in heart of darkness joseph conrad writes of his alter ego. when i was a a little chap, i had a passion for maps. at that time there were many blank spaces on earth. but there was one yet, the biggest, the most blank, that i had a hankering after. this, then, is the congo. the size of all western europe combined it should be africa's wealthiest nation. the people forget or never even knew that the 20th century's first holocaust happened here when belgium's king leopold managed to bam booboozle the wo into giving him personal title to the congo. leopold's agents of whom the mythical kertz was one mutilated and pressed into forced labor much of the population in a blood thirsty quest for, first, ivory and then rubber. when independence finally came, the belgians trashed what they could and left behind a completely unprepared, tribally divided, and largely ungovernable land mass filled with stuff that everybody in the world wanted. things pretty much went down hill from there. this story begins with a truck stop in rwanda. stocking up in rwanda,