The story of two teenagers growing up in the shadow of west Africa's civil wars, the expatriate Congolese novelist Emmanuel Dongala paints a vivid picture of the struggle to survive in difficult times. Don’t get afraid of the sheer size of this volume.. once you start digging in you will be hooked! The author master the art of combining well-researched historical facts with a human touch on each chalter. I have been living in DRC for 4 years and I totally see the reminiscence of some traces of character and the psyche of a very complex country with a terrible past and a constant crave to move forward on spite of the many adversities.. Some 20,000 people work at Shabara artisanal mine in the DRC, in shifts of 5,000 at a time. The DRC produced approximately 74% of the world's cobalt in 2021.

Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso from 1983-1987, is currently in the news because an investigation has just begun into his assassination. This collection of his interviews and speeches provides a window on his programmes to improve people’s lives, involving land redistribution, literacy and education, a focus on women’s rights and a massive vaccination scheme. Revered as Africa’s Che Guevara, Sankara defied neocolonial control by France, the former colonial power, and the US. He described debt, presented as aid, as “neocolonialism, in which colonisers transformed themselves into ‘technical assistance’. We should say ‘technical assassins’.” Senate - percent of vote by party - NA; seats by party - PCT 46, independent 12, MAR 2, RDPS 2, UPADS 2, DRD 1, FP 1, MCDDI 1, PRL 1, Pulp 1, PUR 1, RC 1; composition - men 58, women 14, percent of women 19.4%

Transnational Issues

Stearns bravely sets out to counter the west's indifference and ignorance, doing much dangerous and arduous legwork to hear from key players – both perpetrators and victims – and eyewitnesses. He attempts to understand why Congo has been in turmoil for decades and stability has been so elusive.

This deeply symbolic novel is dedicated: “To all Kenyans struggling against the neocolonial stage of imperialism.” It was written on toilet paper in prison, when Ngũgĩ was detained without trial. Here, the devil represents the international financiers and bankers, in collaboration with Kenya’s elite. One of the devil’s disciples advocates extreme versions of privatisation, including the sale of bottled air. “We could even import some air from abroad, imported air, which we could then sell to the people at special prices!” The story ends with a thrilling act of resistance by its heroine, Jacinta Wariinga. The form of the novel is itself an act of resistance: it was originally written in Gikuyu, not English, to foster a national literature in one of the Kenyan languages. Bennett confronts the question of an artist's role in a time of conflict as an Irish novelist follows his lover to Leopoldville on the verge of independence in 1959. Senate (72 seats; members indirectly elected by local, district, and regional councils by simple majority vote to serve 6-year terms) note- the Senate is renewed in its entirety following a constitutional reform implemented in 2015 ending the renewal by half The naturalist and travel writer sets off on an intrepid river journey in search of the legendary Mokele-mbembe. O'Hanlon confronts natural perils, corruption and poverty with his trademark mixture of gallows humour and laconic understatement, offering a perspective on the Congo focusing more on the people and animals who live there than the region's troubled politics. This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS.Imagine an entire population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. There is no alternative there. The mines have taken over everything. A searing analysis of the 1994 Rwandan genocide which unleashed a wave of instability in the Congo region. Gourevitch combines interviews with victims and their killers and his own first-hand accounts of travelling around the region in the aftermath of the Interahamwe killings. He also builds a powerful case against the international community, whose inaction made it the unwilling accomplice of Hutu power. That’s a masterpiece. A must for anyone willing to approach the subject of the DRC, a very complex subject that can be understood with this book. China has been described as the latest neocolonial power in Africa. In his short story, The Sale, Huchu takes China’s investments in his own country, Zimbabwe, to a menacing extreme. In his dystopian world, neocolonialism has mutated into a terrifying form, where China and the US buy up countries heavily in debt. When the deficit remains, the citizens are sold and then controlled and surveilled by drones. At the centre of this chilling story is China’s intention to bulldoze the medieval city of Great Zimbabwe, now the “property of Ling Lee Antiquities Enterprises and Debt Recovery”. Neocolonialism takes various forms, including the sponsorship of culture. This study of the CIA during the cold war reveals the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front based in Paris, which was active on five continents, including Africa. Among an astonishing breadth of activities, it subsidised conferences, cultural centres, books and magazines, including Encounter in London. “Soon enough”, exclaimed the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka in disgust, “we would discover that we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation, the devil himself, romping in our postcolonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge!”