my passport. I noticed a single bullet hole in the top of the window behind him. He interrogated me on my reason for being in the Congo just as another agent would do when I arrived in Kinshasa, as if the sky above the DRC were a different country and each return to earth required a new visit to customs.
The plane was on time, and as it took off, I stared out the window: a military helicopter parked in the distance, khaki cargo planes, a cannon and a tank, both draped with dun tarp, set back in the trees. A narrow neighborhood of clustered homes with tin roofs passed beneath us, then the city of Goma with its wide avenues and desolate roundabouts, and the shore of Lake Kivu, the dark volcanoes of the Virungas to the east. Soon we were above hills, the unbroken thatch of the forest, before we lifted through a bank of clouds.
For a while, we glided just above them, working our way into a dense, otherworldly terrain. Dozens of cumulonimbus rose above the white plain, casting long clefts of shadow over it. All across the glowing horizon, at the luminous blue line between the clouds and the sky, further cumulonimbus soared, red at their edges, flattened by the cold air above, like mesas in a primeval vision of the American Southwest.
Though I fly often, I’ve never tired of cloudscapes, and I’d never seen one like this. It seemed an expression of the Congo basin, 695,000 square miles, approximately 20 percent of the planet’s remaining tropical forest, spanning Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as its similarly named neighbor, the Republic of Congo. We were crossing over its edge, thousands of feet down, heat and humidity boiling up as it breathed dense air into the atmosphere.
It’s hard to imagine forests like this vanishing, though farmland and plantations have replaced them in most of the world. What makes the impact of deforestation difficult to grasp is that it’s at once gradual and rapid. Humans have cut down much of the world’s forests, including the vast majority of old growth, and we can no longer fully comprehend how they influenced regional climates, regulating humidity, preventing drought, and protecting rivers, watersheds more likely to dry up if exposed to the sun. The vast quantity of carbon released from felled and burned trees escalates climate change and is absorbed into the oceans, gradually acidifying them.
Even now, massive swaths of forests are vanishing. In Southeast Asia, where the human population is booming, forests are being decimated for palm oil plantations, diminishing the orangutan habitat by 50 percent each decade. In Brazil, forests are being cleared for logging, cattle grazing, and soy. In the Congo, with the new political stability, logging companies are again seeking concessions. At a time when industrial powers are charting this forest’s worth, a conservation plan for it is urgent.
For more than an hour, the plane flew above the clouds, larger cumulonimbus muscling up, the sun flaring at their edges, falling quickly now, a blinding disk edging against the white landscape. And then we passed beyond the clouds, into a clear sky, and in the twilight, we swooped low over Kinshasa, the nation’s capital, the rolling savannah beyond it scattered with homesteads, before landing at N’Djili Airport.
Over the years, the articles and books I’d read about the DRC described aggressive people—pushing, shouting, asking for bribes, travelers shoving each other in airport lines. This wasn’t my impression, neither here nor at the border crossing. People apologized for bumping into me, and even the security agents, notorious for extortion and made-up taxes, were courteous, one telling me he was a poet, adjusting his glasses as he explained that he wrote about AIDS, inequality, and handicapped children. Maybe the DRC was changing. Life here certainly used to be worse. But I’d traveled enough not to fixate on media reports, which rated Kinshasa as one of the most dangerous cities in Africa and described the Congo with a daily fare of spectacularly depressing statistics and stories of inhumanity—massacres, slavery, mass rapes, cannibalism, and brutal witchcraft. These reports, though necessary and true in certain regions, easily blind outsiders to the great majority of the country’s people, who work hard to feed themselves and their families.
Eric Epheni Kandolo, a Congolese conservationist in his late twenties and BCI’s communications coordinator, was waiting for me at the airport. Short and solidly built, he spoke as if we’d known each other for years. This immediate familiarity, I was soon to learn, is one of the most endearing qualities of the Congolese. Eric explained that his taxi had refused to wait, and he asked if I’d like a beer while he found another. I declined, but he led me to a beer stall anyway and said I should wait there since he needed to negotiate with taxi drivers.
“If they see a white man,” he told me, “the price won’t be very good.”
He found one, a car of no discernible make, its windshield webbed as if hit by a brick, every panel a different color. When I opened the rear passenger door, the smell of the dark, musty, tattered interior cast me decades back to the rural Virgina junkyards I prospected in as a teenager, looking for parts to rebuild my car and motorcycle.
Beyond the airport, men gathered around booths selling Vodacom, Tigo, and Airtel phone cards, talking and laughing, money changing hands. In the shade of a concrete building, a teenage boy lounged on a swatch cut from a car rug next to a stack of used tires for sale. Women carried bundled market goods on their heads, their spines drawn long, necks as elegant as those of ballerinas.
We drove into the most densely populated neighborhoods of Kinshasa, the wide, uneven streets of broken asphalt littered with trash and rubble and crammed with vehicles. Many of these were also patched together, their varied panels so dented they appeared as if they’d been beaten into place with hammers. People ran through traffic that didn’t slow or swerve. Huge unbranded trucks rumbled past, looking as if assembled from dozens of old vehicles, their engines half exposed. At least one hundred yellow jerry cans were tied to their sides and the cargo was lashed down beneath blue tarps, young men sitting on top.
Eric launched into a political discussion with the taxi driver, a rail-thin man with a weathered, angular head and veins so prominent that his forearms appeared twined with electrical wire. In excellent, mildly academic French, the driver debated President Kabila’s merits, pointing out that though he wasn’t popular in Kinshasa, he was gaining support. As he and Eric broached the topic of whether the president was promoting the country’s development while protecting its national resources, a red passenger van with a rectangular opening in its side cut into our path. Our driver braked and swerved, and Eric told me that these vans, group taxis, were called les esprits des morts, “the spirits of the dead.” They were the most salvaged-looking vehicles on the road, their headlights and grilles missing, people crammed into them, a few clutching the edges of the doorless openings.
Suddenly, our taxi hit a border of raised asphalt and we were in a different city, one of smooth, dark, wide avenues with fresh white crosswalks painted on them, symmetric lines of streetlamps, an immense lit-up hospital off to the left. Eric told me that it was the largest hospital in Central Africa, that all of this, the perfect boulevard and the hospital, was the work of the Chinese, who were opening mines and building highways into the continent’s interior. The vehicles, though, remained dented, and the red or yellow vans, les esprits des morts, raced ahead, the eyes of their passengers shining through the open sides.
We finally stopped at a drab concrete building that looked uninhabited. It stood at a curve in the busy two-lane street where vendors sold grilled meat on sticks and men and women lined up to hail any car with an empty seat. But just past the metal gate, a flight of stairs climbed to BCI’s offices. When I followed Eric inside, I expected to see the small operation they were when I began researching their work several years ago. At that time, BCI consisted of two or three people in the US and a few in the Congo. Now, I saw five Congolese, two women and three men, sitting at desks, working at computers. They introduced themselves: Evelyn Samu, BCI’s national director; Dieudonné Mushagalusa, deputy national director; Richard Demondana, finance manager; Dominique Sakoy, accounting assistant; and Corinne Okitakula, legal officer. Two others, Bienvenu Mupenda, chief of operations, and Papy
