Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  After seven months, Che Guevara and his soldiers left Congolese territory. The rebellion had been fruitless. Bitterly, he noted: “During the final hours of my stay in Congo I felt alone, more alone than I had ever felt before, neither in Cuba nor in any other place where my wanderings around the world had taken me.”98

  TSHOMBE TRIUMPHED. The rebellion had been quashed, thanks to “his” mercenaries and “his” guardsmen. On the heels of this military triumph, he also achieved an extremely important diplomatic victory. He had gone to Brussels to negotiate about the notorious “colonial portfolio.” That was the term used to refer to the sizable package of shares that Belgium had appropriated shortly before independence. The discussion concerning the return of the securities became known as the Belgian-Congolese dispute. Tshombe was able to convince the Belgian negotiators that the packet of shares actually belonged to the Congolese state, thereby effectively bringing the goose that laid the golden egg back to the farmyard. When he returned to Congo, he waved a leather attaché case everywhere he went.99 The portfolio! The people laughed and beamed. The war was over, the money had come back. “Now we can eat makabayu again!” they sang, that lovely salted cod that had been prohibitively expensive for so long.

  During the First Republic, the average Congolese had suffered financially. Inflation had skyrocketed: a kilo (2.2 pounds) of rice that had cost only nine francs in 1960 was up to ninety by 1965.100 Buying power had withered.101 Unemployment became a great burden. Anyone who still had a job was forced to feed more and more mouths with less and less money.102 Hunger was widespread.103 Diseases that had been under control, such as sleeping sickness, tuberculosis and river blindness, once again claimed countless lives.104

  In 1965 Tshombe was by far the most popular politician in Congo. For the first time since the decolonization, the country held parliamentary elections. Tshombe won by a landslide. With his supercartel of parties, he took 122 of the 167 parliamentary seats. Kasavubu realized that Tshombe posed a threat to his position as president. At that point, he already held the combined powers of prime minister and those of minister of foreign affairs, minister of foreign trade, and minister of employment, planning, and information.105 On October 13, therefore, Kasavubu did exactly what he had done with Lumumba: he dismissed the prime minister and pushed forward one of his lackeys as alternative: Évariste Kimba, a man in whom the parliament had no confidence. The move was allowable under the new constitution, but it seemed like everything was starting all over again.

  DURING ONE OF OUR CONVERSATIONS, Jamais Kolonga produced a brightly tinted photograph, rumpled but remarkable. It showed a little group of young men, grinning broadly around a table. In their midst, I immediately recognized the young Mobutu. Even then he had looked like an African remake of King Baudouin. “This was taken on Mobutu’s thirty-fifth birthday. The party was held in the restaurant at the Léopoldville zoo, the best restaurant in town.” It was October 14, 1965, one day after Tshombe was fired. “The one on the left is Isaac Musekiwa, trumpet player with OK Jazz, the one next to him is Paul Mwanga, the singer. That’s me, Jamais Kolonga, standing beside Mobutu! The men on the right are from African Jazz. First the singer, Mujos, then the great Kabasele himself. This one here is Roger Izeidi, from OK Jazz. And the one all the way on the right is no one less than Franco!” The entire fine fleur of Congolese music had gathered that evening around the chief military commander, as though the Beatles and Stones had had their picture taken with the supreme commander of the British armed forces. Jean Lema, alias Jamais Kolonga, was still tickled by it. “Do you know what Mobutu let slip to me that evening? I had worked with him for three months, in 1960, under Lumumba. ‘Jean,’ he said, ‘within a month I will be president of the republic.’”106

  And so it was. At 9 P.M. on November 24, 1965, a date every Congolese knows by heart, Mobutu summoned the nation’s entire military brass to his residence in the capital. His desktop was covered in folders, newspapers, and magazines. He had spent the whole day in meetings, and his mind was made up: he was going to be the new head of state. The First Republic had been an utter catastrophe, it was up to him to set things aright. If Kasavubu was going to repeat the same tricks he’d pulled five years ago then he, Mobutu, would repeat his coup, this time not for five months, but for five years. He dictated a communiqué to one of his staff members. A sublieutenant was ordered to read the text on the radio, while a major went to sabotage Kasavubu’s telephone lines. Everyone promised his support. The beer flowed freely. Mrs. Mobutu treated the guests to fish with fried plantain. Still, she was not at ease with the plans: “Stop this nonsense, would you? If they catch you, you’ll all be killed,” she whispered to her brother-in-law. But at two thirty that next morning she handed them all a glass of champagne. Three hours later, news of the coup was broadcast on Congolese radio.107 The programming for the rest of the day consisted of martial music. The First Republic was over and done with. Not a single shot had been fired. The struggle for the throne had been decided. Each of the four protagonists had had his own finest hour, but it was Mobutu who would walk away with the goods.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE ELECTRIC YEARS

  Mobutu Gets Down to Business

  1965–1975

  SEPTEMBER 1974. ZIZI KABONGO SHOOK HIS HEAD IN AMAZEMENT when the letter arrived. He received mail often enough here in Paris, but delivered personally by the director of his school? That was something new. Since when had the rector of the celebrated Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), become a sort of honorary courier? Didn’t the head of the world’s leading school for radio and TV journalists have better things to do than play postman to a handful of African students?

  But this letter had been sent by someone with clout, Zizi saw. It came by way of the embassy and in those days that could only mean: from the president’s office. Mobutu had handed the letter over to his cabinet minister, the minister had handed it to the ambassador, and the ambassador to his staff. That’s how things went these days in Zizi’s distant homeland. Since Mobutu had taken power nine years ago, he was the one who pulled the strings. All the strings.

  September. The academic year had just begun. Paris was reawakening: the French had come back from vacation, the subways were full again, people trundled hurriedly along the boulevards. “Ambassade de la République du Zaïre,” Zizi read on the envelope. Even after three years, it still took some getting used to . . . . [I]n 1971, the rounded vowel-sounds of Congo had made way for the hiss of Zaïre. Mobutu found that more authentic than the old colonial name. The Father of the Revolution had based his choice on one of the earliest known historical documents: a sixteenth-century Portuguese map. But shortly after the name was changed, Mobutu discovered that it was all a foolish mistake: Zaïre was a slipshod spelling of ndazi, a run-of-the-mill Kikongo word for river. When the Portuguese had landed at the estuary and asked the locals what that huge, roiling mass of water was called, they had simply replied: “River!” Nzadi, they repeated. Zaïre, that was what the Portuguese thought they heard. For thirty-two years, Zizi’s country would owe its name to the sloppy, four-century-old phonetics of a Portuguese cartographer.

  And so Zaïre it was. That was what the country was called, and from then on the river as well, and the currency and the cigarettes and the condoms and all manner of other things. A bizarre name, with its atypical Z and that troublesome diaeresis. When you typed the name, you came up with one of those holy trinities of dots over the i. Mobutu’s American allies could never quite wrap their mouths around it. They spoke of the one-syllable zair, as in air with a z up front.

  À l’attention du Citoyen Kabongo Kalala, that was the address on the embassy envelope. The French found it charming, that use of citoyen as a form of address. At least one country, two hundred years after the storming of the Bastille, still held aloft the tenets of revolutionary etiquette.

  Zizi, of course, wouldn’t have expected them to address it to “Zizi.” There weren’t very many people who knew his real name
, but in official correspondence he remained plain old Isidore—especially in France, where zizi is another word for weenie. But the address didn’t mention Isidore either. Kabongo Kalala, that had been his official name for the last two years. Born in 1940 as Isidore Kabongo, he had gone through life since 1972 as Kabongo Kalala. With no first name. Christian names were now forbidden as being, once again, too colonial.

  The people’s minds, Mobutu felt, had been bent beneath the old yoke for too long. His plan was to liberate them mentally as well. A whole host of name changes would help in that process. Léopoldville was to become Kinshasa, Stanleyville Kisangani, and Elisabethville Lubumbashi. Lesser towns also received a new, indigenous name: Ilebo for Port Francqui, Kananga for Luluabourg, Moba for Baudouinville, Mbandaka for Coquilhatville, Likasi for Jadotville. Lake Leopold was renamed Maï Ndombe, the black water. Lake Albert became Lake Mobutu. And, in order to puncture local pride, Katanga was now to be called Shaba.

  But a different toponymy was not enough, according to Mobutu. People’s names had to reflect the change as well, for there were some who still looked up far too much to Belgium. Individuals bearing the name Lukusa continued to corrupt that to De Luxe. Kalonda sometimes became De Kalondarve. The singer Georges Kiamuangana preferred the Flemish-sounding Verckys as his stage name. And Désiré Bonyololo, the stenographer from Kisangani, liked to call himself Désiré Van-Duel. This was an affront to the ideologists of the Second Republic: the new Zaïrian should be proud of what he was, rather than ridiculously try to flaunt what he wanted to be. From now on, only native names.

  And so Christian names were axed as well. They had been introduced by missionaries who had christened each baptized child with the name of a European saint: Joseph, Jean, Christophe, Thérèse, Bernadette, Marie. Shouldn’t the true Zaïrian, the president said, prefer to describe himself in relation to his ancestors rather than to some remote saint? That is why he banned Christian names and prescribed the use of ancestral ones. The prénom vanished, the postnom (an unintentionally comic Mobutian neologism) took its place. It was a sly attempt to undermine the power of the church. Isidore Kabongo became Kabongo Kalala. Under Mobutu, everything, but then everything, was different.

  “AT FIRST WE WERE QUITE PLEASED with Mobutu’s coup,” Zizi Kabongo told me during one of our many conversations in Kinshasa. There were few informants with whom I met as often as I did Kabongo.1 He spoke about his country’s complex history with great lucidity and finesse. He had attended seminary for a time, like so many of his generation, but was stranded halfway in his calling as a teacher of Latin and Greek in Katanga. He would ultimately choose the path of journalism. Today, at sixty-nine, he is a manager for the national radio broadcaster. “‘Whew!’ we said back then. At last, a little organization! The First Republic had been a huge mess. All that sniping back and forth between Kasavubu and Tshombe . . . . [I]t was a great disillusionment. The trains had stopped running, prosperity had been crushed, unemployment was on the rise. And meanwhile you saw the politicians being driven around in limousines, and sending their children to study in Europe. Mobutu abolished the political parties for five years, and everyone was quite satisfied about that.”

  Mobutu did, indeed, introduce a sudden change in style. Shortly after his coup d’état he spoke to the masses in Kinshasa’s big soccer stadium. Here one had a slim young orator who wore no extravagant tuxedo, but a khaki uniform and a beret.2 He railed vigorously against “the sterile conflicts between politicians who sacrificed the country and their countrymen to their own interests.” His listeners could only agree to that. “For them, the only thing that counted was power and what they could do with it. Fill their own pockets, exploit Congo and the Congolese, that was their motto.” Mobutu called it as he saw it. His language was robust, his reasoning clear. “I will always speak the truth to you, no matter how hard that may be to hear. It is over, the time of assurances that all is well when all is not well. And now I will tell you right away: in our beloved country, everything is going very badly indeed.”

  He went on to treat the packed stadium to a lecture on national economics. He produced sobering statistics. The production of corn, rice, manioc, cotton, and palm oil had fallen drastically. State spending had grown exponentially. Buying power had plummeted. Corruption was alive and kicking. Things could not go on like this. “Special circumstances, special measures, and that in every area.” Mobutu announced a five-year moratorium on political parties. During that period he planned to get the country back on track and to do that he needed the help of every man and woman. “To achieve this plan of recovery, we need hands, a great many hands.” Mobutu rolled up the sleeves of his own uniform, to set the right example. “We will see each other again here in five years’ time. In five years’ time you will see the difference between the first and the second legislature. I am certain that you will notice then that the Congo of today, with its misery, its hunger and its adversities, will have changed into a rich and prosperous country where the living is good, the envy of the world.”3

  Since Patrice Lumumba, no politician had spoken in the capital with such passion. Mobutu employed Lumumba’s vigorous idiom and supplemented it with a concrete plan of action. He radiated confidence and conviction. Congo was going to become a modern country.

  What Zizi really wanted was to go to Europe and write his thesis about Charles Baudelaire, but Mobutu felt that the young intelligentsia should serve their country in a more tangible fashion. Along with a few other of his countrymen, Zizi was therefore sent to Paris to learn the business of television. State television was to become an essential instrument in Mobutu’s attempts to get the country back on its feet. On November 23, 1966, exactly one year after the coup, the first Congolese TV program was broadcast. One year later, the first Lingala-language programs began.

  “Antennae and relay stations began popping up everywhere,” Zizi told me. “Congo had color television long before large parts of Eastern Europe. An entire generation of journalists received excellent training. We went to Paris and from Mobutu we received student grants that were two times the French minimum wage. I had my own apartment, I went to the movies. I earned more than a French worker!” When Mobutu came to Paris once to visit his students, they were all taken out to the Champs-Élysées to buy five suits, at his expense.4 When they went to Brussels to shoot some footage, his chief of protocol came by to check the camera crew’s baggage and make sure their clothes were up to snuff. Even the cameraman had to wear a bow tie. In the end, the per diems were so exorbitant that Zizi was able to build his own house.

  And then came that letter, in September 1974. In it, Zizi read that he was to come to Kinshasa at the end of the month for a visit of no longer than forty-eight hours. All the Zaïrian students at the INA were summoned because if your studies are being paid for by Mobutu, it is only normal that you do something in return. The reason for such great urgency? An important boxing match was going to take place, and it had to be broadcast live. A boxing match featuring Muhammad Ali.

  THE FIRST DECADE of Mobutu’s thirty-year reign was a time of hope, expectations, and revival. “Mobutu was electric,” the writer Vincent Lombume told me once.5 And not only because he brought in television and built hydroelectric power stations, but also because he himself delivered a moral jolt to a nation in disrepair. The period 1965–75 is remembered as the golden decade of an independent Congo. And indeed, Kinshasa was hopping as never before; the beer flowed, the nights never stopped. “Kin-la-Belle,” the city was called. From 1969, beer production rose by 16 percent annually. In 1974, the year of the heavyweight bout, a total of 5 million hectoliters (about 190,000 gallons) was brewed.6 But the first five years, as Mobutu set about consolidating his own power, were also marked by extremely grim moments. Moments surrounding the euphoria like shards of glass cemented to the top of a concrete wall.

  It was early in the morning of a gloomy Thursday in Kinshasa that the first people arrived at the big, open field in the cité, the wasteland besi
de the bridge west of Ndolo airport. Was it really going to happen? Young women carrying baskets of sugarcane on their head slowed for a look. Mothers with babies on their back stopped and stared. Civil servants in suits departed from their usual route to the office. Urchins in torn T-shirts came running up. Was it really true? Hundreds, thousands of feet crossed the big field. Chic Italian loafers stepped through the dust beside bare, callused feet. Spike-heeled slippers poked little holes in the sand. Trucks full of soldiers were waiting. In the midst of the military detachment stood proof enough for everyone to see: a wooden podium had been built, topped by a gallows.