Radio Congo
Signals of Hope from Africa’s Deadliest Conflict
In a London library, Ben Rawlence came across a photograph that captured his imagination. It was a picture in a 1950s Belgian brochure of a street in Manono, a model city in the Congo colony. With its art deco architecture and apparent wealth the city was completely at odds with the steady stream of horrendous stories that dominated news about Congo. What had gone wrong? After a decade of war that has claimed over 4 million lives and sent millions more fleeing the country, Rawlence decided to visit the Democratic Republic of Congo in search of what the country had become, where hope for the future might lie and what had happened to Manono.
From the still hot conflict zone of Goma and North Kivu he made his way down Lake Tanganyika, through mineral rich Katanga and past the source of the river Congo to the once magnificent city of Manono further downstream. Rawlence does not flinch from the terrible suffering the country has endured but what motivates him and drives his journey is the universal human capacity for hope amidst destruction, the green shoots of resilience and redemption, however small.
On the way he encounters the individuals who offer the country’s best hope of a peaceful future. The entrepreneur who makes cheese in the middle of a war zone, the refugees returning to rebuild their lives, the professor of maritime biology who refuses to leave his post for more lucrative offers abroad, the creative miners, gold smugglers and fishermen who strive to make a living in Congo’s unique lawless economy. Amidst the wreckage of a Manono leveled by war, he meets priests who have never missed a mass throughout the conflict, families who dig for tin in the abandoned mine and journalists dedicated to the local radio station that they keep on the air with borrowed equipment and old car batteries.
