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Toujours Servir: A Marshal’s Madness | 1975–1990 The Electric Years: Mobutu Gets Down to Business | 1965–1975 The Struggle for the Throne: The Turbulent Years of the First Republic | 1960–1965 Soon to be Ours: A Belated Decolonization, a Sudden Independence | 1955–1960 The Red Hour of the Kickoff: The War and the Deceptive Calm That Followed | 1940–1955 In the Stranglehold of Fear : Growing Unrest and Mutual Suspicion in Peacetime | 1921–1940

The Belgians Set Us Free: The Early Years of the Colonial Regime | 1908–1921 “Diabolical Filth”: Congo Under Leopold II | 1885–1908 New Spirits: Central Africa Draws the Attention of East and West | 1870–1885 With a span of several hundred years and an enormous cast of characters, ‘Congo’ chronicles the most dramatic episodes of the nation’s history, the people and events that have determined Congo’s development – from the slave trade to the ivory and rubber booms from the arrival of Henry Morton Stanley and his meeting with Dr Livingstone to the brutal regime of Belgium’s King Leopold II from the struggle for independence to Mobutu's exploitative rule and from Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s world famous ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ to the civil war over natural resources that began in 1996 and still rages today.ĭavid Van Reybrouck interweaves his own family's history with the voices of a diverse range of individuals – charismatic dictators, feuding warlords, child-soldiers, elderly, female 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 i. Epic yet eminently readable, penetrating and profoundly moving, ‘Congo’ traces the fate of one of the world's most devastated countries, second only to war-torn Somalia: the Democratic Republic of Congo.