More than a hundred years ago, a Polish sailor named Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski travelled to the Congo to take a job as a steamboat captain on the river. The Congo Free State, as it was then called, had been founded in 1885 under the supervision of King Leopold II of Belgium with the self-declared mission of promoting progress and civilization, free trade and the abolition of slavery. Korzeniowski was supposed to stay for three years, but after just one round-trip on the river, from Kinshasa to Kisangani and back, he quit.
Korzeniowski kept a diary of his journey and almost a decade later, in 1899, when he’d settled in England and Anglicized his name to Joseph Conrad, he transformed those notes into his novel "Heart of Darkness".
More than a century later, with hardly any roads or rails linking most of Congo’s cities and with flights too expensive for nearly all Congolese, boats — belching tugs that push open barges with no facilities — are still the primary way people use to travel between Kinshasa and Kisangani, a commercial hub a thousand miles upstream. If you’re lucky, you can make the upriver journey in four weeks and the downriver journey in two, the same amount of time it took Conrad.
I've read Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" several times, and I've watched the 1993 TV adaptation just as often; now, thanks to YouTube, I can travel from Kinshasa to Kisangani without leaving my sunlit verandah.
"Mistah Kurtz - he dead." Not at "Riverbend" he isn't!
