At his blog, Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese writer living in California, gives a rather comic account of a conversation he had with his landlady after she sees a story on television about “the poor Congolese” (or maybe they were Africans from some other country whose “president has a long name”) who have “illness, famine, and many wives, and who are always fighting each other.” She tells Mabanckou that their president (whoever he is) is really a villan and that “something really should be done…the Americans should go and clean up things over there.”