Updated February 17, 2023

Telling a fast-paced story, I have zeroed in on a small band of characters rather than fully plumbing all the complexities of the Democratic Republic of the Congo—both the joys and nightmares.

No, I have not done total justice to the nature of Congolese families, where grandparents, aunts, and uncles can play such prominent roles. I felt that my readers would care more about the characters—and about real Congolese—if fewer existed to keep track of. Uncles still show up, of course, including my major villain, “Demon Killer.” To another character, he is simply “Uncle Oscar.”

The ever-shifting political scene also does not get its full due in Drone Child. I’ve set the main story in a DRC of the near future, not today’s Congo, so I do not have to squeeze in the dozens of factions of real rebels and others.  

Also, keep in mind that most of the current conflicts are in the eastern part of the country (far from the fictional fighting in the Kinshasa region). President Félix Tshisekedi in August 2021 authorized American Special Forces advisors to go there despite the understandable trepidation of some Congolese. News reports suggested they were to be in the Congo at least several weeks.

May the DRC not become an Afghanistan-style quagmire for the US! Congolese still bitterly associate the Central Intelligence Agency with the 1961 killing of Patrice Lumumba, the popular post-colonial prime minister. They also blame the US for letting Rwandan and Ugandan dictators meddle in national and tribal politics and militarily seize Congolese minerals. Of the millions dead in wars there since the 1990s, too many have died as a result of foreign intervention—African imperialism, abetted or tolerated by outsiders dishing out economic aid. Meanwhile, US firms from Costco to Visa and Starbucks have invested in Rwanda, which has backed murderous rebels in the Congo.

The rebel Congolese Purification Army is my invention with a little help from the late Ray Arco, a veteran Golden Globe judge who contributed to the movie script on which I based Child. A somewhat close real-life equivalent, the Lord’s Resistance Army, metastasized out of Uganda to terrorize parts of the Congo. It has, yes, forced sons and daughters to kill their parents. Thousands of Congolese children have ended up over the years in either rebel or government armies. Citing the now-defunct Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, the Council on Foreign Relations says some in the past have been made to kill relatives or even perform sexual or cannibalistic acts on enemies’ corpses. 

Horrors notwithstanding, certain poverty-driven children may even take their chances and become soldiers by choice. Threatening to halt some military training, the US has sharply reduced the Kinshasa government’s recruitment of child soldiers. But governments and rebels elsewhere, not just Congolese militias, are still on the prowl for young AK-47 fodder. 

Alas, so much of Drone Child reflects horrific realities. I invented the precise details of the gun worship of Demon Killer and the other Purifiers, but people somewhat like that do exist—if not in Africa, then elsewhere. 

Hundreds of gun-lovers brought their AR-15s to rural Pennsylvania, for example, for a giant marriage ceremony in 2018 with the semiautomatics symbolizing “Biblical ‘rods of iron,’” as reported in Vice News. I plead guilty if parts of this book seem like an allegory for politics in a gun-happy place like the United States. The number of people killed here is a fraction of those dying in Congolese wars, but gun deaths in 2021 were still the highest in decades—more than 47,000 homicides and suicides, according to the  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I  also invented many locations, people, and two tribes. I did not want to risk being wrong about actual equivalents where they existed. The river near the home of my hero, Lemba Adula, is imaginary. It’s not the Congo River, which shows up under its real name.  The tall mountain range on the dramatic cover, the idea of the artist, would actually fit in more in the eastern Congo than the parts I write about the most. The Kia Tribe—Tiny and Demon Killer’s foes—is fictional. So is the Ngunda Tribe, the possible tribe of Lemba and the definite one of Mpasi, his fellow child soldier. The name “Lemba”? Well, “Ko Lemba” in Lingala can mean “to soften, to exhaust, to calm”; certainly Lemba did his best to exhaust those who got in his way. “Mpasi” has many meanings in context but can mean “pain,” as in childbirth or in other forms. It is most appropriate for the kind of life Mpasi ended up living and the cruelties he inflicted on others.

To be more precise, the majority of the Congolese names came from Junior Boweya. Although Drone Child is fiction, he and another fact checker-critiquer helped me ground my thinking in reality. I had relied on books, magazine and newspaper articles, online forums, YouTubes, and websites of groups like Human Rights Watch. But even as a novel, Child could never come across as authentic without guidance from Congolese people.

Junior is a translator, software localization advisor, and businessman in Kinshasa who dreams of starting an e-scooter business someday. With his permission, I wrote his hoped-for scooter business into Child to thank him. Yes, my endless appreciation, Junior! In case you’re curious, Junior is Mungala (an Équateur-region tribe) by his father and Muluba (Kasaï region) by his mother. Junior vetted Child for accuracy and cultural sensitivity. He also gave me valuable editorial suggestions and other feedback from a Congolese perspective on the novel as a novel. Junior even passed on some rumors about real pirates living in the Congo, although we could not confirm that. 

Press reports do tell of ship hijackings off West Africa. Any piracy by Congolese despite the tiny coastline?

Far more obvious, unfortunately, is the less than stellar DRC record of the United Nations, which Lemba briefly slams in Chapter 13. The Associated Press, BBC, and Africanews have told of some UN troops’ crimes as well as their frequent fecklessness in preventing massacres. Infuriated protesters want the UN out of the eastern DRC and the government in far-off Kinshasa to do its job. Hundreds of armed groups are kidnapping children, killing, and raping in the Kivu region despite the presence of 20,000 UN soldiers and the expenditure of billions. Some rapist UN “peacekeepers” have also impregnated Congolese women, just as Lemba says. Thousands of blue-helmeted soldiers are well-behaved and dedicated, but the rogues’ crimes have set back the efforts of all the troops. The US has been among UN troops’ most generous financial supporters.

Let me add that Lemba’s opinions on the UN, politics, and other matters are his own and not necessarily Junior’s even though they are plausibly Congolese. 

The same caveat would apply to my other fact checker-critiquer, Jean Félix Mwema Ngandu, a former Mandela Fellow and leader of a democracy-promoting organization called the Buswe Institute. I found Jean Félix through a journalist working for a well-known news organization. Junior I discovered through the Upwork agency. 

Except on extremely minor details, the two fact checkers agreed. My applause to Junior for vetting that withstood vetting! Like Junior, Jean Félix hadn’t any issues with cultural sensitivity—but oh how my fact-checkers saved my posterior on issues such as names and geography!

Something I did not invent is the loathsomeness of Joseph Conrad. By dehumanizing the “brutes” of the Congo in Heart of Darkness, he has at least unwittingly served as one of the many justifications for their exploitation. The Belgian childcare professor in Chapter Two is fictional, but other highly acclaimed intellectuals in different fields have joined Conrad in validating racist greed and cruelty. That would be the opinion of Lemba, my techno-genius hero, and I agree.

I got into Lemba’s brain, by the way, partly through his techie side, having used and written about technology for decades. Child does not truly explore his Blackness or Africanness even though you cannot write about Africa and ignore race. Instead, this is far more a story of war, protective love of family, survival, and the moral conundrums of technology. I was pleased that Junior could identify with Lemba as a fellow tech-lover.

But how real is Lemba in the first place, with his multifaceted brilliance? 

He is one of a kind and certainly much smarter than me; I haven’t started any multi-billion-euro corporations lately. Countless young Africans are brainier than I am in their own ways. May they enjoy Lemba-sized success even if they aren’t my character!

Now, on to the big question. Could genius not only invent new technologies but also help bring peace, prosperity, and honest government to a whole country? I admit the utopianism of it all even if there are and will be many Lembas or partial Lembas. But I can at least offer the scenario of, “What if things can go right in the Congo?” Maybe a few strands of my vision will help encourage young techies and political activists there and in other African countries. W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet, wrote that “In dreams begin responsibility,” a line which inspired the title of Delmore Schwartz’s most famous short story. So why not a variant? “In novels can begin realities?” Look at Jules Verne, having the gall in the nineteenth century to fantasize in detail of moon rockets.

But will the optimistic Lemba-style scenarios pan out? Hardly any guarantees! Think about all the wild cards such as global pandemics and the horrors of climate change, which could displace thousands and perhaps millions of Congolese—flooded or dried out and deprived of food supplies. But let me focus on some positives, such as the possibilities of changes in leadership.

Consider Jean Félix, for example. Born in Kinshasa 36 years ago, he belongs to the Baluba tribe (from the Haut-Lomami province, part of the former Katanga province). His father, a teacher’s son who himself taught, served in a DRC parliament and held several other national positions. His mother, too, has been active in politics. Jean Félix has never held political office, as some have urged him to do. But he has done endlessly useful work within the nonprofit sector as the main founder of the Buswe Institute and Community Service Day, which, he says, in terms of the number of participants, is the largest volunteer effort in the DRC. His personal Facebook account has 3,000 followers and 5,000 Friends—just a fraction, obviously, of CSD’s actual volunteer count.

No, Jean Félix has not turned the Congo into a tropical paradise; it remains mired in poverty and widespread corruption. But his efforts are a good example of the possibilities for change, ideally with plenty of encouragement from the United States, its allies, and elsewhere. Jean Félix’s institute does not just serve as a think tank for progressive ideas for the Congo, it also trains future leaders in democratic ways and related areas ranging from community engagement to social justice. He himself was one of 14 Mandela Washington Fellows in 2015 from the DRC (500 for Africa as a whole). This is the flagship effort of the Young African Leaders Initiative, or YALI for short, that President Obama launched in 2010.

“Thanks to this program,” Jean Félix told me, “I was able to go to Howard University, and I was also able to meet young leaders from other African countries who are bringing change in different ways in their own countries. This experience allowed me to build an important network in Africa and even in the USA. I don't know if there is still a single country in Africa where I don't know anyone. A lot of what I do today has been directly influenced by the program.

“Buswe Leadership Camp is a bit of a YALI in miniature. I hope it can grow even more like the Mandela Washington Fellowship. I hang out every day with amazing young people who won't all have the chance that I had to go to America to learn, but they are lucky to have me and others here to help them develop their skills. We receive a lot of testimonials from young people who have gone through this program, and we are proud of it.”

No billionaires are behind the institute, though I’m 100 percent confident that Lemba would support it if he existed. “We had to do fundraising activities like selling t-shirts to fund our activities,” Jean Félix said. “We have also received occasional support from individuals who find what we do important. But finances are a real headache. To participate in the Leadership camp, for example, young people pay a participation fee; this money allows us to cover the costs related to the camps. Not everyone is able to pay, so we often give spots to those who cannot afford but are really interested in learning. Young people with disabilities are often given free spots.”

I asked how people could get in touch with Jean Félix to offer financial or other forms of help. His email addresses are busweinstitute@gmail.com and jeanfelixmwema@gmail.com, and his phone number is +243812974329. He says the institute is officially registered within the DRC and has an active bank account.

What about Community Service Day? “The objective of Community Service Day is to bring Congolese in general, young people in particular, to contribute to the improvement of living conditions in their communities. The community service day was also created to spread the culture of volunteerism, service and self-giving in the Congolese community through actions of community interest.” Volunteers “meet on the last Saturday of each month for various community actions; to support a noble cause, assist vulnerables—in short, respond to community problems on a voluntary basis.” Thousands of young people, he said, participate in CSD activities in almost all the DRC’s big cities.

So what inspired Jean Félix to create CSD? “I was a member of United Methodist Volunteers in Mission in Zimbabwe when I was a Masters student there, and also when I was in the USA, I had to participate in community service days. These different experiences as well as what I was already doing in the country allowed me to think about creating a structure that would allow the Congolese to participate” in activities for the common good. “Thanks to the CSD, we have been able to rehabilitate schools, pay for the education of hundreds of children, and much more.”

I asked Jean Félix if he might run for a political office. “This is a question I get all the time now. In 2019, a rumor that presented me as the candidate for governor of the city of Kinshasa had gone viral. I had never seen such support, and I admit that I was even overcome with fear. At the same time, this episode made me realize that there are expectations and that a lot of people would see me in politics… The most important thing for me is to be able to contribute to change. Positions are not my priority. It’s not about me but about building momentum with better political leaders for the future and truly politically engaged citizens…”

Two of the national issues for the politically engaged, beyond the terrorism in the eastern Congo, are the environment and election integrity. 

Oil drilling and the like could help decimate rainforests and accelerate climate change, but with the war in Ukraine having jacked up energy prices, Kinshasa is keen on awarding new oil leases. Congolese officials say major powers haven’t agreed to pay the poverty-stricken country enough to avoid this climate calamity. Time for Washington et al. to be more generous, as long as the spending of the money is sufficiently accounted for?

As for electoral integrity in the DRC, foes of President Tshisekedi have accused his supporters of election-meddling against opponents such as Martin Fayulu, a former Exxon-Mobil executive now a businessman and legislator. Claiming Covid concerns, police in September 2021 relied on tear gas to break up a small pro-Fayulu demonstration in Kinshasa, and along the way they beat a prominent journalist named Patient Ligodi after supposedly misidentifying him as a demonstrator. Later a government spokesman conceded that the police had used too much force to crush the protest. General Elections, including the presidential one, will happen December 2023. I’m updating this Author’s Note months after the November 2022 Election in the United States, and I can’t help but notice certain growing similarities between Congolese and American politics. So many US politicians have become tribalists for maximum self gain and job security at the expense of the common welfare and old institutions such as the electoral system. 

Just as in America, the distribution of income and wealth is yet another sore spot, especially in regard to the Congo’s gargantuan mineral resources. Consider—such a poor country so rich in cobalt, copper, good diamond, tin, and tantalum! In the region once known as Katanga province, reforms helped multiply local revenue from minerals. Congolese took over much of the production and refinement rather than simply exporting cobalt and copper, and the same also happened elsewhere in the DRC. Exactly as Lemba would have preferred! Alas, not enough of the money ended up going for such purposes as schools, roads, health, and agriculture. But a law passed in 2018 is intended to change this and even make a percentage of mining revenue available to affected communities. May such be the case in reality! 

In a somewhat related vein, President Tshisekedi has ordered the renegotiations of corrupt deals with foreign investors. Yes! Imagine the possible upside. Suppose enough wealth from minerals were available for a huge Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund to help pay for everything from pensions to sustainable industrial investments domestically and abroad. Norway’s Oil Fund is about $1.3 trillion or $240,000 per Norwegian. That’s enough to help boost per capita GDP to some $90,000, one of the world’s highest. True, the DRC has about 97 million people now, with more than 350 million expected by 2100—compared to Norway’s current 5.5 million. But the Congo’s raw mineral riches may total as much as $24 trillion. 

Would each Congolese enjoy a Norwegian lifestyle after the government got its share of the wealth? From corporate tax rates to the amount of dividend revenue for the government, the planets would need to be sufficiently in alignment. Still, with stimulus from a gigantic wealth fund, dwarfing today’s closest equivalent in the Congo, the per capita GDP could whiz past the present $580. And safer, better-paying jobs for miners could exist than the Dickensian ones in Siddharth Kara’s much-needed exposé, Cobalt Red.

No, the money to develop resources all the way isn’t available now. But the Congo could seek foreign investments from companies and individuals more reputable than the current variety in the mineral sectors. Start with a pitch to the socially minded Norwegian Oil Fund? Maybe foreign investment could grow with the understanding that the Congolese would sharply reduce oil drilling and other environmental horrors and spend mineral wealth transparently for the common good. The US used heaps of foreign cash during the nineteenth century to help pay for the new railroads and other infrastructure. Imagine the equivalent in the DRC. Money could go for industrial development, green energy and advanced telecommunications networks and drones and other means to help the country deal with its vastness and deliver goods and services more efficiently. 

Let me add a warning, based on what Congolese themselves fear. Countless malefactors inside and outside the country want the Congo to be ungovernable and corrupt so they personally can steal more wealth, perhaps siphoning it abroad. Some members of the Congolese military are part of the corruption. Certain officials at all levels have a stake in it. Old tribal loyalties are another obstacle. Truly far-reaching reforms and other improvements could actually lead to more militia groups. Even so, given the rewards, such a risk is worth taking.

If the Congo thrived with the above scenario, it not only could ultimately reduce its economic dependence on boom-and-bust commodities but also forget the old Chinese model from decades ago. This would be in line with the vision of a brilliant Nigerian thinker, tech leader, and investor named Ndubuisi Ekekwe. Under his approach, the DRC would not end up just a source of cheap goods for the First World in a new era of robotics and artificial intelligence. Instead the Congolese could become robust consumers of their own goods. Also, they could trade more with other African countries while using AI to scale up local innovations. Not an impossible dream in the land of rumba. Talk about local creativity applied to areas such as product design, aesthetics included! 

Combine that with expanded and much-improved education so Congolese people can in fact master the technology at all levels and in time make their own contributions to it. Let enough of the mineral money pay for the education and training. In Child, one of Lemba’s children is using AI in his engineering work, and a daughter is considering a career in robotics as one possibility. Go Adulas! You’re far richer than the average Congolese, but with fairly shared resources, many more will enjoy opportunities.

* * *

Returning to this book’s backstory, I’ll also thank my editor, Dave Pasquantonio, for his incisive critiques and production help. Props, too, to my talented cover designer, Nate Allison of Hidden Gems Books, who picked up elements of a vision from the super-gifted Eli Bavar at BavarArt.com.

My appreciation likewise to my early readers, especially Marta Steele of Editing Unlimited, Bob Snyder of Channel Media Europe, Liz Hock, Robert Nagle of Personville Press, Mack Truslow, and Melinda Jackson-Jefferys. Also thanks to Susan Chaires, my lawyer, and Jewel Hart, a book marketing expert. Jewel and Eli, along with my friend Karen Heilman, helped me come up with a new title after I discovered that the world was not falling in love with an earlier one, No Taller than My Gun. The replacement title better conveys the nature of the book to people not already familiar with it.

As is already clear, Child started out as a movie script. I wrote at least 90 percent of it, but the script includes such gems from Ray Arco as Mpasi’s fish-hawking at sea, and I also benefited from Ray’s general feedback on it regardless of our constant disagreements. He was the one who asked, “Wouldn’t Demon Killer wear some kind of ring?” Of course—hence, my vision of AK-47- and RPG-emblazoned variants! Ray was a Romanian-born Jew who had survived Demon Killers with swastikas before making it to Hollywood, where he was a film importer, symposia coordinator, concert tour manager, education activist, and Romanian-language newspaper columnist, while trying his hand at 3,000 poems, 51 books, and 36 film-scripts, lovingly edited and archived by his wife, Ileana, a self-made museum curator. Nothing happened, alas, except a little volume of poetry in the U.S. and some now-forgotten minor film collaborations abroad. 

I’m not surprised. Ray could promote others but all too often floundered at marketing projects that might enable him to move out of the crowded West Hollywood apartment where he’d lived for decades. He pushed the Gun script as a children’s story just right for 12-year-olds, regardless of the body count. An old-fashioned Hollywood eccentric-optimist! 

Only in photographs did I see Ray’s beret and goofy clothes below—we never met face to face. Instead, as editor-publisher of a Virginia-based ebook site, I got this phone call out of the blue ordering me to delete a comment that included his private phone number. No telling why the number had gotten there, but I obliged since the entry strayed far from the cosmic issues of the day such as Kindles vs. iPhones for ebook junkies. As optimistic as ever, Ray asked if I might be working on a novel or script. Imagine—a Golden Globe judge soliciting material from me. 

Child began, as No Taller than My Gun, after Ray said George Clooney might want a child soldier script because of his wife’s prominence as a human rights lawyer. The Gun title came to me almost immediately. It was my variant of a quote from an ex-child soldier in Burma, now known as Myanmar: “My gun was as tall as me.” That became the title of a report from Human Rights Watch, to which I added my own metaphorical twist, letting the giant Demon Killer say: “No man is taller than his gun.” 

Did either Clooney actually read the script? Who knows? But meanwhile Ray could dream, and I could write and rewrite while pondering, “Will he gracefully recuse himself when we’re up for a possible Globe?” Yes, Ray did just a fraction of the scriptwriting. But he was really into formatting. The industry standard for script margins and the rest wouldn’t do—we had to stand out. One day he said somebody at Netflix wanted to check out our project. But then Ray and I spent weeks going back and forth over the script’s exact appearance, and the opportunity passed. What better way to avoid rejection and keep dreaming—just don’t show your work in such situations? More positively, Ray prodded me into writing this book. Thanks, Friend! I’m sorry you weren’t around to finish reading it and then pester me over the margin width.

To answer the inevitable question about a 60-year Golden Globe judge born in 1929, Ray at times could be a man of his era on racial issues. He wanted the script to depict some Congolese women as “exotic.” 

“Please no,” I said. “To the other characters they’re local.” Wives and daughters and sisters and cousins and lovers and friends, not tourist attractions!

But wait. This same man from the start loved the idea of drawing a Black director into the project, and he took a keen interest in anti-poverty, educational, and environmental issues affecting minorities, even writing a master’s thesis on such topics. He worked with indigenous peoples in Canada and also met with the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy to see about forming a nonprofit youth organization.

Ray fell while shopping, slipped into a coma, and died of Covid in the hospital on Christmas Day 2020. I’d begged him to write a will for his family and prepare a list of his contacts to help me follow through on marketing the script if he were no longer around. Ray balked; he absolutely knew he’d make it to 100.  His beloved Ileana died two years later.

I’m just sorry I couldn’t say good-bye. I’m delighted to have been, as described by Ray and Ileana, “the American in the family.”

—David H. Rothman, Alexandria, Virginia