Two men in overcoats walked up to Serge Maheshe as he stood chatting to friends and shot him

Bad news came from eastern Congo on 13 June. A journalist for Radio Okapi, a radio station working for national reconciliation, was shot dead in the lakeside town of Bukavu. I met Serge Maheshe on a trip there last year with David Cornwell, better known as the writer John Le Carré, who was researching his latest book. Sitting on a verandah overlooking the wind-ruffled waters of Lake Kivu, we'd all talked politics before going dancing in one of Bukavu's burrow-like nightclubs, where Serge was the only one of us to look the part. A smart cookie, Serge was also something of a sapeur - a Congolese dandy - and his style of dress was about as bland as the local Pili-Pili sauce.

Serge's murder looks very much like a targeted assassination, the climax to what started as a row over parking with a unit of President Joseph Kabila's presidential guard stationed near his home. That a quarrel over where Serge's cousin parked his car - the guards thought it too close to their roadblock - should culminate in Serge being gunned down on the street says more about the state of the Democratic Republic of Congo than any UN report could. A nominal end to the civil war and the first elections in almost 50 years has done nothing to tackle the issue that poisons daily life in towns such as Bukavu today, just as it did under Mobutu: the sheer number of young men with weapons and a total contempt for the public. They prey like vampires on their put-upon fellow citizens, who can only silently pine for something Congo hasn't experienced for decades: the rule of law.

I kept thinking of Serge and what years of being abused by swaggering youths do to one's morale as I watched a video of Blood Diamond, which I missed on its cinema release. I'd heard contradictory things about this film, made to alert a western public to the issue of conflict diamonds. Some friends dismissed it as schlock, others assured me it was a cut above the normal fare, with the producers going out of their way to write a strong and resourceful African character into the script. Who was right?

It's true that Blood Diamond's creators, alert to the accusations of neocolonialism routinely levelled at westerners setting films in Africa, put a lot of thought into the role of Solomon Vandy, a fisherman who finds a giant diamond in a Sierra Leonean river. Presented in noble counterpoint to the racist white mercenary played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Solomon is a man of dignity and pride and his quest to reunite a family dispersed by Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels serves as a key plot driver.

The problem was that every time Solomon opened his mouth, verisimilitude flew out of the window. Djimon Hounsou, the over six-foot tall Beninois playing him, must have groaned inwardly as he was obliged to speak lines no African villager would ever articulate. Take the scene where Solomon is scouring lists at a displaced people's camp in Freetown, searching for his family. Ignoring the long queue, he storms to the aid official at its head, loudly demanding answers. He gets none, of course, but Solomon, we are supposed to think, is a real man, doing what real men do when crazed by anxiety: they demand a lot of attention.

Then there's a scene where he discovers his wife and children in a vast refugee camp in Conakry. When his wife tells him his eldest boy has been recruited by the RUF, Solomon sinks to his knees. Shaking the wire fence convulsively, he bellows his despair to the heavens, shouting so loudly he brings the Guinean soldiers guarding the camp running.

I've visited plenty of African refugee camps in my time and I've never seen anyone behave like this. People whose villages have been raided, neighbours mutilated and relatives raped will do anything to avoid drawing the attention of the young men with guns. They stand quietly in line, they don't make eye contact, they do exactly as they are told. They keep it quiet, because experience has shown that bellowing only makes things worse. Survival, in countries such as Sierra Leone and DRC, is all about avoiding confrontation.

Lacking any inkling of how those who are put-upon view the world about them, or any grasp of the quiet undercurrent of fear that stifles dissent, Blood Diamond's scriptwriters made Solomon behave as a noisy American would in similar circumstances: think the outraged voices of those marooned by Hurricane Katrina, keenly aware of what was their due. This failure of insight exposes the vast gulf of expectation that separates the world's entitled from its oppressed, who know the bitter value of silence.

For Bukavu's residents, the fate of Serge Maheshe will serve as a reminder of what still regularly befalls those who dare to raise their voice in modern-day Congo.

Eyewitnesses report that two men in overcoats walked up to him as he stood chatting to friends and shot him without provocation. As Serge's friends scrambled away, the gunmen calmly continued shooting the journalist in the stomach, then casually strolled away.

With a bit of imagination, it's really not that hard to guess what years of that kind of brazen violence do to the soul.

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