Home alone

It's two years since Evangelos Valavanis had to flee for his life. When the rebel soldiers raided his remote trading post in eastern Congo, they even swiped the mattress from his bed. The 68-year-old Greek sped into the jungle on the only available transport: a borrowed bicycle.

Eight days and 500 kilometres later, the hungry and exhausted figure free-wheeled into the provincial capital, Kisangani. Since then he has been stuck there.

Outside, the guns of war have been thundering through the jungle, occasionally breaching the city itself. And Valavanis wryly regards the destruction of the African settler dream he signed up for over three decades ago.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, was once swarming with Greeks. In Kisangani - the eastern city that straddles the mammoth Congo river - there were 2,000 in the 1950s. There were good Greek restaurants, Orthodox churches, two cinemas and even a casino.

Now the coffee plantations are abandoned, the roads are impassable and the Orthodox priests have gone home. Three decades of corroding Mobutuism followed by the last four years of war have crushed the strongest resolve. All that remains are the die-hards - nine of them, to be precise.

The last Greeks of Kisangani spend their evenings drinking Primus beer and chain-smoking in a corner of the Club Hellenique. Pushing chess pieces around a board, the three men look drained behind the fug of cigarette smoke. "This is my home, but we have already lost everything," says Andre Gersimou. "It's like the Johnny Halliday song: `Noir, c'est noir, il n'y a plus d'espoir au Congo'."

In its hey-day, the Greek Club was the swinging spot of town where rich folk, mainly white, would flock to eat and party. Now the restaurant is deserted, save for the odd aid worker, while the bar attracts rebel spies hoping to earwig on Westerners. "I used to produce 800 tonnes of coffee on 11 plantations. And now nothing," says Malamos Christakis.

Home is a sparse house with grenade shrapnel embedded in the veranda walls. Three bombs fell in the back yard last June when the Ugandan and Rwandan armies - supposed rebel allies - spent six days lobbing shells at each other across Kisangani. Christakis spent the week cowering in his corridor with a couple of bowls of rice. The following week his Congolese wife fled to the capital, Kinshasa, on a United Nations flight.

"It was the beautiful life here once," he says, remembering a time when water trucks would spray the neat colonial avenues and small planes would drop a cloud of mosquito repellent in the evenings. "But I'm also off to Kinshasa. And if that doesn't work out, Africa is finished for me."

Valavanis figures it's time to go back to Athens too. Trouble is, he can't remember what the place is like. He has no money, no family in Greece and hasn't been back since the 1960s. His last hope is a brother in Chicago, from whom he last heard in 1960. Valavanis sent a letter through the Red Cross a year ago. No reply yet. Now his countrymen are petitioning the Greek embassy in Kinshasa to fly him home.

If he makes it, what does he expect to find? "I don't know - big buildings!" the white-haired septuagenarian laughs raucously in his pidgin French and English, pulling on a borrowed cigarette. "Pas connais!"