Beyond letting us see just what the New World has meant for the African people, I find myself in agreement with some of the locals who think Tim Butcher, a white man, wanting to go overland to the Congo like Stanley, might not be playing with a full deck.

... The airline that was to fly me to the Democratic Republic of Congo in August 2004 was as rickety as the country's latest peace deal. Hewa Bora had been cobbled together from the remnants of various bankrupt versions of the national carrier - Congo Airlines and Zaire Airlines - and although the flight I was waiting for was a scheduled one from Johannesburg to Lubumbashi, the Congo's second city and capital of the south-eastern province of Katanga, there was something about the behaviour of the ground crew and my fellow passengers that suggested it was anything but routine.

A middle-aged Congolese man, hoping to make it to Lubumbashi, spotted my concern as I winced at the check-in muddle. He tried to reassure me. 'I have family here in South Africa, but whenever I travel with Hewa Bora I never know for sure if the plane will take off, or even if there is a plane. It really is a Maybe Airline - Maybe You Get There, Maybe You Don't.'

I waited patiently, watching the ebb and flow of the passengers' mood. One minute they seemed happy, as a female member of staff in Hewa Bora uniform - an elegant blue cotton wrap spotted with yellow teardrops - checked the name of the person at the front of the queue against the manifest. But then the same member of staff would get up from her chair and disappear from view, prompting groans of frustration from the crowd. The flight was not full, but my fellow passengers all seemed to be carrying unfeasibly large amounts of luggage, mostly electrical goods like televisions and CD players, wrapped in the woven plastic, tricolour bags of red, white and blue that you see all over the developing world.

Against this bulky display, my own luggage seemed rather meagre. I had a green rucksack packed with clothing, bedding and a mosquito net, and two shoulder bags for my notebooks, camera, laptop computer and satellite telephone. I wanted to keep it as light as possible so that it could be carried on foot if need be, so the only book I brought with me was Stanley's account of his journey, Through the Dark Continent. I had read it several times, but if my journey was successful I wanted to be able to make a direct comparison between what he found in the late nineteenth century and what I found in the early twenty-first.

My first problem was how to reach the spot where Stanley arrived in the Congo in September 1876.
continues here
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/part-2-blood-river-journey-to-africas.html