Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  TO COUNTER THE CRISIS, a new parallel economy arose, revolving around home commerce. Women would get up early in the morning and fry a single chicken, then take it to the market. Well-to-do ladies who had acquired a pair of chic foreign pumps through the informal circuit would sell them in their own neighborhoods. Nurses who worked in hospitals by day would take home a strip of pills and sell them one by one. Pilots would flog a few jerrycans full of kerosene. Civil servants haggled over every document they stamped. Policeman were delighted with every traffic violation. There was always something that could be “arranged.” Quid pro quo. Madesu ya bana, the people said, beans for the children, in the old tradition of matabiche and baksheesh: the Esperanto of the desperadoes.

  In response to a state that was withdrawing from its citizens, the citizens withdrew from the state. “Article 15” they called it, in reference to a fictitious article in the Zaïrian constitution that read: “Débrouillez-vous!” (get it while you can!). Often enough, this involved illegal activities (contraband, theft, fraud)—but what does illegal mean when the country itself is criminal? Grassroots corruption was the best way to counter corruption at the top, for faithfully paid taxes would simply evaporate up there anyway. Hadn’t Mobutu Sese Seko himself more or less promised to turn a blind eye? During a huge rally in Kinshasa’s soccer stadium, he had said: “If you must steal, then steal a little bit and leave a little bit for the nation.”62

  He should not have said that. During those years, 30 to 60 percent of the coffee harvest was smuggled out of the country, good for a sum of $350 million between 1975 and 1979. Seventy percent of the diamonds, 90 percent of the ivory, tons of cobalt, and hectoliters of gasoline crossed the borders unseen.63 The country was leaky as a sieve, and the state lost out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. It went little by little, just as the president had suggested, until nothing more was left. “The cockroach can finish a whole loaf of manioc, using only his teeth,” the people said.64 There was no other way to survive. Thanks to the informal economy, people were able to pay teachers and nurses. The country was living on borrowed time, but at least it was alive.

  This economics of pillage, of course, could not endure. Congo was being cannibalized. No one gave a hoot about the state anymore. The postal service no longer functioned, water and electricity became scarce, there was less than one telephone line for every thousand inhabitants.65 The country, as Zao said in one of his songs, was becoming cadavéré, it was going into rigor mortis. Boats on the river became slowly drifting villages that would perhaps reach their destination someday. Air Zaïre, the national airline and a former source of pride, received the nickname “Air Peut-Etre” (Air Maybe) with as motto “la seule chose au Zaïre qui ne vole jamais,” the only thing in Zaïre that won’t disappear into thin air. Humor was the best remedy.

  “Mobutu and Reagan and Mitterand were flying around the world in the Concorde,” began the best joke from the Mobutu era. “Reagan stuck his hand out the window and said: ‘I think we’re flying over America.’ ‘How can you tell?’ the other two heads of state asked. ‘I just felt the Statue of Liberty,’ said Reagan. Then Mitterand stuck his hand out the window. ‘I believe we are now flying over France,’ he said right away. ‘How can you tell?’ Mobutu and Reagan asked him. ‘I just felt the Eiffel Tower.’ Finally Mobutu stuck his hand out the window. ‘I know for sure that we’re flying over Zaïre,’ he told his fellow passengers. ‘But how can you be so sure?’ they protested. ‘Zaïre doesn’t have any towers, does it?’ ‘No,’ Mobutu said, ‘but somebody just stole my watch.’”66

  THE CRISIS CHANGED THE RELATIONSHIP between the sexes as well. Many men had lost their jobs and felt humiliated because they could no longer support their families, let alone their mistresses. They were poorer than their parents and often had to turn to them for help. The man had once been the breadwinner, the one who came home with a paycheck, but now it was the woman who saw to the family’s income. A school principal in Kikwit told me: “We would run through my wages in two days. They didn’t add up to anything. And often enough I didn’t even get paid. My wife had a stall on the market. She sold soap, sugar, and salt. That was our family’s main source of income. During that period, many women earned more than their husbands. Sometimes the women even moved out altogether. Young women started going to college and became more independent.”67

  The informal economy, however arduous and unpredictable, provided some women with new opportunities. A number of them adopted a more fighting spirit. Manioc saleswomen in Kivu, farming women themselves, refused to simply accept the way that local police and officials kept coming up with new taxes whenever they brought their baskets to market. They filed official protests, all the way up to the provincial governor’s office.68 In Bukavu, Régine Mutjima, headmistress at a girl’s school, noted that the policy of spending cuts implemented by the IMF and World Bank was leading to abuses.

  [Léon] Kengo wa Dondo was prime minister in 1983, and he had plans to effect drastic cutbacks. Even the pregnancy leave for female schoolteachers was scrapped, ostensibly because there was no money for that, while government funds were being stolen by the truckload at the same time. I was the leader of the Association des Femmes Enseignantes de Bukavu [the Bukavu League of Women Teachers]. A Canadian colleague had told me about Gandhi. I read his writings and those of Martin Luther King, and the works of Lumumba and Nkrumah, even though that was forbidden. I also read the banned weekly Jeune Afrique. In 1986 one of my colleagues died during childbirth. She had kept working right up to the day itself, her baby weighed less than four pounds at birth, less than a little rabbit. I had never experienced anything like it. I decided to organize a sit-in. We went in little groups to the payroll office for the local schools. Three-quarters of the female school teachers took part. At 10 o’clock sharp we all sat down. We were running the risk of being shot at, we knew that, but we wanted to close down the city. That evening I was arrested. A Landrover full of soldiers took me to town hall. All I had on was my nightdress. They were all there: the mayor, the head of State Security, the MPR, the board of education, the borough council. It was one woman against fifty men. One by one, they started calling me names, but all I could think about was that baby that weighed less than four pounds, that little rabbit, whose mother, Madame Rumbasa, a good colleague, had died because she wasn’t given pregnancy leave. I became furious. I exploded. I screamed at the mayor. I had a lump in my throat, it was only the second time I’d cried during my adult life. When my tirade was over, no one spoke a word, that’s how furious I’d been. But then I felt calm. Around midnight, the mayor took me back to my house in his Mercedes.69

  It was a unique act of courage. Mutjima was not prosecuted, but was allowed to go to conferences in Nsele and Gbadolite to talk about the problems faced by young people. Things did not always work out so well, however. On the other side of the country, Thérèse Pakasa worked as a cashier at a little supermarket in Kinshasa. She had once met Antoine Gizenga, Lumumba’s deputy prime minister who lived in exile in Brazzaville but came from her native region. She too read Lumumba and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She became enraged when she thought about the situation in her country. “I wanted to organization a demonstration, but the people were so afraid! I could only find three women who were willing to go along. A woman who sold bread and two housewives. We made a banner and pamphlets. In July 23, 1987 we walked down the Boulevard du 30 Juin, where the Belgian embassy was. We were carrying the old, blue Congolese flag.”

  Four everyday women who risked their lives walking down the biggest street in the capital with a forbidden banner and a forbidden flag . . .

  “After a couple of hundred meters we were arrested. The intelligence service kept me in detention for six weeks. I was tortured, but not very badly, and my determination grew. One year later I did it again, this time with ten women. We were arrested again. I was beaten, then sent under military guard into exile in another part of the country. When I came back to
Kinshasa, I went straight to prison and all my children were arrested too, even my two-week-old baby. They couldn’t believe that a woman would do something like that.”70

  THE BLOOD FLOWING FROM THE WOMAN’S HEAD. The man’s legs bent back like those of a jumping jack. The wintry footage from Romania continued to haunt Mobutu.71 The East bloc was collapsing, the Cold War was coming to an end. Soon he would be an expendable ally to the Americans. Mobutu owed his empire to the fear of communism, but Marx had proven to be a colossus with feet of clay. Loyalty in the struggle against the red menace no longer counted; respect for human rights became the new criterion. At a summit of Francophone countries, President François Mitterand announced that France would from now on support only those developing countries that abided by democratic values and honored human rights. The days of Giscard were over.

  Early 1990. Along with the new decade, a new political climate also seemed to descend. In February Nelson Mandela was released from prison, a world event that gave new hope to the entire continent. In the Ivory Coast, in Benin, Gabon, and Tanzania, cries for the introduction of a multiparty system grew louder. The military dictatorships in Congo-Brazzaville and Mali shook on their foundations. The flush of freedom reached Zaïre as well. Mobutu realized that he could no longer ignore his people.

  And so he consulted them, just as the Belgians had done in 1958 and Leopold II had done in 1905. On those earlier occasions, those consultations had resulted in a dramatic turnabout, but what would happen now? A group of consultants went from city to city and organized public hearings. All over the country, citizens were allowed to express their opinion of Mobutu’s regime, yes, even to air their grievances. There was no need to fear prosecution. The first hearing was held in Goma and Mobutu was there. He was quite willing to hear constructive criticism; after all, no one was perfect. But it rained, no, it poured complaints. Mobutu found himself standing in a tropical downpour of dissatisfaction. Old women stood up and delivered broadsides against him. His new nickname at that point was Mobutu Sesesescu, a clear reference to his late Romanian friend. Press secretary Kibambi Shintwa saw his reaction: “Mobutu couldn’t believe it, he was extremely disillusioned. He felt that the country owed him everything, and he withdrew, he was hurt. He didn’t want to admit the truth. He refused to attend the rest of the sittings.”

  The investigators did their job. More than six thousands reports were drawn up, most of them absolutely damning. The chairman of the investigating committee presented a summary to the president. Zizi Kabongo remembered how that went: “Mobutu had withdrawn to his yacht, the Kamanyola. He called together the political bureau of the MPR for consultations onboard. They were stuck there for two or three days. The cabinet ministers had to come too.” Even the American secretary of state came by to say that Bush Sr. despite all historical ties of friendship, could not go on granting him unconditional support.72

  But on April 24, 1990, his mind was made up. Generals, magistrates, cabinet ministers, provincial governors, members of parliament, and foreign journalists were summoned to the whited conference grounds at Nsele, to what had been the Vatican of the MPR for the last quarter of a century. Standing behind an array of microphones, dressed in the black marshal’s uniform that Alfons Mertens had sewed for him, Mobutu spoke to the auditorium. He had heard the voice of the people; Zaïre was to be democratized. To everyone’s amazement, he announced the end of the single-party state. From now on, three parties would be allowed; room would be made for freedom of the press, free trade unions, and, within a year, free elections. “And what will happen with the chief in all of this?” Mobutu wondered aloud at the end of his speech. “The head of state stands above the political parties. He will be the umpire, even more, the highest court of appeal. I hereby announce that, as from today, I am withdrawing from the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, to allow a new chief to be chosen . . . .” Mobutu hesitated for a moment, stumbled over his words and looked helplessly into the hushed auditorium. Like a man grown old in the space of a single second, he lifted his thick-rimmed spectacles, dabbed at eyelids hazy with tears and spoke the words that have since become legendary: “Comprenez mon émotion, forgive me for being emotional.”

  The footage was seen all over the country. Had they understood correctly? Was this how the Second Republic came to a definitive end? By means of a simple speech, diluted with a few crocodile tears? A speech as prosaic as the radio broadcast with which Mobutu had seized power in 1965? With no revolution or fighting in the streets? Young people raided their fathers’ closets, rummaged through the old clothes, looking for neckties. No one remembered how you tied one, but who cared? This was the emblem of freedom! Girls put on their brothers’ oversized dungarees and went out on the street, giggling. This was one revolution that required no throwing of stones or chanting of slogans. “I remember it clearly.” Zizi said, thinking back on the most hopeful day of his life. “That night the streets of Kinshasa were filled with badly tied neckties.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE DEATH THROES

  Democratic Opposition and Military Confrontation

  1990–1997

  RÉGINE AND RUFFIN BOTH LIVED IN BUKAVU, THAT LOVELY town on Lake Kivu along the Rwandan border—but that was all they had in common. When Mobutu announced the end of the single-party state, Régine was thirty-five and Ruffin was seven. Régine was headmistress at a Catholic girls’ school, Ruffin was just learning to read at a Catholic boys’ school across town. Régine had organized the teachers’ sit-in a few years before. When she heard that the MPR had lost its primacy, all she could do was dance. Ruffin was too young to understand the historical portent of the turnaround. He played soccer with his friends and began to dream of life as a priest. Yet both of them would become involved in the dictator’s fall, in totally different ways and at totally different moments, Régine in 1992, Ruffin in 1997. When it came to falling, Mobutu took his own sweet time.

  Régine Mutijima thought it might all go very quickly. “We really wanted Mobutu to step down after the elections and go on living honorably inside the country.”1 But in the period 1990–97, Mobutu kept hold of power with a stubbornness and cunning no one had thought possible. These were the death throes of a dictator taking his country along with him in his fall.

  In 1905, when Leopold II could no longer deny the atrocities taking place in the Free State, he tarried for three years before turning over his conquered land to the Belgian state. Mobutu’s attitude after 1990 was no different. The results of the public sittings caused him at first to slacken the reins, only to tighten them again afterward. There was, as far as he was concerned, no big hurry with those elections. He had applied his creativity in 1970, 1977, and 1984 to get himself elected, but knew that that trick would no longer work in 1991. The democratic genie was out of the bottle. Still, he succeeded in remaining in power for another seven years, this time without any elections.

  Mutijima knew all too well that Mobutu owed his power to two things: money and violence. Money from abroad, violence at home. But how long could he keep that up, now that the Cold War was over? On May 12 and 13, 1990, a few weeks after his emotional speech, Mobutu ordered the student protests in Lubumbashi crushed by military force, for the students were once again the first to take to the streets. For the West, that was the last straw. Reports spoke of hundreds of casualties, but the exact number has never been stated (there were perhaps only three, Mutijima heard later). Belgium suspended all development aid, France froze all relations, America no longer had any need of Mobutu. In the early 1990s, his former foreign allies were glad to see the back of him. Even the IMF expelled Zaïre as a voting member.

  What remained was: violence. But the army was unreliable and, now that more and more bans were being lifted, the intelligence services had lost their grip on the people. The official media, too, had stopped monitoring the flow of information. Government newspapers with “authentic” titles like Elima and Salongo were overtaken by new periodicals with French names like L’O
pinion, Le Phare, and above all Le Potentiel. Those periodicals did not make it all the way to Mutijima in Bukavu, but they were very important in the capital. At the newsstands along Boulevard Lumumba there arose the phenomenon of the parliamentaires debout (the standing members of parliament), groups of the unemployed who read the front pages of the newspapers that were hung up on display and discussed them all day long. A public space, peopled with critical citizens. The founder of Le Potentiel was Modeste Mutinga: “We were completely independent. We didn’t even maintain ties with other opposition movements, like the UDPS or the Church. I bought a second-hand printing press in Strasbourg. It wasn’t until later, after that period of détente in the early nineties, that things got worse again. The DSP burned our presses and the presses at other papers too. Everything was demolished.”2