Not enough people know what’s happening here. The people, the animals, the Earth — they’re all dying and have been for a decade.
And then on the other side of the bridge is Congo. The instant you cross, you’re hit by a riot of dazzling colors, loud music, drunken border policemen, and women hoisting just about every imaginable kind of fruit and vegetable onto their heads. The soil here is some of the most fertile on the planet. And then there are the minerals, Congo’s seemingly limitless supply of them — gold, diamonds, zinc, nickel, cassiterite, copper, cobalt and coltan, old-school and modern gems. But somehow, for the past 12 years and counting, Congo has been the theater of one of the worst civil wars in modern history, a truly continental disaster that has sucked in many of its neighbors and killed millions of people, a festering wound in the green heart of Africa.
Via The Times on a new book, “Africa’s World War” by Gérard Prunier.
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