A tyrant is having his harem killed in shocking scenes of slaughter – shocking because the artist shows no compassion, only a fascination with flesh and gold.
But Congo is a violent, desperate country, and Schrefer's descriptions portray its terrors — the constant threat of rape Sophie faces, and the scenes of slaughter she witnesses — without becoming overly graphic.
Other elements – the rigid lifetime caste system, the lurid scenes of slaughter when the drones are culled, the gushing crushes on Holy Mother and on Maleness – reflect purely human assumptions about totalitarian states, and gender psychology.
France has launched its second major intervention in Africa within a year, deploying more than 1,000 troops and armoured vehicles to the Central African Republic in an attempt to prevent nightmarish scenes of slaughter from spiralling further out of control.
It was hard to sit in the cutting room and watch these scenes of slaughter: the flickering black and white footage failed to disguise the butchery of sentient animals quivering as harpoons were plunged into their flanks.
In these plates, Goya's focus is directed away from the generalised scenes of slaughter of anonymous, unaligned people in unnamed regions of Spain; he turns towards a specific horror unfolding in Madrid.
