Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  Zaïre remained Zaïre, but a new prime minister was elected directly for the first time in thirty years. On August 15, 1992, the Sovereign National Conference appointed Tshisekedi prime minister of the transitional government with 71 percent of the votes; his opponent, Thomas Kanza, received only 27 percent. Change did not come without a struggle, the offices of the UDPS had been destroyed only a few days earlier, but Étienne Tshisekedi, the man who had written that daring open letter to Mobutu a decade earlier, now became the first democratically elected prime minister since Moïse Tshombe in 1965.

  Things went quickly after that. A transitional government was formed, and a transitional parliament: of the 2,800 delegates, 453 were to take part afterward in the Supreme Council of the Republic. A new constitution was drafted, based largely on the 1964 Luluabourg federal constitution, the only one Congo had ever known that was passed by referendum. An agenda was also established for the coming elections.

  The democratic momentum seemed unstoppable. But Tshisekedi’s fresh new government excelled in neither vision nor strategy.15 The prime minister made no attempt to gain control over the government apparatus’s most essential instruments, the intelligence services and the army. The cabinet ministers wasted their time with visitors and public ceremony. Governing a nation took more than just sitting around in leather armchairs and talking for hours, but that was something these people, who had even less experience with democratic practice than the politicians of the First Republic, did not know. Tshisekedi himself seemed to have come down with Patrice Lumumba’s old ailment: charismatic as long as he remained in the opposition, capricious and unpredictable as soon as he came to power. Becoming prime minister seemed more important to him than providing leadership for Congo.16

  The Sovereign National Conference was drawing to an end, but the reports from the two committees dealing with the most delicate issues still had to be read aloud: the committee on “unlawfully procured goods” (read: theft) and the committee dealing with the political killings. “Monsengwo wanted to hold those sessions behind closed doors,” Mutijima told me. “Mobutu sent tanks to the houses of parliament and had the broadcasts of the conference proceedings stopped.” The damning report on government corruption was read only in part; the worse of the two reports, about human rights violations, was not read at all. A few hundred printed copies of the report made the rounds, but missed any effect. “There were two other women with me in the South Kivu delegation. Neither of them could read or write,” Mutijima said. In a country where more than two generations had done without proper education and where the spoken word had more authority than the printed one, the lack of those moments of public disclosure were more than symbolic.

  In early December 1992, after not three but seventeen months, the Sovereign National Conference closed up shop. The final balance was ambiguous. For the first time, Mobutu had been forced to accept a prime minister he had not appointed himself. The historical review had been of great importance, but the crucial reports were not read aloud and the legislative work remained unfinished. The democratic opposition had not always displayed its political maturity. And the long-awaited elections were still up in the air.17 Mutijima provided a sublime summary of the results: “We wanted to uproot the dictatorship, that’s right, but cutting down a baobab tree is not simple, because it can fall on you. You have to cut the roots one by one, and then work together to pull it down from a distance.”

  THE PEOPLE WERE CRUSHED beneath the weight of the toppling baobab. The period of transition to the Third Republic was a true ordeal for many. In the period 1975–89 Zaïre experienced an average inflation of 64 percent annually; by 1990–95 that had risen to an average of 3,616 percent.18 In 1994, inflation actually peaked at 9,769 percent.19 A wheelchair in Zaïre had cost 750 zaïres in 1981, by 1991 that was 2.5 million zaïres.20 Pocket calculators did not have enough zeros to add up the bills. A simple stay in a hotel already ran to exponential figures.21 Salaries became meaningless. Purchasing power was a farce. The old people said: “In the Belgian days we ate three times a day. During the First Republic we ate two times a day. During the Second Republic that was down to once a day. Where is it all going to end?”22 Children died of starvation. Rather than making furniture, carpenters were now primarily engaged in building coffins, often for children. Child mortality in the cities was around 10 percent, in the countryside around 16 percent.23

  Many hoped for a miracle. In the Zaïre of the 1990s games of chance became wildly popular. Lotteries and risky investment and pyramid schemes promised instant success, but in fact made many poor people even poorer.24 They took their money out of the bank, laid it on the line, won a bit, then lost everything they had. They turned to soothsayers and witchcraft to give luck a helping hand, because money and mysticism went hand in hand. Even Mobutu surrounded himself with powerful marabous and a whole array of féticheurs (healers). When he lost two sons to AIDS, he blamed that on occult forces.

  In response to this mystic revival a new brand of Christianity awakened, one which was not classically Catholic, Protestant, or Kimbanguist, but evangelical and messianic. The congregations were referred to as Églises du Réveil (charismatic churches). They were often initiated by foreign missionaries, particularly from the United States.

  The most conspicuous reborn Christian in Zaïre was Dominique Sakombi Inongo, who had been Mobutu’s main propagandist for years. The man who had thought up the concepts of authenticité, Mobutism, and political entertainment had now become God’s own spokesman. After a traffic accident on a highway outside Brussels (driving down the wrong side of the road at night, he had killed a Belgian woman), he’d had a mystical experience. In a dream, the Almighty spoke to him, saying: “Dominique, my son, I grant to you both life and death, but I recommend that you choose Life! For I shall save you and use you.” That took a little explaining.

  “For years you had my people dance for a man, but from now on it is for Me and only for Me that you shall mobilize the people, so that they may praise Me and be set free at last.” Sakombi decided to make a clean break with the Mobutu regime, and personally advised Mobutu to do the same: “You must coexist with Tshisekedi. You must absolutely be converted . . . . I urge you, as a brother, to turn away for good from the marabous, the witches, the féticheurs [healers], the sorcerers, et cetera. They are liars . . . . Citoyen Président, do not resist the Lord’s call. He died on the cross for you as well.”25 To the former PR man, the symbols of the Second Republic were clearly bewitched. The national anthem, the flag, and coat of arms were of satanic origin. During long prayer meetings, Sakombi told his listeners that he had seen the prototype of the national coat of arms carved in stone in a cave, dozens of meters under the ground, in Egypt. There, close to one of the pyramids of Cairo, on the banks of a subterranean river, there had been elders, singing incantations . . . . The national currency, too, was bewitched: “One need only observe the cabbalistic symbols on it to believe that: they are all about magic. With such banknotes, one can never finance a country’s development . . . . You will recall that the recent series of banknotes caused troubles and even lay at the root of the conflict between Mobutu and Tshisekedi. And now you know why . . . because they are diabolical.”26

  And indeed, there was something peculiar about that recent series of banknotes. Sakombi’s fantastical discourse did not come entirely out of the blue but put a religious twist on well-known public comment. In 1970 the largest denomination in circulation was the five-zaïre note, in 1984 it was five-hundred zaïres. That in itself was a sign of drastic inflation. But in 1990 there appeared a fifty-thousand-zaïre note, and two years later even one representing five million zaïres.27 At times, macroeconomics can be childishly simple. When the value of the biggest banknote rises that quickly, it means either that a country is becoming breathtakingly wealthy or that the currency is becoming breathtakingly worthless. Unfortunately, it was the latter: the five-million-zaïre note was worth only two dollars. Nevertheless, it showed Mobutu look
ing as unperturbed as he had on earlier bills. He stood there proudly in his white marshal’s uniform, the one tailored for him by Alfons Mertens, thereby making it one of the twentieth century’s most oft-depicted outfits. Printing new money on a massive scale, after all, was Mobutu’s favorite way to ensure cash for himself, especially now that he could no longer count on his international backers. He placed his order with the German firm of Giesecke and Devrient, printers of currency for customers from Hitler to Mugabe, and had huge shipments of banknotes brought in by cargo plane. In 1995 alone, 830 million new bills were flown in. Mobutu immediately had to exchange almost half that for dollars, in order pay the printer.28 Printing money in order to pay the printer: economics can also be childishly tragic.

  When Mobutu introduced the five-million-zaïre banknote in December 1992, Prime Minister Tshisekedi declared it unlawful. He wanted to call a halt to this thoughtless monetary policy, but that resulted in the new prime minister’s first serious clash with the president. In the streets of Kinshasa the banknote was soon given the nickname Dona Beija, after a lovely but extremely treacherous character in a popular Brazilian soap opera of that day.29 Mobutu used the money to pay his soldiers. As always, they took their pay right away to a moneychanger; the wages paid on Friday, after all, could lose a third of their value by Monday morning. The phenomenon of the cambistes had manifested itself all over the country, moneychangers (almost always women) who sat under a parasol along the side of the road, piles of banknotes beside them on a folding table. In Zaïre even the black market was colorful. One found them along the street behind the Belgian embassy in Kinshasa, soon referred to as Wall Street, but deep in Matonge too one soon found alleyways full of unofficial change offices. On payday the civil servant, traffic policeman, or soldier would take his plastic bag full of newly printed bills to the cambiste and exchange them for dollars. The moneychanger would later sell the banknotes to someone else, often to state enterprises that needed them to pay their own employees. In this way, Zaïre gradually became “dollarized.”30 Even today, dollars are the prime currency for all major expenditures; the local currency is used only for smaller purchases.

  But the five-million-zaïre note was a catastrophe. After Tshisekedi declared it unlawful, the cambistes refused to accept it. The soldiers who saw their monthly pay dwindling away felt betrayed and decided to collect their wages themselves. From January 28–30, 1993, they went on another rampage. The consequences were terrible. In Kinshasa today, people still speak of the First and the Second Plundering, the one in 1991 and the other in 1993, for these were historical events that impressed themselves deeply on the nation’s memory. The Second Plundering was the most violent by far. This time it was Mobutu’s elite troops, the DSP itself, that mutinied and helped themselves to public and private property. Before the owners’ eyes they smashed shop windows and pulled chandeliers from the ceiling. Because the assortment was often meager, they even yanked the copper wiring and sinks out of the walls. Zaïre had now become the country of last things, a lawless, freebooting, hopeless country that had succumbed to banditry and greed. Thousands lost their lives during the Second Plundering, including the French ambassador and a member of his staff. Once again, French and Belgian paratroopers were mobilized. When it was over the city looked as though a horde of locusts had descended. The streets were littered with bits of paper, notebooks, chunks of debris, and shoes. Curtains flapped through broken windowpanes, brushing the sidewalk. Normal people tried to get a piece of the action as well, for in a bankrupt country even the most trivial takes on new value. Old paper, for example, became a costly commodity The archives at the Kinshasa zoo, a pitiful remnant of colonial days where a crocodile hatched in 1938 still lay basking in the sun (and still does today) were pillaged by city dwellers in search of packing paper.31 In the weeks that followed, anyone buying a handful of peanuts on the market in Kinshasa by way of evening meal received them wrapped in a piece of yellowed paper on which one could read of the wondrous life of the chimpanzee and the okapi.

  HIS COUNTRY COULDN’T GO ON THIS WAY, Mobutu felt. A few months earlier he had celebrated the wedding of one of his daughters at Gbadolite. On that occasion she had worn $3 million worth of jewelry from Cartier and Boucheron. But that wasn’t the problem. The wedding was attended by twenty-five hundred guests. There had been caviar and lobster. Thousands of bottles of top French wines were consumed. But that was not the problem either. A plane had flown to Paris and back again just to pick up the cake, a four-meter-high (thirteen-foot-high) construction, from the bakery of chef-patissier Lenôtre. None of this, however, was the problem, no. In his eyes, the real problem was Tshisekedi, the man who had rejected a banknote with his picture on it and thereby unleashed the plundering. No, there was no way he could work with a stubborn fool like that.

  In March 1993, after ten days in conclave with the leaders of the still-vital MPR, Mobutu decided to set up his own government with its own parliament, constitution, and prime minister. Faustin Birindwa, a former opponent, was the new flunky. He would see to a project of monetary reform in which a new currency, the nouveau zaïre, would replace three million old zaïres.

  Zaïre now had a shadow government. In addition to the institutions established by the Sovereign National Conference, there were now those put in place by the much more sovereign president. The tremendous work fought for by people like Régine Mutijima now fell prey to the avarice of an old dinosaur. The historical irony was clear to all: in 1960 and again in 1965, Mobutu’s coups had been staged in response to Joseph Kasavubu’s twice appointing a prime minister of his own beside the democratically elected one (Joseph Ileo versus Lumumba in 1960, Évariste Kimba versus Tshombe in 1965); Mobutu was now doing the very same thing. This insufferable impasse was to last one year. Transnational organizations recognized the seriousness of the situation and feared an escalation like the one after independence. To negotiate a compromise, the Organization for African Unity and the United Nations sent emissaries to Kinshasa. That compromise was finally found in the form of a superparliament with seven hundred members, comprising two parallel bodies: the parliament approved by the Sovereign National Conference and the one imposed by the dictatorship. Within the rather clumsily named Haut Conseil de la République–Parlement de Transition (HCR–PT), the Mobutu faction held a majority. In July 1994 the prime ministership went again to Léon Kengo wa Dondo, a man of Polish-Congolese origin who had led two relatively stable governments in the 1980s and implemented the IMF’s structural adjustments. That made him acceptable to the international community; the Zaïrians themselves, however, had chilling memories of those years of spending cuts. Kengo never caused their hearts to leap in hope, the way Tshisekedi had. It was now his job to lead the country toward the elections originally projected for 1995; in 1995, however, they were postponed until 1997.

  With this new construction (a parliament that listened to him, a prime minister who did not obstruct him, elections that were not going to happen tomorrow), Mobutu seemed to have once again saved his skin. Yet that was only appearance; Zaïre, the country he had unified and made grand, was gradually falling apart. In Kasai, the people refused to use the new currency, the nouveau zaïre: within that autonomous currency zone now lurked the threat of a new secession.32 In Katanga ethnic violence between the original inhabitants and the Luba migrants from Kasai had flared up again, due to the outright racism of provincial governor Kyungu wa Kumwanza, who dreamed of an independent Katanga and took an advance on that dream by running tens of thousands of immigrants out of the region. The worst violence, though, was seen in North Kivu. There the Banyarwanda, the Rwandan-speaking population, were increasingly seen as undesirable immigrants who unrightfully claimed wealth, land, and power. Most of them had settled in Congo between 1959 and 1962, in response to rioting in their own country. As long as Bisengimana Rwema, the father of the young man I spoke to on that boat on Lake Kivu, remained Mobutu’s cabinet chief, these Rwandan-speakers (mostly Tutsis) were seen as full
Zaïrians and received the Zaïrian nationality quite easily. But a new law in 1981 purposely tightened the criteria for naturalization, and from 1990 the goal was to get rid of these Tutsi immigrants. The Banyarwanda were to Kivu what the Baluba had been to Katanga: undesirable elements, intruders, outsiders, profiteers, foreigners, people who didn’t belong. Rwandais became a term of derision. Children sang: “All Rwandans should go home, we don’t want them anymore.”33 The animosity between Zaïrians and “the Rwandese” grew to such heights that nationalistic militias arose, the Mai-mai. These ad hoc paramilitary groups were in favor of armed resistance against all foreign influences. They drew on the Simbas of 1964 for their bizarre rituals, but this time the enemy was not Mobutu and his Western allies, but the “immigrants” from the east.

  “Je suis zaïrois!” a Mai-mai veteran told me proudly in December 2008, eleven years after his country had changed its name back to Congo. “At first we got along well with the Banyarwanda, but then they tried to eliminate the Hunde, the Tembo, and the Nyanga. I’m a Hunde. The Banyarwanda locked the Hunde up in their houses and burned them down.” The conflict, in essence, was about land. Rwanda and Kivu are Africa’s most densely inhabited agricultural regions. “It started in 1993. We became Mai-mai. To do that you had to belong to the Bantu race, you had to be highly patriotic and baptized with our special water. You received a ritual scar, traditional potions, and medicinal plants. Stealing and raping was forbidden. There was no raping back then. We adapted the rifles we usually used for bird hunting. We had no alternative. The Banyarwanda were foreigners who wanted to annex North Kivu as part of Rwanda.” Overcrowding, poverty, and an absentee state made for a deadly cocktail. In 1993 the tensions in North Kivu led to campaigns of ethnic cleansing that killed at least four thousand, by some accounts as many as twenty thousand, people.34 “Oh, I took part in at least forty battles myself.”35