President Laurent Kabila may be dead but it's impossible to forget him in Kinshasa. Not only is his son in power but his face is everywhere, pasted onto massive billboards, painted on the side of apartment blocks and, over the last week, printed on tens of thousands of shirts and dresses.
Official confirmation of President Kabila's death was only hours old when the massive textile presses of Utex, Congo's largest factory, swung into action. For two days and two nights it churned out "pagnes", vividly coloured cloth wraps used to make almost 100,000 garments bearing the president's smiling face. By Tuesday's funeral the shirts were de rigeur for any self-respecting Congolese patriot paying respects to the slain president.
In some ways the history of the Congo and its unhappy leaders has been written in such wraps. The country's scheming creator, King Leopold of Belgium, its rapacious dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, and its martyred first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, have all been honoured in cloth.
Nearly all were made by Utex, a conglomerate established by Belgian colonists in 1924 and still in operation.
"As soon as there is a political event, there is a pagne," said Mr Jean-Leon Bonnechere, the company's Belgian marketing director.
With massive deposits of diamonds, gold and uranium, Congo should be one of the world's richest countries. Instead, due to 32 years of corrupt rule and now two years of war, it is one of the most bedraggled.
Kinshasa has six million inhabitants but only 20,000 formal, tax-paying jobs. Last year inflation stood at 520 per cent, or as much as 30 per cent in one day, and that's just the official figures.
Utex is one of the few economic cornerstones that hasn't crumbled. Last weeks' unexpected run on Kabila cloths was a mini-boom but to say so would be bad manners, said Mr Bonnechere. "We can't celebrate sales from someone's death. It's unhealthy," he said.
He is prudent to be cautious about his words. Before he was killed last week, Laurent Kabila rounded up the top business bosses and put them in jail until they agreed to fix their prices, despite a collapsing exchange rate.
Business will be hoping such unorthodox practices will be ended under his son, Joseph, who is due to be sworn in as head of state today.
Few Congolese feel that the strife, either political or economic, is yet over.