Congo: The Epic History of a People

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Don’t get afraid of the sheer size of this volume.. once you start digging in you will be hooked! The author master the art of combining well-researched historical facts with a human touch on each chalter. I have been living in DRC for 4 years and I totally see the reminiscence of some traces of character and the psyche of a very complex country with a terrible past and a constant crave to move forward on spite of the many adversities..

Mudimbe, a respected philosopher and writer on Africa, was born in what was then the Belgian Congo. He teaches literature at Duke University in the US. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason Stearns Senate (72 seats; members indirectly elected by local, district, and regional councils by simple majority vote to serve 6-year terms) note- the Senate is renewed in its entirety following a constitutional reform implemented in 2015 ending the renewal by half The Poisonwood Bible spans 30 years in the life of the family as it slowly implodes – under pressures brought on by the intransigent father and political and social upheaval in the country – and then rebuilds itself. A vivid study of the rise and fall of the president who looted the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko. Wrong mixes horror stories and a well-researched history of Mobutu's regime with an account of ordinary life in a country plunged into economic crisis. Written in the mid-1960s but only published recently, this book reminds us of the heady days when lefties acted on their belief that revolution was to be exported. Guevara found himself fighting against white mercenaries in the eastern badlands of the Congo. Four decades later, and the fighting has still not really stopped. 10. A Bend In The River, VS Naipaul (1979)China has been described as the latest neocolonial power in Africa. In his short story, The Sale, Huchu takes China’s investments in his own country, Zimbabwe, to a menacing extreme. In his dystopian world, neocolonialism has mutated into a terrifying form, where China and the US buy up countries heavily in debt. When the deficit remains, the citizens are sold and then controlled and surveilled by drones. At the centre of this chilling story is China’s intention to bulldoze the medieval city of Great Zimbabwe, now the “property of Ling Lee Antiquities Enterprises and Debt Recovery”. Imagine a mountain of gravel and stone just avalanching down on people, crushing legs and arms, spines. I met people whose legs had been amputated, who had metal bars in where their legs used to be. Magical, multi-voiced account of a family's spiralling doom at a remote mission station in the Congo around the time of independence in 1960. Narrated in turns by the mother and the daughters, it captures the singsong sound of Lingala, the language of the lower river, and the jungle's hidden terrors. The day the ant column comes, consuming all before it, forcing the villagers to decide what - and whom - they can leave behind is unforgettable. 8. The Catastrophist, Ronan Bennett (1998)

This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS.

Photos of Congo, Republic of the

Neocolonialism takes various forms, including the sponsorship of culture. This study of the CIA during the cold war reveals the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front based in Paris, which was active on five continents, including Africa. Among an astonishing breadth of activities, it subsidised conferences, cultural centres, books and magazines, including Encounter in London. “Soon enough”, exclaimed the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka in disgust, “we would discover that we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation, the devil himself, romping in our postcolonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge!” Described as the classic statement on the postcolonial condition, this is a compelling read and is supported by a wealth of detail. Nkrumah believed that neocolonialism is “the worst form of imperialism”, on the grounds that those who practise it exercise “power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress”. Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso from 1983-1987, is currently in the news because an investigation has just begun into his assassination. This collection of his interviews and speeches provides a window on his programmes to improve people’s lives, involving land redistribution, literacy and education, a focus on women’s rights and a massive vaccination scheme. Revered as Africa’s Che Guevara, Sankara defied neocolonial control by France, the former colonial power, and the US. He described debt, presented as aid, as “neocolonialism, in which colonisers transformed themselves into ‘technical assistance’. We should say ‘technical assassins’.” Foreign powers have been meddling in the Congo ever since the Belgian king Leopold II sent Stanley off in pursuit of the region's enormous mineral wealth. And central Africa's crises and conflicts have been charted by novelists and historians from Joseph Conrad to John Le Carré. Just as Conrad was instrumental in confronting westerners with the brutality of colonialism, writers such as Philip Gourevitch have been crucial in highlighting the instability and chaos which have swept through the region since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Here we gather together some of the best writing about the region, both fiction and non-fiction.