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.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.David 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 in an attempt to return a nation's history to its people.
