A few years ago, I was grounded at Maiduguri airport in northern Nigeria, a storm coming up out of the desert to the north meaning that no planes could leave until evening. I spent this time in the dust-blown lounge drinking coffee with a pilot. Originally from Barcelona, he now flew unnamed freight around Africa in a series of precarious aircraft, one day in Ghana, the next in Mozambique. I remember at the time thinking that his life would make a good book, and now Giles Foden has written Freight Dogs, a sharp and fast-paced novel that tells the story of the Congo wars of the late 90s and early 00s through the adventures of a freight pilot.
The novel’s protagonist is Manu, the son of a Tutsi farmer in eastern Congo who is sent to a Jesuit boarding school in Bukavu after winning a scholarship. Soon, though, history intrudes, and he watches helplessly as a marauding group of soldiers massacre his family. He’s rescued by another militia group, this time affiliated with the revolutionary Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Manu joins this group – the AFDL – and finds himself at the centre of yet another bloodbath. Foden does a fine job of locating the reader in the maelstrom of this brutal period in Congo’s past, when there were any number of splinter groups looking to make a grab for the power that was slowly slipping from President Mobutu’s grasp.
Recognising that he is not a murderer, Manu escapes, hitching himself to a charismatic Texan, Cogan, who runs a freight company, Normair. He also owns a bar in downtown Entebbe and it’s here that the freight dogs gather: grizzled, hard-drinking men with shady pasts. “Some people call us mercenaries,” Cogan tells him, “mistakenly, we’re not butchers, just carriers.” Cogan needs an African face to join his band of pilots and makes a bet that he can train Manu to fly in a matter of weeks.
The freight dogs are supposedly impartial as far as whom they fly for – whoever will pay the most – and often play one side off against another as the first Congo war unravels into the second. Manu does not find it so easy to escape his own past and soon, as he puts it to himself, “the dog of history” takes “his balls in its mouth”. He finds himself accused of terrible crimes, taken far from home, at risk of losing not only his newfound life as a pilot but even his freedom.
This is Foden’s first novel in 12 years and, at a time when we’re thinking a great deal about the dangers of cultural appropriation, it seems an interesting choice to write wholly from the perspective of a black African. While Ladysmith gave us – brilliantly – scenes from the Zulu camp in its descriptions of the Boer war, it feels much riskier to write a near-contemporary book through the eyes of a young Tutsi caught up in a genocidal war. Zanzibar and The Last King of Scotland were, of course, about white men in Africa, drawing on Foden’s experience growing up in Malawi. The reader will have to decide if Foden has the right to tell this story – to my mind, there’s nothing exploitative or sensationalist about it. Rather, he takes us deep into the heart of a complex war, showing how even the innocent can get caught up in acts of horrifying violence.
• Freight Dogs by Giles Foden is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
