Africa is shaped like a revolver, wrote Algeria's Franz Fanon, and "Congo is the trigger". And since August 1st, the battle for Africa's trigger has resumed in earnest.
As rebel forces dominated by the Banyamulenge Tutsi forces from eastern Congo push westwards fast, a new political coalition ostensibly led by an ex-UNESCO official, Mr Arthur Z'ahidi Ngoma, is bidding strongly for a trigger-grip. Within days this rebel coalition has seized the two key cities in eastern Congo - Goma and Bukavu - and has been pushing strongly to gain control of the central city of Kisangani and its airport. Fighting has become fiercer since, though there has been retrenchment and conflicting claims by both sides over the weekend.
Much of the rebels' success to date must be attributed to their regional backers, despite a stern public warning from Washington to neighbouring states not to meddle in the Congo imbroglio. Around the huge state of Congo-Kinshasa are grouped a series of interlocking power alliances stretching across central Africa: one axis stretches through oil-rich Angola to Africa's south-western tip; another axis runs through the fertile plains of Uganda to the continent's north-east tip in the Horn of Africa.
Eighteen months ago, the beneficiary of those alliances was a guerrilla leader and gold smuggler, Mr Laurent-Desire Kabila who had styled himself as a long-time radical opponent of the brutal and corrupt dictatorship of the president, Mr Mobutu Sese Seko. Swept to power in May 1997 as leader of a makeshift coalition , Mr Kabila rode a military alliance powered by the guerrilla expertise of the Rwandan and Ugandan army, and the airlift and artillery capacity of the Angolan army.
In the background stood other regional powers such as South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia in the south, together with Eritrea and Ethiopia in the north, who were quietly celebrating the ousting of Mr Mobutu, and gave two cheers for Mr Kabila. Unhappily for the latter, most of the states in that regional alliance have concluded that he is not going to deliver the political stability and economic development they want to see from the mineral-rich Congo. Most seriously, his key military backers in Rwanda, Uganda and now, it seems, Angola, believe that he has not secured Congo's borders to cut off supply routes to rebels forces in their territories. These include the Lord's Resistance Army and the Interahamwe forces in the east, and Jonas Savimbi's UNITA rebels in the south. Rwanda, whose north-west province has suffered a number of massacres, reportedly by Interhamwe forces, was the first to lose patience with Mr Kabila, who then expelled all Rwandan troops from the country at the end of July.
Within days, the Banyamulenge rebellion started in the east. Mr N'goma - who is not a Banyamulenge - with his Forces of Future Party emerged as its leader. Mr N'goma makes much of his independent political credentials. He launched his party in Kinshasa last year, but Mr Kabila immediately banned it and the courts handed down a one-year suspended sentence to Mr N'goma, who then left for France. Now he insists he is not a Rwandan or Banyamulenge front man: "This is not a Banyamulenge struggle. It is a struggle of all Congolese."
While he speaks passionately against the oppression and corruption of the Kabila regime, few believe his protestations of independence. Mr Kabila immediately blamed Gen Paul Kagame's government in Rwanda for the N'goma rebellion. "We say explicitly that Rwanda is attacking us," his information minister, Mr Didier Mumenge, told journalists. Mr Kabila has also instructed his UN Ambassador, Mr Andre Kapanga, to ask the security council to condemn "the invasion" by Rwanda.
This replays the history of Mr Kabila's own military campaign, backed by Rwanda and Uganda, against the Mobutu regime which unsuccessfully tried, with some backing from the French government, to get the UN security council to condemn a "foreign invasion" from the east. Mr Kabila looks even less likely to win sympathy from the security council than his old adversary. His best chance seems to be to convince his fellow regional leaders that they should help him shore up his regime and perhaps provide a regional peacekeeping force.
This is the message Mr Kabila put out at the regional summit on the war held in Zimbabwe on Friday and Saturday, with very limited success.
Patrick Smith is editor of Africa Confidential.
President Kabila's government has accused Uganda of joining Rwanda in sending troops into the Democratic Republic of the Congo to fight.