Who Killed the Congo

By Philippa Schuyler

1962: by Philippa Schuyler - 310 pages - The author presents the vital statistics of the Congo Region - its natural resources, native education, health, employment, and tribal differences. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815972121
• ISBN13: 9780815972129
• Release Date: January 1962
• Publisher: The Devin-Adair Company
• Length: 310 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.3" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Why read about 1960s Congo?

Why should you read a book about the history of the Congo under Belgium rule through independence in 1960? The Cold War geopolitics of the 1950s-1960s pitted the US against the USSR played out in “Third World Countries” like Congo. Subsequent US involvement in Vietnam was the product of actual proxy wars rather than an American fear of imagined Communist influence. The promise of post-colonial prosperity and freedom in Africa seems doomed from the start. Did the colonial powers leave the new countries unprepared for the future or did African leaders share the blame? Philippa Duke Schuyler has a fascinating personal biography: her father George S. Schuyler was a noted American Black journalist and novelist of the mid 20th Century. His interracial marriage to Josephine Cogdell in 1927 was socially iconoclastic even in urban New York. Philippa was a child prodigy in many arenas and excelled as a performer and composer of classical music. American racial sensibilities blocked her from many performance venues in the US and she travelled the world to perform. This brought her to Congo as early as 1952 and she began to write articles about the country in 1957. The publication of Who Killed the Congo in 1962 tells an amazingly nuanced and informed story of this troubled transformation. She died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in 1967 while covering that conflict. Largely forgotten, her vivid and productive life serves as a lens on being Black in the mid-20th Century.