Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  What followed instead, under the self-ennobling banner of “the white man’s burden”—an avowed mission to end slavery in Africa and bring civilization to a supposedly dark continent—was in truth one of history’s greatest rapes. Farming was made a crime wherever African labor was needed for rubber cultivation, and men who did not produce enough had their hands chopped off. But instead of trailing shame and guilt through the ages, this rape has mostly bequeathed to us tales of Western heroism.

  Explorers like Henry Morton Stanley are still celebrated with stories about their great exploits, while the details of how he made Leopold’s conquest possible, by driving long columns of heavily chained Africans to their death as they bore his boats and guns and supplies through the great forests of the Congo River basin, are forgotten. Stanley was, in fact, something of a sadist, and was known for shooting Africans on a whim, simply because he didn’t like the way they looked at him. Westerners have forgotten these truths, basking instead in the comforting myth of our civilizing mission, but unsentimental memories of Stanley live on with the Congolese, who even today remember him as Bula Matari, or the Stone Crusher, because of the murderous way he drove press gangs to forge roads where there had once been primordial rain forest and immense boulders.

  Sheer greed and a shocking lack of what we might identify today as humanity drove the Belgian enterprise in Congo, like so much of the early European imperial exploitation of Africa, and the more carefully one examines the record of Leopold’s behavior, the more it comes to resemble pure evil.

  In little more than a generation, the Belgian king’s yearning for empire and fortune may have killed ten million people in the territory—half of Congo’s population, or more than the entire death toll in World War I. Even today Japan continues to face international ostracism for its brutal imperial conduct in China, Korea and other parts of Asia in the 1930s, which followed Leopold’s Congo holocaust by a mere two decades. And yet there has never been any remorse in the West over the fallout from Europe’s drive to dominate Africa. Indeed, few have heard these grim facts.

  In view of the vastly larger scale of Leopold’s atrocities, it is worth asking how he escaped remembrance alongside Hitler and Stalin as great criminals of the twentieth century. If Leopold’s legacy had been millions of deaths alone, the impact of Belgium’s takeover of the Congo would have been horrible enough. But the Belgians also created a tragic example of governance, essentially teaching Zairians that authority confers the power to steal.2 And the practical corollary to this lesson was that the bigger the title, the bigger the theft.

  For an entire generation of Congolese, Mobutu had been the undisputed heavyweight champion of this organized larceny, and although everyone knew what he was up to—a French minister once aptly described him as a “walking bank vault in a leopard skin cap”—he remained the West’s favorite partner in Africa to the bitter end.

  In the image of Leopold, Mobutu looted the copper and cobalt wealth of Shaba Province until industrial-scale mining all but ceased to function. His next El Dorado was the diamond fields of East Kasai. When the famously rebellious East Kasaians entered into a state of near revolt, refusing even to accept a newly issued “national” currency, Mobutu focused his greed on Kilo Moto, the fabulously rich mine in Zaire’s remote northeastern corner that would temporarily slake what had become an unquenchable thirst. Kilo Moto became known as the president’s very own gold mine, and though it does not excuse him to say so, Mobutu was clearly following in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor, Leopold II, staking out a personal claim to the wealth of an entire region.

  On the morning of our river crossing from Brazzaville to Kinshasa, the memories of troubles on our previous trip seemed almost quaint amid the air of hysteria produced by the rush of foreigners—journalists, doctors and relief officials—all seeking a piece of the action in the Ebola outbreak.

  The word “Zaire” is a corruption of “Nzere,” the name for the Congo River in a local language, which means “the river that swallows all other rivers,” and the moniker could hardly be more appropriate. In the generalized absence of roads, the Congo has always been the country’s lifeline. Three thousand miles from end to end, its watershed covers over a million square miles and includes over seven thousand miles of navigable tributaries. Between Brazzaville and Kinshasa, the world’s closest capitals, the river is as broad as a lake, and though its appearance is leaden, even strangely solid in spots, its currents are notoriously strong. Our own docking maneuvers required heading upstream a good way, taking us well beyond our final berth, past a large fleet of huge freighters.

  In this once-booming land, the ships were the equivalent of a rail stock and tractor-trailer fleet wrapped into one. But they were all badly rusted now, immobilized by an economy that with each passing day was growing more informal. Some had turned into floating apartment buildings, and here and there, men could be seen on their decks, squatting naked, taking their morning baths out of plastic buckets.

  Even in this advanced state of ruin, though, Zaire, or more precisely Kinshasa and its skyscrapers, was an impressive sight from the low vantage point of our battered blue-and-white ferry. Mimicking Leopold once again, Mobutu had dreamed big. For a time, during the 1970s and early 1980s, when I had first visited, Mobutu’s hold on the country, no less than that of his European predecessor, was built on a foundation of seductive, but ultimately outlandish, lies: rehabilitating African culture through a series of gimmicks, like banning neckties and Christian names, and through a demagoguery that promised a state whose power would reflect the country’s immensity. At the height of his glory in those years, the tricked-out carapace of Mobutu’s creation glittered with the illusion of promise. By now, though, every one of the country’s forty-five million citizens bitterly understood that the Mobutu system had never been anything more than an empty shell.

  At its core, Mobutu’s program had consisted of little more than manipulation of symbols, fear and greed. But in the end, it was the president’s outsized, Leopoldian appetites and ambitions that had laid his country low. These days, when Mobutu was not savoring champagne breakfasts in one of his European chateaus, he confined himself to his gaudily overbuilt village, Gbadolité, or to his gleaming white luxury riverboat, the Kamanyola, a ludicrous, James Bond–style prop, with a helicopter parked on its prow. All the while, a keen personality cult cranked out flattering names for him—the Guide, the Helmsman or, in a more atavistic mode, honorifics derived from the names of animals, like the Eagle, and his favorite, the Leopard, which hinted more candidly at his rapaciousness.

  No one had declared Mobutu’s Zaire dead yet, but something definitely smelled, and the country’s decomposition had become an open secret. In the space of a mere year or two, by virtue of processes foreseen by none of the outside parties that had served for so long as Mobutu’s allies and handmaidens—not by the Belgians or the French, not by the World Bank or the United Nations, and it seems not even by the CIA—this gigantic country would become a geopolitical fiction. There would still be a flag and an anthem, to be sure, along with a mortally sick and isolated ruler determined to cling on to the last. But like nature, politics tolerates no vacuums, and politically speaking, Zaire was already becoming an empty pit in the heart of the continent—a pit waiting for someone, by yet another unforeseen process, to fill it up and make the earth level again.

  On this day, however, with sunshine streaking through the looming skyline of downtown apartment complexes and office buildings, it was still possible to sense the immense dreams this land had inspired, and not just the horrible ruin. Indeed, the best gauge was a glance back across the immense river at Brazzaville, ever modest, but now as shrunken and reduced as a postcard portrait. The only building that stood out on the distant shore, in fact, was the headquarters of the Central Bank of Central African States, a creation of France that circulated the CFA franc, a version of the French franc decked out in colorful African disguise, for use in Paris’s former coloni
es. The tall copper-colored tower was a play on famous Central African statuary, and it shimmered from afar like a bronze scimitar, jealously warding off Belgium, or Zaire, or whoever else might be tempted to encroach on France’s preserve. But one tower does not a city make, and it shimmered alone.

  I had taken the precaution of alerting the American Embassy to my arrival, and as a courtesy, they had arranged for an embassy staffer, a Zairian “expediter” named Manzanza, to meet us at the quay. This was unusual procedure for both me and for the embassy, but the diplomat, a woman from the United States Information Service, extended me the courtesy with this comment: “Sure, that makes sense. If we don’t greet you, we’ll have to bail you out when they arrest you anyway.”

  As the scene at the docks came into focus, I rejoiced at my foresight. The Zairian quay, Ngobila Beach, was teeming with people: beggars in tatters, the handicapped smugglers in wheelchairs who spent their lives trafficking across this border, hefty market women wrapped in printed cloth and sweating over the quantity of goods they would have to surrender as “tax” to the vultures from the customs service, and every manner of security personnel, including soldiers, policemen and plainclothes intelligence agents.

  We’d never met before, but Manzanza, who was dressed in the kind of neat two-piece outfit worn by the diplomatic corps’ senior African personnel, spotted us immediately. “Don’t give anything to anyone,” he said, ushering us through the glutinous crowd toward the low-slung buildings with their dark rooms. There the customs and immigration officers waited as grimly as executioners, sure that each arriving passenger would surrender something, in cash or in kind.

  In fact, not all the voyagers paid. Some never even approached the musty barracks, where stacks of used immigration forms, some of them easily a decade old, provided cozy nesting for rats. The big fish that passed this way relied on expediters of their own, known as “protocols” in the zestfully euphemistic lingo of Kinshasa. Some people are more equal than others in every society, but in Central Africa, Mobutu’s Zaire had always provided the most colorful illustrations of this rule, and the protocols were slicksters in loud-colored shirts worn under European jackets, impossibly bold ties and showy gold-rimmed sunglasses.

  While Manzanza haggled, some of the customs officers began to take a worrisome interest in Robert’s cameras, insisting on every imaginable kind of paperwork, from photo permits to sales receipts. It was an obvious prelude to a rip-off. While I watched, with mounting anxiety, one after another huge gilded Mercedes and shiny four-wheel-drive vehicles vroomed into the tightly enclosed space of the immigration retaining area to collect the diamond dealers and cosseted VIPs, who immediately disappeared behind heavily tinted windows. The protocols doled out cash and gifts from their small briefcases, thus ending the formalities. The cars then sped away again as quickly and as suddenly as they had arrived.

  We were receiving a lesson in the way Zaire works, and as much as it offended the broad egalitarian streak in me, I took careful note. Robert and I would never enter or leave Zaire again without some form of reception or escort, be it the major we eventually cultivated at Ndjili airport or, later, the right-hand man of Mobutu’s own son.

  The last time Africa had received the kind of attention that the Ebola outbreak was drawing had been during the Rwandan genocide, and even then, after 800,000 people were slaughtered, the interest abated quickly. More than a million Africans die every year from malaria without raising a peep in the wealthy countries of the world. Struggling for a way to depict the scale of this disaster, the Tanzanian researcher Wen Kilama said, Imagine seven Boeing 747s filled mostly with children crashing into Mount Kilimanjaro each day, and you begin to get an idea of malaria’s horrifying toll. In some African countries, 30 percent or more of the population is infected with AIDS, and yet the common bonds of humanity that are said to exist between us have never drawn the rich and the wretched of the world together in an emergency.

  If “the claim of the stranger—the victim on the TV screen—is the furthest planet in the solar system of our obligations,” as writes the essayist on global conflict and nationalism Michael Ignatieff, crises like these placed Africa somewhere beyond planetary space, consigned alone to a moral Oort Cloud.3

  But the massive hemorrhaging and projectile vomiting associated with Ebola were such cinematically compelling new grist for the world media’s insatiable market in images of horror that African disease was guaranteed a spot on the nightly news for as long as the epidemic lasted. Besides sheer prurience, though, the outside world’s interest was being driven by old-fashioned fright and narrow self-interest. Ebola aroused the fear in America and Europe that in today’s shrunken and interconnected world, a deadly threat like this was only a plane flight away (like the SARS virus) from lives that truly mattered—those of Westerners.

  “Where Africa is concerned, there is a constant search for tragedy with a new face; it’s like what else is new in genocide,” Ali Mazrui, a prominent Kenyan scholar, told me on the telephone a few days into the Ebola panic. “There is a hardened insensitivity to things which happen in Africa which are regarded as on the margin of human importance, even if hundreds of thousands die, which can only be called malignant neglect.”

  All too often, Africa coverage has come to resemble the cowboys and Indians games of my boyhood. We are quick to find heroes in the Westerners who are always seen as rushing to the rescue, while unconsciously concluding that the Africans served better in the role of, at best, passive spectators. We have too often gotten our explanations from the outside experts and the Western diplomats who professionally wander these parts, rushing right past the very subjects of Africa’s dramas, the Africans themselves. I was determined to be different, and yet here I was, just like everyone else, rushing toward another lurid African mess that, thanks to the magic of television, had become the global story of the week.

  Our first day in Kinshasa was spent in a blur of formalities, trying to obtain the necessary letters. Along the way, we successfully navigated the Ministry of Health, which wanted proof that we had received all of the normal vaccinations (no protection, of course, against Ebola), and, above all, the Ministry of Mines, whose authorization (for a $500 fee) signified that we were allowed to visit the zone of epidemic—the western Zairian city of Kikwit—for any purpose, except for mining, that is.

  Dr. Kissi, a Zairian officer at the World Health Organization’s offices in Kinshasa, was hardly reassuring. His advice to us was clear and concise. If you must eat in Kikwit, only eat hot food, or fruits and vegetables that have been carefully washed. And above all, avoid all contact with vomit, feces and urine. “It is important that we keep our neighbors in Kikwit contained where they are while we try to put out this fire,” he said. “If not, the flames will arrive in our own home.” He paused for a second, before adding gravely, “Which is to say, Kinshasa. We are lucky in the sense that the more powerful a virus is, and this one is as strong as they get, the more fragile it becomes. And this virus doesn’t seem to be able to survive outside of the human body for very long, thank God. Because if there is one country that is ill prepared to face a large-scale epidemic, it is Zaire.”

  Dr. Kissi sent us off with those hopeful words, and with the last of our precious letters, and thankfully this time there was no fee. All of the other letters had been painstakingly typed and stamped by mid-ranking officials with a care bordering on reverence. The bureaucrats were so caught up in this farce that they had come to take it seriously themselves, and explained with great solemnity how our growing collection of expensive laissez-passer would assure our freedom of movement and safety even in the farthest hinterlands. Experience, though, had already shown us that in a pinch they were next to worthless. At bottom it was all nothing more than a racket that allowed poorly paid officials to supplement their monthly salaries.

  I had been snared in this Catch-22 so many times already that by now I regarded it as one of those weary, immutable facts of life. You reach your destinat
ion with all of your paperwork just right, only to have some red-eyed official blow smoke in your face and invent yet one more piece of paper that you are supposed to be carrying. Often, there was no way forward except to pay a bribe.

  Outsiders might call it corruption, or perhaps even anarchy, but for Zairians the games officials played with “formalities” was an unremarkable part of what was called “Système D,” for débrouiller, the French verb meaning “to make do.” Stealing was not just all right in Zaire; it had become an absolute imperative—a matter of survival, especially for unpaid officials assigned to distant provinces.

  Early the next morning we drove to Kinshasa’s general aviation airport, which was run-down even by the standards of this run-down country. First and foremost, it was a boneyard, the final resting place for the rusty DC-3s and other workhorses that had flown incredible numbers of hours with minimal maintenance ferrying Mobutu’s troops and his private merchandise—diamonds, gold, pineapples, cassava— around this huge country. Mobutu had largely given up on territorial control by this stage of his rule, having concluded that it was as tedious as it was costly. The one thing that counted, he had concluded belatedly, was control over markets, and from this point of view, the president’s fleet of planes, though barely airworthy, was his most vital asset.

  Every few months one of these loose-riveted aircraft would crash somewhere, typically in a remote forest. It was the kind of thing that people around here shrugged off as happenstance. This casual fatalism changed forever a few months after our trip, though, when the inner-city airport itself was the scene of a dramatic crash: A Russian Antonov running guns and diamonds back and forth to Angola did a belly dive, plowing through the adjacent, zinc-roofed shantytown and killing scores of residents in its huge fireball.