No Mercy:  A Journey To The Heart Of The Congo, by Redmond O’Hanlan

This book was one that was somewhat disappointing to me.  A great deal of that springs from the worldview of the author himself, who went on a trip to the Republic of Congo in search of natural beauty and an investigation into lakes with mysterious reports of cryptids (namely a sauropod of some kind) and found himself involved in a great deal of shamanistic superstition, to which he himself added his own hostility to Christianity and biblical religion and his own evolutionary superstition.  Throughout this book I had the distinct and not very positive impression that the author was largely unaware of the fact that he was an immense hypocrite, looking down on the obvious problems that were faced by the people around him but unable and unwilling to get to the root causes of their failures in spiritual bondage as well as political oppression under communist rule.  Apparently the author had to feign (or may have actually possessed) some sort of leftist perspective, since he acquired the not altogether flattering nickname of Redso from one of the Americans who traveled with him for part of the way, but it did not make for enjoyable reading.

The book itself is divided into four parts that show the author’s travels throughout various parts of Africa.  First the author and a group of associates acquires through bribery various necessary visas and paperwork to leave Brazzaville and travel up the Congo to a regional city that appears to be mainly a boat town.  After that the author makes a detour to the northwestern part of Congo as far as he can go, finding a great deal of superstitious belief not dissimilar from the animism explored in Liberia by Graham Greene and others.  After being somewhat stranded the author and his party make their way to a dangerous lake whose inhabitants have a murderous hostility to one of the people with the author because he had reported their tribal chief to the capital authorities for his demands for bribes from him on a previous trip to the area.  After a dramatic rescue of a baby gorilla the author makes his way back from Congo, poorer and in his own mind wiser and compassionate for his efforts, after having suffered much and seen much in the way of life in the obscure and remote Republic of Congo.

As someone who is unfamiliar with the area, I am not sure about what led the author to write the book he did.  He sees no cryptids, sadly, and though he sees lots of birds and plants he does not add anything to the knowledge of life in the Congo.  Throughout his journey he witnesses slavery and problems of identity and sees the frustrating way that even along the river one can go two or three villages upstream or downstream and find tribes with mutually unintelligible languages from one’s own, a fact which dramatically hinders the unity of the area or its ability to think on a larger scale than one’s own personal problems and one’s own narrow mindset.  The author, of course, fancies himself to be a broad-minded person, and is certainly observant even where he is not insightful.  If the author is aiming at people who think like he does, he will probably find a lot more support for his views, but as for me, I found this book deeply and sadly disappointing because the author’s worldview blinded him to the reality of what he was seeing and reporting on, and left him able only to think as a materialist rather than someone with an understanding of the deeper aspects and layers of reality.