The Villain's Dance by Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Fiston Mwanza Mujila's The Villain's Dance is a rich yet scattershot exploration of the borderlands between Zaire and Angola
Sometimes more is more and sometimes less is best. If the question is how much plotting, exposition or symbolism is too much in a literary work, then the answer usually depends on the story being told. In the case of The Villain’s Dance, its story cannot fully convince its reader of its attempts at restraint or excesses.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s tale of two countries – Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Angola, and the borderlands between them – presents a surge of stirring images. Acts of sybaritism and abandon flow from those of struggle and insurgency. Minor accidents and major incidents happen, cracking open numerous plot possibilities, and main characters – including the ageless and arcane quasi-divinity, Tshiamuena – are sketched with verve.
However, as Mujila details in his author’s note, the magical realism of The Villain’s Dance unfolds against a real world backdrop of the cultish regime of President Mobutu. Unfortunately, the story of the febrile political climate of late-1990s Zaire and its neighbours – a vital history of brain drain and bloodletting, refuge-seeking and rebellion, colonial scramble and civil resistance – runs downstream from, and becomes diluted by, the novel's many digressions and the exploits of its dramatis personae.
Across 54 chapters – some pleasingly taut, most frustratingly scattershot – Mujila does manage to expose the grit and gleam of the streets, the shantytowns, the diamond mines and, most notably, a Lubumbashi nightclub known as the Mambo de la Fête. The Mambo, according to one of its patrons, is a “world in motion”. The Villain’s Dance, too, is unremittingly dynamic: it bounces and it swings, its polyphonic nature continually wrong-foots and occasionally charms, but far too often its core story shimmies entirely out of focus.