The heavyweight world championship showdown between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman electrified a city full of pride and promise....

  ... – and then the money ran out …

“Kinshasa was a very nice place. Very clean. Not too many people, like there are now,” Dieudonne Duabo explains quietly. Sitting in the shade of an ageing hangar at the edge of the city’s Ndolo airport, the 64-year-old former army pilot is reflecting on when he first came here as a 17-year-old student in 1968. “At the time, with what I had, I could go to the supermarket and get what I wanted. I could really control my life. It was OK. No problem.”

Ndolo airport was once a shining symbol of Kinshasa’s modernity, growth and prosperity. Built in the early 1920s, it was a cornerstone of Congolese aviation and a major hub in the allied African air network during the second world war. Now it is as tumbledown as most of the rest of the sprawling city, with derelict planes littering its margins and weeds slowly eating the decaying concrete.

 Crowds line the streets of Kinshasa as Muhammad Ali passes ahead of his 30 October 1974 heavyweight fight against world champion George Foreman.
Crowds line the streets of Kinshasa as Muhammad Ali passes ahead of his 30 October 1974 heavyweight fight against world champion George Foreman. © AFP/Getty Images

But while Kinshasa has been relatively quiet since the violence that marred elections in 2011, tensions are beginning to rise again. The current president Joseph Kabila, son of Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001 four years after overthrowing Mobutu, is due to stand down next year under Congolese rules limiting him to two terms. Kabila and his political allies are mulling plans for a possible constitutional change allowing him to serve a third term, something his critics and members of the international community oppose.

There were protests in Kinshasa and other DRC cities last month, and it’s safe to assume there will be more. There is a lot of discontentment across the social strata – but according to Trefon, it may be too much to expect people who are busy simply trying to survive to muster the strength and courage to tackle what amounts to a broken system.

“People have the view: what’s the point in trying to get ahead, because there are so many negative forces bringing them down?” Trefon says. “So they can live with this sentiment of ‘survival without development’. It’s like the Congolese singer Koffi Olimide said: ‘If there’s a field of corn and one corn stalk is higher than the other, the wind is going to take it down.’”

At Ndolo airport, as the fierce midday sun starts to beat down on the hangar roof, Dieudonne Duabo paints a depressing picture of daily life for many Kinois. “Nothing is going up, it’s going down. Everything, every day. It’s true that we are free to express ourselves today – but people can’t eat. The majority of the population doesn’t have something to eat all day. There is food, but they have no money. So it’s very bad.

“Anywhere you go today, somebody tells you, ‘Ah, everything is OK, don’t you see that they are making roads, and they are building schools and universities, hospitals? So life is OK, there’s no problem.’ But who is going to put that food on his plate? Nobody. That’s why there’s no hope. People are crying all day.

“Every day, people with uniforms go to the poor population, taking away whatever they’ve made during the day and so on. I’d like them to go to people from the government, high-ranking people, generals, and take money from them. That would be OK. But not from people who are just fighting, fighting for their life. Every day, they are crying. Every night, problems – they can’t sleep. People just break in with grenades, anything. They break into somebody’s house and take everything there is.”