Deep in the heart of Congo, millions struggle to survive after more than a century of instability brought on by brutal colonists, military dictatorships and war. The landscapes and the difficulties of life have changed little since the days of Joseph Conrad’s Congo.


.... and the stretch of the river abreast of the clearing glittered in a still and dazzling splendor, with a murky and overshadowed band above and below. Not a soul was seen on the shore. The bushes did not rustle.

Evening shadows reach towards a young Rwandan refugee selling food on the street. After being shot through the neck during a massacre at Mbandaka in 1997, the former child soldier was abandoned by the Rwandan army. He now lives with local fishermen.


You could see these two roaming about all day long with their heads close together in an everlasting confab.

Steamers — once the lifeblood of the Congo — now lie broken and rusted along the river, where they become makeshift dwellings for the homeless. More than two million people have been displaced by the war, many of them women and children, according to the United Nations.


I looked around. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky--seemed to lead also into the heart of an immense darkness.

Soldiers haggle over the price of a crocodile stolen from a local fisherman in the Banduada region. The various armies in Congo have been accused of countless human rights abuses, including torture, abduction and murder.


He held his head rigid, face forward; but his eyes rolled, he kept on lifting and setting down his feet gently, his mouth foamed a little.

An RCD soldier in Goma washes in the steaming waters of Lake Kivu, thermally heated by molten lava from Mount Nyiragongo, which erupted days earlier.


A stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody

Renowned for their skills as trackers and hunters, Congo’s pygmies have been recruited as military scouts by both rebel and government forces. To avoid being drafted, many crossed the river to neighbouring Republic of Congo. Long isolated in central Africa’s dense jungles, the pygmies are highly susceptible to disease in new urban environments.


And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.

Light pours into an orphanage run by an Italian priest in Kisangani. The privately funded shelter provides food and lodging for about 50 street children


I thought his memory was like other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man's life, a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage; but before the high and ponderous door ...

A mother and son perform a delicate balancing act over cooling lava in Goma, just days after the kilometer-wide flow oozed through the city’s commercial district, destroying businesses and the headquarters of the Rwandan-backed rebel movement that has occupied eastern Congo since August 1998. (North Kivu, January, 2002).


I don't know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.

For many refugees displaced by war, the Congo River provides the only reliable source of food.


Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick heavy and sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.

In the late 19th century, Belgian colonists built a railway between Kinshasa and the port city of Matadi to transport goods past rapids blocking the river route to the coast. But the terrain proved treacherous and hundreds of thousands of Congolese slaves died during the project. Today, the train runs through one of Kinshasa’s largest graveyards.


A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a railway.

A mother takes her child to bathe in the Congo River, the source of life for many Congolese families.


The woods were unmoved, like a mask – heavy, like the closed door of a prison – they looked with their air of hidden knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silent.

Fishermen ply the river — often traveling great distances — in long, narrow pirogues carved from trees hacked from the forest. The valuable timber is also driven downstream for export to Europe, where it fetches premium prices. The floating log booms sometimes become drifting rafts for travelers also headed towards the coast.


and a neatly stacked wood-pile. This was unexpected. We came to the bank, and on the stack of firewood found a flat piece of board with some faded pencil-writing on it. When deciphered it said: 'Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously.'

For thousands of years, fishermen in Wagenia have relied on wooden traps to catch their prey. In keeping with tradition, Sunday’s haul is always presented to the village chief.


There had been enemies, criminals, workers--and these were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very pacific to me on their stick

At Malebo Pool, the first customs station north of Kinshasa, border guards work two-month shifts collecting unofficial “taxes” from travellers.


Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay--cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death -- death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush.

A labourer on a charcoal barge prepares his cargo for market in Kinshasa.


I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. all this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.