Mobutu, beaming with pride, stood with his cronies and awaited liftoff. The countdown was in German. The first two tests had been successful. One year earlier, in deepest secrecy, the company had fired a six-meter-high (twenty-foot-high) rocket twenty kilometers (about 12.5 miles) into the air. Two weeks before, a heavier projectile had actually reached an altitude of thirty kilometers (about nineteen miles). Today, nothing could go wrong. This colossus was going to make it to a hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles).
Mobutu loved such spectacles. Wasn’t he the man who had invited the moon walkers to Kinshasa? Hadn’t he organized the match of the century in Congo? Hadn’t the public hanging been a spectacle too? But performances alone were not enough. He also wanted to treat the country to a series of megalomaniacal infrastructural works. The Inga Dam on the Congo he had rebuilt into one of Africa’s biggest hydroelectric plants. Upon completion in 1982, the new dam, Inga II, was to produce 1,424 megawatts instead of the former 351. Soon afterward Mobutu began dreaming of Inga III, a station with a capacity of no less than 30,000 megawatts, enough to supply energy for all of Africa and a part of Europe too. Before things got to that point, however, he had a high-tension line stretched from Inga all the way to the mining province of Shaba, an 1,800-kilometer-long (1,100-mile-long) extension cord straight through the jungle. Shaba itself was already well-equipped with power stations, but that line was Mobutu’s way of keeping a finger on the main switch of the rebellious province. The project required 10,000 pylons. In Maluku, on the Congo north of Kinshasa, he had a foundry built that could produce an annual 250,000 metric tons (275,000 U.S. tons) of steel.7
All these prestigious projects bore identical earmarks: they were built by foreign companies and equipped with the very latest gadgetry, they were delivered as turnkey projects—and they never worked as they were meant to. As soon as payment was received, the French, Italian, or American contractor would leave the country, abandoning all the high-tech equipment to people who did not know how to use it or had not had the time to learn. Inga II cost $478 million, but Zaïre continued to be plagued by blackouts.8 Maintenance of the turbines was neglected and the two (of the original eight) that still work today generate only 30 percent of the intended yield. The high-tension line to Shaba cost a dizzying $850 million, but often carried no more than 10 percent of its capacity.9 In addition, the project included no trunk lines to serve the cities and villages along the way. A $182 million price tag came attached to the steel mill at Maluku, but the company never turned a profit: it was unable to process local iron ore, only imported scrap metal.10
All that wasted money . . . That never became clearer to me than in 2007, the first time Zizi Kabongo showed me around the national broadcasting building. Mobutu’s construction craze was not limited to heavy industry; Kinshasa was to be beautified too, just like Brussels in the days of Leopold II. In the borough of Limete a huge traffic cloverleaf was built, with broad exits and entrances and daring overpasses; in the middle of the rotunda there arose a modernistic replica of the Eiffel Tower, a pointed steel-and-concrete structure 150 meters (about 485 feet) high. A panoramic restaurant was to be built at the top of it, but the complex was never finished. Along the banks of the Congo he had built the CCIZ, Zaïre’s international trade center, a high-priced structure that has stood in disrepair for decades. Shortly after the official opening, when the air-conditioning broke down, it turned out that the building’s windows could not be opened—a bit of a nuisance in a tropical country. In the center of the city there arose a chic, multilevel shopping mall called the Galéries Présidentielles. And a few kilometers farther away came the media park for the RTNC, the national broadcasting company, Kabongo’s new place of employment. Cost price: $159 million.
“The French built this,” he said as he showed me around. “They were determined to get the contract. In exchange for the commission, they gave Mobutu free Mirage jet fighters.” He showed me the dilapidated recording studios. Two of the original nine were still in use: massive, unequipped hangars. During live broadcasts, a little band of intrepid journalists availed themselves of two old cameras and a few microphones, at least if the electricity hadn’t gone out. I saw it happen once myself. As part of an artists’ exchange program between Brussels and Kinshasa, I took part in a morning talk show with a few other guests. The ceiling sagged. In the light from the spots we could see the asbestos floating down ceaselessly. Power cables were exposed; mixing consoles were lashed together with rope. I couldn’t understand how they could produce live television here. Before the talk show came a news report. The anchorwoman had no autocue, not even notes, but she presented the items perfectly, by heart, without the slightest hesitation and with amazing presence. The only thing was: after the news had been going for a few minutes, a technician realized that there was no microphone on her table. The broadcast had to be interrupted. While the crew feverishly went in search of a mike that still worked, the Congolese viewers were treated to a long stretch of test pattern. I saw the elegant anchorwoman sitting there at her brightly lit table, in the vastness of a darkened, rundown studio.
“The complex was originally built for six thousand employees,” Kabongo said. “Two thousand people still work here.” The central building was a nineteen-story phallus. The reception desk in the entryway had a switchboard that could accommodate hundreds of incoming calls. It had all been out of order for years, just like the elevators. These days everything went by way of the emergency stairwell, a dark labyrinth like some sketch by Escher that stank terribly of urine because the plumbing on the top floors was broken as well. In the old days the managing director had his office on the building’s top floor, from where he had a majestic view of the whole city. Today no one feels like clambering up to that eagle’s nest. The current director enjoys the great privilege of a ground-floor office. The higher you work in the building, the lower your status. “What a waste of money,” Kabongo sighed as we climbed to his fifth-floor office, “the RTNC, the CCIZ, all those projects . . . and all of it at a point when there was so much poverty elsewhere in the country.”11
It is truly amazing, the way Mobutu kept throwing money around. Ever since 1975 and the start of an endless war of decolonization in neighboring Angola, Zaïre had been unable to use the Benguela Line—the stretch of railroad on which my father had worked and that connected the Katangan mining basin with the Atlantic. It became much harder to export ore and Mobutu missed out on a lot of foreign revenue. The country was crumbling, but he seemed hardly aware of that.
Vier, drei, zwei, eins . . . a burst of flames lit the surroundings. The roar swelled. Slowly, the rocket rose from the launching pad. A hundred kilometers into the atmosphere, that’s where it was headed, a new step forward in African space travel. A lavish lunch was waiting for the guests. But before the projectile had left the pad, even a child could see that something was going wrong. The rocket listed, cut a neat arc to the left and landed a few hundred meters away, in the valley of the Luvua, where it exploded. As a thick cloud of smoke rose up from the savanna, Mobutu turned away in silence. Against the sky, the spectators could briefly see a dark vapor trail describing the curve the rocket had made.12 A parabola of soot. It looked like a graphic representation of Mobutu’s regime: after the steep rise of the first years, his Zaïre toppled inexorably and plunged straight into the abyss.
AND THERE WERE MORE THINGS TO COME DOWN out of the blue in those years. Between 1974 and 1980, two of the Zaïrian army’s C-130 transport planes, two Macchi fighters, three Alouette helicopters, and four Puma helicopters went down.13 Not a single one of those crashes took place during combat. The reason for so much bad luck? The soldiers were so badly paid that they had started selling the spare parts for their aircraft. Pierre Yambuya, a helicopter pilot in the national army, saw it all happen. His testimony provides a unique glimpse of the state the armed forces were in at the time. “Anyone with a private plane knew that Kinshasa was the world’s cheapest market for spare parts. The soldiers sold
them for twenty times less than the factory price.”14 Mobutu showed off with his prestigious projects, but began neglecting the institution that had made his coup possible: the army. Air force pilots supplemented their incomes by selling, wherever they landed, a part of their kerosene to the local population, who used it as lantern fuel. It became such a common custom that children would run with their yellow jerrycans to the landing strip as soon as a government plane arrived. Yambuya knew what he was talking about: “A sergeant-major earned 280 zaïres, a bag of rice cost 1,200 zaïres back then. An adjutant got 430 zaïres. But a school uniform cost 850 zaïres, and with the 5 zaïre allowance he received for each child, you couldn’t even buy a pencil.” That suddenly makes corruption much more understandable. The soldiers did not protest “up through the ranks,” for that could cost them their jobs or even their lives, but repeated at lower levels that which went on over their heads. “To lead a reasonable life, for example, I sold the fuel from my helicopter. My superior stuck the funding intended for my mission in his own pocket and said: ‘If you land somewhere, just sell some fuel. After all, what you do is your own business.’”15
Zaïre became sick. The deeper cause was a shortage of revenues (due to the copper crisis, the oil crisis, failed Zaïrianization, and grotesque public spending), and the worst symptoms were the withdrawal of the state and the spread of corruption. It was in the army that that first became visible. Soldiers took military vehicles away from the base and used them to run their own taxi services. Radios and record players disappeared from the mess halls, bulldozers and trucks from the garages. Officers even took their subordinates home with them and used them as servants. Absenteeism in the barracks was high, sometimes more than 50 percent. The few soldiers who did show up for roll call were not highly motivated. Discipline was something from long, long ago. An internal document, the “Mémorandum du Réflexion,” did not shrink from self-criticism when it came to a concise summary of the troops’ morale: “Everyone wants to command, but no one wants to obey.”16
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Angolan border, Moïse Tshombe’s troops—the veterans of the Katangan secession—were increasingly active. Many of them belonged to the Lunda tribe, a people whose traditional territory reached into Angola. Mobutu had driven them into exile many years ago, after they had defeated the Simba rebels. But now, along with their sons and new recruits, they were out for revenge. These notorious Katangan guardsmen had followed a remarkable course. During the Katangan secession (1960–63) they had fought for a rightist, European-run Katanga, but in Angola they had taken sides since 1975 with the Marxist MPLA, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola. The reason for the ideological turnaround was simple enough: the MPLA, like them, held a grudge against Mobutu.
After the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Angola started in 1975 a violent struggle for decolonization. As in Congo the contest was one for the throne, but in Angola the conflict was far bloodier. There were three factions. Agostinho Neto’s left-wing MPLA faced off against the FNLA of Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA. The superpowers got involved. Angola was the spot where the Cold War experienced its most heated African episode. The MPLA received massive support from Russia and Cuba; the two other militias had American backing. The U.S. support went by way of South Africa and Zaïre: Pretoria backed Savimbi in the south; Kinshasa supported Roberto in the north. Because Roberto also happened to be Mobutu’s brother-in-law, the former Katangan guardsmen chose to join up with the MPLA. Their leader’s name was Nathanaël Mbumba, their new nom de guerre the FLNC (Front pour la Libération Nationale du Congo), their nickname les Tigres Katangais (the Katangan Tigers).
The rebels invaded Zaïre on two occasions. In 1977 and again in 1978 they crossed the border and seized a large part of western Shaba (the so-called Shaba I and Shaba II wars). In numbers and logistics they were far inferior to the national army, but the local population received them joyfully; not only were they fellow Lundas, but the people were also tiring of Mobutu. The rebels won ground easily and in 1978 even took the important mining town of Kolwezi. For the first time in a decade, Mobutu had to deal with a military uprising. Dissidents who had fled to Brussels and Paris hoped the dictatorship would topple and saw in the invasion the “embryo of a people’s army.”17 Mbumba, they felt, could breathe new life into the dreams of Lumumba and Mulele. The sun king’s empire seemed to be tottering.
Mobutu, however, did everything in his power to portray the rebellion as a foreign, Marxist intervention. According to him, Mbumba was merely a pawn of the MPLA and therefore of Cuba and Russia. With this line of reasoning he hoped to draw support from abroad, for his own army was now virtually worthless. And it worked. After eight days, Shaba I was quashed by Moroccan troops flown in in French military aircraft. Shaba II was put down after only a few days by French Foreign Legion troops and Belgian paratroopers. Mobutu’s allies sprang into action after the rebels had slaughtered thirty whites in a villa in Kolwezi. What these foreign friends did not know was that the white people had probably not been murdered by the rebels at all, but by Mobutu’s own troops. Helicopter pilot Yambuya was in Kolwezi, and was clear about what he had seen:
On Sunday, May 14, Colonel Bosange [of the national army] suddenly orders all those Europeans locked up in the villa to be executed. According to him, they are all mercenaries. Bosange will tolerate no objections, and General Tshikeva does not try to dissuade him. Only old Musangu raises his voice in protest. Bosange commands the head of the intelligence and security services, Lieutenant Mutuale, and three other soldiers to carry out his orders. Mutuale and his firing squad go to the villa, where the doors and windows are hermetically sealed. They fire their machine guns through the closed metal blinds. The volleys echo like the sound of a car crash. Five minutes later, Mutuale and his men are back: mission accomplished.18
Mobutu knew his history. In 1960 Belgium had invaded the country after the murder of five whites in Elisabethville. In 1964 Stanleyville was retaken by Belgian paratroopers after hundreds of whites were taken hostage. Kill a few Europeans, Mobutu knew, and you’ve got a Western army on your side. That is: as long as you can put the blame on someone else.
The two Shaba wars were short-lived, but the lessons they taught were of great importance. First, Mobutu was capable of doing absolutely anything to maintain his position. Second, his army was worthless. Third, he survived by dint of foreign support. America had been a faithful ally ever since 1960 (regardless of occasional tensions), but now France came along as well. President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing implemented a very explicit policy of increasing the French sphere of influence in Central Africa. As the world’s largest Francophone country, Zaïre of course received special attention. Back in 1960, with decolonization in full swing, France had even tried to acquire Congo from Belgium with a reference to the historical droit de préemption from 1885!19 Giscard, however, was much more interested in financial gain. Trade with Zaïre received a strategic boost. It was against that background that the deal had been made to build TV studios in exchange for Mirage jets. The main contractor was Giscard’s cousin, while another of his cousins was one of the project’s biggest financers.20 Nepotism was hardly a Zaïrian invention.
In Kinshasa and Brussels I spoke a number of times to Colonel Eugène Yoka, who had been one of the Zaïrian army’s few fighter pilots. He was the son of the last surviving widow of a World War I veteran and came from a soldiering family. His father had fought against the Germans; his grandfather was one of the first soldiers in the Force Publique. He himself had put in more than two thousand flight hours. In 1961 he was among the first batch of Congolese pilots to complete his training; he had been taught to fly in an SV4-BIS—a propeller biplane—at Tienen, in Belgium. Afterward he had flown Dakotas, T-6 aircraft, P-148s, you name it. He was there when the Concorde made its first flight to Africa in 1973; Mobutu would soon charter the supersonic plane for jaunts on a regular basis, including trips with his family to Disneyland Paris.21 Yoka al
so became one of the select circle of pilots able to fly the Mirage. He had been trained in France. I asked him about his memories of the Shaba wars. “I was there,” he said, “for both Shaba I and Shaba II, but not as a pilot.”22 I’d received a similar answer from Alphonsine Mosolo, the first female parachutist, who had received her training in Israel. “The wars in ’77 and ’78, I never had to jump then.” Both soldiers had received extensive training abroad, both of them had to show up for the annual parades in Kinshasa, but neither of them had to apply their expertise when the time came. The armed forces seemed to have fallen into disuse. Mosolo said: “Instead of jumping, I cooked for Mobutu aboard the Kamanyola. That was his private yacht, the one he used on the river. One evening there was a party on board. I was finished cooking. Mobutu liked it when spirits were high, he was a real partygoer. I was sitting in a chair, but he wanted me to dance. He even took my shoes off to get me to dance. Really! The president himself! Down on his knees! Even though my feet stank so badly!”23
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