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Kinshasa’s Theatre of Power

The DRC’s capital is set to become Africa’s largest city, but struggles to assert its authority over a profoundly fractured state as it expands in chaotic fashion. Dilapidated infrastructure and a disintegrating formal economy have not extinguished Kinshasa’s extraordinary cultural vitality, or its role as a centre of political opposition.

Africa’s Leaky Giant

Recent analysis of Congo’s plight has foregrounded notions of local agency and impenetrable complexity, excluding structural analysis. In a landmark rebuttal, Joe Trapido argues that it is just as implausible to deny the agency of powerful outsiders as that of powerful Africans. Dynamics of a primitive accumulation that never results in sustained development, its gains still leaking overseas.

Congo’s Agonies

Etienne Smith on Gérard Prunier, From Genocide to Continental War. Ambitious attempt to make sense of Congo’s decade of war, from a Francophone observer-participant of the continent’s high politics.

Dispatching Lumumba

Linda Melvern on Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba. Archival revelations of the way the Belgian government organized the murder of the Congo’s first Prime Minister.

Colonialism and the Predatory State in the Congo

“At independence, the Congo had only two graduates, and such fabulous riches that the country inevitably became a magnet for rapacious foreign companies and for the Western intelligence services. Kinshasa, as the capital Leopoldville was renamed, swelled with worldly businessmen not averse to secret deals. Once Lumumba was . . .” read more

Zaire at the End of a Reign

“President Mobutu Sese Seko’s triumphal return in December to his capital Kinshasa, a place he had avoided for many years, proved only a nine days’ wonder. After just three weeks, and despite his parlous physical condition, he was off to Morocco and Egypt in search of military aid, . . .” read more

Che Guevera and the Congo

“It’s Che Guevara time again in the pleasure gardens of the West, as publishers and television companies gear themselves up for the thirtieth anniversary of the guerrilla leader’s death in 1997. We’ve already had the early motorcycle diaries, published all over Europe in 1995, and no less than . . .” read more