Mapped
A Bend in the River
V. S. Naipaul
Salim, a Muslim of Indian descent, buys a shop in a town at a bend of the great river in the interior of a newly independent central African country, and watches the fragile post-colonial order rise and rot under the rule of the Big Man. Naipaul's unnamed town is drawn from Kisangani on the Congo: the river and its choking water hyacinths, the market and the shop, the Big Man's shiny new Domain on the edge of the bush, and the far-off capital from which power and terror flow.
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Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Conrad steamed up the Congo himself in 1890 and Marlow's journey retraces his own. The places are never named in the book, but they map onto a real route: from the Company's Outer Station at Matadi on the lower river, overland past the cataracts to the Central Station at Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), and on up the great bend to the Inner Station near Stanley Falls (now Kisangani). The bbox spans that whole run.
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The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
An American missionary family lands in the Belgian Congo in 1959 and settles by the Kwilu River in the Bandundu backcountry, near the real river town of Kikwit. Over the next years the story follows the country out of colonial rule and into the turmoil of independence, from the fictional village of Kilanga to Leopoldville, then downriver to Bulungu. The map holds the Kwilu heartland; the family's later drift into Angola and back to Georgia falls outside it.
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