Gbadolite

Gbadolite was a small settlement in the Ngbandi country of the northern Ubangi forests, about 12 km south of the river that marks the border with what is now the Central African Republic. Its transformation began with one man: Joseph Désiré Mobutu, born in 1930 at Lisala and raised partly in this district, who took power in the Congo in 1965 and renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko and the country Zaire.

From the 1970s he turned his home village into a second capital. State money built a series of palaces, including the vast residence at Kawele with its marble, fountains and formal gardens; power came from a hydroelectric station on the Ubangi at Mobayi-Mbongo, opened in 1989; and an airport was laid out with a runway able to take Concorde. Heads of state, businessmen and diplomats were received here, and the town acquired the nickname "Versailles of the Jungle" while the rest of the country's infrastructure decayed.

The arrangement ended with Mobutu himself. As the rebellion that would depose him advanced in 1997, he left Gbadolite and the country, dying in exile in Morocco later that year; the palaces were looted and stripped within days. During the Second Congo War the north-west was fought over by the rebel Movement for the Liberation of the Congo, led by Jean-Pierre Bemba, who was born in Nord-Ubangi, and Gbadolite changed hands. Since then the town has served as an ordinary provincial centre, becoming the capital of the new Nord-Ubangi province when Equateur was divided in 2015, with the ruins as its most visible inheritance.

This is Ngbandi country, the people from whom Mobutu came, living alongside Ngbaka, Ngombe and other communities of the Ubangi. Lingala is the shared language of trade and the street, French belongs to administration and schooling, and local languages are spoken at home and in village affairs. The border makes the area bilingual in another sense as well: Sango, the language of the Central African Republic, is heard among traders who cross the river.

Church life dominates the week. Catholic and Protestant missions established themselves here in the colonial period and still run schools, clinics and choirs, and revival churches have grown alongside them. Customary chiefs and clan elders retain authority in land disputes, marriages and funerals, and obligations to the extended family shape household budgets.

Mobutu's legacy is part of the local identity in a way outsiders often find surprising. Many older residents remember the years when the town had reliable electricity, paved roads, a hospital with equipment and aircraft coming and going, and speak of that period with a nostalgia that sits uneasily beside the record of the state he ran. Music, Congolese rumba above all, plays from bars and shopfronts in the evening; football is the shared enthusiasm; and social life revolves around the market, the church and the long conversation.

Gbadolite is a small provincial capital, and most of the people of the surrounding territory live in villages and outlying quarters rather than in a dense urban centre. The town is spread out along avenues built for a scale of traffic that never came, with cassava plots and palm trees between the buildings.

The economy is agricultural. Households grow cassava, plantain, maize, groundnuts and rice, tap palm oil, keep small livestock and gather forest products; coffee, which was once a commercial crop of the Ubangi, has largely declined. Trade runs towards Gemena and across the river, and provincial administration, churches, schools and the organisations that work in the area provide the small number of salaried jobs.

The day begins early in the fields and the market and slows through the afternoon heat. Electricity is intermittent even though the dam at Mobayi-Mbongo stands a short distance away, and many households depend on solar panels or generators; water is drawn from wells and standpipes. Isolation is the defining condition: roads that fail in the rains, flights that come irregularly, thin medical services, and the high cost of anything manufactured that has to be brought in from Kinshasa or across the border.

Cassava is the foundation of every meal, pounded into fufu or fermented and wrapped in leaves as chikwangue, and its leaves are stewed with palm oil and smoked fish as pondu. Plantain, makemba in Lingala, is boiled, fried or roasted; rice, maize and groundnuts fill out the table; and palm oil gives sauces their deep orange colour.

Protein comes from the rivers and the forest. Fish from the Ubangi and its tributaries is grilled fresh, stewed, or smoked on racks for keeping and selling, and is often cooked in leaf parcels with onion, tomato and chilli. Groundnut sauces are common in this northern country, edible caterpillars are gathered in season, wild mushrooms and honey come out of the forest, and goat or chicken appears on festive days. Pili-pili chilli is added to almost everything, either in the pot or as a paste at the table.

Palm wine is tapped in the villages and drunk the same day, still fermenting; maize and cassava spirits are distilled locally; and bottled lager, trucked or flown in, is the drink of the bars along the main avenues. Strong sweet tea and coffee are taken in the morning, a reminder of the plantations that once worked this part of the Ubangi.