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> Perhaps surprisingly, the least sympathetic characters post-independence in In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz might be the World Bank and IMF employees. Could you

• mycologos 5y ago
  Sure. Maybe the easiest way to sum it up is that I saw them as the most callow actors in the story. Even Mobutu is working under real constraints, he has a whole class of people to keep happy, or else the security apparatus around him will fall and he and his family will go with it, and Congolese politics seem febrile and complex in the best of times. I mean, he's certainly a bad guy. But somehow the badness of his western enablers is worse, because they come from orderly, well-off, educated places, and throughout the book they just seem uninterested in actually understanding the country that they're supposed to be experts on. There's a little section Wrong writes about how promotion in these organizations is often a function of just getting aid out and caring a lot less about what said aid actually does, and nearly all of the elite western characters insist after the fact that, actually, none of what happened is their fault, even as Wrong writes about what seem to be, uh, rather less than diligent efforts to actually assess the effectiveness of their methods.