All the aliens are gone now...

...and the people are living on top of what they left behind.

There are two main cities in the DRC, Kinshasa and Lubumbashi. These are the only two cities in which I see new construction. The only two cities that look as if the people living in them built them and are continuing to build. These two have individual character. You can tell you are in Lubumbashi and not in Kinshasa.

The secondary cities which I've visited, Mbandaka, Kindu, Kananga, Kisangani, all look the same...the same architecture, the same coat of paint that was applied 55 years ago, the same roof that was last repaired then, the same street surface that was new then and the same sense that but for the current residents chopping down the larger plants, the forest would have won long ago. When I fly low over the country side, I see the same thing; farms, plantations and mills that used to be.

I've been wracking my brain for months trying to figure some way to explain it to myself and this is what I figure.

A race of aliens took over the land. They built cities, ports, farms, airfields, churches and all the things that marked them as mighty everywhere in the nation. They were here for decades and then one day they left, all of them, overnight.

The people had watched the aliens do all this but they had not really taken part in it. When the aliens left they went to the cities and plantations and knew they were useful, but they didn't know exactly what they were useful for. So they moved onto them. They didn't really move into them, they moved onto all the great edifices and lived there as they lived in the countryside. The people cut down the weeds but they didn't know what else to do with all these structures.

When a thunderstorm blew off part of the roof, the people moved into another room of the house. If a child broke a window while playing, they hung a mat over it. When a pothole developed in the road, they made a path around it. Mostly nobody intentionally or maliciously broke anything; but nobody tried to preserve anything either.

Eventually, when there were no more dry rooms, and all the walls had collapsed, and the road couldn't be seen anymore, the people stopped cutting down the plants and the forest took back all the aliens had made.

This is what all these secondary cities are like. Nothing, or almost nothing, has changed since the Belgians left. The big buildings have no glass, no electricity. There is mold on all the painted surfaces. You see telephone switching boxes in the streets and there hasn't been any land line service in decades. Imagine whole cities like this, dozens of cities and towns like this. In a few decades, there will be nothing left. In the rural areas, you can see places already completely abandoned that the forest has almost taken back.

This must be like what Rome was after the fall or what the Mayan cities and temple complexes were like as they were being consumed by the jungle. It's eerie.

The touching thing is that at the airports, some of the guys working there worked when there were working radios, glass in the windows and regularly resurfaced runways. They remember. You can tell they could run it if only it could be rebuilt. They come to work everyday expecting it to be rebuilt, someday. I wonder if that someday will ever come.