Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  Discouraged by these thoughts, I began watching the landscape down below, and once again was hypnotized by the awesome tables and folds of earth. There was the natural, and there was the man-made.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Golden Bough

  The easiest way back to Abidjan was a return flight from Brazzaville. So we decided to go home just the way we had come, taking the westbound ferry back across the Congo River and stopping off for a few days. I wanted to reacquaint myself with a country I had known well a decade earlier, when I had visited often as a translator at World Health Organization conferences, and later as a journalist.

  As the ferry made its return passage, I recognized the same languid Zairian rumbas playing on the tinny speakers on the open deck above that I had heard from my seat in the cabin on my way to Kinshasa. As the boat rocked gently and its engines chugged against the river’s strong currents, cutting silently through huge clusters of floating hyacinths, instead of the deep anxiety I had felt a couple of weeks before, I found myself fighting off sleep.

  Somnolence seemed like an altogether appropriate state for my return to Congo-Brazzaville. Other than an intense but brief burst of killing during the country’s transition from its Central African variant of “Marxism” to an equally tropical form of “democracy” back in 1992, nothing much ever seemed to happen here. Indeed, bored foreigners often joked about the place, calling it Rip Van Winkle’s village, because of its reputation for immutable sleepiness.

  The broad boulevards cut decades ago by the French during colonial times were filled as ever with sand. The polio-afflicted beggars with their loopy limbs and wooden crutches gathered in clusters at the stoplights, just as I had remembered them. And you could still set your watch by the abrupt halt to business activity at the start of the noon-time siesta.

  I had been rereading one of my favorite novelists, the Congolese author Sony Labou Tansi, and having heard that he was secluded in a village somewhere, together with his wife, Pierrette, both of them dying of AIDS, I was thinking of trying to find him.

  If an African god had set out to make a country, a land resembling the Congo would not be an unlikely result. Zaire next door had always been spoken of as Africa’s “geological scandal,” because of its disproportionate share of the continent’s mineral wealth, but the real scandal was here, and it merely began with minerals. This little country seemed rich in just about every way that nature allowed—large oil deposits, huge expanses of virgin tropical forests, untouched minerals of just about every kind, great rivers, the sea. Congo-Brazzaville was as big as Montana and almost as empty, with barely two million souls to share all of this wealth. But in the end, the folly of the country’s leaders, propelled by the boundless greed of outsiders, proved too much to overcome in spite of the innate wealth.

  Governance in Congo had been as deranged as any other in Africa, but the place was too small ever to command much attention. The dividends it paid to its benefactors in France, the former colonial master, were too generous for them to complain about the political mess. Indeed, the French had long profited from the chaos by deftly pulling the strings. Most of all, Congo had remained obscure because it never had a dictator like Mobutu, who dominated the much larger country next door, commanding attention on the world stage with his solicitude toward the West during the Cold War and through his outrageously colorful style. When Congo-Brazzaville did rouse itself from long bouts of quiet, the place became very complicated.

  At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was squeezed out of Zaire—then also confusingly known as the Congo—in the CIABACKED coup that overthrew Patrice Emery Lumumba in 1960. It is hard to imagine world powers competing fiercely for influence anywhere in today’s Africa, but in the 1960s intense rivalry was the name of the game all over the continent. So when a group of young officers in Brazzaville took power in a 1968 coup, creating the purest version Africa had yet seen of a Marxist-Leninist state, Moscow rushed in with aid and advisors, seeking the much smaller, former French Congo as its consolation prize.

  The heavy industrial and agricultural machinery sent to Congo was intended to turn the country into the Soviet Union’s showcase in the region. Moscow was about to learn that among the political forces at work in Central Africa, entropy has few rivals, least of all an imported ideology from the cold lands of the north called Marxism. For the Russians, even with all of the latent and unexploited wealth of Congo-Brazzaville at hand, trying to create a New Man there would prove as futile as it had back home.

  The French at least had the advantage of their lengthy colonial experience, which allowed them to better understand the Congolese. When commercially viable quantities of oil began to be discovered in Congo in the early 1970s, Paris easily outmaneuvered Moscow, restoring what it called relations privilégiés with the country that had been the base of the Free French forces during World War II.

  For all of the Soviet Union’s advisors, for all the MiGs that took off and landed at the airports in Brazzaville and Pointe Noire, lending the leadership a macho blush of power, for all of the model farms created and for all of the monuments to Marx and the streets named for Lenin, the French had an answer. It was a softer, more seductive form of power, something called joie de vivre—bespoke suits, les meilleurs crus, haute cuisine, hôtels particuliers on Paris’s most prestigious boulevards for the richest—and the Congolese elites, like their peers just about everywhere else in Central Africa, lapped it up.

  Once the oil began flowing in earnest, nothing but fat years seemed to lie ahead for this obscure little land, but in fact, all the pieces were in place for a big fall. The country’s predicament was part of a recurring drama in Africa, where the outside world’s lust for some raw material, be it rubber, timber, cocoa, cotton, uranium or oil, knocks a society off balance and sends it careering into disintegration. The basket cases of tomorrow can be fairly easily predicted today. One need only glimpse quickly at the oil rushes under way in Equatorial Guinea, Chad and Angola or, on a smaller scale, at the scramble in eastern Congo for exotic minerals, like coltan (there was also a fad among Japanese for African ivory for use in carved personal seals in the 1980s), to sense the approaching disaster. And yet the consequences of this commercial predation are no more debated today than in the time of Leopold; perhaps less.

  In Congo, the beginning of the end was ushered in by Denis Sassou-Nguesso, a strikingly handsome army officer with a keen taste for the good life. It has long been said that even tinier, oil-rich Gabon next door was the world’s leader in per capita champagne consumption. But surely under Sassou, Congo’s Pierre Cardin Marxists were not far behind.

  After a brief interim, Sassou had succeeded Marien Ngouabi, a more earnest communist who was mysteriously assassinated in 1977, just as the petroleum boom was starting, and under the new leader it wasn’t long before an arrangement was reached that seemed to leave all the big players happy. Congo’s communist elite went through the motions of Marxism-Leninism, holding as many plenums and Central Committee purges as it wished. For many, ideology became a hair-splitting, almost religious obsession, allowing leaders and party cadres to live up to the Congolese reputation, built up by generations of brilliant sculptors, musicians, priests and writers, for creative imagination. The Russians contented themselves with the country’s Marxist label, and with its supportive votes at the United Nations. Paris’s main demand—and it was one that the Congolese elite, never too keen on dirtying its hands in the battle for national construction in the first place, was only too eager to grant—was to stay out of the way while Frenchmen ran the oil industry.

  In its own absurd and tragic way, Congo functioned reasonably well like this for nearly two decades, on the surface, at least. The Marxist leaders ran a tightly policed dictatorship, providing meager but steady returns to the population while they and their foreign partners salted away billions of dollars worth of oil revenues in Western banks and luxury real estate in Paris, Switzerland and the French Riviera.

&n
bsp; “Your situation is rich with rewards. But you’ll have to be resourceful,” a minister of national education instructed a newly appointed minister of health in a telling passage in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel of the wretched excesses of sudden wealth and absolute power, La Vie et Demie. “A minister is made from his 20 percent share in the expenditures of his ministry. If you are clever, you can even tease that figure up to 30 percent, even 40 percent. . . . You must build things. We build all the time, because building pays the minister. In short, be daring and you will see how little streams turn into big rivers.”

  A hallucinatory tale that remains purposely ambiguous about the identity of the country where its action takes place, the novel speaks equally well to the situation of both its author’s native Congo and of Zaire. The only thing is that in both countries, as ruin set in like a bad case of gangrene, the greed grew so intense that ministers were soon too busy stealing to build anything at all.

  In a brief foreword to La Vie et Demie, which was published in 1979, Tansi calls his work an attempt to see “tomorrow with the eyes of today.” In a reference to the repression on both sides of the Congo River that prevented artists like himself from describing their countries’ situations more openly, he writes, “when the occasion comes to speak of the present day, I won’t take such a roundabout path; nothing, in any event, so torturous as a fable.”

  From the time of brutal tribal kingdoms that competed with one another to sell slaves to the Europeans, to European colonization itself, with its forced labor and Draconian punishments for failure to meet production quotas for things like rubber or cotton, the Congolese people had never known a good deal. Strong-arm tactics were used to keep intellectuals quiet during the Marxist era, too, and few others were inclined to complain during this period, when amazingly, the majority of the population was kept on the public payroll. In effect, the latest triumph of the Congolese imagination was building a workers’ state without workers. But despite having absorbed the worst lessons from Moscow (including dictatorship of the proletariat and hopelessly inefficient heavy industry) and from Paris (limitless bureaucracy and Latin-style corruption), as long as ever more oil kept flowing, the semblance of a functioning state could be maintained.

  “This was the capital of l’Afrique Centrale Française, so what did the French do when they set up here? They put all the elite grandes écoles for Central Africa here and began training bureaucrats and officials,” said an American diplomat whose cynicism was the fruit of several tours in the region. “Then the Soviets came, and the Congolese who already had a centralized state began adopting the idea that the government does everything for the people.

  “I served here through some of the period of Marxism-Leninism and Scientific Socialism, and even then it struck me as a bunch of baloney. I don’t think that Sassou and his friends believed any of it, not for even a minute. It was simply a wonderful tool for maintaining control, and it coincided perfectly with the tribal model that everyone here already knew inherently: The leader is chosen through some form of consensus, but rules with a pretty heavy hand. Under the old system, whenever you had an enemy, you accused him of sorcery. Under communism you call it deviation from the ideological line, and you purge him. The results are the same: liquidation, banishment or reeducation.”

  One such victim was Bernard Kolelas, the mayor of Brazzaville and a leader of the Bakongo ethnic group. Kolelas was a voluble and head-strong politician whose messianic crusade against one-party dictatorship was fueled in equal parts by Christian zeal and by his outsized ego. “Nine times I was arrested for speaking out against totalitarianism,” Kolelas told me in his spacious Brazzaville home, which was heavily guarded by unsmiling youths with machine guns. “They would keep me tied up from morning till night, and torture me with an electric cable.”

  This treatment may not have kept Kolelas quiet for long, but most other Congolese got the message, and sought refuge in beer and palm wine, in the loose and easy sensuality of this land near the equator, or if they couldn’t bear it at all, in exile. But as well as it seemed to work for a while, the Congolese system was just as surely never built to last. Oil prices fell throughout the late 1980s, creating huge problems for a state that had grown addicted to the manna. Simply put, no one had made provisions for declining oil prices or for declining reserves.

  By the time the bottom finally fell out at the start of the 1990s, the little Congo that hardly anybody had ever heard of accounted for one quarter of the French state-owned oil giant Elf Aquitaine’s proven reserves, and according to many estimates, an even higher percentage of the firm’s profits. “They didn’t know a thing about the oil business and let the foreign companies define all of the terms,” an American diplomat said. “Throughout this period, Elf was the leader, and all they had to do was deal with Sassou and a few other people, buying them off at a fairly modest price. We are talking about a few tens of millions of dollars skimmed off of the top.”

  So what do you do when you can no longer pay salaries in a country full of civil servants? In February 1991, after Congo had been refused new credits by France and by the International Monetary Fund, Sassou convened an extraordinary meeting that he called the Sovereign National Conference to discuss the jam he had gotten himself into. An unprecedented debate about the state of the nation took place there, one that was intended to lance the boil of public discontent, while reinforcing Sassou’s rule. But instead the conference turned into a raucous, three-month-long trial of the communist leadership.

  “The national conference basically boiled down to one central question,” said Kolelas. “The people said that we have been laboring all of these years and you’ve been pocketing our money. We refuse to go along with a system like that any longer. There’s no point in working anymore.”

  Sensing that he could not hold on much longer, Sassou boldly sought to get out in front of history by volunteering to become a figurehead transitional president, and hence reinventing himself, however improbably, as the father of Congolese democracy.

  Next door, giant Zaire was becoming the spectacle of Africa, steadily disintegrating while Mobutu, a recluse in his village palace in Gbadolité, clung to power. Meanwhile, unnoticed amid the attention lavished on an Eastern Europe that was suddenly casting off its communist dictatorships, Congo-Brazzaville was joining a small club of African nations—initially including Mali and Benin—that, without foreign help or fanfare, were “going democratic,” as largely peaceful civic movements brought down longstanding dictatorships.

  Congo’s brief democratic experiment and its collapse turned out to be deeply influential, not least in once-mighty Zaire. Looking back now, the obvious lesson to be learned from this—whether or not it has been grasped—is that in Africa, both big advances and huge disasters often begin in small countries. Congo’s democratic honeymoon ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. As would prove the case in country after country in Africa in the 1990s, the experience was derailed by regional, and then, even more narrowly, by ethnic and then, finally, by tribal efforts to monopolize power, accompanied by bloodshed and warlordism. Without sturdy institutions, and with little experience in the rule of law—problems whose roots go back to colonial rule— politics was reduced to a game of ethnic brokerage.

  Here and there, fledgling democracies quickly assumed a sectarian hue, as, for example, when predominantly Christian southerners united against northern Muslims in Ivory Coast, or when Muslim majorities in northern Nigeria interpreted majority rule to mean that they were justified in imposing strict Sharia Islamic law in the states they controlled. In Congo-Brazzaville, officers from the sparsely populated north had dominated during the oil boom years, and when the Sovereign National Conference chased Sassou from power, southerners rejoiced, uniting briefly around a simple but potent theme commonly heard all over an ethnically splintered continent: It’s our turn.

  “After the disaster of one-party rule we had the tragedy of democracy, and it has lasted so far for three years,” sai
d Emmanuel Dongala, a Congolese novelist I went to see to talk about Sony Labou Tansi and about the state of his country. “We went straight from dictatorship to multiparty politics without any transition. The attitude was, Aghh, the old regime has fallen and the northerners are gone. Now it is our turn to hoard all of the money, to have the most beautiful women and to drive the fanciest cars. The rude awakening that we had here was to learn that in Africa political parties are still composed on the basis of the lowest common denominator, and for the Congolese, that still means the ethnic group.”

  With Congo producing an alphabet soup of political parties, each pretty much organized along ethnic lines—and sometimes consisting of nothing more than a clan leader and his extended family—the handwriting of this country’s demise was written on the wall for all to see. Pascal Lissouba, a southerner, a thick-spectacled Marxist with a background in plant genetics, won election as president. Sassou complained that his supporters had not been given enough jobs and refused to participate in any multiparty “unity government.” The former president then made common cause with Kolelas, making Lissouba’s party the minority in government and setting the stage for the first battle for Brazzaville in 1993.

  Almost no one outside of Central Africa, except perhaps France, paid any heed to the urban warfare in Brazzaville, which pitted the president’s militiamen against Kolelas’s private army, but the fighting showed as much resourcefulness in its disregard for human life as any war in recent memory. For weeks, rival gangs composed of soldiers and neighborhood toughs pounded one another and residents of the city with anti-aircraft guns and heavy artillery aimed at one another’s neighborhoods.

  “It all began when the Aubervillois led a charge into the Bakongo neighborhood, bashing and banging for a day and a half with heavy-caliber field guns that didn’t have any business being used in a city,” a foreign diplomat told me, in a reference to Lissouba’s militia. “Kolelas’s people, the Lari, responded by cutting off the railroad lines that came in from the coast, and then going after Lissouba’s people with equal viciousness in the streets of Brazzaville. The fighting didn’t end until pretty much everybody in Brazzaville had lost an uncle or a brother or a nephew. This had always been a country where people from different groups intermarried, and it was an amazing thing to watch the hatreds boil over. You have to wonder now if it can ever be put back in the bottle.”