40 Quotes by Tim Butcher

the normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.” p141

In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.

Almost astride the Equator, night fell like a portcullis. The sun dropped below the horizon and suddenly all was dark.

Members of his crew knew dialects from further up the African coast, but they had never heard words like those spoken by these river people. Cao heard the name Kongo being repeated. Following the pattern of other African groups, they explained they were the BaKongo people and called their language KiKongo. Inland, they said, was the capital of their tribe, MbanzaKongo, where there lived a powerful leader or king, the ManiKongo.

It taught me a lesson about one of the Congo’s chronic problems, its lack of institutional memory.

Like many other African dictators, Mobutu won power by presenting himself as the only leader strong enough to unite the country.

That is what we need more than anything. A sense of the law and the sense that there is someone to enforce it. Without that there is chaos.

Then the mob parted and there was the boy, with his arms twisted behind his back and the foot of a man, a petrol attendant in Cohydro cap and uniform, stamped firmly on his neck. The boy’s mouth was bleeding and the side of his face was squashed flat on the uneven concrete of the forecourt. It was a scene I had witnessed numerous times during my stint covering Africa. Quick and brutal, African mob justice is a terrifying thing.

We are seeing malnutrition levels here as if this place was suffering from a full famine.