Mineral Wealth of the Congo

EnlargeChina in Africa | photo illustration by Plamen Petkov

A simple stroll down the streets of Kinshasa reveals how precarious life has become in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This city of ugly half-finished buildings radiates both the optimism and the paranoia of a gold-rush town. Government banners strung across main avenues urge the citizens to stay cool: no more violence, no more hatred, no more manipulation and change your mentality. On the sidewalks below, the Congolese look sharp in their colorful dresses and short, wide ties (this was a Belgian colony, after all), but that only makes it sadder to watch them disappear down Kinshasa's muddy lanes and into its scrofulous shantytowns. In the city's center, traffic is so implacable that drivers are pushed relentlessly forward, sometimes peeling the doors off of parked cars when their owners try to squeeze inside. As I walk along a sidewalk near the headquarters of Congo's mining ministry, hands reach out of nowhere to unzip my attaché case. Sitting for a moment on a bench outside a major supermarket, I'm greeted by the shop's friendly security guards, who sit beside me and, within moments, rub their fingers together in a request for money.

White UN trucks and aid-group vehicles are everywhere. "Ninety percent of the NGOs appeared here when the World Bank, IMF, and European Union decided to give Congo money," says A.L. Kitenge, a local businessman and publisher of Entreprendre, a well-regarded investigative magazine. "We call them 'sucking pumps.' This is the common feeling of the Congolese about these NGOs." That may be, but experts say that the only real commercial drivers of the economy in recent years have been the NGO and UN communities. Pull them out, and the economy does a nosedive.

Outside of the fortified U.S. Embassy -- the State Department warns Americans not to come to Congo at all -- lies a swirl of beggars, barbed wire, homemade tin shacks, and one-legged soldiers limping on crutches. Hawkers materialize at the sight of me, shoving one item after another into my face -- counterfeit Chinese watches, leather cases, towels, jeans, muffins, peanuts, eggs, even the live chickens that lay them. At night, I accompany a French businessman to a stylish club filled with wealthy and welcoming Congolese, only to be confronted upon leaving by a cop demanding the inevitable payoff. "Whites are not allowed in that bar," he claims.

At Kinshasa's airport, doctors stand beside immigration officials; travelers arriving without proof of yellow-fever vaccination get jabbed on the spot. It's understandable: Congo has perhaps the most extensive collection of known and emerging infectious diseases in the world. And the State Department warns that "outbreaks of deadly viruses and other diseases can occur without warning and many times are not rapidly reported by local health authorities." Plague, malaria, tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, river blindness, Eh, hookworm, typhoid. I showed up in the middle of one of the worst Ebola outbreaks in years and left just before a cholera epidemic arrived. The few studies that have been done indicate that many citizens in the sub-Sahara are polyparasitic, or harboring two or more parasites, which, if not fatal, appears to affect cognitive function and wage-earning capacity. Intestinal parasites alone cause an "incalculable loss in human productivity," says the World Bank.