Alan Parker asked Tim Butcher:

Tim, I just finished "Blood River". To discover how things are now, I checked Kisangani in Wikipedia. To my surprise, it has changed a lot: "The city is a centre for television, radio, theatre and film. The waterfront and nightlife attract residents and tourists alike." Either the situation has changed profoundly, or someone is putting a brave face on the situation (to be polite). The question is which?

Tim Butcher As President Abraham Lincoln famously said: `I’ve learned not to believe everything I see on the internet’. The city of Kinshasa functions, as it did when I travelled through for the Blood River journey in 2004. Not sure how many tourists visit but the urban population grows every year. Public services are bumpy (barely functional criminal justice system, poker-like taxation system of receiving claims and then bidding them down, a health system where hospitals have locked patients in wards until their bill is paid, etc) but ATM machines work, your cellphone will ring and the internet looks as anywhere else in the global village.
Yet I refer to the city’s `illusion of normalcy’. A visitor can reasonably believe that the country must function well enough if the capital does, only to be disappointed. River travel is unreliable, the road network parlous and the rule of law fragile. The world’s second biggest (and getting bigger) ebola outbreak currently in the east of the country has not been contained because of central government’s failure to provide a base modicum of control.
The country remains as magnificent as ever, the people as richly talented. Yet sadly the triumph of disappointment over potential still prevails. I meet Congolese every day in Cape Town and this remains their commonly-held view.

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