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A boy with his wooden bike or chikudu on in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo
A boy with his wooden bike, or chikudu, on in Goma, Congo. Photograph: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
A boy with his wooden bike, or chikudu, on in Goma, Congo. Photograph: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images

Congo's intriguing mixture of fascination and frustration

This article is more than 14 years old
David Smith discovers the place that British journalist Tim Butcher described as 'Africa's broken heart'

Is there anywhere in Africa to rival the mystery and mystique of Congo? Henry Stanley explored there, Joseph Conrad's Mr Kurtz went mad there, and Muhammad Ali fought there.

The subtitle of the British journalist Tim Butcher's book about this vast country, Blood River, describes Congo as "Africa's broken heart".

But first, I had to find it. A long day of flying and waiting culminated in a 2am arrival at Kigali airport in Rwanda, where the taxis had long since gone.

Eventually, I negotiated a ride to the Village Motel, where the sign promised: "Our service is the best."

I was assigned the Burundi room. There was no seat on the toilet and no soap on the basin. The TV screen remained stubbornly blank. I shrugged and lay down.

Three hours later, there was a hammering at the door. The driver was back, telling me it was time for breakfast.

We sat alone in the restaurant area and listened to the offstage sounds of cupboard doors, crockery and footsteps.

Then, finally, the waiter appeared, walking slowly, and set the table even more slowly. He was a young man, but placed and adjusted each item with the painful deliberateness of a white-haired family servant.

A jug of hot milk was the only drink proffered. I asked whether there was any chance of a coffee. After another wait, the coffee appeared. I took a gulp. It was, without a shadow of doubt, the most unutterably dreadful cup of coffee ever made. I quickly reached for the water.

We began the three-hour journey to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and I dozed on the back seat as the driver put on a CD.

The joyful, bouncy music was like a movie cliche about Africa as I, the European blank canvas, gazed out at children running carefree, women dressed in a blaze of colour and bustling market stalls under lush green hills.

We went higher and higher, and I awoke to see a long march along the road, each man, woman or child gripping a yellow jerrycan and walking with a purpose. Presumably, they were all bound for the nearest water source. A boy broke ranks and stood on the corner, watching me.

I went back to sleep. "This is it, wake up!" the driver said, helping me offload my bags and seemingly a little too keen to be rid of me.

He drove off, and I stood on a dark patch of land, not entirely sure where to go next. A few curious locals turned to look, apparently unaccustomed to seeing someone so obviously not from around their area.

Adjacent to this rough, unromantic clearing, I could see Lake Kivu glinting in the sunshine.

I found a shabby brick office and got my passport stamped. "So," I asked, "Is Congo that way?" I pointed at an inviting piece of coastline on my right.

The woman laughed and shook her head. "No, it's over there," she said. I looked to my left at the rather less appealing face of Goma – but I was grateful that she had saved me from a week of wandering around the wrong country.

And so, as with many border posts around the world, the moment of crossing the line was rather anticlimactic. Unsteady under the weight of heavy bags, and watched by a small audience, I penetrated Congo in the old-fashioned way – on foot.

Goma was once a popular tourist stop for those adventurous enough to drive from one end of the continent to the other. Not any more. Hotels such as the Ihusi still offer fabulous views and boat trips on the lake, but others have succumbed to cockroaches or turned to dust.

Anyone trying a road trip won't get very far on the rutted, pot-holed, jolting terrain. I couldn't see any traffic lights, but the skies were busy with the spaghetti of electricity cables.

This is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the freshly painted logos of mobile phone networks couldn't disguise the dilapidated state of most of the buildings.

I could see people sitting in grime on the streets, trying to sell whatever they could – live chickens, sacks of grain, flimsy towers of eggs, pairs of shoes. Others occupied concrete shells and offered fruit and vegetables from unclean floors.

A one-legged man travelled on a chikudu – a sort of wooden bicycle-cum-scooter peculiar to Goma – while a crowd of men and women gathered around a wooden shack, entranced by what appeared to be a 1970s kung fu movie from Hong Kong.

I saw children playing on a hillock made from hardened clumps of black lava. In the far distance was the silhouette of the Nyiragongo volcano – a perpetual menace to this city – which erupted earlier this month. I thought about living in the shadow of Vesuvius.

Yet along the road to the airport, Goma changed. Coiled barbed wire ran along a high wall either side of a gun tower. Rows of white tents were followed by white military vehicles and white aircraft. This was the base of the UN: the biggest peacekeeping operation the world has ever seen.

I asked Alan Doss, the Welsh-born head of the UN mission, about the magnetism of Congo. "The great rush for Africa," he explained.

"You had people of principle like Livingstone, adventurers like Stanley. It's so vast, it's so massive, it's so magnificent. This is truly a magnificent country with incredible diversity among its peoples.

"That has attracted travellers and adventurers, the good and not so good, and it was all so recent. It's hard to believe that, two centuries after much of Asia was explored, the centre of Africa was unknown to the outside world.

"It will continue to exercise its fascination – and frustration. That's Congo."

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