Clashes between students and the new regime escalated in the course of 1968 and 1969. The students demanded greater say, less interference from the MPR, and a fairer distribution of scholarships. A big demonstration was planned for June 1969, but Mobutu sent his troops to the campus. Lovanium was sealed off from the outside world for days. Still, a few hundred students succeeded in slipping around the guards and made it to the city center by bus. There they entered into heavy confrontations with the army. The soldiers fired tear gas, but the students made masks out of wet handkerchiefs and threw the canisters back. More and more local people joined them. The army opened fire. According to official figures, six people were killed and twelve wounded; the students said there were fifty casualties and eight hundred arrests. MPR? Mourir pour rien, die for no reason, the students said in disgust. Mobutu vowed to eradicate the student movement root and branch. Each campus was to have it own MPR youth association, the “Manifeste de la Nsele” became required reading and everyone was ordered to return to their books. The resistance was quashed. The leaders of the student revolt received harsh prison sentences of up to twenty years. This critical voice was now silenced as well.
HANGINGS, TORTURE, MASSACRES. The first five years of Mobutu’s presidency read like a catalogue of horrors, but that is only part of the story. Many older people in Congo today look back on that period with a certain nostalgia. “Things were orderly,” Zizi Kabongo said when I expressed amazement at that. “The soldiers went back to their barracks. There were commodities to be had, prices went down, industry received a boost. For me, too, it was the start of the most prosperous period of my life.”
For the first time since independence, major infrastructural projects were under way. Mobutu began work on the first hydroelectric plant on the Congo: the Inga Dam, which produced 351 megawatts. Kinshasa’s new neighborhoods received drinking water and electricity. A sewer system was built. The city’s central hospital had fifteen hundred beds and received four thousand patients a day. Ten thousand operations were carried out each year, and 1.6 metric tons (about 1.76 U.S. tons) of laundry were processed each day.27
Mobutu was no democrat, but he did change the course of the nation. All able-bodied men had to spend a few hours each Saturday afternoon doing volunteer work for the state, a taxation in kind like that seen in colonial times. Salongo it was called now. People were required to pull weeds, repair bicycle paths, and sweep the streets. In addition, to help boost agricultural production, everyone was encouraged to cultivate a plot of ground. Even army generals went out harvesting manioc. Work, work, work. Mobutu himself set the good example. He got up every morning at five. He read piles of newspapers, had breakfast with diplomats, attended a constant flow of meetings, and put in days of eighteen hours or more. In 1969, barely thirty-nine, he had a minor heart attack. “How would you lead this goddamned country?” he asked his personal physician.28
Mobutu was nothing like the flabby figure he would become later. After the total debacle of the First Republic, he put Congo back on the map. He won respect and gave the country new élan. Had the Americans landed on the moon? He invited the crew of Apollo 11, making Congo the only African country to welcome the moon travelers.29 Were the Europeans organizing a Miss Europe contest? He convinced the organizers to hold the finals in Kinshasa, and to give them a native twist. The winner, including in the category “African Costume,” was a ravishing blonde from Finland. Were Congolese women still seen as the most beautiful on the continent? He backed Maître Taureau in organizing the first national Miss Congo contest. “The winner was Elisabeth Tabares from Katanga. She had lovely heels and not those stubby little toes.”30
In short, Mobutu made good on the promises that independence had awakened but been unable to keep.
But it wasn’t all circuses: there was also bread. In January 1967 a cheerful funeral procession moved through the streets of Kinshasa. Mobutu was there and young people from his corps of volunteers held aloft a cross topped by a pith helmet. The banner draped across it read: “Requiescat In Pace, UMHK, born 1906, died December 31, 1966.” The Union Minière du Haut-Katanga was being carried to its grave! The big coffin had been made to fit the dimensions of Louis Walaff, then chairman of the board of directors. In order not to rile the ancestors, the mining Moloch’s “remains” were tossed into the river.31
This lampoonery, however, represented an extremely important matter. Mobutu made no bones about his displeasure with the way Tshombe had wangled the notorious colonial portfolio away from Belgium. Along with that, of course, there was the humiliation to which Mobutu had been subjected at the economic round-table conference in 1960. Congo, he said, was politically independent, but economically far from that. The figures hardly proved him wrong. Only 5 percent of the employees in Katanga were foreigners, yet they took home 53 percent of all wages paid.32 The amount they paid for a good bottle of whisky equaled a miner’s monthly salary. In 1967, therefore, Mobutu set about nationalizing Union Minière, a move greatly deplored by the Generale in Brussels. The company was rechristened Gécomin, Générale Congolaise des Mines, but later also became known as Gécamines, Générale des Carrières et des Mines. The copper revenues would now flow directly into the national treasury. And those revenues were considerable. With the Vietnam War raging in the background, the price of copper on the international market had gone sky high. The Congolese economy had always profited from wars in other parts of the world: that had been the case in 1914–18, 1940–45, and during the Korean War, but the Vietnam War put even more money in the till.
To underscore his new economic regime, Mobutu also changed the country’s currency. At independence, 1 Congolese franc had equaled 1 Belgian franc, but by 1967 it was worth only one-tenth of that.33 Mobutu introduced the zaïre as the new monetary unit: 1 zaïre was worth 1,000 old Congolese francs, and equaled 100 Belgian francs and 2 U.S. dollars. The first banknote showed Mobutu and a few dignitaries resolutely rolling up their sleeves: “Retroussons les manches!” was the slogan. Getting back to business!
For many people, those were golden years. In Lubumbashi I met Paul Kasenge, a former Gécamines employee. “We had everything we wanted. I was twenty-six, and after studying commercial economics I became a manager. I was one of the first blacks to do that. The foreign managers had left, the Congolese took over. We were paid well. Copper commanded a good price. We had a house and a garden. There were schools and hospitals for our children. We even received a loan in order to buy a car, and could pay it off in installments.”34 A bicycle had once been the ultimate dream; now it was an automobile.
For others, the MPR offered new opportunities. André Kitadi, the cautious World War II veteran who had crossed the desert and gone out to dinner in English after the war, told me: “Through the MPR, I became a city councilman in Ngaliema. For the first time I had access to a higher position. I’d been waiting a long time for that.” The people were not dissatisfied. When Mobutu had himself reelected in 1970, he received 10,131,699 votes, with only 157 votes against him. Those all came from a single polling place, in Kinshasa’s student district. Also worthy of note is the fact that more votes were cast in his favor than there were registered voters, even though poll attendance was not compulsory.35 André Kitadi had changed his mind only much later on: “The dictatorship brought about the nation’s fall, but we didn’t know that back then.”36
SEPTEMBER 1974. Zizi Kabongo is getting ready to go home for the boxing match. During the first five years, Mobutu consolidated his power; during the next five he ruled through generosity. The world-championship heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman was to be the absolute high point of that flamboyant bonhomie. The match would go down in history as “the rumble in the jungle”; in Congo itself they called it “le combat du siècle” (the battle of the century). And it was, indeed, one of the great sporting events of the twentieth century. By refusing to enter the U.S. Army (“No Vietcong ever called me a nigger”), Ali had lost his title, but after a three
-and-a-half-year suspension he was out for revenge. Foreman was seven years younger, only twenty-five, the Olympic champion, the world champion, unbeatable. He had knocked boxing legend Joe Frazier to the mat a total of six times in only two rounds before the fight was stopped. But Ali wanted his title back.
Promoter Don King was demanding a $10 million purse, an insane amount by all standards. No one was prepared to lay down such an astronomical sum for a slugfest that was bound to last no more than twelve times three minutes. No one but Mobutu. The Zaïrian economy had just gone through six years of uninterrupted growth and it was time for a party. Ali was euphoric about the decision, but probably unaware that the prize money Mobutu was coughing up came indirectly from the war in Vietnam. For him, the match in Kinshasa was his ultimate chance for revenge; for Mobutu it was the ultimate opportunity to do some “country marketing.”
That the founding president of the MPR chose boxing as his public relations tool should come as no surprise. Boxing had always been part of the black struggle for emancipation. Fists made possible what the law ruled out: the black man’s triumph. In 1910 the American Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion of the world; after he gave Jim Jeffries a thumping, race riots broke out all over America. The Senegalese Battling Siki had beaten the Frenchman Georges Carpentier with a well-placed uppercut in the 1920s: until then, it had been unheard of for a colonial subject to so humiliate a superathlete from the mother country. In 1938 world heavyweight champion Joe Louis beat the German Max Schmeling with a technical knockout. “Heil Louis!” people shouted in the streets of Harlem that night. The fight in Kinshasa was between two black men, but Ali was the Zaïrians’ favorite from the start, Zizi said. “The people saw Ali as the good black man. He was very smart, he went into the cité. Ali, boma ye! the people shouted: Ali, kill him! Foreman was considered a white black man, just another American, not one of us.”
Muhammad Ali and Mobutu: the two had more in common than might have appeared at first glance. They came together in their distaste for white arrogance; both men wore their blackness as a source of pride. Both had shed their Christian names for politico-religious reasons: the Christian Cassius Clay had become a militant Muslim; the Catholic Joseph-Désiré now bore the ancestral-sounding name Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, “the powerful warrior whose stamina and willpower carry him for victory to victory, leaving behind only fire” (but also “the rooster that leaves no hen unruffled,” depending on the translator). The American sportsman and the African dictator were both young, strident voices that challenged the dominance of the white West. And what voices they were: virtuosic, voluble, humorous, and razor-sharp. With words, too, one could deal out blows. The agile French that Mobutu employed with such bravura was the equal of Ali’s cascade of English. Pokerfaced, shortly after the public hangings, Mobutu had told two Belgian journalists: “We Bantus can administer democracy, but not to the letter, not like you.” To a flatterer he once thundered: “I didn’t ask you to come here to hear your angelic voice or your evangelical message. Speak your mind, man! What is your problem?” But to someone who did dare to speak his mind, he said: “So you’re saying that you feel caught in a game of cat and mouse?” “Yes, that’s right.” “Well then tell me: who is the mouse?” “We are, papa!” “And who is the cat?” “Um . . . we’re that too.” “All right, so what’s the problem?” Ali enriched the English language with one-liners like: “I’m so bad, I make medicine sick” and “My toughest fight was with my first wife.” During his stay in Kinshasa, he came up with the immortal quip: “I’ve seen George Foreman shadowboxing, and the shadow won.”
That latter claim proved close to the truth as well. During a workout with his sparring partner, Foreman suffered a torn eyebrow and the fight had to be postponed for five weeks. Zizi Kabongo could stay in Paris a little longer. But the cultural component of the rumble in the jungle got off to a start anyway. Mobutu had brought the world’s greatest black musicians to Kinshasa. From Latin America there were performances by Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco, from the United States came B. B. King, the Pointer Sisters, Sister Sledge, and James Brown. The Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango and South African singer Miriam Makeba shared the stage with the big stars of Zaïrian music. Old Wendo Kolosoyi, godfather of the rumba, was there, along with Franco and his OK Jazz. Tabu Ley, the man once known as Rochereau, gave a show, and the younger generation was represented by the funk-driven soukous band Zaïko Langa Langa, the most influential Congolese group of the 1970s. The three-day music festival in Kinshasa was a powerful, intercontinental expression of African pride.37 It was a sort of black Woodstock. What the slave trade had driven asunder, Mobutu brought back together.
At last Zizi was able to leave. He took the opportunity to visit his father in Kasai; he had bought a flour mill for him in Europe. A former railway official with the BCK, his father too had become a part-time farmer under Mobutu’s new agricultural plan. An electric mill made it so much easier to grind manioc. “When I saw him, my father was very upset. Mobutu had just said that the American artists were the descendants of slaves, and that slaves had not been sold into captivity by the whites, but by native chieftains. He said: ‘Mobutu claims that the blacks sold our brothers to the white man!’ ‘He’s right, Papa.’ ‘But that’s unbelievable!’ It distressed him greatly. I suspect that Mobutu was spreading those ideas intentionally. It helped him to break the power of the local chiefs.”
Mobutu did all he could to combat ethnic reflexes. A strong nation was incompatible with tribal logic; the younger generation had to be given a new frame of reference. The national soccer team had to include players from all over the country. Girls from each province took part in the Miss Zaïre contests. The army was to be inclusive as well: even Pygmies were allowed to join the military.38 To boost Zaïrian awareness, Mobutu also implemented reforms in higher education. The country’s three universities were fused to form one huge, national super-university with three campuses. You could go to Kinshasa to study law, economics, medicine, the natural sciences, or polytechnics. Kisangani was for psychology, teaching, or agricultural engineering. And Lubumbashi, close to the mines, was for earth sciences. There too, far from the capital, one could follow the “risky” curricula such as social sciences, philosophy, and literature.39 This reform weakened the student movement and resulted in an obligatory tribal mixture among young academics. The most striking example of that was one I came across in a yard in Bukavu one evening, just before dusk. I had been invited to visit Adolphine Ngoy and her family. Her daughter was preparing dinner over a charcoal fire. Adolphine came from Moanda, a seaside town on the Atlantic Ocean. How had she ever ended up two thousand kilometers (almost 1,250 miles) to the east, close to the Rwandan border? “Dodo and I met in Kinshasa. He was doing the polytechnic, I was studying linguistics. He was a Mushi from Bukavu, I was a Mukongo from Moanda. As the eldest son he was supposed to marry within his tribe, but he chose me. I moved here. His family objected strenuously. It took years for the neighborhood and the family to accept me.”40
Just as the Erasmus Program was intended to instill young people with a greater love for Europe, by means of a foreign sweetheart if need be, so too did Mobutu’s education reform create greater Zaïrian awareness. Mobutu liked to surround himself with young, enthusiastic Zaïrians who were completely taken by his national project. The two most influential people from his entourage were Citoyen Sakombi Inongo and Citoyen Bisengimana Rwema.
In April 2008 I traveled from Goma to Bukavu by ship across stunningly beautiful Lake Kivu, which forms the border between Rwanda and Congo. On board I was introduced to a reserved, extremely distinguished young man: the sort of gentleman one would never find out on the windy rear deck of a passenger ship, but who prefers to remain below deck and make phone calls. He was the son of Bisengimana, who had been the number-two man in Zaïre for years. “My father started working for Mobutu in 1966, but in 1969 he was promoted to director of the Bureau du Président de
la République. Mobutu trusted him highly. My father was even allowed to disagree with him. They called him le petit léopard (the leopard cub). He wore a leopard-skin hat too. He remained Mobutu’s cabinet chief until 1977, when they had a falling out. After my father left, no one ever had as much power again under Mobutu.”41
The most unusual thing about that appointment, however, lay outside the ship’s window. The boat roared across the water. On our port side rose up the contours of the island of Idjwi, with Rwanda just behind. Bertrand Bisengimana was from that island and he was on his way home. Idjwi had been a German possession at first, but passed into Belgian hands even before World War I. The population consisted largely of Tutsis from Rwanda. Like him and his father. The Tutsis were an ethnic minority that had for centuries formed the social and political upper crust of the Rwandan empire, a position they owed to cattle breeding. Cows were to the Tutsi what coal had been to the industrial barons: everything. As early as the nineteenth century, Tutsi cattlemen had left overcrowded Rwanda to settle on the lake’s far shore. They moved onto the plateaus of South Kivu, to the volcanic region of North Kivu, and to the island of Idjwi. To the Congolese they were, in every way, “different.” They looked different and spoke differently. Their Kinyarwanda was a highly specific Bantu language, spoken only in Rwanda and the south of Uganda and related to the language of Burundi. The archetypal Tutsi was tall to extremely tall (1.95 meters—about 6 feet 5 inches—was not unheard of), with a pointed noise, a high forehead, and thin lips. A cliché, of course, but every bit as true as the clichés concerning the Irish, Italians, and Swedes. According to that same cliché, they had a reputation in Zaïre for being arrogant and devoid of humor, yet Mobutu still appointed one of them to be his cabinet chief.42 “In the beginning, Mobutu didn’t want to give preferential treatment to his own tribe,” Bertrand said, “otherwise my father, a Tutsi from Idjwi, could never have become the regime’s second man.” For Mobutu, of course, there were advantages to the fact that his direct associate came from a small tribe of migrants that could pose no threat to him . . . . Little did he know then that, in 1997, Rwandan Tutsis would depose him.
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