The 25th Anniversary Edition, with a foreword by Barbara Kingsolver

An enthralling story . . . A work of history that reads like a novel. -- Christian Science Monitor

As Hochschild's brilliant book demonstrates, the great Congo scandal prefigured our own times . . . This book must be read and reread. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist * A New York Times Notable Book

In the late nineteenth century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a brutal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River. Ultimately slashing the area's population by ten million, he still managed to shrewdly cultivate his reputation as a great humanitarian. A tale far richer than any novelist could invent, King Leopold's Ghost is the horrifying account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who defied Leopold: African rebel leaders who fought against hopeless odds and a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century's first great human rights movement.

In 1958 in Accra, Ghana, the Hands Off Africa conference brought together the leading figures of African independence in a public show of political strength and purpose. Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, who had just won Ghana's independence, his determined call for Pan-Africanism was heeded by young, idealistic leaders across the continent and by African Americans seeking civil rights at home. Yet, a moment that signified a new era of African freedom simultaneously marked a new era of foreign intervention and control.

In White Malice, Susan Williams unearths the covert operations pursued by the CIA from Ghana to the Congo to the UN in an effort to frustrate and deny Africa's new generation of nationalist leaders. This dramatically upends the conventional belief that the African nations failed to establish effective, democratic states on their own accord. As the old European powers moved out, the US moved in.

Drawing on original research, recently declassified documents, and told through an engaging narrative, Williams introduces readers to idealistic African leaders and to the secret agents, ambassadors, and even presidents who deliberately worked against them, forever altering the future of a continent.

This is one of the best books I have read in years . . . gripping, full of colorful characters, and strange plot twists. --Fareed Zakaria, CNN host

It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium--one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo's new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling the Congo crisis. Dag Hammarskjöld, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization's biggest peacekeeping mission in history. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help--an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go.

Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjöld, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-fire with the Congo's rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960-61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity.

This remarkable debut book from Philip Gourevitch chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title.

With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's genocidal logic in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa.

Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.

From the beginnings of the slave trade through colonization, the struggle for independence, Mobutu's brutal three decades of rule, and the civil war that has raged from 1996 to the present day, Congo: The Epic History of a People traces the history of one of the most devastated nations in the world. Esteemed scholar David Van Reybrouck balances hundreds of interviews with a diverse range of Congolese with meticulous historical research to construct a multidimensional portrait of a nation and its people.

Epic in scope yet eminently readable, both penetrating and deeply moving, Congo--a finalist for the Cundill Prize--takes a deeply humane approach to political history, focusing squarely on the Congolese perspective, and returns a nation's history to its people.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times

This is one of the best books I have read in years . . . gripping, full of colorful characters, and strange plot twists. --Fareed Zakaria, CNN host

It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium--one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo's new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling the Congo crisis. Dag Hammarskjöld, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization's biggest peacekeeping mission in history. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help--an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go.

Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjöld, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-fire with the Congo's rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960-61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.

When Romeo Dallaire was called on to serve as force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, he believed that his assignment was to help two warring parties achieve the peace they both wanted. Instead, he was exposed to the most barbarous and chaotic display of civil war and genocide in the past decade, observing in just one hundred days the killings of more than eight hundred thousand Rwandans. With only a few troops, his own ingenuity and courage to direct his efforts, Dallaire rescued thousands, but his call for more support from the world body fell on deaf ears. In Shake Hands with the Devil, General Dallaire recreates the awful history the world community chose to ignore. He also chronicles his own progression from confident Cold Warrior to devastated UN commander, and finally to retired general struggling painfully, and publicly, to overcome posttraumatic stress disorder -- the highest-ranking officer ever to share such experiences with readers.

In April-May 1994, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu fellow citizens--about 10,000 a day, mostly being hacked to death by machete. In Machete Season, the veteran foreign correspondent Jean Hatzfeld reports on the results of his interviews with nine of the Hutu killers. They were all friends who came from a single region where they helped to kill 50,000 out of their 59,000 Tutsi neighbors, and all of them are now in prison, some awaiting execution. It is usually presumed that killers will not tell the truth about their brutal actions, but Hatzfeld elicited extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they had perpetrated. He rightly sees that their account raises as many questions as it answers.

Adabert, Alphonse, Ignace, and the others (most of them farmers) told Hatzfeld how the work was given to them, what they thought about it, how they did it, and what their responses were to the bloodbath. Killing is easier than farming, one says. I got into it, no problem, says another. Each describes what it was like the first time he killed someone, what he felt like when he killed a mother and child, how he reacted when he killed a cordial acquaintance, how 'cutting' a person with a machete differed from 'cutting' a calf or a sugarcane. And they had plenty of time to tell Hatzfeld, too, about whether and why they had reconsidered their motives, their moral responsibility, their guilt, remorse, or indifference to the crimes.

Hatzfeld's meditation on the banal, horrific testimony of the genocidaires and what it means is lucid, humane, and wise: he relates the Rwanda horror to war crimes and to other genocidal episodes in human history. Especially since the Holocaust, it has been conventional to presume that only depraved and monstrous evil incarnate could perpetrate such crimes, but it may be, he suggests, that such actions are within the realm of ordinary human conduct. To read this disturbing, enlightening and very brave book is to consider in a new light the foundation of human morality and ethics.

While he captures the tragedies that have repeatedly befallen Africa's peoples, French also opens our eyes to the immense possibility that lies in Africa's complexity, diversity, and myriad cultural strengths. The culmination of twenty-five years of passionate exploration and understanding, this is a powerful and ultimately hopeful book about a fascinating and misunderstood continent.

While the revolutionary leftist movements of the 1960s and '70s in Europe, the United States and Latin America have been the subject of abundant literature, similar movements that emerged in Africa have received comparatively very little attention. This book sheds new light on these political movements.

Africa's left were extremely active in these years. With pro-Soviet movements, Maoism, Trotskyism, Guevarism, Pan-Africanism and the Black Panthers, the rumble of revolution was felt across the continent. From feminist student rebels in Nigeria to pro-democracy moments in Liberia, the exciting and complex interplay between these many actors changed Africa forever.

Can we see echoes of these movements in African politics today? What can we learn from the people who lived through these decades? This unique collection will open the eyes of leftists worldwide who will find new and important insights into an important chapter in global history.

One hot May morning in 2003, a crowd of Hutus who had participated in the genocidal killings of April 1994 in Rwanda filed out of prison and into the sunshine, singing hallelujahs, their freedom granted by presidential pardon. As they returned to their old villages, Tutsi survivors watched as the people who had killed their neighbors and families returned to the homes around them. In The Antelope's Strategy, Jean Hatzfeld returns to Rwanda to talk with both Hutus and Tutsis struggling to live side by side. We hear the voices of killers who have been released from prison or returned from exile, and Tutsi escapees who must now tolerate them as neighbors. How are they managing with the process of reconciliation? Is such a thing even possible? The enormously varied answers Hatzfeld gets suggest that little faith in true recovery survives among those who lived through the genocide. This is an astonishing exploration of the pain of memory, the nature of stoic hope, and the ineradicability of grief.

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, had terrorized, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale over eight bloody years in power--all while enjoying full American and Western support. After Habré's overthrow, his victims and their supporters were determined to see him held responsible for his atrocities. Their quest for justice would be long, tense, and unnerving, but they would not back down.

To Catch a Dictator is a dramatic insider's account of the hunt for Habré and his momentous trial. The human rights lawyer Reed Brody recounts how he and an international team of investigators, legal experts, and victims worked across three continents to unearth evidence and witnesses, petition courts and skeptical governments, and rally public opinion. They faced many obstacles and constant threats. One of Brody's Chadian colleagues was gravely injured in a bomb attack, and another had to seek asylum in the United States. Habré fought back bitterly, drawing on secret bank accounts and extensive political connections to preserve his life of luxurious exile. Yet Brody and his allies ultimately triumphed: Habré became the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity in the courts of another country. This fast-paced, suspenseful book shows that there is nothing inevitable about the impunity that too often protects the powerful and that even the worst tyrants can be brought to justice.

The book also features a foreword by Jacqueline Moudeïna, the lead lawyer for Hissène Habré's victims, who received the Right Livelihood Award (the alternative Nobel Peace Prize) in 2011.

Unfortunately, slavery is still practiced in parts of the world.

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, had terrorized, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale over eight bloody years in power--all while enjoying full American and Western support. After Habré's overthrow, his victims and their supporters were determined to see him held responsible for his atrocities. Their quest for justice would be long, tense, and unnerving, but they would not back down.

To Catch a Dictator is a dramatic insider's account of the hunt for Habré and his momentous trial. The human rights lawyer Reed Brody recounts how he and an international team of investigators, legal experts, and victims worked across three continents to unearth evidence and witnesses, petition courts and skeptical governments, and rally public opinion. They faced many obstacles and constant threats. One of Brody's Chadian colleagues was gravely injured in a bomb attack, and another had to seek asylum in the United States. Habré fought back bitterly, drawing on secret bank accounts and extensive political connections to preserve his life of luxurious exile. Yet Brody and his allies ultimately triumphed: Habré became the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity in the courts of another country. This fast-paced, suspenseful book shows that there is nothing inevitable about the impunity that too often protects the powerful and that even the worst tyrants can be brought to justice.

The book also features a foreword by Jacqueline Moudeïna, the lead lawyer for Hissène Habré's victims, who received the Right Livelihood Award (the alternative Nobel Peace Prize) in 2011.

Although the genocide of 1994 catapulted Rwanda onto the international stage, English-language historical accounts of the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa are still scarce. Drawing on a wide range of sources -- colonial archives, oral tradition, archaeological discoveries, studies in anthropology and linguistics, and his thirty years of scholarship -- Jean-Pierre Chr tien offers a major synthesis of the history of the region, which encompasses Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Eastern Congo, and Western Tanzania, a region still plagued by extremely violent wars.

The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History first retraces the human settlement and the formation of kingdoms around the sources of the Nile, which were discovered by European explorers around 1860. Chr tien then describes these kingdoms' complex social and political organization and analyzes how the colonizers -- German, British, and Belgian -- not only transformed and exploited the existing power structures, but also projected their own racial categories onto them.

Finally, the author shows how the independent states of the postcolonial era, in particular Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda, have been trapped by their colonial and precolonial legacies, and especially by the racial rewriting of the latter by the former. Today, argues Chr tien, the Great Lakes region of Africa is crucial for historical research: not only because its history is particularly fascinating but also because the tragedies of its present are very much a function of the political manipulations of its past.