The Daily Telegraph changed the course of African history when it funded Henry Morton Stanley's voyage of discovery down the Congo River in the 1870s, which launched the continent's troubled modern history of colonialism and post-colonial turbulence.
In recent decades the Congo has regressed into the most dangerous, remote region in the world. I followed Stanley's original 2,000 mile route using pygmy motorbike guides and a flotilla of unconvincing river-craft on a journey that provided a harrowing snapshot of modern Africa.
I passed through villages deep in the rainforest where human bones littered the ground and the only glimpses I caught of local people were shadows fleeing in fear at the sound of outsiders, so often the harbingers of violence.
But I also found a region that we ignore at our peril, one that represents a very real threat to the wider world.
Decades of war and rebellion have made the territory, known today as the Democratic Republic of Congo, even more dangerous than in Stanley's time - civil unrest kills 1,200 people each day, a death toll much higher than post-Saddam Iraq.
Violence has plunged the vast country - from one side to the other is the distance from London to Moscow - back into the Dark Ages, with almost no functioning roads, electricity, medical supplies or transport links.
Not only does cross-border smuggling partly fund the genocide in the Darfur region of neighbouring Sudan, there are worries about its connection to the war on terror.
Congolese uranium mines - source of the fissile material used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks of 1945 - are once again being mined. But with state control all but collapsed in the Congo, the final destination of the uranium is worryingly unclear.
North Korean agents tried to acquire Congolese uranium in the 1990s and there are worries it might now have become a target of al-Qa'eda.
In a series of articles, I will this week describe the journey through a backward but important part of Africa, explore its history and draw conclusions about its hopes for a better future.
Stanley turned to the Congo after his journalistic scoop of 1871, when he tracked down the British missionary, David Livingstone. The trip made Stanley a household name but there remained one daunting challenge, to solve the mystery of the Congo River.
Portuguese mariners had discovered the mouth of Africa's mightiest river in 1482. The Nile might be longer but the Congo River is more powerful.
But for 400 years precious little more was known about the Congo River because of impenetrable rapids just a short distance from the mouth. Various Portuguese and British teams tried to explore the river on its banks but were beaten back by hostile tribes and disease.
By the 1870s, the eastern half of central Africa had largely been mapped. But the western half and, crucially, the watershed of the Congo River, remained, as Joseph Conrad later put it, the "blankest of blank spaces''.
When Stanley walked into the Fleet Street offices of the Telegraph for an audience with the then editor, Sir Edwin Arnold, he had one thing on his mind - backing for an expedition to chart the Congo.
He won its financial support in the form of a £6,000 stipend to cover the hiring of 350 bearers in Zanzibar and all the equipment needed for a three-year expedition including a collapsible river boat named The Lady Alice after his fiancée.
And he took two other Telegraph assets - Francis and Edward Pocock, crew from the editor's private yacht - as assistants, before the expedition set out from Africa's east coast in late 1874.
Two years later Stanley reached a huge river, known locally as the Lualaba, heading due north but he could not be certain if he had found the headwaters of the Congo or another river. There was only one way to make sure so he launched The Lady Alice.
The expedition had a wretched time. When Stanley emerged at the river mouth in August 1877, there were just 115 survivors. Both Pocock brothers had died.
Stanley's trip, described in detail by The Daily Telegraph, changed the course of African history.
His reports caught the eye of Leopold II, the King of the Belgians. He was anxious to create a colony and in the Congo River he saw the spine of a massive new territory.
It was Leopold II's creation of what he called The Congo Free State in the 1880s that forced other European powers, including Britain, to colonise Africa in an unseemly land grab now known as The Scramble For Africa, the beginning of Africa's troubled modern history.
Tomorrow: in the second of four reports Tim Butcher makes a journey into the dark ages.
Blood River by Tim Butcher (Chatto & Windus) is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 pap from Telegraph Books. To order, call 0870-428 4112 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
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