Like Lumumba, the story of Congo too is one of almost unrelieved horror from the day in 1885 the Belgian King Leopold II took over the huge mineral-rich area as his personal fiefdom and established what was called the Congo Free State. It was anything but free. The decades of atrocities have recently been chronicled better than ever before in a brilliant book by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost. Today the horror in Congo continues. African leaders have been sitting once again in Lusaka under the chairmanship of Zambia's Frederick Chiluba trying to extricate themselves from the war there.
Congo still has no proper, ordered government.
Never since independence has the writ of the administration in Kinshasa properly run across a land four times the size of France. And no wonder. In its 75-year rule the colonial power had produced fewer than 30 Congolese graduates. There were no Congolese army officers, engineers, agronomists or doctors. Leopold II never even went to Congo himself to witness his handiwork.