Shortly before Tim Butcher arrived in Johannesburg in 2000 to begin his work as Africa correspondent for Britain’s The Daily Telegraph, a veteran journalist took him aside and told him solemnly, “Just two things to remember in Africa—which tribe and how many dead.” At first that may seem wildly reductive. There are more than 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, so which ones did he mean? But its pragmatism also says something important about how little the Western world knows—or wants to know—about the troubles of the region. And no country in Africa is more troubled than the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo, formerly—in what must be the most mind-boggling, inaccurate appellation of all time—the Congo Free State). From the horrifying reign of Belgium’s Leopold II to the crisis after...
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