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vilest dictators the continent had produced.
    Our ragged little choir was led by a prancing animateur , a kind of compère. I was to learn that he was a party spy who would report anyone who showed less than total enthusiasm to the authorities. We concluded with a rousing rendition of the national anthem as the flag of the Congo rose up the pole. Except that it had mysteriously gone missing some time before, so we all stood rigidly to attention in the middle of the rainforest watching the whole process in mime. I later came to suspect David of having purloined the flag himself, though I could never get him to admit it.
    The ritual was absurd, grotesque, laughable, but the consequences of not taking it seriously could be dire indeed. Perhaps I sensed the dark side of this picture even then. Once it was over, David hustled me through the dispersing crowd.
    ‘Keys to your department,’ he said as he unlocked a pair of blue-painted doors and swung them wide.
    The ramshackle Land Rover which had collected us the previous day stood inside, leaking oil on the stained concrete floor. Around it were stacked boxes of spares, drums of oil, paraffin and aviation fuel, a hand pump, bags of hardening cement, bits of timber, scattered tools. The space stank of diesel. David kicked the nearest crate.
    ‘Vaccine fridge,’ he said. ‘Just come up on the riverboat. Need to get that installed sometime soon.’
    I sensed a pet project. I had very little idea what a vaccine fridge was and no idea how to install one. ‘Me?’ I said. ‘Install that?’
    ‘That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’
    ‘Is it?’
    He stared at me for a moment and then gave up.
    ‘Staff,’ he said, and jerked his head to where an uneven line of half-a-dozen Congolese men in green overalls had formed up behind us without me noticing. He singled out one of them, a tall, wiry, glum-faced man of about sixty. ‘Tata Noah. Foreman. Speaks some French. None of the others do. Lingala or nothing for them.’ He tossed me the keys. ‘See you around.’
    He left me and the ill-favoured Tata Noah to eye one another with mutual suspicion.
    My life as logistics officer at the Bolobo Medical Centre had begun.
    Sue and I learned quickly over the next few weeks. We acquired new skills and got to know new people. We both, inevitably, fell ill and got well again. We established routines. We began to find our way around.
    Sue could not start work until she had completed an induction course at a hospital near Kinshasa, and that couldn’t be scheduled for some weeks, so most of the domestic work fell on her shoulders. There was plenty of it.
    When we had first unpacked our things the house was covered in dust and grime. Fine reddish grit coated every surface and gathered on the skin. An infestation of small scorpions – rumoured to be deadly – meant that we quickly learned never to go barefoot and shook our shoes and sandals before slipping them on. There were other tenants, too: tribes of chunky chestnut-brown cockroaches, spiders the size of a fist, and dozens of brightly coloured lizards. Mosquitoes, the scourge of Africa, were audible everywhere and all the time, not simply after dark. I often only felt or saw them after they were withdrawing from their latest feast.
    Among our more engaging houseguests were two enormous rats that lived in the wood stove. Somehow they would elude us when we or Tata Martin came to light the kindling, but they would always return to bask in the heat afterwards and pick up any scraps that happened to be lying about.
    Our staple diet quickly became beans, rice and eel. The eels came from the river and had an extremely strong taste and texture. Guavas, mangoes, paw paws, avocados, bananas and pineapples all flourished within a stone’s throw of the house.
    The people here lived much as they have always lived. They fished the great river from dugout canoes and hunted in the forest with spears and, for the last century or so, with