In the 2023 presidential election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, held on December 20, the incumbent, Félix Tshisekedi, has provisionally been declared the victor, with an improbable 73 percent of the vote. In the NYR Online today, Nicolas Niarchos writes about an election in which “voters were intimidated, polling stations attacked, and, perhaps most tellingly, voting machines installed in private houses and fed ballots marked with” Tshisekedi’s name.

Below, alongside Niarchos’s essay, we have collected six articles from the Review’s archives about the history of the DRC.

Nicolas Niarchos
‘A Simulacrum of Elections’

President Félix Tshisekedi’s reelection in a contested vote further weakens democracy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Helen Epstein
Congo for the Congolese

A century and a half of malign interference by imperial powers and marauding neighbors is enough. The only way out of this mess is to deliver Congo back to the Congolese.

Lucas Adams
Bodys Isek Kingelez:
Building Fantasy

Out of modest ingredients the Congolese sculptor Bodys Isek Kingelez creates a whole world, entirely his own.

Jeremy Bernstein
In Congo’s Virunga Hills: Gorillas Under Siege

“We headed down to visit the mountain gorillas, a rare subspecies of Eastern Gorilla that is found only in national parks in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nowadays, it is estimated that there are about 700 left.”

Colm Tóibín
The Tragedy of Roger Casement

“As soon as he saw what was happening in the Congo, Roger Casement showed enormous determination and confidence. His letters to his masters in London are detailed, hectoring, at times, highly emotional, and often very long…. The atrocities he outlined included mass murder and mutilation and enslavement. He was capable of a measured tone, outlining his evidence with care and precision. But he was, in the words of Brian Inglis, ‘filled with rage and compassion.’”

Brian Urquhart
The Tragedy of Lumumba

“Patrice Lumumba’s assassination was an unpardonable, cowardly, and disgustingly brutal act. Belgium, Kasa Vubu and Mobutu, and Moise Tshombe bear the main responsibility for this atrocity. The United States, and possibly other Western powers as well, tacitly favored it and did nothing to stop it.”

J. H. Plumb
A Black Heart

“Leopold II created the Congo—its misery, its slavery, its impotence, and its anarchy. And he did more besides. The notoriety of his life, the evil of his methods, threw into vivid relief the greed, the indifference, the moral bankruptcy and public hypocrisy of high capitalism of western Europe in the late nineteenth century.”

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