Congo
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MOBUTU HAD GIVEN THE PEOPLE greater prosperity; now his aim was to give them a dream. That dream was Zaïrian nationalism. And that dream’s architect was named Dominique Sakombi, better known—in accordance with the tenets of the day—as Sakombi Inongo.43 Sakombi was an intelligent, extremely eloquent young man, a greater Mobutist than Mobutu himself. In spring 2008 I spoke to him briefly on the phone: his voice had grown thin as rolling paper, in no way reminiscent of the vocal barrage of yesteryear. He was very ill and could not bring himself to grant me an interview.
In the early 1970s Sakombi’s achievement was a particularly ingenious one: he did not ban tribalism, but raised it to the state level. The Zaïrians were still allowed to love their tribe . . . as long as that tribe was called Zaïre. He said: “For us, the ancestral village extends all the way to the borders of the national territory.”44 The arbitrary domain established by nineteenth-century European politicians now had to feel like a natural phenomenon. More than the head of state, Mobutu was to become the national village chieftain, the headman de luxe. And the citizens were his villagers, his children.
Sakombi was the state commissioner of information. His ministry had fourteen hundred staff members, its budget second only to that of the ministry of defense. Mobutu knew where his priorities lay: in a former lifetime he had been both a soldier and a journalist. If his dictatorship had at first relied on the power of the army, from 1970 on it relied on propaganda.
Sakombi designed a sweeping cultural policy that was marketed to the people under the slogan Recours à l’authenticité! Resume authenticity! The changing of the name of the country, of the cities and even of the citizens themselves was a part of that, but it went much further. The resumption of authentic living impacted almost every aspect of daily life. When a Zaïrian got up in the morning he knew what to wear. A ban had been imposed on Western clothing. Men were no longer to wear a suit and tie, but were obliged to put on an abacost, a high-necked outfit based on Mao’s own, with an upright collar and cravat. (Abacost was yet another Mobutuist neologism: it came from à bas le costume [down with the suit]. The language, too, was being changed.) Women were no longer allowed to wear miniskirts, only the traditional pagne, an elegant outfit in three parts—skirt, blouse, and headscarf. Only natural hairstyles were allowed. Extensions and the “conking” or straightening of hair was forbidden. Even more strongly forbidden were preparations for lightening the skin. The authentic Zaïrian was the diametrical opposite of the évolué, a person who no longer aspired to be what he would never become anyway, but who drew strength from his or her own identity, culture, and traditions.
If the Zaïrian happened to live in the city, he saw on his way to work new monuments being erected everywhere. The statues of Stanley, Leopold II, and Albert I were pulled down. As Sakombi drily stated at the time: “As far as I know, there is no statue of Lumumba in the center of Brussels either.”45 On squares and in front of government buildings arose stylized figures in concrete, their arms raised to the sky or toting baskets. Two hundred sculptors were active in Kinshasa alone.46 Their style was strikingly modern (works influenced by Ossip Zadkine, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancus¸i were legion), but that was all right, for those Europeans had themselves been strongly influenced by African art. The authenticity policy was no exercise in nostalgia, but a complex admixture of tradition and modernity. Of it Sakombi said: “We respond as our forefathers would have done, had their culture not been interrupted by colonial acculturation.”47 He was not out for a retour à l’authenticité, a going back, but a recours, a resumption. From out of the old visual idiom, a new art was to be born. And so Mobutu had art treasures brought together from all over the country. Tens of thousands of masks and fetishes found their way into the national museums, just as all manner of artifacts had made their way to Tervuren during the colonial days.48 The national ballet was expected to study traditional dances in the interior and reinterpret them. A national theater company was set up, a national literature prize established.49
When a Zaïrian listened to the radio during the day, Zaïrian music was what he heard. Western music was banned. Mobutu set himself up as the great champion of popular music. Franco, the leader of OK Jazz, was placed at the head of a new government institution intended to support the music business. Wasn’t this the man who had stood beaming beside Mobutu at the leader’s birthday party, just before the coup? Tabu Ley toured the country. With Mobutu’s support; he even became the first black man to perform at the Olympia in Paris. Docteur Nico experimented with traditional percussion. Franco brought the old accordionist Camille Feruzi back into the limelight. Recours à l’authenticité, one heard him sing. Kinshasa’s music industry experienced its busiest years. Music recorded at five in the evening was in the shops the next morning at nine. There were recording artists everywhere. In Matonge, the absolute heart of the city’s nightlife, the central square of the Rond-Point Victoire was redubbed Place des Artistes. A huge statue was erected there to the pioneers of Congolese, no, Zaïrian music.
When the Zaïrian came home from work in the evening, he ate authentic cuisine. Pundu, fufu, makayabu: manioc loaf, grubs, all seasoned with the mother of all peppers: pilipili. Before taking a sip of your beer or palm wine you first spilled a few drops on the ground. Making libation to the ancestors, that was part of it too. When you turned on the TV after your wonderful meal, you saw the animation politique, huge groups of people in geometrical formation, all dressed in the same outfits (usually of green cloth with the national flag on it), dancing and singing the praises of the MPR. Day in, day out, songs went up to the benevolence of the illustrious leader. This went on for six, sometimes even twelve hours a day.50 Then, at six o’clock, there began the high point of state television: the news. It opened with one of Sakombi’s ideas. The president’s face appeared against a sky full of fluffy clouds and grew larger and larger, until it looked as though Mobutu were floating down from heaven, right into your living room. The children thought that he was God the Father. “Everything the president and his wife did was shown on the news,” Zizi said, “and also everything done by the members of the Political Bureau and the central committee. It became a real personality cult. Sakombi called Mobutu ‘the African pharaoh.’ That kind of thing.”
Even when one crawled into bed at night one could not leave the state’s propaganda behind, for Mobutu had called on the people to be fruitful and multiply—the revolution required many pairs of hands. Even at the most intimate moments of one’s private life, one heard the supreme leader calling. The joke went that, during lovemaking, he himself never cried out “Ça va jaillir!” (I’m going to come!), but “Ça va zaïre!” . . . Just as the missions had dictated their view of the “good” colonial body (the use of soap, the covering of one’s nakedness, the practice of monogamy), so too did the dictator worm his way into the intimacy of personal life and subject it to a new, all-inclusive regime. There was no getting around it. To have an orgasm was to serve the nation.
And it worked. The Zaïrian began feeling Zaïrian. With Sakombi’s help, Mobutu accomplished within a few years what the European Union has failed to achieve after more than half a century: people truly began feeling like part of a greater whole. The British and the French still refused to become Europeans, but the Bakongo and the Baluba were proud to be Zaïrian.
BUT WAS THERE NO RESISTANCE? Of course there was, but only discreet resistance. Zizi: “Not being allowed to wear a necktie, that was difficult. In Katanga you sometimes saw men walking down the street wearing a suit and an ascot, out of protest. The police would stop them right away: ‘What’s with the colonial outfit? What are you, a foreigner?’ ‘Yes, from Zambia,’ they would say then. After all, you could be executed for that!” While in Europe the necktie became the symbol of bourgeois values and repression, in Congo it developed into a statement of resistance and the desire for freedom. “Some people would put on a necktie, just to sit in the living room.”
The mandatory name change
also prompted sly protest. “My father sent me a list of nine names from our family, from which I could choose my postnom. But one of my colleagues was named Gérard Ekwalanga. He was a great sports journalist and very religious, so he was quite attached to his Christian name. In protest, he named himself Ekwalanga Abomasoda. That postnom was not an ancestral one at all. In Lingala it means: ‘He who kills soldiers’! Or Oscar Kisema, who chose the name Kisema Kinzundi. That sounds like a normal name in Lingala, but in Swahili it means the ‘big vagina.’”
The ban on Christian names came as a blow to the church. “Mobutu wanted to destroy the power of the Catholic Church,” Zizi said. “He wanted to replace the saints with the ancestors.” At first the church had shown itself loyal to the new regime. One month after the coup, Cardinal Malula solemnly stated: “Mr. President, the church recognizes your authority, because authority is God-given. We will faithfully abide by the laws you see fit to pass.”51 But six years later, on January 12, 1972, this same Malula delivered a cutting speech against the regime. Mobutu was furious. He immediately expelled Malula from the Order of the Leopard, sent him into exile abroad, and forbade Christians to pray for their archbishop. To little avail. The church long remained one of the regime’s most vociferous critics. The bishops enjoyed the backing of an international network and they also ran the schools. States usually have two means for molding their citizens: the schools and the media. Mobutu had only the media. He therefore did all he could to curb the power of the church (mission schools had to have a native headmaster, crucifixes were burned, seminarians had to join the MPR youth movement, Christian young people’s organizations were banned, Christmas became a normal working day, even all religious gatherings, with the exception of mass and confession, were taboo at a certain point). And when none of this had the desired effect, he simply offered the bishops top government positions or bought them jeeps and limousines.
Mobutu’s cultural policies did not explicitly stipulate what the Congolese were to believe, and ancestor worship received no detailed national theology, but Kimbanguism, the religion persecuted so heavily under the Belgians, flourished as never before. It was seen as an authentic African religion. The Kimbanguists’ own organization developed into a miniature version of the state: hypercentralistic and hierarchical. The religious leader was venerated in song and dance, just like Mobutu. The underdogs of the colonial era now became the heralds of Mobutuism.52
RELYING ON ONE’S OWN IDENTITY was a lovely idea, but of course also fraught with catches. Why did Mobutu promote the native kitchen, when his own favorite dish was still ossobuco alla romana? What was so authentic about that gruesome animation politique, which he had only copied from Kim Il-sung of North Korea? What was so Zaïrian about the notorious abacost, which was really nothing more than a Mao outfit with more color to it, the finest examples of which came from Arzoni, a textile plant in Zellik, close to Brussels? What was so typically African about the pagne—made from Indonesian batik and praised by the nuns for the way it covered the breasts—the most colorfast variations of which (the famous wax hollandaise) came from the Vlisco plant in Helmond, the Netherlands? What made Camille Feruzi an authentic musician? He played the accordion, for God’s sake, and he had obviously listened to a lot of Tino Rossi.
Was this recours à l’authenticité then simply a ruse? A charming ideology meant to disguise a deeper reality? Yes, it was. And that deeper reality was: Mobutu had started caring less and less about his people. He was so busy safeguarding his position that he neglected major governmental duties. He was so caught up with handing out cars, appointments, honorariums, and ambassadorial posts that the state treasury was drained. Yes, one could speak of economic recovery, but that was due more to Vietnam than to prudent policy making. It was a chance period of economic boom on which Mobutu was able to surf along in comfort, but it in no way served to combat poverty. He used the wealth of revenues to keep his own power base intact. In essence, he owed his power to an extreme form of pork-barrel politics. Mobutu perched atop a pyramid of clientalism where, directly or indirectly, thousands ate from his hand. He and his retinue were bound to each other by a network of mutual debts and favors. In exchange for benefits, his followers gave him the loyalty he needed to remain in power. Mobutu needed them and they needed Mobutu. A monstrous alliance. Mobutu was a slave to his own thirst for power.
In Zaïre, therefore, a true state bourgeoisie arose, a large group of individuals who owed their prosperity to the regime.53 In the most literal sense, the state served as economic base for this new middle class, which did not hesitate to diplay its newfound wealth in the form of expensive cars, lovely homes, and a luxurious lifestyle.54 Those who drove around in a Jaguar or Mercedes received the nickname “Onassis.” “And anyone who felt a nasty cough coming on flew to his family physician in Brussels,” Zizi said.
This clientalism went well as long as there was money. The nationalization of Union Minière had produced huge revenues for Mobutu, but his attempts to retain power were consuming more of that money all the time. “I used to have, as it were, no family at all,” he moaned once, “no one cared a whit about me! But since I have become president, it seems that half of Zaïre has discovered that they could very well be related to me in one way or another, and therefore have a right to my assistance.”55 All of this took place, of course, to the disadvantage of the common Zaïrian, who was unable to recall any family ties with the head of state. To keep his growing clientele satisfied, Mobutu had to keep on finding new sources of income. Foreign investments, bilateral agreements, and international loans came in handy.56 The more needy his country was, the more he was able to rake in. Poverty pays. It was an economic jackpot.
But it was still not enough. On November 30, 1973, he made a drastic decision. He had just returned from a tour of China, where he had seen the country’s planned economy. “The peril is more white than yellow,” he said upon his return. “Politically we are a free people, culturally we are becoming that, but in economic terms we are not at all the masters of our fate.”57 Mobutu began a process of “Zaïrianization”: those small- and medium-sized businesses, plantations, and trading companies still in the hands of foreigners, a few thousand enterprises in all, were expropriated and given to his faithful followers.58 From one day to the next, Portuguese restaurant owners, Greek shopkeepers, Pakistani TV repairmen, or Belgian coffee growers saw the work of a lifetime disappear. At the head of their company came a Zaïrian from the president’s circles who usually had no sense of how to run a business. In the best of cases he allowed the original owner to work on as manager and came by each month to collect the profits. In the worst cases, he immediately emptied the till and sold all the stocks on hand.
The consequences were grotesque. An elegant lady who never left the capital might suddenly be running a quinine plantation on the other side of the country. Gentlemen who couldn’t tell a cow from a bull became heads of a cattle company. Generals were allowed to run fisheries, and diplomats soft-drink factories. Minister of Information Sakombi became the owner of a series of newsstands and movie theaters, but also of a few sawmills. Bisengimana received the Prince de Ligne plantations on Idjwi, which comprised one-third of the island itself.59 Our friend Jamais Kolonga, a small fish in the network around the president, became head of a lumberyard in his native district. The party animal from the capital was now suddenly required to manage a stock of tropical hardwood. Some made a mess of it, others rose to the occasion. In one fell swoop, pop star Franco became the new owner of Willy Pelgrim’s recording empire, a sector with which he was indeed familiar.60 Thanks to Zaïrianization, Jeannot Bemba became the country’s wealthiest businessman. He was made chairman of the employers’ association and even started his own airline, Scibe Zaïre. Finally, Mobutu treated himself to fourteen plantations spread all over the country. He controlled a quarter of the production of cacao and rubber, had twenty-five thousand people on the payroll, and so became the nation’s third biggest employer. Thanks in part to t
he mining revenues, he was now estimated to be the world’s eighth richest man.61
But Mobutu saw his country, and it was not good. In late 1974 he switched to “radicalization.” Ailing companies were now taken over by the state. That way they could continue to yield revenue and with those yields he could stay on friendly terms with his friends. It had not been a good idea, letting them run the companies. But this new economic reform worked out badly as well. Without asking for it, Mobutu, that close friend of the Americans, suddenly found himself stuck with a communist economy. By means of a third reform, this one dubbed “retrocession”(rhetoric was the only branch of business still solidly on its feet), he tried to give the plucked and dressed companies back to their original owners, but they were no longer interested in the least.62
The social consequences were disastrous. As brilliant a communicator as Mobutu was, he was an equally great flop as an economist. The fiasco of Zaïrianization caused unemployment to rise. Those who still had a job, for example as civil servant or teacher, could no longer get by.63 Everyone moonlighted, as bricklayer, chauffeur, or beer vendor. Their wives tried to earn a little through microcommerce. They would spend the whole day on the market, sitting beside a little pile of charcoal or onions. They bought bread at the wholesale bakery and carried it on their heads around town until it had all been sold. They stayed at home with the children and started a little shop where the neighbors could come to buy tea bags, matches, and soap. They let their homes be used as depots for a brewery or a cement factory, and sold soft drinks or bags of cement at a tiny profit. Everyone tried to make ends meet. Even if that meant turning to their families for help.