The Congolese really love to dance. If you haven’t had the good fortune to hear Congolese music or see some top notch DRC dancing, the mighty Papa Wemba is a good place to start. A few weeks ago, before the …
It's fair to say that British Embassy staff in DRC are slaves to our smartphones. Whether we're pruning our inboxes on our way to meetings or surfing the web outside work, we feel as though we can't live without them. But anyone …
Blogging by candlelight seems like a contradiction in terms. But in the city of Kananga – the most Bond villain-sounding of a strong field of Congolese place names – it’s candlelight or nothing. Kananga is a “ville noire” – which …
Olympic fever is running high in the UK. London 2012 kicks off in late July, and the excitement is palpable, even from an Embassy a whole continent away from home. So it's no wonder that everything we do this year – …
What do you think about when you think about research? Do you think of stereotypes – such as academics looking like Einstein in the picture below with the blackboard? Dusty theses sitting on library shelves? Or do you think about the …
It's moth season in Kinshasa. Every month here seems to bring different insects. Sometimes it's giant flying beetles. Other times it's swarms of brown paper-like flies. Just now there are moths everywhere - moths as big as my two hands; tiny moths; you …
I'm sitting on a covered patio at the Embassy, watching a Congolese storm brew. The weather didn’t let up all weekend, and it's hard not to see it as a metaphor for the turbulence that has followed the release of …
"I thought results were due out today?" my dad asked on Tuesday. "What's going on?" It's true that the announcement of the results of the DRC elections were originally slated for the 6th December. But the huge challenge of getting …
Locked inside a classroom at 9pm, watching the count of presidential votes by the light of camping lanterns, I couldn't have been further from my day job. As I reported in my last blog, I spent Monday 28th November 2011 …
"Can you call someone?" I kept being asked, "We want to be able to vote." I set off at 4:45 this morning - bleary-eyed but as tightly wound with excitement and anticipation as the city of Kinshasa has been throughout …
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