Sources — The Congo Free State

General works

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. The book that put the subject back into general circulation, and rightly. Narrative history of a high order; its population figure is an estimate of decline and is often misquoted as a body count.
Vansina, Jan. Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. The essential account of what was there before. Vansina is also the source of the demographic estimate everything else rests on.
Vellut, Jean-Luc, ed. La mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial. Tervuren: Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale, 2005. In French. The Belgian scholarly reassessment, produced by the museum that had spent a century not doing it.
Vanthemsche, Guy. Belgium and the Congo, 1885–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The best single scholarly overview of the whole relationship, and the most careful on what Belgium did and did not know.
Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History. London: Zed Books, 2002. By a Congolese political scientist; the necessary counterweight to histories written from Brussels or Boston.
Ndaywel è Nziem, Isidore. Histoire générale du Congo. Paris: Duculot, 1998. In French. The standard Congolese national history.

Chapters I–III

Thornton, John K. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
Heywood, Linda M. Njinga of Angola: Africa's Warrior Queen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Reefe, Thomas Q. The Rainbow and the Kings: A History of the Luba Empire to 1891. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Sheriff, Abdul. Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. London: James Currey, 1987. On the east-coast trading system that reached the Lualaba, and on Tippu Tip's world.
Stengers, Jean, and Jan Vansina. “King Leopold's Congo, 1886–1908.” In The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The standard scholarly summary, by the two historians who knew the archives best.
Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991. For Berlin and the wider partition.
Jeal, Tim. Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer. London: Faber, 2007. Revisionist and sympathetic; read against Hochschild rather than instead of him.

Chapters IV–VI

Harms, Robert. “The End of Red Rubber: A Reassessment.” Journal of African History 16, no. 1 (1975): 73–88. On why the system collapsed when it did, and the role of Asian plantation rubber.
Harms, Robert. River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500–1891. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
Morel, E. D. Red Rubber. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906. The campaign's central text, by its organiser. Polemical, evidenced, and the reason the subject became public.
Casement, Roger. The Casement Report. London: HMSO, 1904. The official British consular investigation. Published as a parliamentary paper and available online; the single most important document in the story.
Ó Síocháin, Séamas, and Michael O'Sullivan, eds. The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement's Congo Report and 1903 Diary. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003.
Ó Síocháin, Séamas. Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2008.
Sliwinski, Sharon. “The Childhood of Human Rights: The Kodak on the Congo.” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 3 (2006): 333–63. On Alice Seeley Harris's photographs and the birth of atrocity photography as a political instrument.
Grant, Kevin. A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926. London: Routledge, 2005. Places the Congo campaign in the wider humanitarian politics of the period, including what it declined to look at.

Chapter VII

Vansina, Jan. Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. One society followed through the whole period, by the historian who knew it best. The most useful single book for understanding what the population collapse meant on the ground.
Lyons, Maryinez. The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Essential. A large share of the mortality was epidemiological, and this is the book on it.
Sanderson, G. N. “The Congo Free State and the Question of Depopulation.” In various Belgian colloquia proceedings, 1980s.
Gann, L. H., and Peter Duignan. The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 1884–1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Markedly more sympathetic to the colonial administration than anything else on this list; included deliberately, as the best-argued version of the other case.
Stengers, Jean. Congo: Mythes et réalités. Brussels: Duculot, 1989; rev. 2005. In French. The most careful sceptical treatment of the larger casualty estimates, by a historian nobody accuses of apologetics.

Chapter VIII

Young, Crawford. Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.
De Witte, Ludo. The Assassination of Lumumba. Trans. Ann Wright and Renée Fenby. London: Verso, 2001. The book that forced the Belgian parliamentary inquiry of 2000–2001.
Wrong, Michela. In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo. London: Fourth Estate, 2000. Mobutu's Zaire, reported from inside it.
Stearns, Jason. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. The wars of 1996–2003, and the best account of them in English.
Van Reybrouck, David. Congo: The Epic History of a People. Trans. Sam Garrett. London: Fourth Estate, 2014. A Belgian writer's history built from Congolese oral testimony, running from prehistory to the present. The best-written book on this list.
Hunt, Nancy Rose. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Contemporary sources

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Edinburgh: Blackwood's Magazine, 1899; book form 1902. Conrad commanded a Congo steamer for six months in 1890 and the novella is drawn from it. Read Chinua Achebe's 1975 lecture “An Image of Africa” alongside it.
Conrad, Joseph. The Congo Diary. 1890. The notebook itself, much plainer and in some ways more damning than the fiction.
Sheppard, William Henry. Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo. Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1917. By the African-American missionary who investigated the Kuba killings and was sued for reporting them.
Harris, Alice Seeley. Photographic collection, Anti-Slavery International, London. The photographs that made the campaign. Distressing, and the reason anyone believed Morel.
Twain, Mark. King Leopold's Soliloquy. Boston: P. R. Warren, 1905.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Crime of the Congo. London: Hutchinson, 1909.
Rapport de la Commission d'Enquête. Brussels, 1905. Leopold's own commission of inquiry, which he expected to exonerate him and which did not.