Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the world's largest active volcanoes. The Boston Globe presents photographer Oliver Grunewald's amazing
photo essay of a June 2010 expedition to the lava lake sheltered inside the crater.
[more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia
on Mar 5, 2011 -
34 comments
Democratic Republic of Congo: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa. We made the decision to tackle this part of Democratic Republic of Congo when we were in Egypt. It would take us about 4 months to drive from Cairo down to the Zambia/DRC border. We immediately started our quest for information. It would soon become clear that very little information was available. We did not know of a single traveler that did this in the last 20 years. We knew of two who tried (both on motorbikes) in recent years. One crashed after a few days and got evacuated. The other got arrested and deported. Both didn't get very far.
So we had to be creative and think of other sources of information. If there is one thing you can find anywhere in the world it is Coca-Cola. They should know how to get their goods in the country. We had no response via email, so we called them up. Their answer was pretty short: They do not have a distribution network outside the major cities in Congo. And it proved to be true, Congo is the first country we have visited were Coca-cola is hard to get once you leave
the major cities.
The moral of the story was: nobody knew anything about the road conditions.
posted by bluesky43
on Nov 15, 2010 -
167 comments
A Glimpse of the World All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built, ports deepened,
commercial contracts signed -- all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose
appetite for commodities seems
insatiable. Do China's grand designs promise the transformation, at last, of a star-crossed continent? Or merely its exploitation?
The author travels deep into the heart of Africa, searching for answers.
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Apr 26, 2010 -
20 comments
General Laurent Nkunda is a Tutsi warlord in
Katanga who was recently
interviewed by the Huffington Post. The
BBC believe he is nothing more than your standard African rebel with a long list of atrocities to his name. An opinion supported by the UN and some human rights groups.
The War Nerd has come to his
defense, however, suggesting that he's just angered the UN by refusing to disarm and allow the Hutu "refugees" from the Rwandan Genocide to terrorize the lands under his control.
[more inside]
posted by Pseudology
on Jan 11, 2009 -
8 comments
The other day I happened to come upon a music video that is just so grooving, so human and so
real, that, well, it
moved me, darling.
Just check it out. After watching the clip, I learned that these guys are mostly disabled by polio (that's why several of them are in those rather unusual wheelchairs) and that they were living on the grounds of the Kinshasa zoo, which is where the clip was filmed. Then I learned that last year they were seeking to bring
a lawsuit against the UN. Then I found
some other clips. And now I am a
major fan of
Staff Benda Bilili.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Apr 26, 2008 -
47 comments
The full-on, amped-up
sanza sounds of
Konono No. 1 have been celebrated here at MeFi not
once but
twice, and they are indeed wonderful.
Björk's been working with them a bit lately, too. But let's go back a few decades, and take a listen to the unplugged version of this type of music: mesdames et messiurs,
Papa Kourand, the grand old man of the sanza!
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Oct 10, 2007 -
11 comments
Dear Friend,
I am a Swiss Banker currently in possession of over $ 1 Billion in funds stashed away by the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko of the Congo. Our Swiss Confederation President Micheline Calmy-Rey said her government is holding just $6.6m frozen in accounts.
"We discussed the question of Mobutu's funds and my government is prepared to restore the money to the DR Congo as soon as possible," Ms Rey
told reporters in the DR Congo capital, Kinshasa, after talks with Mr Kabila.
But we can help you get the rest of the 92.4 million dollars if you will just send us your bank account number and call to confirm your ID and pin number.
posted by infini
on Jul 17, 2007 -
65 comments
There is a remote part of the Congolese jungle, called the Bili forest, where local legend has long told of a breed of giant apes that eat lions, catch fish and howl at the moon. To his surprise Dutch researcher Cleve Hicks
found them. In fact they are large chimps but they appear to have a number of behavioural differences from other groups seen in the wild. (
More information from Wikipedia).
posted by rongorongo
on Jul 16, 2007 -
33 comments
"More Vicious than Rape." Thousands of Congolese girls and women, among the hundreds of thousands of rape cases, who have been deliberately harmed following their rape in a particular way with a brutality that staggers the mind.
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike
on Nov 17, 2006 -
112 comments
Dead Ringers: the Science Museum asks us the question "should we upgrade our mobile phone?" "
No" and "
no" say the Times and the Observer, but we still do: on average every 18 months. What's the problem? Well it isn't just the lead, arsenic, beryllium and
brominated fire-retardant cases (pollutants all) disappearing into our land fills (which are not covered by the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive [
WEEE] in Europe). Coltan also goes into our phones. It occurs mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and as such our demand for upgrades has been
contributing to a war (despite mobile phone companies' claims to the contrary, coltan is not regulated like timber). If we must upgrade, we can at least
recycle or hack our
old phones.
posted by nthdegx
on Aug 7, 2006 -
49 comments
Bought from a slave trader and put on display at the Bronx zoo: the strange, sad story of Ota Benga, a Pygmy with filed teeth brought from the Congo to America in 1906.
Here are a couple of contemporary news accounts of the controversial exhibit. After the zoo, Benga tried to make a life in America, studying to be a missionary.
"But what he really wanted to do was to tell everyone in this country that his people were dying, and why. I think he thought that eventually they'd listen. But they never did. That, to me, is the real tragedy."
In 1916, at the age of 32, he built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps on his teeth, performed a final tribal dance, and
shot himself with a stolen pistol.
Creationists say the story illustrates "the racism of evolutionary theory" and "the horrors that evolutionary theory has brought to society."
posted by CunningLinguist
on Aug 7, 2006 -
35 comments
Congotronics! Mawangu Mingiedi, 72, a musician and truck driver from Kinshasa, was simply trying to allow the music of his street band,
Konono No. 1, be heard over the traffic and street noise, but when he fashioned home-made amplifiers out of junkyard parts he created something raw and distorted with
a sound all its own (quicktime). (via
MonkeySARS, where an MP3 awaits you)
posted by Robot Johnny
on Nov 22, 2005 -
41 comments
Konono No. 1 "This band is one of the main exponents of a spectacular style of music which has developed in the suburbs of Kinshasa (DR Congo). The Congolese call it "tradi-modern", in other words: electrified traditional music. These are musicians who left the bush to settle in the capital and who, in order to go on keep fulfilling their social role and make themselves heard by the ancestors (and, more concretely, by their fellow citizens) despite the high level of urban noise, have had to resort to DIY amplification of their instruments, and to megaphones (conical speakers). This makeshift electrification has provoked a radical mutation of their sound, as it has introduced distortions which they have integrated to their style. [...] The band's line-up includes three electric likembés [thumb pianos] (bass, medium and treble), equipped with hand-made microphones built from magnets salvaged from old car parts, and plugged into amplifiers." Via
womanonfire.
posted by jokeefe
on Feb 25, 2003 -
16 comments
