An Incomplete Education

by Judy Jones

  THE LAYOUT: First, let’s be clear: There are two African Congos. The smaller, sleepier Republic of Congo (RC), a.k.a. Congo-Brazzaville, was formerly the French colony known as Middle Congo, a part of French Equatorial Africa. To the southeast, just across the Congo River, lies the larger, relatively more hellish, and quite laughably named Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a.k.a. Congo-Kinshasa, formerly known as Zaire and before that as the Belgian Congo. Occupying the heart of central Africa and the belly of the continent, the DRC is what everybody thinks of when they think “darkest Africa.” It straddles the equator in the north and is full of the kinds of terrain familiar from old Tarzan movies—mile after mile of steamy tropical rain forest at the center, swampy grasslands in the north, high savannahs in the south, and in the far eastern regions volcanoes and jungle-covered mountains that rise majestically through the mists, providing a picturesque home for the world’s remaining mountain gorillas and a home away from home for guerrillas from neighboring Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi. The land is crisscrossed by many muddy, croc-filled rivers, all tributaries of the 2,733-mile-long Congo River, which, though dangerous and frequently unnavigable, is the closest thing DRC has to a superhighway. Although the country is loaded with natural resources above ground and vast mineral wealth below, fifty-six million Congolese live near the very bottom of the world’s misery indices.

  THE SYSTEM: Dictatorship supposedly in transition to representative government, but don’t hold your breath. The interim government stitched together by President Joseph Kabila in 2003 is an uneasy power-sharing arrangement between former combat enemies, none of whom is dim-witted enough to trust the others. Since elections are planned for the summer of 2006, in a vast, dysfunctional country that lacks roads, railways, functioning laws, basic services, and a voting public (the last election was back in 1960, and anyway, these days a substantial number of Congolese are too busy foraging for edible roots and fighting off plague to vote) but is well stocked with armed profiteers who would prefer that elections not take place at all, what currently passes for Congo’s “system” may have morphed into something worse or simply been blasted out of existence by the time you read this. For the moment, at least some of the DRC is governed by the president, who shares power, sort of, with four vice presidents—including one from each of the two main rebel movements, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), backed by Rwanda, and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), backed by Uganda, and one from the civilian opposition. A thirty-five-member transitional cabinet is meticulously if not productively divided among the leaders of the country’s many factions. The eastern region of the DRC is still controlled by whichever rebel group or tribal militia gets lucky on a given day. Ten provinces and the capital of Kinshasa have their own governors. There are about 250 known ethnic groups: The official language is French, but Swahili, Lingala, Kikongo, and at least seven hundred local dialects are also spoken here.

  WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That the conflict known as “Africa’s world war” broke out in the DRC in 1998, sucked in six neighboring African countries, killed a conservatively estimated 3.8 million Congolese, and is still causing about a thousand civilian deaths a day in the eastern regions, despite an official end to hostilities in 2003. The war has been aptly summarized as being “partly about ethnic hatreds but mostly about loot.” Don’t be surprised if you have trouble keeping the combatants straight—even the ones who don’t go into battle wearing dresses have complex agendas and serious identity issues. There are, for instance, the Interahamwe, the Hutu militias blamed for the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis next door in Rwanda. The Interahamwe are said to have sparked the Congolese war when they escaped across the border into the DRC, indistinguishable from a million and a half more or less innocent Hutu refugees who fled the advancing Tutsi army. In 1998, Rwanda and Uganda invaded the DRC with help from Burundi, ostensibly to stop the Interahamwe from launching attacks from inside Congolese territory but also, as it turned out, to massacre as many Hutu refugees as possible and install a Tutsi-friendly regime in the DRC. The Western powers, feeling sheepish about their failure to stop the Rwandan genocide, bent over backward to support the Tutsis, even after it became clear that the latter were out for revenge and a genocide of their own. Finally, the governments of Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe jumped in to defend the Congolese regime, partly because the DRC is critical to the stability of the entire region, but also, in the case of the Zimbabweans, because engagement gave them—along with the Rwandans, Ugandans, Burundians, Congolese warlords, government ministers, and at least eighty-five known multinational corporations—a chance to plunder the DRC’s vast resources at their leisure.

  Oh and by the way, if you’re reading English-language newspapers, brace yourself for the inevitable allusions to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

  WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A CONGOLESE: How to party down with someone who’s suffering from disease, malnutrition, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Try a little tenderness. If your date is a woman, she may have been gang-raped by rebel soldiers on her way to meet you, especially if you’ve arranged a rendezvous outside one of the squalid refugee camps where some of the two million or so internally displaced Congolese huddle in tents, waiting for supplies that never arrive. If your date’s a man, congratulations on having found a live one!Let’s hope he’s younger than forty, which is the average life expectancy of a Congolese man these days. Keep an eye on your guy. If he shows up wearing a piece of garden hose as a necklace, he’s probably a Mai-Mai. They’re the rabidly anti-Rwandan teenage militia fighters who are still tearing it up all over Ituri province, near the Rwandan border. The Mai-Mai are convinced that magic water protects them from bullets and allows them to fly. They also like to pump up for the next round by cannibalizing their enemies, but around here, who doesn’t?

  If you date a civilian, he might work as forced labor in the mines, illegally extracting diamonds, gold, or the ever-more-valuable coltan, a mineral used in cell phones, to be smuggled out of the country. Other than that, employment opportunities are pretty much limited to raising cassava behind your hut or selling plastic flip-flops from a bicycle. The average Congolese who earns money at all earns about a dollar a day in the better neighborhoods, eighteen cents a day in the war-torn east. Don’t expect big meals, but do expect to party, no matter how wretched your date’s condition. Congolese music is legendary, and although the war destroyed Kinshasa’s music industry, wildly popular ndombolo is still played and danced everywhere.

  Do you need to be reminded to practice safe sex? You’re in AIDS country. We’d shock you with the dizzying HIV rates but, what with the ubiquity of rape these days and the fact that so much of the populace is already out sick with polio, malaria, and plague or just terminally run down, most humanitarian organizations won’t even hazard a guess.

  WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: If you’re American, you may be called upon to explain why the CIA backed Joseph Mobutu’s (later known as Mobutu Sese Seko) overthrow of Patrice Lumumba a year after Lumumba won Congo’s first national elections. That one’s easy. It was the Cold War, the DRC was strategically positioned, and we couldn’t let a suspected Commie sympathizer like Lumumba run the country, could we? And why did we spend the next thirty years propping up the kleptocracy of Mobutu, despite his questionable taste in hats and the unbridled enthusiasm with which he pursued the World’s Most Corrupt and Repressive Dictator award? That’s a no-brainer: He was on our side. Remind your date’s parents that once the Cold War was over, we began to feel uncomfortable with Mobutu’s international image and in 1997, when rebel armies were about to march on Kinshasa, we made it clear to him that he no longer had our support. It wasn’t our fault that Laurent Desiré Kabila, the thuggish, Rwandan-backed rebel leader whom we helped put in his place, turned out to be just as bad. Anyway, no harm done—or not that much; Kabila was assassinated just a year later.

  Point out to your date’s pa
rents (trying not to sound too patronizing) that Congo’s troubles really started back in 1885, when Belgium’s King Leopold II tricked the European powers carving up the African continent into letting him claim most of the Congo River basin as his personal property. Having convinced them that he was on a humanitarian mission to halt slavery in the region and make the heart of Africa safe for Christianity and capitalism, Leopold turned his Congo Free State into a forced-labor camp from which he extracted a fortune in wild rubber. His agents raped, murdered, and routinely cut off the hands of those who failed to meet their daily rubber quotas; an estimated ten million Africans died under his rule. (But surely your date’s parents can be proud of the fact that Leopold’s brutality gave rise to the world’s first mass human rights movement!) In 1907, faced with international scandal, the Belgian state took over. It renamed the country the Belgian Congo and ran it as a colony until 1960, when riots and unrest caused the Belgian government to hurriedly grant Congo independence and head for the airport.

  Now, as you squat together in the dense jungle underbrush, sharing stories instead of food, keeping an eye out for boys carrying AK-47s, and soothing the brows of plague-ridden relatives, you can remind your date’s parents that, here in the Congo, things could be worse. ETHIOPIA

  THE LAYOUT: Ethiopia used to stand tall, even without shoes. Located in the Horn of Africa, just across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, it was a venerable Christian stronghold flanked by Muslim states, with its feet planted firmly in black Africa and its face turned toward the Middle East. Later, it became a militant Marxist outpost in spine-tingling proximity to the Suez Canal. Then the country’s sense of geographical identity, already under stress from its loss of strategic importance at the end of the Cold War, took a further hammering in 1993, when Eritrea, the northern coastal province that provided Ethiopia’s only access to the sea, formally won its thirty-year battle for independence. Now all one can safely say about Ethiopia is that it’s got a lot of mountains. Ethiopia is one of only two black African countries—Liberia is the other—that largely escaped colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Italy invaded in 1895 but, having been thoroughly trounced in the ensuing war with the locals, was forced to content itself with colonizing Eritrea.) But in this case, owning your own country hasn’t turned out to be all that much fun. Primarily a high central plateau seamed with deep valleys and fringed by semi-desert, Ethiopia is, as one freaked-out traveler put it, “a terrain of crag and precipice, where Nature seems to have lost her temper with the landscape or to have become demented.” It is, at any rate, the kind of radically divisive topography that makes tribal warfare seem like a sensible alternative to recipe-swapping among the nation’s eighty or so different ethnic groups. It has also encouraged Ethiopians to lose touch with the outside world—and their leaders to lose touch with reality—for centuries at a time.

  THE SYSTEM: As of when the constitution was adopted in 1994, a federal republic (officially, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia) comprising nine ethnically based regions, each of which has considerable autonomy and the right to secede. At the federal level, there are a president elected for six years, a prime minister who heads the government and selects the Council of Ministers, a bicameral parliament, a supreme court, and enough political parties to grind every ax in a spectacularly fractious land. It all looks promising on paper, but of course, none of it actually works. And really, why should it? Ethiopia, formerly known as Abyssinia, was just your average biblical empire until 1974. That was when Emperor Haile Selassie (whose name, reggae fans, was Ras Tafari up until his 1930 coronation), who claimed royal descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, was deposed (and later strangled in his bed) by the Provisional Military Administrative Council, better known as the Dergue. For the next few years, the Dergue busied itself replacing Selassie’s feudal state with “scientific socialism,” a one-party Marxist system complete with collective farms, nationalized property, and a government stranglehold on the economy. Bitter infighting among the Dergue’s 120 members led, in 1977, to a shoot-out from which Colonel Mengistu Mariam emerged as the country’s leader. Mengistu’s rule, characterized by militant Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy coupled with a short-man complex, lasted for seventeen years and earned him the nickname “the black Stalin.” During this period, he managed to build the largest standing army in black Africa, which, with the help of Soviet weapons and Cuban troops, allowed him to keep a lid on the rebellions percolating in virtually every Ethiopian province. Finally, in 1991, with the Soviet Union no longer around to back him up, Mengistu was routed by a loose coalition of rebel groups calling itself the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and forced to catch the next flight to Zimbabwe, where he’d been scouting real estate for some time. Since then the EPRDF, which took over a country that, oops, suddenly lacked an army, navy, air force, police department, money, or anything resembling an infrastructure, has been struggling—with limited success and a questionable human-rights record—to keep Ethiopia from splintering into warring ethnic groups. Of course, all this may have changed by the time you read this; the the EPRDF’s claim that it won the 2005 election, amid charges of election fraud, brought violent protests and a brutal clampdown by the government. So it may be back to the old brutally-repressive-government cauldron for a nation that, for a little while, seemed to have to cope with only famine, extreme poverty, centuries-old ethnic resentments, and fallout from violence in nearly every neighboring country.

  WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That from the end of the Cold War, which destroyed the country’s standing as the Western powers’ strategic outpost in the Horn of Africa, to the massive violence that followed the 2005 elections, you had to turn to at least page sixty in the major newspapers (forget about your local ones) to find out whether there even was an Ethiopia anymore. In the absence of accessible oil or mineral reserves, only the threat of another world-class famine, as there was in 2003, seemed sufficient to attract the attention of the Western press—and even then, journalists seemed less interested in the potential starvation of millions than in the possibility of a sequel to 1984’s Live Aid concert. Things have picked up, however, since we became obsessed with violent Islamic fundamentalism. Ethiopia’s surrounded by it.

  It’s true that, since the overthrow of Mengistu, hundreds of newspapers have come into print. Unfortunately, hundreds of journalists have also been killed, jailed, or exiled for writing about the EPRDF’s stunningly unsuccessful relocation program, in which thousands of subsistence farmers were transported from the deforested, eroded soil of the central plateau to the outlying mosquito- and tsetse-fly-infested lowlands near the Sudan border, where hardly any of the promised resources awaited them and from which they were quickly bused back home again, weighing even less than before. Nor will you see many accounts of the battles raging in the western Gambella region, where the indigenous Anuak have been ambushing the more recently arrived Highlanders and are being, observers say, ethnically cleansed in return. Meanwhile, on the (entirely government-controlled) radio and TV (and yes, there are plenty of TV antennas flying above those decrepit huts) you may be treated to reports of the new landscaping in Addis Ababa, part of the city’s ongoing bid to be the capital of Pan-Africanism and of Ethiopia’s never-ending struggle to attract foreign development funds instead of just emergency ones.

  By the way, should you decide to turn to the Arab or Muslim African newspapers for global awareness, you will, sooner or later, learn of the dastardly Israeli/Ethiopian plot to steal the life-giving waters of the Nile. As the story goes, the two governments have for some time been conspiring to build dams that will divert the water currently shared with Egypt and Sudan. Expect this paranoid thread to appear as a hard news “account” every time an Israeli minister, diplomat, or grandmother (remember all those Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to Israel during the war with Eritrea) gets off a plane in Addis Ababa.