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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.
A devout Catholic politician assassinated by a capricious dictator. A Cardinal standing up for his people in the face of political repression. A priest leading his nation’s constitutional revision. The “Mother Teresa of Uganda” transforming the lives of thousands of abandoned children. Two missionaries who founded the best community radio station in Africa. A peace activist who has amplified the voices of grassroots women in the midst of a brutal civil war. Such are the powerful stories in For God and My Country, a book that explores how seven inspiring leaders in Uganda’s largest religious community have shaped the social and political life of their country. Drawing on extensive oral research, J. J. Carney analyzes how personal faith, theological vision, and Catholic social teaching have propelled these leaders to embody Vatican II’s call for the Church to be a sign of communion and unity in the world. Readers will gain rich insight into Uganda’s postcolonial politics and the history of one of Africa’s most important Catholic communities. Each chapter closes with leadership lessons and reflection questions, making this an ideal text for classroom and parish adoption.
“We who have been colonized can never forget” Andrée Blouin—once called the most dangerous woman in Africa—played a leading role in the struggles for decolonization that shook the continent in the 1950s and ’60s, advising the postcolonial leaders of Algeria, both Congos, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea, and Ghana. In this autobiography, Blouin retraces her remarkable journey as an African revolutionary. Born in French Equatorial Africa and abandoned at the age of three, she endured years of neglect and abuse in a colonial orphanage, which she escaped after being forced by nuns into an arranged marriage at fifteen. She later became radicalized by the death of her two-year-old son, who was denied malaria medication by French officials because he was one-quarter African. In Guinea, where Blouin was active in Sékou Touré’s campaign for independence, she came into contact with leaders of the liberation movement in the Belgian Congo. Blouin witnessed the Congolese tragedy up close as an adviser to Patrice Lumumba, whose arrest and assassination she narrates in unforgettable detail. Blouin offers a sweeping survey of pan-African nationalism, capturing the intricacies of revolutionary diplomacy, comradeship, and betrayal. Alongside intimate portraits of the movement’s leaders, Blouin provides insights into the often-overlooked contribution of African women in the struggle for independence.
The Assassination of Lumumba unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts of the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba—the first prime minister of the Republic of Congo and a pioneer of African unity—since it perpetration. Making use of a huge array of official sources as well as personal testimony from many of those in the Congo at the time, Ludo De Witte reveals a network of complicity ranging from the Belgian government to the CIA. Patrice Lumumba’s personal strength and his quest for African unity emerges in stark contrast with one of the murkiest episodes in twentieth-century politics.
A "meticulously researched and comprehensive" (Financial Times) 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.
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.
New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.
This book transports readers into the jungles and crocodile-infested waters of sub-Saharan Africa. The author travels a river barge teeming with merchants, mothers, prostitutes, fishermen, and spiritual followers, then launches his quest to confront the Congo River by descending its longest navigational stretch.