These pictures are an attempt to capture my experiences of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country often ignored and misunderstood. I wanted to illustrate the energy of life there; the colours, the variety, and the vast calm of the meandering river that defines the country.

Towards the end of 2019 in a journey coast to coast from west to east across the continent, I retraced some of the steps of Joseph Conrad through the DRC.

Impassable roads mean that the river still provides the only way to cross much of the country, and Kisingani, the upper station in Heart of Darkness, was the starting point for our journey onto the river itself. He writes in Heart of Darkness: “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.“ These words still ring as true now as they did then.

Our transport was akin to that which has plied the river for centuries; a dugout canoe made of a single hollowed log, the heart of one of the immense trees that still line the banks. We made our way, propelled by an outboard motor slung over the back, slowly down the river towards Yangambi, in the heart of the equatorial rainforest.

This small town was once one of the largest tropical forestry research centres in the world, but it's outsized red brick buildings have spent most of the last few decades melting back into the vegetation. Now though, EU funding has helped resurrect some of the work being done here, to try and understand the potential impact of global warming on the world’s second largest rainforest.

James on IG