Never a dull moment in Jef Geeraerts’ Gangrene, a breathless, violent, wildly erotic romp through the final years of what, until 30 June 1960, was the Belgian Congo. There aren’t very many Flemish books about Belgium’s former Central African colony, and for this reason alone Geeraerts’ novels are worth reading. Controversy surrounded its first publication in Dutch in 1967. While some praised its hard-boiled style, which even won Geeraerts a literary prize, a judge had it impounded for pornography and racism and questions were asked about it in parliament.


The story, told in the first person in long uninterrupted bursts of barely punctuated prose, is that of Joseph, a low-ranking official in the Belgian colonial administration and a corrupt, sex-crazed brute of a man. We follow Joseph from one post to another, and from one lover to another, from 1955 to early 1960, with the colony’s increasing political turmoil in the background. Joseph loathes his pregnant wife, and gets away from her as often as he can to indulge in orgies of sex and alcohol, each affair as rapturous and short-lived as the previous one. The women are black, sensual and eager, and sex with them gives Joseph the sense of breaking loose from Western hypocrisy, morality and culture.


Mbala is Joseph’s eighth lover (he himself doesn’t keep count, though), and with her he goes through a native wedding ceremony during which he feels ‘centuries of culture’ falling away from him as Mbala’s people become his blood-brothers and Joseph jettisons his Western clothes. Soon afterwards he goes off to Belgium for six months’ leave, and feels disgusted by the smugness of his compatriots. On his return he learns that Mbala has died and he has been transferred to another post. There the old routine is repeated. Joseph staggers from girlfriend to girlfirend and from orgasm to orgasm, until he meets his ‘Black Venus’, the adorable, sensual, aristocratic Cathérine, whom he follows to Bangui in French Equatorial Africa for a two-week feast of love-making, big game hunting and drug-taking. On his return to the Congo, Joseph is given the opportunity to join a military operation to suppress a native rebellion. The book’s final episode is set a year later, only months before Independence. Joseph has witnessed unspeakable cruelty in the past year, and realizes his time in Africa is up. He puts his wife and children on a Sabena flight to Brussels, grabs and embezzles all the money he can lay his hands on and, with anarchy reigning all around, he kills two innocent Congolese men and boards a DC-3 back to a despised motherland that, as he sees it, didn’t have the guts to keep control of its colony by force.


The portrait of Joseph as colonial administrator is anything but flattering. He comes across as an exhibitionist, a racist, a chauvinist pig and a cynical, seedy character. But it is interesting to look at what drives him. The incessant sex is also a rite of passage. Joseph is virulently anti-rational, anti-Christian and anti-Western, a white man who wants to cast the trappings of culture aside and trust only his instincts. He knows he is beyond the pale and abusing his power, but he refuses to think about it. His search for an uninhibited, raw primitivism is doomed, and when he finally has to face reality, he is filled with hatred and pent-up, destructive fury. Not an endearing picture perhaps, but as far as Joseph is concerned his confession constitutes a piece of therapeutic writing, while for the reader it is a tale of caution about self-delusion on a monstrous scale.

...in short I discovered that my replacement has taken the Bokoi firmly in hand and that they had given way under the pressure of his threats, that the father superior of the Boyange mission had emptied out a shoeful of earth on the village square of Bombana, swearing that people would die if they refused to grant the concession and if unbelievers who made a mockery of Christian marriage and the Commandments continued to live in the village, that in one week two people had inexplicably died, that as a result Mbala’s entire family, which was heathen and had been specifically named by the father superior, underwent the trial by mbondo poison to prove their innocence, that Mbala, her father, and her younger brother Mopangu all died, but that when their bodies were opened the pancreas of each was dark, a sign that they had been innocent.

I remember that it was oppressively hot but that my teeth were chattering when I asked them if Mbala had suffered much pain, they didn’t know, and when I asked them if she had said anything before dying, the elder with difficulty replied: ‘No, but she was pregnant.’ (p. 54, tr. Jon Swan)