Letter from Kinshasa Paul CullenSome cities are born drab, some achieve drabness, but you suspect that Kinshasa, the teeming capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has had drabness slowly thrust upon it.
Each year that passes brings fresh waves of migrants from the countryside and a further steady decline in the state of the city.
Like an ageing set of teeth, bits of the urban streetscape crack, become dislodged and fall out.
New layers of dust and decay settle on the faded fabric of the city; potholes grow deeper, broken windows remain unreplaced.
Other African cities were ravaged by war, but Kinshasa doesn't even have this excuse. Brazzaville, capital of the other Congo across the river, was battered by shelling a few years ago but Kinshasa, throughout all its conflicts, avoided taking a direct hit.
Rather, its dowdy, threadbare looks are the result of regular bouts of looting, as if a passing swarm of locusts had picked the city bare. The city has fallen apart; it is, in the local phrase, "cadavéré".
No one really knows how many people live here. In the 1980s the population was little over two million but these days, rough estimates put it at between eight and nine million.
For decades, "Kin-la-Belle" absorbed those fleeing ethnic strife elsewhere in the Congo, offering them sanctuary if not comfort. Former dictator Joseph Mobutu stimulated further growth through his creation of a vast, underworked bureaucracy.
But with the civil wars of the 1990s came economic collapse. Factories closed, civil servants were left unpaid and soldiers went on regular looting sprees. Mobutu's cronies fled to Europe with the fortunes they had salted away and fighting cut the capital off from the resource-rich provinces.
With typical big-city humour, the Kinois resort to the French acronym for Aids to describe their impoverished condition, Sida (Salaire Insuffisant Depuis des Années).
Even the city's nuclear reactor was pillaged for profit. Built by the Belgians in 1958 - little did they know they would be gone within two years - the reactor rusted dangerously throughout Mobutu's rule. Then its nuclear rods went missing, only to show up in Europe. In 1998, Italian authorities seized a fuel element which had been shipped to DR Congo in the 1970s. It is believed the rods ended up in the hands of the Mafia, for possible sale to the Middle East; now the Americans fear they made have gone to al-Qaeda.
The model city of boulevards, parks and sports grounds laid out by Belgian colonisers is largely gone now, submerged under tin-shack slums and mountains of rubbish (hence the city's revised nickname, Kin-la-poubelle).
While the Boulevard du 30 Juin, Africa's Champs Elysée, still runs the full length of the downtown area, its eight lanes are usually choked with ancient, overcrowded buses and cars.
Only the posher districts on the heights, such as Mont Fleurie and Ma Campagne, retain an ordered look, courtesy of high security provided for present-day elites. A few international- style hotels survive, too, using generators to overcome the shortcomings of the city's electricity supply.
But even the five-star Grand Hotel, with its jaded décor and garish curtains, seems to have changed little since George Foreman stayed here in preparation for his famous "rumble in the jungle" with Muhammad Ali in 1974.
It's hard to know what the Kinois do for a living. Certainly, they trade - like the woman who carried a gross of eggs on her head as she hurried past my window to the market each morning - but no one seems to actually manufacture anything.
Locals tell you workers are people who go to work to see if they might get paid. At the postal service HQ, for example, hundreds of employees oversee a non-functioning postal system. There are no customers in the post office, only workers who say they are owed more than five years pay.
Kinshasa might be drab, but it is never dull. This is the original home of the sapeur, the style-mad poseur who believes it is better to be well-dressed than well-fed. Amid all the poverty and deprivation, sapeurs treat bars and nightclubs as catwalks where they can flaunt their latest purchases.
DR Congo is the musical capital of sub-Saharan Africa and Kinshasa its beating heart. Music, spontaneous and joyful, permeates a city where hip- waggling seems involuntary.
Teeming slums pulse to the hybrid, carnal Afro-Cuban rhythms unique to the country. The biggest stars have long since emigrated to Brussels or Paris but the music, like the life in the city, goes on.