Tram 83′ is Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s dazzling first novel. It follows an idealist writer named Lucien in an unnamed African mining town governed by global capitalism’s worst impulses. In the midst of a world reduced to chaos, survival and exploitation, Lucien tries to finish his grand oeuvre, a “stage-tale” entitled The Africa of Possibility and dedicated to Patrice Lumumba. The novel’s action occurs almost exclusively in a nightclub where child miners mix with striking students, rapacious Western businessmen, and women who are, in the words of one of the characters, “emancipated, democratic, and independent.” Mwanza’s vivid representation of this temple of intemperance and, more generally, of the human landscape in which Lucien must function, makes his novel a fascinating read that oscillates between gripping dystopia and humanist celebration.

Tram 83 was published in French in 2014 and has already won several literary prizes in Europe. It is now available in English (translation by Roland Glasser) and translations in several other languages will appear soon. However, few Congolese writers works have been made available internationally; in fact the last time a Congolese novel was translated in English was 1993, when the DRC was still named Zaire.

Mwanza grew up in Lubumbashi, Southeastern Congo’s copper capital. Lubumbashi is a city pregnant with difficult histories, where the wounds of colonial segregation overlap with the more recent memories of secession, dramatic economic decline, and the violence of politicized ethnic identities. It is also a cultural crossroad where artists have taken advantage of the great distance that separates them from Kinshasa to go where their own imaginations took them. Not coincidently, the city also claims the photographer Sammy Baloji (who happens also to be Mwanza’s cousin) and the baroque singer Serge Kakudji, two artists whose work have a brilliance and freshness that resembles his own.

I recently talked to Mwanza on Skype in his home in Graz, Austria, where he has lived for several years. We discussed his novel, the recent protests in Kinshasa, and the new generation of Congolese musicians.