“I think of dogs, especially those dogs the woman sat watching, when I think of the universal meaning of tenderness, and not in the other way. The copulatory tie that happens when mating dogs are stuck together is necessary for the semen to be deposited into the reproductive tract. The male dog, to preserve his back, must be allowed to dismount and turn 180 degrees so that, at long last, he stands in a position of comfort until coitus is naturally completed. No one teaches dogs what to do, so they must intuit their business while the rest of us are told what to do, but at the same time they didn’t invent their elaborate sex routine. I think of it, rather seriously, as God’s tenderness: there can be no life among canines without the bulbous tie, but let’s find a way to make it easy for the males.”

“Much closer to home, in the 1990s hardly a month went by without a Congolese singer or band arriving in Kampala to put on a concert, from Tshala Muana, the late rumba star who pleased audiences with her extravagant gyrating style, to Koffi Olomide, the soukous singer who performed with a bevy of queen dancers with seemingly bleached faces. Nearly three decades after the death of Mobutu, this picture of Congo is hard to imagine. There was no Zaïre before Mobutu and there is no Zaïre after him, as the dictator himself had warned, in a kind of prophetic curse fulfilled by his successor, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, whose first order of business was to rename his country the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kabila lasted barely four years in power, destroyed by the same powerful forces of intrigue that had propelled him to power in Kinshasa. So while Congo survives, many parts of the country have known little peace since 1997: for younger Africans, this is the dominant image of Congo, a country to be lamented over and yet so richly endowed with mineral and other natural resources.”