By the time Tony co-founded Lonely Planet Publications in 1973, he already had the travel bug. And ever since, travel and discovery have been at the heart of his life and career.
Every now and then I bump into somebody who’s busy trekking around the world putting a ‘been there’ tick beside a list of every country in the world. You can have arcane arguments about what ‘been there’ means – is the airport transit lounge good enough? But the start...
‘A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa’ is the subtitle of this page-turner of a history. The Greed is down to King Leopold, the Belgian horror story, who grabbed a large tranche of central Africa and ran it ruthlessly as his personal colony. The Ter...
Jason Stearns’ book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters tries to unpick the story of ‘The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa.’ Clearly a near impossible task, because you’re still left fairly bemused at the end how all these events – from the Cold War to t...
I’ve never been to Congo – to either of them, Republic of Congo (the ex-French one, capital Brazzaville) or Democratic Republic of Congo (the ex-Belgian Congo, ex-Zaire, capital Kinshasa), but they’re both on my list and I keep reading books about them. Of course t...
I keep talking about visiting Congo and keep bumping into people with a Congo connection. I nominated the Zaire version (there are two Congo’s ‘Republic’ and ‘Democratic Republic,’ the Zaire one) as the place I really need to go to on the Jennifer Byrne book programme...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013