Second paragraph of third chapter:One problem with our donors was that several of them were not only financiers of the process but also had interests in its outcome, whether those were pressures from past and potential investors in the DRC or concerns about the cost and availability of suitable troops to deploy as peace-keepers. Thus three of them ( Read more... )

More or less by coincidence, this is the second book about Congo that I have read this month. This is the story of an earlier era, of the awful exploitation, rape and murder of vast numbers of Africans under the personal supervision of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Hochschild admits that precise figures are difficult to establish with ( Read more... )

I read this book sitting beside its author on a trans-Atlantic plane flight, which is an unusual level of interaction. It is a tremendously detailed account of how, in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the new Rwandan government invaded its neighbour Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) kicking off a conflict that sucked in military ( Read more... )

I had literally no expectations of this book before I started it, and was interested to discover that it is about an American family in Africa, given that I'm due to go to the continent for the first time myself in two weeks ( Read more... )

4) Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
5) Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe ( Read more... )