Kinshasa

Kinshasa is the giant of the pair: seventeen million people on the south bank of the Malebo Pool, the largest French-speaking city on Earth, engine room of Congolese rumba — inscribed by UNESCO as heritage of humanity — and of more music, paint and sheer verbal invention per block than almost anywhere. Across the water, close enough to read its windows at dusk, sits Brazzaville: the other half of this atlas's only mirrored pair of charts, each carrying the other on its horizon.

The traveller who comes — and the brave ones do — takes La Gombe first: the Boulevard du 30 Juin, the Académie des Beaux-Arts whose sculptors and painters carry a national art tradition on their shoulders, the river terraces where the Pool does its evening silver. Then, guided and gladly, deeper: Matonge for rumba that starts after ten and negotiates with sunrise; the sapeurs, whose elegance is a sovereign act; grilled chikwanga and liboke by the water; and the markets, which are not visited so much as survived, joyfully.

The Guide's honesty, with love: Kinshasa asks for street wisdom — a trusted driver, no flashed phones, photography kept far from official buildings and bridges, and counsel taken on which quarters at which hours —; papers are checked, so carry them; the ferry from Brazzaville is a genuine adventure with a paperwork prologue. None of this is a reason to stay away; it is the price of admission to one of the great cities of this century, and those who pay it rarely stop talking about it.