Dead Man's Motorcycle: A Novel of Congo

By: Van Houte, Cornelis

A Belgian property lawyer inherits two things from his uncle Maurice: a 1977 Yamaha XS750 that has never been ridden, and a colonial land deed that has been in a drawer for thirty years.

The deed covers 14,000 hectares in the volcanic highlands south of Goma. On the paper: vacant land, mineral rights, a registration date of November 1952. On the ground: a village, a cemetery, mango trees planted a century ago, and a family that has farmed the same fields for four generations.

Cornelis Frost ships the motorcycle to Matadi and rides east. In Kinshasa he meets Amina Mbeki-Lwa, a Congolese lawyer who has spent eight years building a case against the Sicomines mining concession - a $7 billion infrastructure deal negotiated under documented corruption, locked behind an arbitration clause that has made it legally untouchable. She has forty-seven folders of evidence. She is missing one document. The document is the deed.

Together they ride from Kinshasa to Goma on roads the UN classifies as Category C and D, through a country where the M23 moves through villages at night and the Security Council takes note. At the end of the road: a retired Rwandan colonel with a terminal diagnosis and a dossier. A village called Kitembe. The land itself.

Dead Man's Motorcycle is a legal thriller without a courtroom, a road novel without romance, and a reckoning with the distance between what international law provides and what it has so far produced. It asks one question: when the cage was built on a corrupt foundation, is it still a cage?

The law does not wait for perfect cases. It develops through imperfect ones.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GWLR6C3Q
• ISBN13: 9798255598847
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"