DRC: DRC's economic war

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899 and years later subject to a polemical but much-needed critique by one of Africa’s most prolific writers, King Leopold’s colonial project in the Congo is described as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.” More than a century later, writes Zahra Moloo, after a protracted war in which an estimated 4.2 million citizens perished and the nation’s stability was invested in the UN’s largest peacekeeping force to date, Conrad’s oft-repeated phrase is, tragically, just as pertinent.