Description
The creator of this book, Professor Nzongola-Ntalaja, is likely one of the country’s leading intellectuals. Despite being forced into long years of exile (throughout which he taught political science in the USA and elsewhere), he has played a part at significant moments in his country’s political struggle. His deep knowledge of personalities and events, and his understanding of the underlying class, ethnic and other factors at work, make his book a compelling, lucid, radical and utterly unromanticized account of his countrymen’s struggle. In acknowledging their defeat, he sees it and the crisis of the post-colonial state as the result of the breakdown of the anti-colonial alliance between the masses and the national leadership after independence.
This book is very important reading for understanding what is happening in the Congo and the Great Lakes region. It’s going to also stand as a milestone in how to write the modern political history of Africa.