Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo              (Random House, 2014).

By Jared Malsin

A reporter sets out to cover a devastating war across the ocean. He encounters the war, but also tedium, loneliness, and brutality.

This is the rough outline of the story told by Ajnan Sundaram, a former stringer for the Associated Press in Congo, in his book, aptly titled Stringer. It is that rare book where the writer’s personal observations are original, startling, and compelling. And this holds true for matters both vast and minute, from monstrous war in Congo, to a dead rat he finds decomposing in his bedroom.

After graduating from Yale in 2005, Sundaram turned down a PhD program in mathematics as well as a job with Goldman Sachs, to pursue reporting as a freelancer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I had left for Congo in a sort of rage, a searing emotion,” he writes. “The world had become too beautiful. The beauty was starting to cave in on itself, revealing a core of crisis.” His serene campus life and the abstractions of advanced math seemed an illusion.

The war in Congo beckoned. In comparison to the scale of the conflict—five million have died since 1996—media coverage of Congo, was, and remains, spotty. Sundaram is indignant about the hollow state of foreign reporting. “This great event in human history has produced no sustained reporting. No journalist is stationed consistently on the front lines of the war telling us its stories,” he wrote in a recent op-ed in The New York Times. The violence in Congo, not to mention the country’s contentious politics, often was, and is, reduced to 200-word wire reports. Sundaram argues righteously that such a vast and deadly conflict ought to be covered in depth.

So he set out to do what reporters do, flying to Kinshasa on a one-way ticket, in hopes of capturing some of this epic story.

In careerist terms, his time in Congo was a success. He was picked up by the Associated Press and the Times. He became one of a handful of journalists reporting day to day on the war, a major presidential election, rioting, and earthquakes. But what is most remarkable about his book are the otherwise dull and painful moments that came before, and in between those successes. Sundaram excels at describing the moments of unfathomable tedium, petty crime, and long stretches of solitude.

These moments, beautifully rendered, draw back the curtain on the making of foreign news. They fill in some of the messiness, the long hours of grinding work and waiting that are condensed into those 200 or 800 words of wire reporting. For journalists who see war reporting glorified, it is refreshing to read a book that embraces and does justice to the fact that swashbuckling can be a grueling and underpaid business.

The book captures all that is unglamorous, even infuriating, about foreign journalism. Preparing to file an important article, he sits in the darkness after the electricity cuts out in the apartment he shares with a working class Congolese family in Kinshasa. His phone, containing hundreds of irreplaceable contacts, is stolen by a street child. He struggles with sickness and at least one bout of paranoia. He pursues important stories that, due to logistics and circumstance, he is never able to complete, wasting weeks of his time and his own hard won money. He struggles with his editors in a relentless battle to prove that what is happening here is news. This battle is acute in central Africa, where the international media are perpetually delinquent. The contemporary conflict in the Central African Republic, for example, has killed more people than the Ebola epidemic, but the violence has been covered inconsistently and with none of the same urgency.

The battle to convince editors to devote limited resources to foreign news is a struggle that stringers and freelancers everywhere will recognize, and one I relate to. Like Sundaram, I left America shortly after graduating from Yale, two years after he did. I, instead, went to the Middle East. And I can relate to many of his observations about the trials of foreign reporting.

Unlike Sundaram, I enjoy the relative luxury of covering a region that is, compared to central Africa, blanketed in foreign journalists. American geopolitical involvement in the Middle East means that news from Cairo, Beirut, and even Baghdad is more robustly covered that news from Sub-Saharan Africa is.

Sundaram’s book lives in the moments of grime. He waits. He sits crammed on busses. He wanders strange cities, sleeps in strange guesthouses. Sundaram’s eye lingers on every ant that crawls across his path. His surroundings and his subjectivity come into sharp relief.

Take for example, this description of his arrival in the city of Bunia, in Eastern Congo. “Arriving in such a state, without a specific destination, with only an idea, one found oneself relentlessly looking: the mind was like an antenna that probed, that latched onto small emotions,” he writes.

The scenes are vivid, the prose muscular. Sundaram paints vast emotional landscapes that he would never have been able to squeeze into a wire report. His publishers note that he writes in the style of Ryszard Kapuscinski and V.S. Naipaul. The comparisons are valid; Sundaram recalls being given a copy of one of Kapuscinski’s books as one of his inspirations to make the leap to Congo. He follows Naipaul’s urge “to hold oneself in constant readiness for adventure or revelation; to allow oneself to be carried along, up to a point, by accidents; and consciously to follow up other impulses.”

This is perhaps the riskiest part of Sundaram’s method. At one point, he follows a lead that leaves him stranded in the middle of the jungle, with little money, frustrated editors, no story, and no clear direction anywhere. But whereas wire journalism might have constrained him, the book gives him room to expand on these mundane moments.

Like Kapuscinski, Sundaram attempts to make bold, vivid observations about the world around him. Like many writing in his genre today, he is forced to boil down decades of history into a few pages that get interspersed with the story of his personal journey in Congo. As a result, there are times when his efforts at describing the situation in the Congo verge into the realm of pop sociology and pop history and moments when his commentary leans too heavily on generalizations. The result is that the history feels broad brush. Everything is beautiful prose and attempts to seize the iconic moments, but the larger political story feels hazy at times.

On the other hand, Sundaram earned his insights the hard way, through experience. The book is, in a way, a testament to the importance of longform journalism, and books in general. It comes at a moment when budgets for foreign reporting are squeezed even further than they were when Sundaram set out on his voyage. These days foreign stringers and freelancers are expected to write pieces that will generate web traffic. We are compelled to unearth stories that are not so much newsworthy, as Upworthy.

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Jared Malsin is a journalist based in Cairo. He has contributed to TIME, VICE, The New Republic, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications. He tweets at @jmalsin.