contents

map

introduction

1: missionaries and traders

Livingstone and Stanley

‘The king with ten million murders on his soul'

Red rubber

Resistance

Who gained?

Further critics

The end of Léopold’s empire

2: miners and planters

Élisabethville

The church

The social wage

The limits of reform

Away from the cities

Early independence struggles

World War II

The demand for freedom

Preparing for power

3: rebels and generals

The passive revolution

The second war of independence

Resistance to secession

Tshombe’s fiefdom

The play of external forces

US strategy

The fall of Lumumba

Lumumba: icon of struggle

Mobutu makes his first move

Efforts to build a coalition

Descent into civil war

Rebellion or revolution?

Why the army?

The all-conquering warrior

Mobutu in power

4: the great dictator

The creation of Zaïre

From boom to bust

Mobutu’s first decade

Wars in Angola, wars in Shaba

Towards structural adjustment: the late 1970s

Capitalism and class formation under Mobutu

Support abroad, opposition within

5: the failed ‘transition’

Economic collapse

The regime challenged from below

International changes and internal struggle

The march of hope

Resuming the ‘transition’

Frustrated transition

6: speculators and thieves

Understanding the east

Refugees, the UN and Rwanda

The first rebellion

American interests

Kabila

Kabila in power

Intervention and the second war: the case of Zimbabwe

Uganda, Rwanda and the role of the military

Minerals and multinationals

Ituri, gold and multinational companies

Negotiations

The IMF, criminality and the partition of the Congo

conclusion

notes

introduction

one

two

three

four

five

six

conclusion

index