In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo

Mr Kurtz, the colonial white master, brought evil to the remote upper reaches of the Congo River. A century after Conrad's Heart of Darkness was first published, Michela Wrong revisits the Congo as the era of Mobutu Sese Seko collapses into absurdity, anarchy and corruption. This is a portrait of the grotesque as confusion takes over: pink-lipsticked rebel soldiers mingle with tracksuited secret policemen in hotels where fin de siècle dinner parties are ploughing through hotel wine cellars rather than see bottles lost to the new regime. Congo, Africa's richest country in terms of its natural resources, has institutionalised kleptomania: everyone is on the take. In a country where the minimum wage had dropped below $150 a year, the government, over twenty-five years, spent $250 million providing courtesy cars. Congo has a vanity nuclear reactor built on a subsiding slope and one of its uranium rods is missing. The Mobutu reign, successor to Belgium's failed imperial experiment in Africa, was fed by World Bank dollars and IMF loans. Having presided over unprecedented looting of the country's wealth, Mobutu, like Kurtz, retreated deep within the jungle to his absurdly overwrought palace of marble floors and gold taps. A century on, nothing seems to have changed at the heart of Africa: it is lawless, graceless and it slaughters its own. But this is a story of grim comedy amid the apocalypse and a celebration of the sheer indestructibility of the human spirit in a nation run riot.