Smuggling up the Congo

My friends may not be surprised, given that I seem to be drawn to warzones like a moth to flame, to learn that in 48hr time I will be touching down in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What I suspect will surprise them is that on this trip I will be smuggling contraband goods, in fact smuggling them for the Congolese government itself.

I am currently in my flat in central London awaiting a phone call from the Congolese Ambassador to inform me off the pickup instructions. I am then to collect a mysterious sealed box which I have been told to deliver at precisely 11am on Tuesday into the hands of the Foreign Minister in Kinshasa. I have no idea what the box will contain. It might be fairly standard merchandise such as trafficked human organs, drugs or non-sequential dollar bills. It could however be something slightly more exotic, such as the design blueprints for a nuclear weapon, or evidence linking political enemies with the missile attack in 1994 which destroyed the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian Presidents and sparked a decade of genocide and war in the region.

The official description which the Ambassador gave me yesterday, when he persuaded me to make the delivery (in return for getting a visa at short notice without all the officially required documentation), was that the box contains "headed stationary". So perhaps the truth of this little anecdote is merely that President Major General Joseph Kabila has a predilection for the kind of high quality scented letter writing paper that can only be bought from certain shops located on London's Bond Street... surely that's the most plausible explanation, isn't it?

My trip to Congo, by the way, is part of the work I'm doing on HIV/AIDS in the region. I'm just going to be in the capital for a week on this occasion, but will hopefully spend most of July visiting AIDS projects out in the eastern part of the country around lake Kivu, and also in Rwanda and Burundi. As a side line while I'm there, I'm hoping to solve one of the last remaining puzzles of African geography by discovering the source of Um Bongo .