Colonialism In The Congo

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In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism

Author : J. P. Daughton
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393541029
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (935 download)

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Book Synopsis In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism by : J. P. Daughton

Download or read book In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism written by J. P. Daughton and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad and the human costs and contradictions of modern empire. The Congo-Océan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noir. It was completed in 1934, when Equatorial Africa was a French colony, and it stands as one of the deadliest construction projects in history. Colonial workers were subjects of an ostensibly democratic nation whose motto read “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” but liberal ideals were savaged by a cruelly indifferent administrative state. African workers were forcibly conscripted and separated from their families, and subjected to hellish conditions as they hacked their way through dense tropical foliage—a “forest of no joy”; excavated by hand thousands of tons of earth in order to lay down track; blasted their way through rock to construct tunnels; or risked their lives building bridges over otherwise impassable rivers. In the process, they suffered disease, malnutrition, and rampant physical abuse, likely resulting in at least 20,000 deaths. In the Forest of No Joy captures in vivid detail the experiences of the men, women, and children who toiled on the railroad, and forces a reassessment of the moral relationship between modern industrialized empires and what could be called global humanitarian impulses—the desire to improve the lives of people outside of Europe. Drawing on exhaustive research in French and Congolese archives, a chilling documentary record, and heartbreaking photographic evidence, J.P. Daughton tells the epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad, and in doing so reveals the human costs and contradictions of modern empire.

Selling the Congo

Author : Matthew G. Stanard
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 0803239882
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis Selling the Congo by : Matthew G. Stanard

Download or read book Selling the Congo written by Matthew G. Stanard and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belgium was a small, neutral country without a colonial tradition when King Leopold II ceded the Congo, his personal property, to the state in 1908. For the next half century Belgium not only ruled an African empire but also, through widespread, enduring, and eagerly embraced propaganda, produced an imperialist-minded citizenry. Selling the Congo is a study of European pro-empire propaganda in Belgium, with particular emphasis on the period 1908–60. Matthew G. Stanard questions the nature of Belgian imperialism in the Congo and considers the Belgian case in light of literature on the French, British, and other European overseas empires. Comparing Belgium to other imperial powers, the book finds that pro-empire propaganda was a basic part of European overseas expansion and administration during the modern period. Arguing against the long-held belief that Belgians were merely “reluctant imperialists,” Stanard demonstrates that in fact many Belgians readily embraced imperialistic propaganda. Selling the Congo contributes to our understanding of the effectiveness of twentieth-century propaganda by revealing its successes and failures in the Belgian case. Many readers familiar with more-popular histories of Belgian imperialism will find in this book a deeper examination of European involvement in central Africa during the colonial era.

The Lumumba Generation

Author : Daniel Tödt
Publisher : de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 9783110708691
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (86 download)

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Book Synopsis The Lumumba Generation by : Daniel Tödt

Download or read book The Lumumba Generation written by Daniel Tödt and published by de Gruyter. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why did the African elite turn from loyal intermediaries into opponents of the colonial state? This book wants to help better understand the dramatic political and cultural processes of decolonization in the Belgian Congo. Focusing on the ma

Belgium and the Congo, 1885-1980

Author : Guy Vanthemsche
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521194210
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (211 download)

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Book Synopsis Belgium and the Congo, 1885-1980 by : Guy Vanthemsche

Download or read book Belgium and the Congo, 1885-1980 written by Guy Vanthemsche and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains how and why Belgium, a small but influential European country, was changed through its colonial activities in the Congo, from the first expeditions in 1880 to the Mobutu regime in the 1980s. Belgian politics, diplomacy, economic activity and culture were influenced by the imperial experience. Belgium and the Congo, 1885-1980 yields a better understanding of the Congo's past and present.

Being Colonized

Author : Jan Vansina
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN 13 : 0299236439
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (992 download)

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Book Synopsis Being Colonized by : Jan Vansina

Download or read book Being Colonized written by Jan Vansina and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2010-03-18 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was it like to be colonized by foreigners? Highlighting a region in central Congo, in the center of sub-Saharan Africa, Being Colonized places Africans at the heart of the story. In a richly textured history that will appeal to general readers and students as well as to scholars, the distinguished historian Jan Vansina offers not just accounts of colonial administrators, missionaries, and traders, but the varied voices of a colonized people. Vansina uncovers the history revealed in local news, customs, gossip, and even dreams, as related by African villagers through archival documents, material culture, and oral interviews. Vansina’s case study of the colonial experience is the realm of Kuba, a kingdom in Congo about the size of New Jersey—and two-thirds the size of its colonial master, Belgium. The experience of its inhabitants is the story of colonialism, from its earliest manifestations to its tumultuous end. What happened in Kuba happened to varying degrees throughout Africa and other colonized regions: racism, economic exploitation, indirect rule, Christian conversion, modernization, disease and healing, and transformations in gender relations. The Kuba, like others, took their own active part in history, responding to the changes and calamities that colonization set in motion. Vansina follows the region’s inhabitants from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, when a new elite emerged on the eve of Congo’s dramatic passage to independence.

King Leopold's Ghost

Author : Adam Hochschild
Publisher : Picador
ISBN 13 : 1760785202
Total Pages : 474 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (67 download)

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Book Synopsis King Leopold's Ghost by : Adam Hochschild

Download or read book King Leopold's Ghost written by Adam Hochschild and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.

Church, State and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890–1962

Author : Reuben A. Loffman
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3030173801
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (31 download)

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Book Synopsis Church, State and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890–1962 by : Reuben A. Loffman

Download or read book Church, State and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890–1962 written by Reuben A. Loffman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the relationship between Catholic missionaries and the colonial administration in southeastern Belgian Congo. It challenges the perception that the Church and the state worked seamlessly together. Instead, using the territory of Kongolo as a case study, the book reconfigures their relationship as one of competitive co-dependency. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, the book argues that both institutions retained distinct agendas that, while coinciding during certain periods, clashed on many occasions. The study begins by outlining the pre-colonial history of southeastern Congo. The second chapter examines how the Church began its encounters with the peoples in Kongolo and the Tanganyika province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Subsequent chapters highlight how missionaries exerted significant influence over the colonial construction of chieftainship and the politics of Congolese decolonization. The book ends in 1962, with the massacre of a number of Holy Ghost Fathers in an event that signaled the beginning of a more Africanized Church in Kongolo. ‘The author gratefully acknowledges support from the Economic and Social Research Council in the completion of this project.’

Naming Colonialism

Author : Osumaka Likaka
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN 13 : 0299233634
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (992 download)

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Book Synopsis Naming Colonialism by : Osumaka Likaka

Download or read book Naming Colonialism written by Osumaka Likaka and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2009-12-08 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What’s in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners’ physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range—often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village’s understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations. Methodologically innovative, Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process—the naming of Europeans—can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents—“the home burner,” “Leopard,” “Beat, beat,” “The hippopotamus-hide whip”—clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.

Colonial Impotence

Author : Benoît Henriet
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110649098
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis Colonial Impotence by : Benoît Henriet

Download or read book Colonial Impotence written by Benoît Henriet and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-21 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Colonial Impotence, Benoît Henriet studies the violent contradictions of colonial rule from the standpoint of the Leverville concession, Belgian Congo’s largest palm oil exploitation. Leverville was imagined as a benevolent tropical utopia, whose Congolese workers would be "civilized" through a paternalist machinery. However, the concession was marred by inefficiency, endemic corruption and intrinsic brutality. Colonial agents in the field could be seen as impotent, for they were both unable and unwilling to perform as expected. This book offers a new take on the joint experience of colonialism and capitalism in Southwest Congo, and sheds light on their impact on local environments, bodies, societies and cosmogonies.

King Leopold's Congo and the "Scramble for Africa"

Author : Michael A. Rutz
Publisher : Hackett Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1624666582
Total Pages : 134 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (246 download)

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Book Synopsis King Leopold's Congo and the "Scramble for Africa" by : Michael A. Rutz

Download or read book King Leopold's Congo and the "Scramble for Africa" written by Michael A. Rutz and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "King Leopold of Belgium's exploits up the Congo River in the 1880s were central to the European partitioning of the African continent. The Congo Free State, Leopold's private colony, was a unique political construct that opened the door to the savage exploitation of the Congo's natural and human resources by international corporations. The resulting 'red rubber' scandal—which laid bare a fundamental contradiction between the European propagation of free labor and 'civilization' and colonial governments' acceptance of violence and coercion for productivity's sake—haunted all imperial powers in Africa. Featuring a clever introduction and judicious collection of documents, Michael Rutz's book neatly captures the drama of one king's quest to build an empire in Central Africa—a quest that began in the name of anti-slavery and free trade and ended in the brutal exploitation of human lives. This volume is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the history of colonial rule in Africa." —Jelmer Vos, University of Glasgow

Religion, Colonization and Decolonization in Congo, 1885-1960. Religion, colonisation et décolonisation au Congo, 1885-1960

Author : Vincent Viaene
Publisher : Leuven University Press
ISBN 13 : 9462701423
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (627 download)

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Book Synopsis Religion, Colonization and Decolonization in Congo, 1885-1960. Religion, colonisation et décolonisation au Congo, 1885-1960 by : Vincent Viaene

Download or read book Religion, Colonization and Decolonization in Congo, 1885-1960. Religion, colonisation et décolonisation au Congo, 1885-1960 written by Vincent Viaene and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-30 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion in today’s Democratic Republic of Congo has many faces: from the overflowing seminaries and Marian shrines of the Catholic Church to the Islamic brotherhoods, from the healers of Kimban-guism to the televangelism of the booming Pentecostalist churches in the great cities, from the Orthodox communities of Kasai to the ‘invisible’ Mai Mai warriors in the brousse of Kivu. During the colonial period religion was no less central to people’s lives than it is today. More surprisingly, behind the seemingly smooth facade of missions linked closely to imperial power, faith and worship were already marked by diversity and dynamism, tying the Congo into broader African and global movements. The contributions in this book provide insight into the multifaceted history of the interaction between religion and colonization. The authors outline the institutional political framework, and focus on the challenge that old and new forms of slavery entailed for the missions. The atrocities committed at the time of the Congo Free State became an existential question for young Christian communities. In the Belgian Congo after 1908, more structural forms of colonial violence remained a key issue marking religious experiences. And yet, religion also acted as a bridge. The authors emphasize the role intermediaries such as catechists or medical assistants played in the African “appropriation” of Christianity. They examine the complex interaction with indigenous religious beliefs and practices, and zoom in on the part religions played in the independence movement, as well as on their reaction to independence itself. Coming at a moment when Belgium confronts its colonial past, this volume provides a timely reassessment of religion as a key factor.

Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development

Author : Ewout Frankema
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0415521742
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (155 download)

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Book Synopsis Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development by : Ewout Frankema

Download or read book Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development written by Ewout Frankema and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since many countries in the world at present were European colonies in the not so distant past, the relationship between colonial institutions and development outcomes is a key topic of study across many disciplines. This edited volume, from a leading international group of scholars, discusses the comparative legacy of colonial rule in the Netherlands Indies and Belgian Congo during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas the Indonesian economy progressed rapidly during the last three decades of the twentieth century and became a self-reliant and assertive world power, the Congo regressed into a state of political chaos and endemic violence. To which extent do the different legacies of Dutch and Belgian rule explain these different development outcomes, if they do at all? By discussing the comparative features and development of Dutch and Belgian rule, the book aims to 1) to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of colonial institutional legacies in long run patterns of economic divergence in the modern era; 2) to fill in a huge gap in the comparative colonial historical literature, which focuses largely on the comparative evolution of the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese Empires; 3) to add a focused and well-motivated comparative case-study to the increasing strand of literature analyzing the marked differences in economic and political development in Asia and Africa during the postcolonial era. Covering such issues as agriculture, manufacturing and foreign investment, human capital, fiscal policy, labour coercion and mineral resource management, this book offers a highly original and scholarly contribution to the literature on colonial history and development economics.

A Colonial Lexicon

Author : Nancy Rose Hunt
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822323662
Total Pages : 500 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (236 download)

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Book Synopsis A Colonial Lexicon by : Nancy Rose Hunt

Download or read book A Colonial Lexicon written by Nancy Rose Hunt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-15 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Colonial Lexicon is the first historical investigation of how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Rejecting the “colonial encounter” paradigm pervasive in current studies, Nancy Rose Hunt elegantly weaves together stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, to reveal how concerns about strange new objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu’s Zaire. Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu’s Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of “colonial middle figures”—particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives—to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today’s postcolonial Africa. With its close attention to semiotics as well as sociology, A Colonial Lexiconwill interest specialists in anthropology, African history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and women’s and cultural studies.

A Short History of Colonialism

Author : Wolfgang Reinhard
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719083273
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (832 download)

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Book Synopsis A Short History of Colonialism by : Wolfgang Reinhard

Download or read book A Short History of Colonialism written by Wolfgang Reinhard and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This well-written and comprehensive book by an outstanding expert provides students of history and the general reader with reliable, up-to-date information on an essential part of the history of mankind. It deals with the discoveries; with Portuguese, Dutch, and English trade systems in Asia; with the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British Colonies in America; the American plantation economy and the trade in African slaves; with settler colonies in the southern hemisphere; with US, Russian, and Chinese continental imperialism; with Western colonial rule in Asia and Africa; and the several waves of decolonization between 1775 and 1989. Twenty-four maps illustrate the narrative. A useful teaching text, it combines traditional and more recent perspectives to produce a final balance sheet of Western colonialism and its global heritage. A carefully selected bibliography encourages further reading.

Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts

Author : Jules Marchal
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1784786330
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (847 download)

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Book Synopsis Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts by : Jules Marchal

Download or read book Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts written by Jules Marchal and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive account of exploitation in the Congo, introduced by Adam Hochschild In the early twentieth century, the worldwide rubber boom led British entrepreneur Lord Leverhulme to the Belgian Congo. Warmly welcomed by the murderous regime of King Leopold II, Leverhulme set up a private kingdom reliant on the horrific Belgian system of forced labour, a programme that reduced the population of Congo by half and accounted for more deaths than the Nazi Holocaust. In this definitive, meticulously researched history, Jules Marchal exposes the nature of forced labour under Lord Leverhulme’s rule and the appalling conditions imposed upon the people of Congo. With an extensive introduction by Adam Hochschild, Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts is an important and urgently needed account of a laboratory of colonial exploitation.

A Nervous State

Author : Nancy Rose Hunt
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822375249
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis A Nervous State by : Nancy Rose Hunt

Download or read book A Nervous State written by Nancy Rose Hunt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Nervous State, Nancy Rose Hunt considers the afterlives of violence and harm in King Leopold’s Congo Free State. Discarding catastrophe as narrative form, she instead brings alive a history of colonial nervousness. This mood suffused medical investigations, security operations, and vernacular healing movements. With a heuristic of two colonial states—one "nervous," one biopolitical—the analysis alternates between medical research into birthrates, gonorrhea, and childlessness and the securitization of subaltern "therapeutic insurgencies." By the time of Belgian Congo’s famed postwar developmentalist schemes, a shining infertility clinic stood near a bleak penal colony, both sited where a notorious Leopoldian rubber company once enabled rape and mutilation. Hunt’s history bursts with layers of perceptibility and song, conveying everyday surfaces and daydreams of subalterns and colonials alike. Congolese endured and evaded forced labor and medical and security screening. Quick-witted, they stirred unease through healing, wonder, memory, and dance. This capacious medical history sheds light on Congolese sexual and musical economies, on practices of distraction, urbanity, and hedonism. Drawing on theoretical concepts from Georges Canguilhem, Georges Balandier, and Gaston Bachelard, Hunt provides a bold new framework for teasing out the complexities of colonial history.

The Congo from Leopold to Kabila

Author : Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
Publisher : Zed Books
ISBN 13 : 9781842770535
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (75 download)

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Book Synopsis The Congo from Leopold to Kabila by : Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

Download or read book The Congo from Leopold to Kabila written by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2002-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As this book shows, the People of the Congo have suffered throughout the past century from a particularly brutal experience of colonial rule, and a series of post-independence political conflicts. But as this insightful political history of the Congolese democratic movement of the 20th century decisively makes clear, its people have not taken these multiple oppressions lying down. Instead, they have struggled both to establish democratic institutions at home and to free themselves from exploitations abroad.