Development Blogs.com

Recent turbulence in the financial market is a reminder that economic stability is heavily reliant on collective perceptions and ‘market confidence’. So it is with security, and nowhere is this more evident than in a so-called fragile state like the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is plummeting into a different kind of recession. The seemingly endless crisis in North Kivu is making a rare foray into the international news agenda. (Recent reports from The New York Times and the BBC.) UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that “the intensification and expansion of the conflict is creating a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic dimensions and threatens dire consequences on a regional scale”. It’s more complicated than this, but here’s some of the...

Kinshasa’s skyline, seen from The River Rory MacLean has done me the honour of responding to my recent post, berating him for writing, in a review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River for The Guardian, that ‘there is little difference between the Congo seen by Stanley and by Butcher’, and suggesting that readers should weep for Congo but not go there. (See the original post and comments here.) Rory wrote: I am sorry if my review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River has upset some DRC residents. I am no Congo expert, but I understand that life in much of the country can be very grim. The Lancet reports that 1,200 people die in the Congo each day through civil unrest. By comparison, post-Saddam Iraq and post-Taliban Afghanistan do not even come close to 1,200 dead per day. As to...

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22nd ALNAP Biannual Meeting, Papers [access] - Papers are available in English and French. The theme of the meeting was "Compounding crises: combinations of vulnerabilities, risks and hazards in West Africa." Angola: Former IDPs share the common challenge of recovery and reconstruction (IDMC, Dec. 2007) [text via Refworld] Between war and peace: Land and humanitarian action in Colombia, HPG...

Stanley’s expedition shoots the rapids 130 years have passed since hot-tempered Welsh-American Henry Moreton Stanley navigated the Congo River, his newspaper reports piquing the interest of King Leopold II. Visiting in the 1920’s, Grace Flandrau may have been unimpressed by the cuisine, but she had fewer difficulties getting around Ituri than she would if she could return today. The likes of Joseph Conrad, Mobotu, Mohammad Ali and Franco may have helped keep the Congo/Zaire on the map internationally, but it has never been much of a tourist destination. However, things appear to be improving in the wake of last year’s elections, even in Ituri. Much depends on the behaviour of the new government, but improved security may attract some adventurous travellers as well as...

I have just finished reading Then I Saw the Congo, a 1920’s travel memoir by Grace Flandrau, a novelist from Minnesota who shared an editor with F. Scott Fitzgerald. (It happens that her biography is being published this spring.) I had misgivings about the title (see below), but found Flandrau’s writing pleasantly unburdened by the conventions of the adventure travel genre, and she disparages - even mocks - the then-fashionable pastimes of shooting large animals and ill-treating ‘the natives’. Since the book is long out-of-print (Nayembi discovered it in an antique book shop in Lilongwe), I’ll spare you a review and transcribe some of the more memorable passages instead. First impressions of Kinshasa: At first glance Kinshasa gives one the rather...

‘Playtime is over,’ declared President Kabila at his inauguration (’J'annonce la fin de la recréation sous toutes ses formes’). The phrase has reverberated around Kinshasa ever since, and interpretations are diverse. Optimists hope this edict will prove applicable to the members of the new government, but time alone will tell. This week, though, playtime’s extended: we have a five-day weekend, due to the coincidence of three nationwide days of mourning. Monday was for Cardinal Frédéric Etsou, Archbishop of Kinshasa, who popped his clogs on 6 January 2007, at the ripe old age of 76. Yesterday’s holiday was for Laurent Désiré Kabila, assassinated by a bodyguard on 16 January 2001. Although the facts remain remarkably obscure, this looks to have...

I still can’t resist pointing my camera at the sun, when the light is clear. In a marvel of concise English, the Economist sums up Congo’s recent history in 157 words. You can read their account of the current crisis here. 8.17pm Stop Press, etc: As of a minute ago, we can add the following sentence: Pending confirmation by the Supreme Court, President Kabila has won the run-off election by 58.05% to Vice-President Bemba’s 48.95%....