In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz Read Online Free Page A

and was drowned.
    Leopoldville, the trading station Stanley set up here in honour of Leopold II, the Belgian King who sponsored his return to the area to ‘develop’ the region, was originally separate from Kinshasa, a second station established further upriver and dominated by baobab groves. The baobabs have gone now and the two stations have merged to form one inchoate city, a messy urban settlement of fits and starts that always seems about to peter away into the bush, only to sprawl that little bit further afield.
    In the city’s infancy, the Belgian colonisers had laid out a model city of boulevards and avenues, sports grounds and parks. But with the population now nudging five million, all thought of town planning has been abandoned, the rules of drainage and gravity ignored. Nature takes its revenge during the rainy seasons, when mini Grand Canyons open up under roads and water-logged hillsides collapse, burying inhabitants in their shacks.
    â€˜It looks as though it’s survived a war and is being rebuilt,’ a photographer friend, a veteran of Sarajevo, remarked after her first visit to Kinshasa. But the damage has been self-inflicted, in two rounds of looting so terrible they have become historical landmarks in people’s minds, so that events are labelled as being ‘avant le premier pillage’ or ‘après le deuxième pillage’, before and after the lootings. It is Congo’s version of BC and AD.
    As for rebuilding, the impression given by the scaffolding and myriad work sites dotted around Kinshasa is misleading. The work has never been completed, the scaffolding will probably never be removed. Like the defunct street lamps lining Nairobi’s roads, thetower blocks of Freetown, the fading boardings across Africa which advertise trips to destinations no travel company today services, it recalls another era, when a continent believed its natural trajectory pointed up instead of down.
    Down in the valley lies the Cité, the pullulating popular quarters. Matonge, Makala, Kintambo: districts of green-scummed waterways, street markets and rubbish piled so high the white egrets picking through it bob above the corrugated-iron roofs. In heavy rains the open drains overflow, turning roads into rivers of black mud that exhale the warm stink of sewage. On the heights, enjoying the cooler air, are districts like Mont-Fleuri, Ma Campagne and Binza, where spiked walls conceal the mansions that housed Mobutu’s elite and giant lizards in garish purple and orange do jerky press-ups by limpid blue swimming pools.
    When the ‘mouvanciers’, as those belonging to Mobutu’s presidential movement were called, ventured downhill, it was usually to the Hotel Intercontinental that they headed in their Mercedes. It was a home away from home. They liked to sit in its Atrium café in their gold-rimmed sunglasses, doing shady deals with Lebanese diamond buyers, ordering cappuccinos and talking in ostentatiously loud voices over their mobile phones while armed bodyguards loitered in the background.
    They were the only ones who could afford to patronise the designer-wear shops in the hotel’s arcade or hire the Junoesque whores—renowned as the most expensive in Kinshasa—who swanned along the corridors. They ran up accounts and left the management to chase payment by the government for years. Kongulu owed the casino a huge amount, but who could force a president’s son to pay?
    It was never a place where those who opposed the regime could feel comfortable. Mobutu’s portrait stared out from above the main desk, his personality seemed to invest every echoing corridor. The Popular Movement for the Revolution (MPR), the party every Zairean at one stage was obliged to join, rented a set of rooms here and on at least one embarrassing occasion for management, ahandcuffed prisoner was spotted in the lifts, being taken upstairs for interrogation.
    Time the placing