"The Benevolent American in the Heart of Darkness" is a trilogy of Albert Russo's award-winning African novels set in the former Belgian Congo and Rwanda-Urundi. "In The Black Ancestor, the reader will find, as in the two other novels, Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika and Mixed Blood or your son Léopold, many poignant and delightful passages, especially in the journeys across the magnificent Kivu province, which today, along with bordering Rwanda and Burundi, has been scarred by fratricidal wars. That Leodine, in the opening novel, happens to be an adolescent, as was Leopold in Mixed Blood, isn't fortuitous, for it is at that vulnerable period of one's life that one's personality takes form. In Albert Russo's Africa you will find humankind's infinite diversity and, amid such richness, a quest for the deep self." Eric Tessier. "Albert Russo has recreated through a young African boy´s joys and struggles many of the tensions of modern life, straight and gay, black and white, third world and first ... all of these tensions underlie this story of a biracial child adopted by a benevolent American. Mixed Blood or Your son Leopold is a non-stop, gripping read!" Edmund White.