Then there is the scourge of disease. Walk through Goma and one sees a gallery of ills — men and women, in tattered clothes matted with dirt, victims of polio or leprosy, rolling down the crowded streets in makeshift tricycles or walking on their hands, their withered legs twisted behind them, often begging — stretched out arms to able-bodied people who can barely survive themselves.

And were that not enough, the spectre of Ebola looms, breaking out frequently enough to remind people that their lives are not entirely theirs, that the next outbreak could be the decisive one that finally exterminates the town, hovering in the collective consciousness, like a dull splinter in the mind.

But these woes hold no candle to the scourge that humanity itself has posed.

Salted through these 34 eruptions & countless disease outbreaks have been the depravities of war and conquest. The exploitation and dispossession of the pygmies, the extirpation of the gorilla population, colonialism and its attendant cruelties, slavery, cannibalism, tribalism, theft, hunger … an almost endless tide of unimaginable suffering.

And then a crescendo in 1994: an orgy of slaughter now known as the Rwandan genocide, in which a million people were murdered in 100 days in the most personal genocide in human history.

Less than a decade later, suffering from the ripple effects of the Rwandan genocide & other systemic issues, Congo went through the horrors of what some historians call the unreported Third World War, where up to five million people died.

“And Still I Rise”. Maya Angelou’s third anthology of poetry is the lovesong of this region, because, in spite of the wretchedness of humanity, there remains an enduring stubbornness, a desire to forge a life of purpose and happiness that is hard to extinguish.