Chaos in Kinshasa

From beloved Congolese comics creator Barly Baruti and Belgian comics critic Thierry Bellefroid, translated from the original French by Batchelder Award-winning translator Ivanka Hahnenberger

A Harlem gangster's trip to Central Africa to attend the legendary 1974 Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match becomes a one-way ticket to the seedy underground of Zaire-complete with espionage, murder, and a communist plot to overthrow Zaire's infamous President Mobutu.

When Ernest, a low-level gangster from Harlem, wins tickets to travel to Zaire to attend the "Rumble in the Jungle," the now-legendary bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, he's eager to reconnect with his African roots and escape the ruthless gang leaders he's indebted to back home. But in Zaire, Ernest becomes entangled in an Angolan coup against the country's embattled president Mobutu Sese Seko--inspired by Che Guevara himself--and soon realizes that Zaire may hold even more dangers for him than Harlem ever could.

A Cold-War-era thriller set against the backdrop of a landmark moment in sports history, Chaos in Kinshasa features Barly Baruti's characteristic art and Thierry Bellefroid's punchy dialogue woven in with the elements of a great gangster story--sex, spies, bribes, and murder. A thrill ride through a pivotal moment in Cold War, African, and sports history.

Baruti Kandolo Lilela, better known by his pen name Barly Baruti, is a renowned Congolese cartoonist. He was born in 1959 in Kisangani into a family of painters. After studying pedagogy, Baruti worked at French cultural centers in Kisangani and Kinshasa, where he produced his first comic work, an environmental comic titled Le temps d'agir. He has been described by the BBC as "the Congolese author best known outside his country." Baruti is the co-founder of the Atelier de Création et de l'Initiation à l'Art Creative Workshop for an Initiation to Art) to encourage talented youth in Kinshasa, and he is responsible for organizing the first Afro BD show in Kinshasa in the effort to promote African comics. He has lived in France and Belgium, where he apprenticed with several renowned comic artists. He currently lives in Kinshasa. In 2023, Barly was named Facilitator of Partnerships and Cultural Relations in Europe by the Congolese Ministry of Culture.

Thierry Bellefroid works for the Belgian television company, RTB, where he presents every week Sous Couverture, the RTBF literary magazine which he created after setting up, directing and presenting Mille-Feuilles from 2004 to June 2011, then Livrés à Domicile from 2011 to 2019. He has been the anchor of RTBF's Le Journal 13H00 for six years. Since September 2009 he has focused solely on book and comic book news. From 2007 to 2020, Thierry Bellefroid was also a guest lecturer at the School of Journalism of Louvain at UCLouvain, where he taught television journalism there in Master 1, mentoring journalism students in comics reporting. He has published three novels, a collection of short stories and a digital novel. Amongst many things, he has been a member of numerous comics juries (International Prize of the City of Geneva and Töpffer Prize from 2001 to 2020, Grand Jury of Angoulême in 2000, president of the Jury of the Quinzaine de la BD de Bruxelles in 2004 and 2005, member of the jury of the Algiers International Comic Strip Festival in 2011 and 2012); he has been a member of Groupe d'Experts sur la Bande Dessinée pour la Communauté Française de Belgique since its creation in 2001 and a commissioner for the Commission for Aid to Comics of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation of Belgium, which is the equivalent of the French CNL, until 2015; he coordinated comic strip animations for eight years for the Brussels Book Fair; and has participated in the catalogs of many comics exhibitions including CGRI (now WBI) in Seoul, Santiago, Bologna, etc., the exhibitions of several editions of the Lausanne BD-FIL Festival, the exhibition Archi et BD curated by Jean-Marc Thévenet at the Cité de l'Architecture in Paris, and the Le Temps des Cités exhibition in Brussels from February to April 2013.

Ivanka Hahnenberger has translated over 60 comics and graphic novels, including several highly acclaimed titles such as Climate Changed, Blue is the Warmest Color, Madame Livingstone (a 2021 New York Times Globetrotting title) and Catherine's War, which won her the Silver 2021 Batchelder Award. Born in Berkeley California, she spent part of her childhood in Geneva, Switzerland and lived in a multilingual, multicultural household. She has lived in Europe since 1983, primarily in France and Germany but with several short stays in other European nations, and presently lives in London. She has translated and transposed film and TV pitches, business plans and power points for decades, starting when she worked as a TV and film producer and consultant. As a big fan of French BD, she started a company to sell French rights into North America and through this began translating works to help buyers acquire. This grew into contractual translation work. She has translated biographies, scientific graphic novels, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, sagas, creative fiction, adaptations, history, classics and much more. She has also translated non-fiction guides on art and architecture, white papers on marketing concepts such as Nudge Theory, and children's chapter books. She translates from both French and German into American English.