You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.

We make an edition of the program for BBC Radio 4,

but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the BBC World Service.

It's presented by Owen Bennett Jones.

It's the end of a year that seems to have had a decades worth of news.

There's been financial crisis and war, and in the Middle East we've seen an overturning of the old order and the hope, by no means the certainty, of a bright new future.

And whilst these events have been swirling around us at from our own correspondent we've been

digging in our old sound recordings looking for dispatches and seeing if faded

correspondence notebooks from years past have lessons for today. and notebooks but in Africa. It was the final days of President Mobutu of Zaire, that's the Democratic Republic of Congo these days,

and they were characterized by rumor and fear as rebel forces approached the capital Kinshasa.

Wednesday 14th of May.

Rebellion enters the city first in disembodied form.

It comes in the shape of hearsay and rumor and rising apprehension.

It comes out of the dense, damp immensity of the rainforest in silent menacing legion

and along the teeming tributaries of the great river by steamer and ferry boat and dugout canoe.

The rebel advances out there traveling the same silent hidden paths and it is all the more menacing

for being unseen and unheard, a stalking night hunter closing on its prey by stealth.

We know the rebels are coming to take the city, and we know that when they descend it will

be decisive and immediate.

But we don't know how far they are,

or how imminent their strike.

We wait in the highly charged city,

...