Lusanga - DRC: Nostalgia of a glorious past

Abandoned houses and offices, ruins of factories ..this is what is left of the city of Lusanga, otherwise known as Leverville during the colonial days in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Painful memories of forced labour and bullying, but also the nostalgia for a lost empire of the English- Dutch multinational company, Unilever.

Located about 570 kilometers to the East of Kinshasa, the city , in 1911 was known as the Belgian Congo with huge concessions of wild palms forest. They belonged to the English entrepreneur William Lever, of the levers Brothers which gave rise to Unilever two decades later, today’s international food and cosmetic industry giant.

With the fall of the oil system and the wars that ravaged the country between 1996 and 2003, Unilever gradually withdrew and assigned all of its remaining assets in the country in 2009.

In this town of 15,000 inhabitants, now devoid of the infrastructure, without electricity nor safe drinking water, there is still hope for a miraculous revival of activities by yet another buyer.