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.