(3)The niece of a missionary in Africa recounts her travels in the Belgian Congo, capturing the remnants of Zaire's colonial past, the mission station where her uncle worked, the white expatriate community, and the realities of modern Zaire.
(1)A comprehensive guide to the adventures and pleasures of East Africa--a region boasting incredible scenic wonders, a rich tapestry of peoples and history, and some of the best wildlife viewing in the world. Illustrated.
(1)Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of the Congo is a collaboration between VII Photo Agency, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and de.MO. Introduction by Simon Robinson, who has covered Africa for Time since 1999; foreword is by Nicolas de Torrente, executive director of MSF.
Extraordinary photographs document the crisis in eastern Congo where the death toll is the highest ever attributed to war anywhere in the world since World War II. Violence, war-related hunger, and disease continue to kill 1,000 people every day, and almost four million deaths have occurred in the past five years.
Also recorded is the response by the MSF, a medical humanitarian organization delivering aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural and man-made disasters, and exclusion from health care in nearly 70 countries.
expedition
(7)An American explorer and cryptozoologist chronicles his adventures on the Congo searching for the elusive Mokele-Mbembe, a dinosaur-like creature reported to live in the river. By the author of The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck.
(19)Feeling the need to reorient his inner compass, filmmaker Kevin Kertscher set out on a personal journey across large expanses of the African continent.
(12)As a freshly trained 23-year-old fish culture extension agent, Tidwell was ill prepared for the remote tribal kingdom in central Zaire called Kalambayi. But his reward, ultimately, was his acceptance by the generous Kalambayans and his ability to share their daily lives.
(7)Kitabu means 'book' or 'diary' in Swahili...an appropriate word for this exciting autobiographical account covering twelve adventure-filled years of dedicated work among seventeen Central African tribes.
In 1948 Jean-Pierre Hallet, age 21, embarked on a career in the Congo as an agronomist and sociologist for the Belgian Colonial Government. Working in intimate daily contact with the bushland tribes, he delved into the strange traditions and customs of each culture... the vivid background against which the reader relives the author's sometimes staggering adventures.
Early in his career M. Hallet almost succumbed to malaria and blackwater fever, but as in other dangerous situations, his stamina and size (6'5", 240lbs) helped hims survive. Fluency with native tongues and determination to meet the Africans on a man-to-man level led him into a series of remarkable experiences, including his initiation in a Congolese secret society and blood brotherhood with Kenya's warrior Masai.
In October 1955 he lost his right hand while dynamiting fish to feed the famine-stricken Bamosso of Burundi; a year later, one-handed, he attacked and killed a leopard which was mauling one of his porters.
The author's work among the Bambuti Pygmies was described by the Central Congo Government as an 'ethnological revolution': he taught them to cultivate the soil, to build houses and schools, to read and write.
When the Congo's troubled independence came in 1960, Hallet reached the painful conclusion that there was no longer a place for him.
(23)In 2005 Kate Jackson ventured into the remote swamp forests of the northern Congo to collect reptiles and amphibians. Her camping equipment was rudimentary, her knowledge of Congolese customs even more so. She knew how to string a net and set a pitfall trap, but she never imagined the physical and cultural difficulties that awaited her.
Culled from the mud-spattered pages of her journals, Mean and Lowly Things reads like a fast-paced adventure story. It is Jackson’s unvarnished account of her research on the front lines of the global biodiversity crisis—coping with interminable delays in obtaining permits, learning to outrun advancing army ants, subsisting on a diet of Spam and manioc, and ultimately falling in love with the strangely beautiful flooded forest.
The reptile fauna of the Republic of Congo was all but undescribed, and Jackson’s mission was to carry out the most basic study of the amphibians and reptiles of the swamp forest: to create a simple list of the species that exist there—a crucial first step toward efforts to protect them. When the snakes evaded her carefully set traps, Jackson enlisted people from the villages to bring her specimens. She trained her guide to tag frogs and skinks and to fix them in formalin. As her expensive camera rusted and her Western soap melted, Jackson learned what it took to swim with the snakes—and that there’s a right way and a wrong way to get a baby cobra out of a bottle.
(12)A hilarious and wrenching memoir from a peace Corps volunteer in Zaire.
(7)448 PAGES. WORLD-FAMOUS EXPLORER,NATURALIST AND AUTHOR.INTERNATIONAL BEST SELLER
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(1)In 1903, Roger Casement, then a British consul, left his consular base on the Lower Congo River and made a journey through the regions of the Upper Congo to investigate at first hand reports of alleged atrocities. His subsequent report was a crucial instrument in the British government's efforts to bring about change in King Leopold's Congo Free State. This edition brings together Casement's report, together with his diary of that year, which have been carefully edited for publication. Names which were omitted from the original published report have been reinstated, and explanatory notes have been provided to report and diary. The editors' introduction addresses the scramble for Africa, the role of Leopold and the Congo Free State, Britain and the Congo question, Casement's career, publication of the report and the humanitarian campaign, 1904-13.
Known as the heart of Africa, the Congos are one of the last bastions in Africa for the seriously adventurous traveler. This revised guide tells you how to travel both adventurously and safely with the practical information and unique maps needed to explore this jungle territory. The Congos encompass Africa’s largest area of intact rainforest and much of the book is devoted to the spectacular wildlife including the mountain gorilla and the critically endangered eastern lowland gorilla. This is the only comprehensive guide to both Congos in English.
(10)In this brilliant mix of political journalism and travel writing, Helen Winternitz and fellow journalist Timothy Phelps witness what few Westerners have: life in the ecologically rich but financially impoverished American-backed dictatorship of Zaire, the former Belgian Congo.
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(7)'When seven Burundian paratroopers booted down the door of my hotel room and arrested me, I was wearing nothing but a towelling dressing-gown. With angry movements of their Kalashnikovs, they gestured to me to get dressed. What, I wondered in that long, slow-motion second before the fear kicked in, do you wear to your own execution? Would the Gap jeans do one more day?' In the summer of 1994, Christian Jennings arrived in Rwanda with an almost impossible mission: he had five days to track down the army officers and government ministers responsible for the slaughter of 850,000 people and persuade them to participate in a TV documentary about their crimes. He had fifteen thousand dollars taped to his thigh, a satellite phone, thirty feet of rope, eighteen litres of mineral water and a good command of French. Nothing in his past - which included service in the French Foreign Legion and a spell in publishing - prepared him for the three and a half years that followed. Across the Red River is an epic account of the terror and beauty of Central Africa, both moving and harrowing in its detail, and frequently appallingly funny.
