Radio Congo: Signals of Hope from Africa’s Deadliest War. By Ben Rawlence. Oneworld; 303 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

IT CAN be hard to find a guide to the Democratic Republic of Congo who does not mention Mr Kurtz. The fictional character at the centre of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” has so often been present in the worst of what has been written about sub-Saharan Africa’s largest country, as well as some of the best, such as Michela Wrong’s “In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz”. It is a relief then that Ben Rawlence, who begins his debut, “Radio Congo”, with a trawl through colonial-era maps in London, chooses to follow a different path.

His mission to find Manono, a 1950s model town built by a Belgian mining company in the rarely visited interior of eastern Congo, is illuminated as much by the detours as the destination. He takes a wrong turn going to meet the persecuted Tutsi minority Banyamulenge in their mountain home; gets drunk with priests from the Catholic missions; dances to popular bolingo music; and stops to pay as much attention to cheese production in north Kivu as he does to Congo’s notorious conflict minerals.

Mr Rawlence’s companions are often local broadcast reporters, one of whom grandly informs him that “radio is the spider’s web that is holding this country together”. After years of internecine war, communities are “islands in a sea of forest”. These towns know more about events in foreign capitals than they do about what is happening in villages a few days’ walk away. In the absence of roads or reliable information only the foolhardy travel far overland.

On getting to Manono after a hazardous journey, free of the usual hyperbole that Congo travels inspire, Mr Rawlence discovers the ruin of a town that once triumphed over nature before becoming its prey. The planned Utopia now resembles “how the world might look after a horrendous natural disaster or economic collapse”. Its industrial past can be seen in the flooded wreck of the hydroelectric plant. Its shops and cafés are empty of everything but Coke bottles. The people, except for some Lebanese tin traders, have returned to scratching a living from the earth.

The journey itself is less meaningful than the time the writer spends with ordinary Congolese, often living hopeful lives. The result is not a sweeping history of what has come to be known as “Africa’s world war”, but a series of intimate and entertaining portraits that are sometimes missing from other accounts. The author, who speaks one of the country’s more widespread languages, Kiswahili, has helped others achieve his own goal of moving on from “knowing more about how people in Congo were dying than about how they lived”.