Kinshasa was a magical place for young party-goers in the 60s. But outside the capital rebel armies led by foreign mercenaries engaged in ruthless war. “Mad Mike” Hoare proved to be too much for Che Guevara:

Che spent his days waiting in the mountains for the rebel leader Laurent Kabila to turn up. He gave the rebels classes in how to be “new men” but they laughed at him, he got dysentery, he lost his pet monkey, and then Kabila finally arrived but was completely drunk. Che Guevara gave up any hope of creating a revolution. He wrote Fidel Castro a despairing letter. In it you can feel the 20th century dream of transforming oppressed people into new kinds of powerful beings quietly dying away.