Death in the Congo offers a seamless account of the downfall of the Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Emmanuel Gerard is a professor of history at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Bruce Kuklick is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. They have collaborated to produce a fascinating account of what happened in those first eventful months of the Congo's independence in 1960. The authors use an impressive array of primary sources, the most important of which are new material from the National and State Archives of Belgium, the Belgian Foreign Affairs archives, the Archive of the United Nations, and newly released documents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Death in the Congo shows how the legacy of Belgian imperialism helped create an international crisis and a grand-scale national tragedy. Gerard and Kuklick are brilliant on the interplay and importance of Belgian politics in the Congo's...