Rivers, like mountains, are places of the imagination as much as they are facts of geography and political history.
In the introduction to his 2014 book Congo: The Epic History of a People, Belgian historian David van Reybrouck acknowledges this duality — let’s call it the magical actuality of rivers — in relation to Central Africa’s greatest river.
The Congo, tells Van Reybrouck, has a resonance that far exceeds its 4 700km length. The basin where the river flows into the Atlantic Ocean is an enigma of colour: a yellowish, ochre, rusty…
