In the steps of Stanley

Of all the world’s under- developed and misruled countries few can compete with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The former Belgian Congo, more recently known as Zaire, has lived for so long with lawlessness, brute violence and neglect, with Belgian colonial and Mobutu’s post-colonial exploitation, that it seems to have justified Joseph Conrad’s selection of this particular slice of land to serve as the continent’s heart of darkness. Recently it has seemed as if someone had switched the lights off altogether: it comes as a surprise, in our Google-mapped age, to discover that somewhere has disappeared from sight. The DRC has managed this. So why, then, would a sane, successful foreign correspondent want to leave his post and partner to travel through what he calls Africa’s ‘broken heart’?

For Tim Butcher it seemed an obvious thing to do. Newly appointed Africa correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, he was doing what correspondents like to do and was sitting by a pool, doing research, when he came across the story of one of his predecessors in the job, Henry Morton Stanley.