Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo. This was the period in which Mobuto attempted to transform the Congo into a revolutionary society of citoyens and citoyennes modeled on a number of dictatorial regimes, including that of Mao Zedong. This was the tense phase in which, having rejected the remaining vestiges of colonial rule, Mobutu led his country in a socialist experiment in which much of the nation’s private property was confiscated and redistributed by the state and, subsequently, the country descended into poverty and authoritarianism. Though not intended as a historical account per se, and certainly not limited to central Africa in its implications, A Bend in the River offers a detailed depiction of a similarly unravelling state in which individual lives are at the mercy of corrupt civil servants who terrorize the population with the president’s assent. In Naipaul’s fictionalized account, even the system of river commerce, from time immemorial the primary means of distribution for food and goods, is foreclosed as travel becomes perilous. With the photograph of the president displayed everywhere, “getting bigger and bigger, and the quality of the prints finer” (168), the ruler attempts to govern by the force of his personality, but failing that he soon resorts to mere force. Inevitably, this process is accompanied by a declining standard of living as resources are confiscated to prop up the