Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
If ever there was a book that illustrated the intractability of of certain issues it is the well written and surprisingly balanced account of recent Congo history by Jason Stearns. Though Stearns certainly provides a sizable apportionment of blame to colonialism, he also does not spare the Africans themselves from conducting their affairs in self serving and often horrific ways.
Stearns used the tools of several narratives to weave not one, but several stories of how a country such as the Congo, (formely Zaire, formerly the Congo) could have seen all of the advantages of vast natural resources wasted. The wars with Rwanda, and several other countries, not to mention its own civil wars, lead to the deaths of millions.
There is understandably a bias on the part of media to cover local events. Yet the little amount of press that this man-made disaster achieved in the mid-1990s is borderline appalling. Not that the developed nations could have done much. The United Nations is shown here to be feckless, understaffed, and in many cases, as corrupt as the hundreds of organizations and miltias organized almost entirely for their own interests at the expense of the people of the Congo.
Any reader wishing to garner at least a sense of the issues concerning central Africa today should make Dancing in the Glory of Monsters a must read.