Congo

Congo gained independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960. David van Reybrouck examined Congo’s tumultuous one-and-a-half century of history. A mixture of more than 100 oral history interviews and the usual historiography based on written sources.

Featured here are the people and events that influenced Congo’s development – from the slave trade to the ivory and rubber boom; from the arrival of Henry Morton Stanley to the tragic reign of King Leopold II; from global outrage to Belgian colonialism; from the independence struggle to Mobutu’s brutal rule; and from the world-famous Rumble in the Jungle to the civil war over natural resources that began in 1996 and is still raging today.

Van Reybrouck interweaves his own family’s history with the voices of a wide variety of individuals – charismatic dictators, warlords fighting, child soldiers, the elderly, female merchant smugglers and many in the African diaspora in Europe and China – to offer a very human approach to political history, focusing on the Congolese perspective and giving a country’s history back to its people.