The Democratic Republic of Congo is a vast area the size of Western Europe. French rather than English is spoken everywhere: Swahili is used in the East and predominantly Lingala in the West.
We know about the powerful Anglican churches in the English speaking countries of Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, Sudan and Tanzania, and so it was a surprise to me to discover that there is a thriving Anglican Province in the former Belgian colony.
I had heard only bad things about the Congo. This is the ‘heart of darkness’ according to Joseph Conrad writing 100 years ago, a place of tribal wars and slave trading for centuries, brutal rulers and theft of abundant resources by governing elites. More recently, the war in the East of the country, triggered by the Rwandan genocide, has over the last 20 years claimed an estimated 5million lives. People scrape a living in vast forests from subsistence farming or mining by hand, only to have what they have gained taken by marauding gangs and militias. Preventable diseases like malaria and AIDS kill thousands. A land with great potential, but consistently mismanaged, benefitting only the rich, largely out of control. Can anything good come?
