Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  Besides the newspapers, democratization expressed itself in other ways. In between the powers-that-be and the masses, there arose a full-blown société civile (civil society). Hundreds of new associations were set up: for rural women, for taxi drivers, for altar boys . . . associations for agrarian development, for solidarity between laypeople, for health care . . . even associations for the chairmen of associations.3 Trade union organizations shot up like mushrooms: in 1991 there was only one state-aligned union; by 1991 there were 112.4 And, just like in the late 1950s, there was an explosion of political parties. Mobutu had advocated a three-party system at first, but soon had to allow a full multiparty system. In no time, the all-powerful MPR had to countenance some three hundred rivals large and small. Some of them had no more than one member. News of the upcoming abdication caused some people to dream of a bid for power. Mobutu watched ruefully: the proliferation of parties confirmed his fears of disintegration and sectarianism. “But if you can’t beat them, join them” he must have thought; in an attempt to weaken the power of the opposition, he paid some loyal followers to set up parties that advanced his own views. “Alimony parties” those were referred to mockingly, or “taxi parties,” because their members could all fit in one taxi cab. Was this the mulitpartisme Mobutu had promised? It looked more like multimobutisme!5

  In the end, the restless political field crystallized around two poles, with Étienne Tshisekedi’s UDPS—the so-called Union Sacrée de l’Opposition (Holy Alliance of the Opposition)—on one side, and the MPR and Mobutu loyalists—the mouvance présidentielle—on the other. Between them one had the mugwumps. The church sympathized with the opposition, but was often prepared to compromise. Mutijima did not feel called to serve. “I had been a member of the UDPS for a while, when it was still clandestine, but I didn’t feel at home in politics. For me, the most important thing in 1990 was the birth of the société civile.”

  The opposition gained a major victory when Mobutu agreed to the organization of a national conference. With that, he hoped to cut a good figure abroad and regain Western support. The plan was to bring together representatives to discuss the past and set out tentative lines for the future, analogous to a similar conference in Benin that had recently reformed that country in ten days’ time. The Kinshasa conference was intended to give form to the shift from the Second to the Third Republic; today it is best known by the name given it later, the Sovereign National Conference. The participants were to include not only politicians and dignitaries, but also the rank and file, representatives of the associations and the churches. The meeting would be held in the capital, but with delegations from all the provinces. Everything was to be broadcast live on radio and TV, a high mass of town-hall democracy.

  In distant Bukavu, Mutijima donned her battle dress: “The other women teachers in Bukavu said: ‘You have to go to Kin!’ So I ended up in the South Kivu delegation. All the tribes were represented, we didn’t want to think along ethnic lines. At the Sovereign National Conference we were going to denounce everything. We were going to depose Mobutu and demand his head on a platter.”

  Mutijima went to the capital as one of the twenty-eight hundred delegates, no more than two hundred of whom were women. “There were too few women, not even 10 percent. A lot of women were afraid to express themselves. They were badly informed about how such a meeting worked and about the importance of lobbying.” But she herself would prove her mettle. The Sovereign National Conference started on August 7, 1991, and was intended to last three months. The opening session was held in the Palais du Peuple, the national house of parliament. That colossal structure, thrown up by the Chinese, was only a few hundred yards from the new soccer stadium. In the parking lot, Citoyen Jacques Tshimbombo Mukuna, one of the big cheeses in the regime, stood passing out banknotes from a cardboard box to anyone interested in starting a little, off-the-cuff political party. The money was free, all you had to do was stick up for Mobutu . . . . 6 Tshimbombo was the man who once, on the president’s behalf, had presented the members of the national women’s basketball team with twenty-two Mercedes sedans for winning the Africa Cup, and kept eleven of them for himself . . . . 7 Now that the people saw him standing there with his box of money, they jokingly began referring to him as the “guardian of the national treasury.” Mobutu was clearly out to thwart the purposes of the conference, by hook or by crook.

  “He kept trying to compromise us by offering us hotel rooms, giving us presents or offering to let us stay at the Nsele conference grounds,” Mutijima said, “but we refused. The South Kivu delegation was very militant. We even spent two nights sleeping on the ground in front of the doors of the house of parliament! People brought us food. It was the first time in my life that I tasted manioc bread. And in Kinshasa you had these big, fat mosquitoes. We didn’t have any of that in the mountains of South Kivu.”

  Mobutu was prepared, if need be, to agree to an extensive transitional government with a certain amount of room for dissenting votes. A government of national unity with great power for the opposition, however, was too much for his taste. He had stipulated that he would appoint the conference’s chairman himself and entrusted the task to an old supporter, a man whose nom kilométrique (mile-long name) alone showed how fanatically “authentic” he was: Kalonji Mutambai wa Pasteur Kabongo. The old man’s name still makes Mutijima sigh in despair: “He was a complete marionette. He was hard of hearing and didn’t even understand what we said! “Pasteur wa Farceur” was what we called him, the Honorable Joker. I remember thinking: did we come two thousand kilometers to let ourselves be jerked around? We told each other: We need to silence this man! But how? Every morning we had to walk past the police guards and be frisked. We started smuggling in whistles, those little plastic ones. I had five of them tucked away in my shoes and in my braids. Every time the chairman took the floor, we started whistling until he stopped.”

  The first weeks of the conference went agonizingly slowly, with endless quibbling over procedural questions and interminable haggling over who was to take part in the committees. Mobutu, who followed it all from a distance, must have relished the bickering. A failed conference, after all, would serve him well. But there was growing unrest outside the walls of the Palais du Peuple. On September 23 the soldiers at the paratroopers’ center at Ndjili staged a mutiny. They went to the nearby airport and shut down the control tower. From there they cut a swath to the center of town, plundering department stores, shops, gas stations, and even private homes along the way. Everything worth anything was up for grabs: the mutineers dragged away television sets, refrigerators, and photocopy machines; entire warehouses were pillaged, trading companies sacked. With the desperation of the hungry and the poor, the people joined in. It was a great rush, a party, the moment for the Big Snatch. At last the people could do what their leaders had been doing for a quarter of a century! A delirium, the reversal of all values. Forbidden and fantastic! The upheaval spread to other cities, and the plundering went on for days. The Belgian and French armies intervened to free their own nationals. Some 30 to 40 percent of all the urban businesses were destroyed, 70 percent of the small retailers were ruined. Some 117 people were killed and some 1,500 injured.8

  And Mobutu? He didn’t react. He simply let his troops go about their business. Many suspected that he had provoked the mutiny himself in an attempt to scuttle the Sovereign National Conference. Even his loyal press officer Kibambi Shintwa, when we spoke later on the balcony of his little apartment, said he suspected the president of opportunism. “Mobutu wanted to break the country. Maliciously. His pride was deeply wounded by Tshisekedi’s popularity, and he wanted revenge. It’s like someone with a nice cell phone.” He held up his own phone by way of illustration. “The kind of cell phone that other people would like to have, but can no longer afford. So what do you do then?” He lowered the hand holding the phone until it was beside his chair. “You drop it, so it breaks and no one else can have it either. That’s what Mobutu did. When the Sovereign
National Conference started, he moved out to Gbadolite, permanently. He knew that his people despised him. At three in the morning the soldiers sacked the airport and he didn’t do a thing to stop them. It was really a case of: après moi le déluge. He saw the pillaging as the people’s just deserts. I was very disappointed when he ruined the country like that. For the first time, I was more afraid of being killed by the people than by Mobutu.”9

  Once the ransacking stopped, the conference got a new chairman: this time by popular vote. Laurent Monsengwo, the popular archbishop of Kinshasa and chairman of the national synod, was chosen without delay to replace Pasteur wa Farceur. Monseigneur Monsengwo: the very name prompted great expectations. With his purple vestment and moral authority, he seemed poised to become the Desmond Tutu of Zaïre. The opposition liked him: the Zaïrian synod of bishops had often expressed sharp criticism of the Mobutu regime. Under Cardinal Joseph-Albert Malula the church had evolved into the major counterforce in the Second Republic. When the new civil society awakened, many organizations, even the more secular among them, drew inspiration from the grassroots groups and liberation theology of Latin America.10 Monsengwo was perhaps not the most radically progressive of Catholic clerics, but the church itself enjoyed credibility among the opposition (which referred to itself—not at all coincidentally—as sacrée). There was no doubt about it in Mutijima’s mind: “Monsengwo was our candidate, but he even received votes from a few Mobutu supporters!”

  Mobutu was not pleased. His relationship with the church had always been ambivalent: he had fought and feared it for almost twenty years. On the eve of the pope’s visit in 1980, he had quickly arranged a marriage in the church with his mistress, Bobi Ladawa. He built a cathedral at Gbadolite—he, the man who had once tried to outlaw the liturgy and liked to surround himself with West African miracle workers and soothsayers. With Monsengwo at the head of the conference, the time had come to watch his step. Having surrendered the power to choose the chairman of the national conference, he would now make sure he decided about that other central position in the transitional government: the prime minister. Zaïre had eight different prime ministers between 1990 and 1997, seven of whom were given a leg up by Mobutu himself. The longest term of office had been three years, the shortest three weeks. The latter had been his archenemy, Tshisekedi. In October 1991, after the pillaging was over, Mobutu appointed him to chair the cabinet. Had the uprisings forced the Steersman to acknowledge that he could no longer get around Tshisekedi? Or was it a cunning move to discredit him with his own following? The standing members of parliament along Boulevard Lumumba chattered about it for days, but three weeks later the prime ministership was over. Mobutu immediately replaced Tshisekedi with Bernardin Mungul-Diaka, another of his old enemies. He remained in the saddle for one month. Then it was Nguza Karl I Bond’s turn; yet another dissident from the distant past. Le vagabondage politique (political merry-go-round) was once again running at full speed, and meanwhile nothing was happening. In January 1992 Mobutu declared that the Sovereign National Conference had come to an end. The game had lasted long enough in his eyes, and to his relief nothing had been achieved. This reef too had been skirted and he had kept his firm grip on the wheel of state.

  “The delegates had their trips home paid for them,” Mutijima said, “but we couldn’t go home empty-handed. The people of my province demanded results. Those elections had to be held. The government finally withdrew our travel allowance, but we stayed in Kinshasa, thanks to the people’s support.” The Congolese were not about to relinquish the hope for a change.

  AND THEN IT WAS FEBRUARY 16, 1992, a day as important in Congolese history as January 4, 1959, when the riots broke out in Léopoldville. Here too, the immediate cause was a banned demonstration and here too that led to large-scale protests in Kinshasa and a bloodbath. The churches wanted to protest against the closing down of the conference, but the government refused permission. The charismatic priest José Mpundu, a cleric who stood closer to the masses than to the hierarchy of the church, was directly involved in the organization of the protests. I spoke to him in his plainly furnished house just outside the old soccer stadium. He was wearing short pants—a rarity among Congolese men—and—even rarer—he addressed me right away with the familiar tu.

  The bishops had already called for the conference to be reopened. The priests had mentioned that during mass on Sunday. A number of laypeople said: well then, let’s do something about it. I went along with their initiative and attended their preparatory meetings, where I talked about nonviolence. Within the bishops’ conference, you see, I was secretary of the commission for justice and peace. But Cardinal [Frédéric] Etsou, the new archbishop, wouldn’t give permission for the march and Monseigneur Monsengwo felt that bishops should talk, not act . . . . Anyway, we mapped out the routes and decided that the banners would say: “Unconditional reopening of the Sovereign National Conference.” Later I was kicked out of the bishops’ conference for that.

  The march began on Sunday, February 16, after the nine o’clock mass. Starting in Kinshasa’s more than one hundred parishes, people left their churches and converged along the broken boulevards and avenues of the capital. They were simple believers, not diehard dissidents or dyed-in-the-wool politicians, merely schoolchildren, students, young parents, poor people, people who felt supported by the common clergy, like the nonconformist Father José. They waved fronds and sang songs. The Protestants, the Kimbanguists, and Muslims took part too. Similar marches were held in Matadi, Kikwit, Idiofa, Kananga, Mbuji-Mayi, Kisangani, Goma, and Bukavu. More than a million people took to the streets, it was the biggest mass meeting in the country’s history. People referred to it as the March of Hope.

  “I was on my way from Limete to Pont Kasavubu,” Mpundu told me, “but when we got to Saint-Raphaël we encountered a battalion of heavily armed soldiers. I was up in front. We had agreed beforehand: if anything happens, we all sit on the ground. Sitting beside me was an old woman, looking in disbelief at those soldiers who were maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. One of them looked her right in the eye, and she said: ‘Mwana na nga, est-ce que omelaki mabele ya mama te?’ [My son, didn’t you ever drink at your mother’s breast?] The boy didn’t know which way to look. That’s the power of nonviolence, of the truth.” For a moment Congo resembled the India of Mahatma Gandhi. “Then they dispersed us with tear gas. We ran away, but regrouped again a little farther along. We marched on, and we kept singing. At Kingabwa we ran into bodyguards, I think they belonged to Prime Minister Nguza. They threatened to kill us. ‘Don’t sing, just march,’ they shouted. But I said: ‘If we keep marching, they’ll shoot at us.’ A burly fellow with a revolver tried to grab me, but the people held on. The buttons on my cassock popped off. My chain broke. One of the parishioners picked it up. White priests were beaten up too.”11

  The March of Hope ended in a bloodbath. At least thirty-five civilians lost their lives that day.12 The guardsmen shot at anyone they saw, even from very close range, even at children. They not only used tear gas to disperse the crowds, but also a highly inflammable product rarely used outside military operations: napalm. During one of my many conversations with Zizi Kabongo, at a picnic table outside the canteen at the public broadcasting company, he said: “After that march, Mobutu was afraid he would be excommunicated. The Sovereign National Conference was allowed to reopen, and he withdrew even more to Gbadolite. The conference became much more assertive. The fear was gone. ‘Did you really think you could kill us all?’ people said out loud. During the march, my wife saw bodies lying around. I was burned too.” He shifted his legs from under the table and rolled up his pants legs. I had known him for a few years already, but he had never talked about this or shown it to me. On his shins I saw big, pink spots, as though he were a white man wearing camouflage. A long silence descended. “Napalm,” he said at last.13

  THE CONFERENCE RESUMED IN APRIL 1992 and this time it made a great deal of progress. It became truly sovereign: its decisions wer
e no longer lukewarm recommendations, but expressions of popular will with the force of law. With the conference as the supreme state body, the process of democratization accelerated decisively. After the plenary sessions the delegates split up into twenty-three committees and a hundred subcommittees, spread around the city. Amazing work was done in many of those groups. Inventory was taken of existing problems and realistic alternatives were offered. Régine Mutijima ended up in the “Woman, child, and family” committee. “I was the acting secretary. We worked around the clock. Afterward, all the reports were read aloud during the plenary session, so they could be amended and ratified. The negotiations that finally led to consensus were a formidable lesson in democracy. The Mobutu supporters discussed openly with the opposition. We wanted to bring the country’s true history to the surface and give a voice to the powerless.”

  The Sovereign National Conference voted on a provisional constitution; its most notable clause read that it was not the president who appointed the prime minister, but the conference itself. That constituted such a radical break with the past that the symbols of state had to change as well: Zaïre was to once again be called Congo and the country’s motto and national anthem would revert to those used before 1965.

  And then something peculiar happened: Monsengwo left the conference and went to negotiate with Mobutu on his own. That step ran completely counter to all agreements concerning the conference’s sovereignty.14 Mobutu told the prelate in no uncertain terms that the country would continue to be called Zaïre; a name change was completely unacceptable to him. But he also intimated that he might settle for a more ceremonial presidency. Mutijima still has mixed feelings about that move: “I thought it was outrageous of Monsengwo to go off to Gbadolite, but I think he did it to keep more people from being killed.” The men of the DSP, Mobutu’s private army, were still well-armed; a civil war could have broken out. “Monsengwo was for gradual change. He didn’t want there to be winners or losers, because he feared that the latter would ultimately take revenge. Tshisekedi, on the other hand, wanted a fast victory, even at the risk of a serious conflict. Monsengwo chose for the gentle landing. He did his best to operate tactically in a complex situation.”