It is high time that someone writes a fair history of the ex-Belgian Congo, Leopold II's lion share of the 1885 Berlin conference, which presided to the partitioning of Africa. Today, the very idea of these thirteen European countries, plus the USA, meeting in order to appropriate, and allocate to themselves, pieces of an entire continent and its people --- natural resources and workforce in one bundle --- is difficult to bear. But such is hindsight and such is history, that we know not to judge the past by today's standards. David Van Reybrouck, archaeologist, writer and journalist, was himself born in Bruges in Belgium. His endeavour to compose a history of the ex Belgian Congo acts as a spectacular landmark to Belgium's painful, and fairly recent, awakening to the particular cruelty of its past. Belgian myself and child of 2 generations of colonial Belgians, I can testify to the general unease, usually alleviated by firm silence, that still presided over discussions on the subject only 20 years ago. initially written in Flemish, Congo is a 'tour de force'. At once documentary, biography and testimony, it is very well-researched and underpinned by an impeccable erudition, coupled with more than 500 witness accounts collected over six years --- a search for veracity that lends the pathos and force of a novel to this 700 pages-strong essay. This roller-coaster of a narrative is also an eye opener, allowing the reader to understand the country's complex history, a history that most of us only know through the contemporary excesses so spectacularly mediated by our screens. For Van Reybrouck it was also about "listening to the beating heart of a people" and "give back to them all that they have given me". This is a well-deserving bestseller, a fascinating historical epic, well on its way to debunk the myth of the Heart of darkness.