ALL STORIES ARE TRUE By: Jimmie Briggs Photos: Nabil Elderkin

On June 30, 1960, Patrice Emery Lumumba stood in sweltering heat before an enthralled crowd of millions in Kinshasa to make the first Independence Day speech in his country’s history. The Republic of Congo was newly free from colonization and Lumumba, an anti-colonial fighter, was its first legally elected president. He began in measured, reflected tones urging his countrymen and women to fulfill the realization of dreams they and their predecessors held for generations.

“We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force,” he noted referring to the notorious Belgian rule. “… Our wounds are too fresh and too painful still for us to drive them from our memory. … I ask you unconditionally to respect the life and the property of your fellow citizens and of foreigners living in our country. … Our government, strong, national, popular, will be the health of our country.”

Ten weeks later, Lumumba was deposed from government and later executed in a coup led by a military officer named Mobutu Sese Seko, plunging the country into more than 40 years of strife, exploitation and unrealized possibilities. Most casual observers of Africa expect the worst, and no country on the continent embodies that sentiment more than the Democratic Republic of The Congo. By assuming the worst in a place or person though, one usually finds it. The very mention of “Congo” conjures images of sexual barbarism, refugees and economic exploitation, but rarely hope — of which there is a surprising abundance.

Today, much like it did 49 years ago, the nation struggles to emerge from devastating conflict and foreign interference, but for very different reasons. Since the fall of Mobutu in 1998, the country has been plagued by weak or suspect leadership, as well as economic meddling of surrounding nations too willing to take advantage of its social instability for their gain. No one’s hands are clean, not even those coming from outside such as U.N. peacekeepers that have been implicated in sexual exploitation and trading arms for natural resources.

If the Congo is cursed, as many foreigners and some citizens believe (if indeed a country and its people can be collectively cursed), it is one that is being lifted every painful day by individuals whose stories too often go undocumented on the front pages of the world’s major newspapers. Perhaps the curse began with the Polish-born English writer Joseph Conrad, whose widely regarded 1902 novella Heart of Darkness has remained an unshakable moniker of the Congo, and Africa as a whole, for more than a century. Deemed a part of Western literary canon, Conrad told the story of an insane, dying trader named Kurtz who is committing human atrocities against native Congolese deep in the bush. Heart of Darkness not only spawned a legion of editors to insert the title into any written story about the Congo, but also film director Francis Ford Coppola’s quixotic parable of the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now.

All the stories one can hear are probably true. The worst is in the Congo. In the last decade, more than 5 million have died from war-related causes, only exceeded in the past century by World War II. One million Congolese civilians are displaced, and due to a rebel offensive late last October, that figure grew by 250,000. The United Nations estimates upwards of 250,000 women have survived sexual assault, ranging in age from 3-month-old infants to 80-year-old grandmothers. Cholera, Ebola, AIDS, diarrhea and malaria are regular foes in understaffed, under-resourced medical centers. The infant mortality rate is more than 10 times that of the United States. Despite having some of the greatest natural deposits in the world of highly valued resources such as copper, gold, diamonds, uranium, timber, coltan and caciterite — the latter two being necessary elements of laptop computers and mobile phones — the Congo has one of the poorest national economies.

Darkness cannot exist without light, even in the midst of tragedy and loss. If one of the richest nations in the world (the size of Western Europe) has any chance of recovery and survival, now is the time to invest in the Congolese people and honor their journeys.