that watched them die called it too confusing to cover.

Stearns refuses that. Four hundred and sixty times, I refused it with him.