Rising Up At Night

The lights have gone out in Kinshasa. The entire city, home to over seventeen million people and the capital of Congo, is plunged into darkness. Each night, electricity fails to reach homes or streets, leaving the population to navigate their neighborhoods in pitch blackness. There is talk on the radio of an international project, financed by Chinese or Spanish investors, to build a dam that could solve the crisis. But for now, life is unbearable, and danger grows with the setting sun. At night, neighbors band together in search of solutions, while preachers and religious fanatics—seemingly government emissaries—arrive to offer mystical hope to a population on the brink of despair.