Excerpt
Rising out of the jungle unlike any other sight in central Africa are Kinshasas towers, its lights, its chaos, its squalor. After spending weeks or months inside the far reaches of the Congos and arriving onto the paved yet pot-holed streets of the capital, one can easily be overwhelmed - quiet evenings of darkness are overtaken by raucous clubs, cluttered evening markets, throngs of touts and beggars. Truly maddening traffic unseen anywhere else in the Congos clogs the streets - from barely operating minibuses to convoys of tinted cars, thousands of people on the move in every direction, unknown faces of unknown people lurking in the corners of abandoned buildings, all living side by side in Kinshasa.