Several years ago my friend Nicky Twilley sent me a short piece of a book, Feasting Wild, by Gina Rae La Cerva, in which the author states that the constitution of the Congo equated the Iyaelima people with wildlife, demoting them to animals so they were allowed to live in the forest. This struck me as odd, and unlikely. So I decided to fact check it. As it turns out, there was a single (specious) source of the ‘fact’, a piece for National Geographic Adventure by John Falk, a piece itself a horror show of racism, colonialism and misogyny, for which he cited no sources.

I was so appalled by the positive press the book was getting, and this bit in it, I read the entirety of the current Congolese constitution (in French), and the forest code of law. I read all of the law that Kabila instituted when he became president, still nothing. Then I reached out to a friend who runs an NGO on that forest and asked if he had heard of it, and shared the sources I had read in hopes to find any comment. He was deeply horrified, profoundly so, and said it was unlikely but that he would check with his local sources. While awaiting his response, I went and read all the Belgian Geographic Society’s notes on the forest, forest research, and legal creation, and still came up with nothing.

I commented on this back in the day when Twitter was useful and the book publisher reached out to me. I explained my research, and the horror, and she got in touch with the author and the book’s editor. The editor confirmed that Rae had used Falk as the source (horrifying to not reflect on the lack of citations and all the other concerns with what he wrote), and also then the fact checkers and the publisher utterly failed to check their data, and printed a book that dehumanized an entire tribe of people and inaccurately portrayed the country. They did tell me that they were going to correct the error in future printings of the book — I never did check, and attempt to address with readers of the first printing themselves, also something I never checked.

I also eventually got an email from the author, who also asked me about all the legal documents I read, and the ways in which Mobutu passed laws to expand the Salonga park boundaries. She asked if I wanted to be cited as the discovered of the false information, which I declined. Though I did respond with further detail on the tribal structure and the park laws and ancestral lands. I will note that some materials were hard to find remotely, so it is possible there was some document somewhere, but not one I found. She felt that it ‘sounded like something a colonial power might have done’ as why she didn’t dig further. I never did hear back further on this.

They were very nice, though I am generally disappointed at the quality of fact checking. (As an aside, when my Magnet book was fact checked, I was returned an ‘error’ on my behalf which they corrected. Their source was wikipedia and mine was academic journal papers. When I was teaching at Pratt and SVA, wikipedia was entirely disallowed as a valid source. Now, it seems to be canon (even though so often wrong) and it is the AIs that are disallowed. The needle may have moved, but it is still more false than I would like.)

All of the above took place in 2020, in the early days of the covid lockdown. Perhaps why I had time to read the constitution and forest law, but also, I was so annoyed by the casual dehumanization without citation, I probably would have done it anyway. Poor Nicky, after pointing this out to me, then had to suffer through my rage-emails at the horror, though I did of course share the resolution and the emails from editors and authors.

Poor Nicky, however, just got to suffer through my rage texting about a book that is so infuriating to me, that I also engaged in fact checking and validation of assorted conlcusions. This book enraged me far more than Feasting Wild, and deserves its own post, which I shall attend to next. (Manvir Singh’s Shamanism, is that book.) In general I have a rule against writing negative book reviews, as author’s spend a lot of time working hard on their topics and just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean that I need to tear it down. However, stay tuned for Part II of this, because here I feel very strongly.