The rape of a nation

Foreword by John Le Carré

‘The continuing human tragedy of Congo is not a statistic. It is a continuing human tragedy. It is fourteen hundred and fifty tragedies every day. It is countless more than that if you include the orphaned, the bereaved, the widowed, and all the ripples of truncated lives that spread from a single death.  It is you and me and our children and our parents, if we had the bad luck to be born into the world this book portrays.

But Congo has one secret that is hard to pass on if you haven’t learned it at first hand. Look carefully and you will find it in these pages: a gaiety of spirit and a love of life that, even in the worst of times, leave the pampered Westerner moved and humbled beyond words.’ (Excerpt from the foreword)

Marcus Bleasdale has been following the war in Congo in all its horror and grotesqueness for almost a decade – a war which has claimed more than four million victims to date. Seven years ago, Bleasdale published his first book on Congo, One Hundred Years of Darkness, which was immediately voted best photo journalistic book of the year by the American Photo District News.

Marcus Bleasdale was awarded the unicef Photographer of the Year Award, the 3p Photographer Award and the Alexia Grant for World Peace and was awarded the Open Society Institute Distribution Grant for his work with Human Rights Watch.

He was named Magazine Photographer of the Year in the USA by POY. He was awarded the Olivier Rebbot Award for best foreign reporting in the USA and a World Press Award for his work on street children in Congo.His work on Human Rights abuses in Congo was awarded a first prize in POY.

Marcus is represented by VII Photo Agency and continues to cover those conflicts under-reported and forgotten by today’s media.

Design: Heijdens Karwei, Amsterdam