Download or read book Congo written by David Van Reybrouck and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as "a monumental history . . . more exciting than any novel" (NRC Handelsblad),David van Reybrouck’s rich and gripping epic, in the tradition of Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, tells the extraordinary story of one of the world's most devastated countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo. Epic in scope yet eminently readable, penetrating and deeply moving, David van Reybrouck's Congo: The Epic History of a People traces the fate of one of the world's most critical, failed nation-states, second only to war-torn Somalia: the Democratic Republic of Congo. Van Reybrouck takes us through several hundred years of history, bringing some of the most dramatic episodes in Congolese history. Here are the people and events that have impinged the Congo's development—from the slave trade to the ivory and rubber booms; from the arrival of Henry Morton Stanley to the tragic regime of King Leopold II; from global indignation to Belgian colonialism; from the struggle for independence 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 still rages today. Van Reybrouck interweaves his own family's history with the voices of a diverse range of individuals—charismatic dictators, feuding warlords, child-soldiers, the elderly, female merchant smugglers, and many in the African diaspora of Europe and China—to offer a deeply humane approach to political history, focusing squarely on the Congolese perspective and returning a nation's history to its people.
Download or read book In the Forest of No Joy The Congo Oc an Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism written by J. P. Daughton and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad and the human costs and contradictions of modern empire. The Congo-Océan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noir. It was completed in 1934, when Equatorial Africa was a French colony, and it stands as one of the deadliest construction projects in history. Colonial workers were subjects of an ostensibly democratic nation whose motto read “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” but liberal ideals were savaged by a cruelly indifferent administrative state. African workers were forcibly conscripted and separated from their families, and subjected to hellish conditions as they hacked their way through dense tropical foliage—a “forest of no joy”; excavated by hand thousands of tons of earth in order to lay down track; blasted their way through rock to construct tunnels; or risked their lives building bridges over otherwise impassable rivers. In the process, they suffered disease, malnutrition, and rampant physical abuse, likely resulting in at least 20,000 deaths. In the Forest of No Joy captures in vivid detail the experiences of the men, women, and children who toiled on the railroad, and forces a reassessment of the moral relationship between modern industrialized empires and what could be called global humanitarian impulses—the desire to improve the lives of people outside of Europe. Drawing on exhaustive research in French and Congolese archives, a chilling documentary record, and heartbreaking photographic evidence, J.P. Daughton tells the epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad, and in doing so reveals the human costs and contradictions of modern empire.
Download or read book Congo written by Michael Crichton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-05-14 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Jurassic Park and Timeline comes a gripping thriller about the shocking demise of eight American geologists in the darkest region of the Congo. “Thrilling.” —The New York Times Book Review Deep in the African rainforest, near the ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, a field expedition is brutally killed. At the Houston-based Earth Resources Technology Services, Inc., a horrified supervisor watches a gruesome video transmission of that ill-fated group and sees a haunting, grainy, man-like blur moving amongst the bodies. In San Francisco, an extraordinary gorilla named Amy, who has a 620-sign vocabulary, may hold the secret to that fierce carnage. Immediately, a new expedition is sent to the Congo with Amy in tow, descending into a secret, forbidden world where the only escape may be through the grisliest death.
Download or read book The Congo Free State and the New Imperialism written by Kevin Grant and published by Macmillan Higher Education. This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces students to the history of the Congolese peoples and the Congo Free State, ruled by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908. It illuminates central issues in the study of the era of the "new imperialism" and challenges students to analyze a variety of different kinds of sources in building their own historical arguments about the period. The introduction provides an overview of the Congolese peoples, the environment in which they lived, and the process through which the Congo Free State was established and developed. The documents invite students to explore the history of the Congo Free State through speeches, international treaties, oral histories, investigative depositions on atrocities, visual texts, official and private correspondence, parliamentary debates, and published exposés. Document headnotes, a chronology, and analytical questions help students to place the Congo Free State in the context of not only the new imperialism but also its larger global context.
Download or read book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters written by Jason Stearns and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "tremendous," "intrepid" history of the devastating war in the heart of Africa's Congo, with first-hand accounts of the continent's worst conflict in modern times. At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, renowned political activist and researcher Jason K. Stearns has written a compelling and deeply-reported narrative of how Congo became a failed state that collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres. Stearns brilliantly describes the key perpetrators, many of whom he met personally, and highlights the nature of the political system that brought these people to power, as well as the moral decisions with which the war confronted them. Now updated with a new introduction, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters tells the full story of Africa's Great War.
Download or read book Battleground Africa written by Lise Namikas and published by Cold War International History. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title Battleground Africa traces the Congo Crisis from post-World War II decolonization efforts through Mobutu's second coup in 1965 from a radically new vantage point. Drawing on recently opened archives in Russia and the United States, and to a lesser extent Germany and Belgium, Lisa Namikas addresses the crisis from the perspectives of the two superpowers and explains with superb clarity the complex web of allies, clients, and neutral states influencing U.S.-Soviet competition. Unlike any other work, Battleground Africa looks at events leading up to independence, then considers the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the series of U.N.-supported constitutional negotiations, and the crises of 1964 and 1965. Finding that the U.S. and the USSR each wanted to avoid a major confrontation, but also misunderstood its opponent's goals and wanted to avoid looking weak or losing its political standing in Africa, Namikas argues that a series of exaggerations and misjudgements helped to militarize the crisis, and ultimately, helped militarize the Cold War on the continent.
Download or read book Recalling the Belgian Congo written by Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000-09-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the author embarked on her study, her aim was to approach former colonial officers with a view to analyzing processes of domination in the ex-Belgian Congo. However, after establishing a rapport with some of these officers, the author was soon forced to revise her initial assumptions, widely held in present-day Belgium: these officers were not the "baddies" she had expected to meet. Exploring the colonial experience through the respondents' memories resulted in a far more complex picture of the colonial situation than she had anticipated, again forcing her to question her original assumptions. This resulted not only in a more differentiated perspective on Belgian colonialist rule, but is also sensitized her as regards the question of anthropological understanding and of what constitutes historical fact. These two aspects of her work are reflected in this study that offers specific material on the way Belgian colonialism is remembered and reflects on its conditions of production, thus combining ethnographic analysis with a theoretical essay.
Download or read book Congo Square written by Freddi Williams Evans and published by University of Louisiana. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive study of one of the New World's most sacred sites of African American memory and community.
Download or read book The War That Doesn t Say Its Name written by Jason K. Stearns and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why violence in the Congo has continued despite decades of international intervention Well into its third decade, the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dubbed a “forever war”—a perpetual cycle of war, civil unrest, and local feuds over power and identity. Millions have died in one of the worst humanitarian calamities of our time. The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name investigates the most recent phase of this conflict, asking why the peace deal of 2003—accompanied by the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world and tens of billions in international aid—has failed to stop the violence. Jason Stearns argues that the fighting has become an end in itself, carried forward in substantial part through the apathy and complicity of local and international actors. Stearns shows that regardless of the suffering, there has emerged a narrow military bourgeoisie of commanders and politicians for whom the conflict is a source of survival, dignity, and profit. Foreign donors provide food and urgent health care for millions, preventing the Congolese state from collapsing, but this involvement has not yielded transformational change. Stearns gives a detailed historical account of this period, focusing on the main players—Congolese and Rwandan states and the main armed groups. He extrapolates from these dynamics to other conflicts across Africa and presents a theory of conflict that highlights the interests of the belligerents and the social structures from which they arise. Exploring how violence in the Congo has become preoccupied with its own reproduction, The War That Doesn't Say Its Name sheds light on why certain military feuds persist without resolution.
Download or read book The Trouble with the Congo written by Séverine Autesserre and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trouble with the Congo suggests a new explanation for international peacebuilding failures in civil wars. Drawing from more than 330 interviews and a year and a half of field research, it develops a case study of the international intervention during the Democratic Republic of the Congo's unsuccessful transition from war to peace and democracy (2003-2006). Grassroots rivalries over land, resources, and political power motivated widespread violence. However, a dominant peacebuilding culture shaped the intervention strategy in a way that precluded action on local conflicts, ultimately dooming the international efforts to end the deadliest conflict since World War II. Most international actors interpreted continued fighting as the consequence of national and regional tensions alone. UN staff and diplomats viewed intervention at the macro levels as their only legitimate responsibility. The dominant culture constructed local peacebuilding as such an unimportant, unfamiliar, and unmanageable task that neither shocking events nor resistance from select individuals could convince international actors to reevaluate their understanding of violence and intervention.
Download or read book The Taste of Fear written by Jeremy Bates and published by . This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American movie star Scarlett Cox and her husband, hotel tycoon Salvador Brazza, head to Africa to get away and resuscitate their ailing marriage. When robbed of their money and passports, they seek help from the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam on the very day Al Qaeda chooses to bomb it. In an eyeblink they are taken hostage and whisked across the border deep into the Congo, one of the last truly wild places left on earth. Battling terrorists, deadly wildlife, and cannibalistic rebels, Scarlett and Sal must find a way to survive in a violent, primeval world. And the only person who may be able to save them is the assassin sent to kill them.
Download or read book Death in the Congo written by Emmanuel Gerard and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death in the Congo is a gripping account of a murder that became one of the defining events in postcolonial African history. It is no less the story of the untimely death of a national dream, a hope-filled vision very different from what the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo became in the second half of the twentieth century. When Belgium relinquished colonial control in June 1960, a charismatic thirty-five-year-old African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the new republic. Yet stability immediately broke down. A mutinous Congolese Army spread havoc, while Katanga Province in southeast Congo seceded altogether. Belgium dispatched its military to protect its citizens, and the United Nations soon intervened with its own peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, both the Soviet Union and the United States maneuvered to turn the crisis to their Cold War advantage. A coup in September, secretly aided by the UN, toppled Lumumba’s government. In January 1961, armed men drove Lumumba to a secluded corner of the Katanga bush, stood him up beside a hastily dug grave, and shot him. His rule as Africa’s first democratically elected leader had lasted ten weeks. More than fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Lumumba’s assassination still trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick pursue events through a web of international politics, revealing a tangled history in which many people—black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American—bear responsibility for this crime.
Download or read book Congo Masquerade written by Theodore Trefon and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2011-09-08 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Congo Masquerade is about mismanagement, hypocrisy and powerlessness in what has proved to be one of Africa's most troublesome and volatile states. In this scathing study of catastrophic aid inefficiency, Trefon argues that whilst others have examined war and plunder in the Great Lakes region, none have yet evaluated the imported 'template format' reform package pieced together to introduce democracy and improve the well-being of ordinary Congolese. It has, the book demonstrates, been for years an almost unmitigated failure due to the ingrained political culture of corruption amongst the Congolese elite, abetted by the complicity and incompetence of international partners. Startling and provocative, Congo Masquerade offers a critical examination of why aid is not helping the Congo.
Download or read book America s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo written by Justin Podur and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-30 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines US interventions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda -- two countries whose post-independence histories are inseparable. It analyzes the US campaigns to prevent Patrice Lumumba from turning the DR Congo into a sovereign, democratic, prosperous republic on a continent where America’s ally apartheid South Africa was hegemonic; America’s installation of and support for Mobutu to keep the region under neo-colonial control; and America’s pre-emption of the Africa-wide movement for multiparty democracy in Rwanda and Zaire in the 1990s by supporting Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In addition, the book discusses the concepts of African development, democracy, genocide, foreign policy, and international politics.
Download or read book King Leopold s Ghost written by Adam Hochschild and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.
Download or read book Consuming the Congo written by Peter Eichstaedt and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the "conflict minerals" mined in the Congo amidst armed conflict and human rights abuses including gold, diamonds, coltan, tin, and tungsten used in cell phones, computers, and other electronics. Explores the slave labor, violence, and disease killing millions of Congolese mining these resources, and offers ways one can help.
Download or read book Congo Crisis written by Robert C. Good and published by . This book was released on 1962* with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
