THE village of Wagenia stands on the banks of the great Congo River just below the Stanley Falls, the point at which the river becomes finally unnavigable 1,000 miles from the coast.

Like villages all over this vast, impoverished land, it has no electricity, no fresh water, no schools, no paved roads and no clinic. Its handful of stone houses are dilapidated, their walls pockmarked by bullets, mortars and shells. Open windows are covered by scraps of old cloth. Few of the 700 villagers are literate. Few earn more than 10p a day. Naked children, many with untreated sores from worms, play in the river while their fathers fish in the traditional way using home-made reed baskets like giant lobster pots. They communicate with nearby villages through a large drum balanced on worn-out lorry tyres.

During its entire history Wagenia has known nothing but brutality, exploitation and suffering. It has suffered from slave-traders, exceptionally cruel colonialism followed by an even worse dictatorship, and then many years of war. But next weekend it will try something new: democracy.

Across a country the size of Western Europe, 25 million people will vote in what will be, by any standards, an extraordinary election. The Democratic Republic of Congo has only 200 miles (320km) of paved road outside its cities, so the ballot papers will be delivered to the 46,718 polling stations by plane, boat, dug-out canoe, bicycle, mule and foot.

The papers themselves will be the size of posters, with 33 presidential and 9,500 parliamentary candidates. The UN has trained 300,000 election workers, and there are 17,500 UN troops in the country helping to keep the peace until a new government can establish itself. An eight-month registration process in a country that had had no census for 45 years cost £55 million. The election itself will cost £235 million, making it the most expensive so far held in Africa.

Whether the vote will be truly free and fair, and how on Earth the villagers are supposed to choose between candidates they have never seen or heard of, is another matter, but those seem minor considerations for the villagers of Wagenia. “No one has ever voted here — not me, not my parents, not my grandparents,” Difuma Martin, 78, said. “We have never lived in a state of law. Nothing has ever been built here, just destroyed.”

“It is time to change. We have waited long enough,” said Joseph Beaka-Aifila, the village headman, who plans to lead about 200 adult villagers, proudly bearing their electoral registration cards, to a voting station in a dilapidated school a few miles away, where most will use their thumbprints to cast their ballots.

They have indeed waited long enough, for Wagenia has always been at the centre of Congo’s bloody history. First, Arab slavers came and marched the villagers off to their slave boats in Zanzibar. Then came Henry Morton Stanley, the Victorian explorer who first raised the gold-starred blue flag of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State at the nearby waterfalls 130 years ago. The voracious Belgian monarch plundered his new empire for ivory and rubber, Victorian bicycle tyres having made rubber the boom commodity of the age.

Local chiefs were forced to hand over land in exchange for cloth, beads and a couple of bottles of gin. Leopold’s henchmen instituted a system of slave labour, and those who resisted had limbs chopped off, were treated to the chicotte — a special whip made of hardened hippopotamus skin — or placed in iron chains for months on end. As many as ten million were killed.

“Our grandparents told us tales of how our ancestors were carried off, never to be seen again,” Mr Beaka-Aifila said. “Then the Belgians took people off into the forest and forced them to work. No one knows how many people were killed, but many never came back.”

Congo finally won independence in 1960, but that brought no respite. Within six months, Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic liberation leader, was dead, murdered in a plot that Belgium and the United States were accused of orchestrating because of his left-wing stance.

In 1965 Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power in a military coup. He later Africanised his name to Mobutu Sese Seko and set up one of the continent’s most infamous dictatorships. He salted away billions of pounds from sales of copper, cobalt, gold, diamonds, nickel and, latterly, coltan — a metal used in mobile phones.

Mobutu refused to build roads for fear that they would facilitate opposition to his rule. Wearing his trademark leopardskin hat, he flew from one enormous kitsch palace to another in private jets, accompanied by a huge entourage of fawning aides, Scandinavian prostitutes and crates of pink champagne. He bought mansions in Europe. His people received nothing.

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