We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (1999)

Kingsolver wears her politics on her sleeve and fearlessly skewers colonialism, patriarchy and religious fanaticism, while also reflecting on guilt and personal responsibility. Imagine a mountain of gravel and stone just avalanching down on people, crushing legs and arms, spines. I met people whose legs had been amputated, who had metal bars in where their legs used to be. Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso from 1983-1987, is currently in the news because an investigation has just begun into his assassination. This collection of his interviews and speeches provides a window on his programmes to improve people’s lives, involving land redistribution, literacy and education, a focus on women’s rights and a massive vaccination scheme. Revered as Africa’s Che Guevara, Sankara defied neocolonial control by France, the former colonial power, and the US. He described debt, presented as aid, as “neocolonialism, in which colonisers transformed themselves into ‘technical assistance’. We should say ‘technical assassins’.”domestic: fixed-line infrastructure inadequate, providing less than 1 fixed-line connection per 100 persons; mobile-cellular 97 per 100 persons (2021) Stearns bravely sets out to counter the west's indifference and ignorance, doing much dangerous and arduous legwork to hear from key players – both perpetrators and victims – and eyewitnesses. He attempts to understand why Congo has been in turmoil for decades and stability has been so elusive. That’s a masterpiece. A must for anyone willing to approach the subject of the DRC, a very complex subject that can be understood with this book.

Neocolonialism takes various forms, including the sponsorship of culture. This study of the CIA during the cold war reveals the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front based in Paris, which was active on five continents, including Africa. Among an astonishing breadth of activities, it subsidised conferences, cultural centres, books and magazines, including Encounter in London. “Soon enough”, exclaimed the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka in disgust, “we would discover that we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation, the devil himself, romping in our postcolonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge!” There are some incidents that are just so burned into me that they'll come at me just like a terror, and it's hard. I just hope I've done justice to those stories and to the people who shared their tragedies with me, courageously shared these tragedies with me. I just want their voices [to] reach the world and then the world will decide what to do with the truth and the testimonies of the Congolese people. But if I've done some justice to bringing those voices out into the world that can scarcely function without the suffering of the Congolese people, then it's all worth it. Even the nightmares and the terrors, it's all worth it. Bennett confronts the question of an artist's role in a time of conflict as an Irish novelist follows his lover to Leopoldville on the verge of independence in 1959. Mudimbe, a respected philosopher and writer on Africa, was born in what was then the Belgian Congo. He teaches literature at Duke University in the US. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason StearnsThe naturalist and travel writer sets off on an intrepid river journey in search of the legendary Mokele-mbembe. O'Hanlon confronts natural perils, corruption and poverty with his trademark mixture of gallows humour and laconic understatement, offering a perspective on the Congo focusing more on the people and animals who live there than the region's troubled politics. A more convincing account of the turbulent start to Congo colonialism. Ward was one of the foot soldiers hired by Stanley when he returned to claim the vast river basin, employed by the Belgian king, Leopold II. Ward learnt river languages to fluency, survived paddling thousands of miles up and down disease-ridden reaches and managed to retain some sense of humility throughout. 3. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899) Imagine an entire population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. There is no alternative there. The mines have taken over everything. Their personal stories are inextricably linked to the turmoil within the country as it struggles for nationhood. Each has committed a grievous act of betrayal against the other, which costs them dear. Loyalty, deceit and greed lie at the heart of the tale.