Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  I tried to suspend judgment, but watched in dismay as the people of the city waved and cheered the man most responsible for the country’s miserable fortunes. Then I rushed with my colleagues through the packed streets to get downtown for Taylor’s arrival news conference, the first he had ever held in the city.

  The scene inside the large villa that Taylor had chosen as his temporary residence was almost surreal. The thirty or so reporters allowed in after a huge crush at the heavily armed entrance were ushered into a large room where Taylor’s top aides scurried back and forth, brandishing victory grins and looking busy as they prepared to receive us and to hold a banquet for Taylor immediately afterward.

  Victoria Refell, a tall, domineering Americo-Liberian woman who favored long shaggy Cruella De Vil wigs, spectacularly painted fingernails and heavy makeup, gave the press a lecture about how we should address “the honorable” Mr. Taylor, who, she promised, would be with us in a minute. Most of the reporters were from Liberia’s heavily bled press corps, and they looked frightened and incredulous at finding themselves inside the Boss Man’s home. When Taylor finally walked in, I had a second premonition about how this man would wield power if he ever became president.

  As a child, Taylor had been given the nickname “Bossy” by his schoolmates, because of an already pronounced obsession with authority. By now, no one who had watched him as a warlord could believe in his transformation into a democratic leader. Indeed, his every symbol and gesture—from the gaudy motorcade, followed by praise-singing supporters who ran for miles behind his vehicle, to the Mobutu Sese Seko outfit—presented him as a throwback to the dinosaurs of an earlier era in Africa, the worst of the first-generation leaders of the continent who had built powerful personality cults and clung to power for decades. Liberians were still in rags, but here was a man impeccably coiffed, manicured and groomed, and dressed in a finely tailored two-piece African-style suit with the same kind of Mao-cut jacket popularized by the illustrious Zairian despot.

  Exuding haughty self-contentment, Taylor seated himself in a high-backed rattan chair reminiscent of the one in the famous picture of Black Panther leader Huey Newton. In his hand he held an elaborately carved wooden scepter. When he began to speak it was, as usual, pure bombast. “We must take a moment to thank God,” he said, “for this popular, people’s uprising was, in reality, God’s war.”

  This was the man who had revolutionized warfare in Africa by making generalized use of child soldiers, binding them to him through terror and drug addiction. This was the man who had pursued a war in his own little country that had killed as many people as all the wars in Yugoslavia.

  He carried on for a while in the same vein, and when he finally finished speaking Refell stepped forward to ask for questions from the press. Many of the Liberian reporters were literally trembling. Virtually every Liberian had lost relatives in Taylor’s war. Almost every Liberian had lost his livelihood. And I could not know if their reaction was due to fear or to barely stifled outrage. To say that lives had been shattered would be a trite understatement. For all of the inequality under its Americo-Liberian apartheid, a half generation ago Liberia had been one of Africa’s most advanced countries. Now people were living in abject poverty and degradation, without a formal economy or even a government. For all of this, the only thing Taylor saw fit to say about the destruction he had wrought was that it had been God’s plan.

  An eerie and absolute silence lasted for two or three minutes. Finally, Refell stepped forward and tried to get someone to ask a question, and when no one did, I raised my hand and spoke. I have seldom had trouble staying within the emotional confines that American newspaper journalism calls for when conducting an interview or writing a story. By convention, our work is about studied neutrality, or at least a semblance of it. But when I opened my mouth to speak, I began to feel the tremor I had seen in my Liberian colleagues, and I found that I was unable to contain the anger I sensed boiling in the room among my cowed peers.

  “Isn’t it outrageous for someone who has drugged small boys, given them guns and trained them to kill to call this God’s war?” I asked. Unaccustomed to being in the company of anyone but sycophants or people terrified of him, Taylor averted his gaze. Meanwhile, Refell and the other aides glowered at me. “How dare you call the destruction of your country in this manner and the killing of two hundred thousand people God’s war?”

  In truth it wasn’t really a question, but Taylor knew that he couldn’t allow this to be the last word. “I just believe in the destiny of man being controlled by God, and wars, whether man-made or what, are directed by a force,” he sputtered, momentarily confused. “And so when I say it is God’s war, God has his own way of restoring the land, and he will restore it after this war.”

  The press conference was over, and Charles Taylor, despite a rare moment’s embarrassment, had achieved his objective. The snake was finally inside the capital.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Falling Apart

  Wild rumors had been circulating in Kinshasa for weeks. Mobutu had suffered a heart attack. Mobutu was dying of AIDS. Mobutu had succumbed to a mysterious curse. Mobutu lay in a coma in the south of France. Then, one hot day late in August 1996, a street kid ran through one of the city’s largest markets screaming, “Mobutu is dead, Mobutu is dead.” Within a few panicked seconds, the huge market had emptied, demonstrating just how raw nerves can be in a city that had experienced repeated bouts of looting. Indeed, a scarce few minutes later, most of the shops in the surrounding neighborhood were shuttered.

  Within the fraternity of Africa’s longest-serving dictators, it had become a point of pride, a competition almost, to see who could spend the most time outside his country without inviting a serious threat to his power. Since the death of the founding father of Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, in 1993, Mobutu, who liked to while away his summers on the Riviera, had been the continental champion, hands down.

  Kinshasa is a singularly incestuous city of five million people. From the cool heights of Binza, where the rich live on the same baronial plots that the country’s Belgian masters once inhabited, to the cratered streets of La Cité, where the heavy rainy seasons leave puddles so deep they are dubbed Lake Mobutu, big news traveled as if by superconductor. What was so unsettling this time was that nobody seemed to know what was going on, and yet everyone could sense that something was badly wrong.

  In early September the guessing game was brought to an end by a laconic statement issued by Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland: Mobutu Sese Seko suffered from prostate cancer and had just been operated on. Later that day, hoping to calm the public, the ailing president granted a brief interview to a local radio station, which was immediately rebroadcast in Zaire. The palpable fatigue in Mobutu’s voice, like the noncommittal answers about when he would return home, had the opposite effect, though, and word immediately circulated that the man who had single-handedly run this country since 1965 was in the final stages of a deadly disease.

  Barely a month had passed since fifty thousand people had marched through downtown Kinshasa demanding that Mobutu organize elections by May at the latest, as he had only recently pledged, or resign. Now, suddenly, the nation was suffering a case of the chills. Mortality was just not something one associated with Mobutu—most Zairians had grown up with him as their leader and fully expected to die with him as their leader as well.

  Feisty and rambunctious in normal times, Kinshasa settled into an awed and wary quiet. Too jaded or simply too poor, most Kinois had long ago given up buying the scores of thin, poorly set newspapers that proliferated in the capital. Instead, they gathered around newsstands where vendors laid out the most popular titles in sprawling displays, allowing people to read at their leisure, often aloud, and with Mobutu dying, the crowds had never been bigger.

  The hush even included the city’s politicians. As a class, these men had made careers attacking the president during the last, relatively freewheeling decade of his rule.
But the capital’s politics still ultimately remained Mobutu’s game, and he knew well that for most of his critics, the dissenter’s soapbox was viewed merely as a stepping-stone to some kind of lucrative appointment. If you could shout loud enough and draw big enough crowds, there was hope that Mobutu might name you prime minister. The lucky few stole as much as they could, first for themselves, then for their villages and finally for their clans, before the president’s revolving door would spin once more. The result was a political class that was thoroughly co-opted. The only standout was Etienne Tshisekedi, whose short-lived stints as prime minister had made him a popular hero because, though powerless, he clung stubbornly to democratic principles.

  Mobutu ridiculed his critics with his Louis XV–type warnings that after him would come the deluge, and if the prostate scare proved anything, it was that no one had ever seriously contemplated a future without the Marshal at the helm. Like orphaned children, a galaxy of people who had made their careers as professional opponents now trembled at the prospect of Mobutu’s disappearance.

  Mungul Diaka, a short-lived Mobutu prime minister and governor of Kinshasa, was a fairly typical specimen. A man full of ideas for his country, and like every prominent politician in Zaire, equally full of himself, he spoke to me about the need for federalism and decentralization for hours one evening on the huge, pillared balcony of his princely Kinshasa house. Finally, as I made my way to leave, he turned to me and confided his fears.

  “The way Mobutu ran this country, I pray God that he’ll have a bit more time; enough anyway for him to organize elections, so that he can be beaten and replaced,” he said. “If he were to die now, we have no structures in place to govern this country. The army would try to take over, and it would be a catastrophe for us all.”

  Kinshasa’s politicians might have been sweating, but remarkably, for the man who was supposedly dying, life’s routines continued much as before. Mobutu owned a twenty-eight-room mansion in Lausanne, but for his cancer treatment he opted for some spiffy new digs nearby, renting a whole floor at the Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel, on the shore of Lake Geneva, for a cool $16,000 a night. Throughout his treatment, Swiss investigators sought to question Mobutu over the tens of thousands of dollars worth of telephone bills and other accounts left unpaid by the huge presidential entourage in Lausanne. But the Leopard would not be disturbed. During the final nights before his surgery, he was often spotted by reporters in a Beau-Rivage bar, fondling the high-priced prostitutes who paraded before him in casting-call fashion while he downed $350 bottles of Dom Pérignon with hangers-on.

  Here again were unmistakable echoes of Leopold II, who was named in a British courtroom in 1885 as a client of a “high-class” house of prostitution, to which he allegedly paid £800 a month for a steady supply of young women.

  The farther away one got from Kinshasa, the less fazed people seemed by the looming uncertainties of an era already being dubbed “l’après-Mobutu.” The countryside was so neglected that for years people must already have been feeling that they lived in l’après-Mobutu. So I began making the rounds of the various ministries for the travel authorizations Robert and I would need to go see for ourselves.

  After our brief abduction at the tuberculosis asylum, Tony, the timorous, roly-poly man who had been my first driver in Kinshasa, begged out of working with me any longer. He had decided that getting roughed up by agents of SNIP, the National Service for Intelligence and Protection, was above the call of duty, no matter how good the money I paid. In his place, Tony recommended another driver named Pierre, who one morning showed up at the Memling Hotel, where I was eating breakfast in the crowded and dreary buffet-style restaurant.

  Old Man Bah, in Liberia, was serenity personified. Pierre, on the other hand, with his permanent look of slight dishevelment, a battered blue Fiat that was forever in need of urgent repairs, and creditors and relatives who constantly pursued him for funds, was the picture of ill ease. For all of his complaints of ulcers and bouts with malaria, though, Pierre, who was crowding fifty and dressed constantly in a uniform of grease-stained jeans and hand-me-down tee shirts, knew his country better than almost anyone I had met. He spoke Zaire’s two most commonly used languages, Lingala and Swahili, with equal ease, and after years of working with journalists, he often seemed to know our jobs better than most of us did, with the critical difference that he was unfailingly humble.

  I learned more about operating in sticky situations from watching Pierre worm his way through dangerous neighborhoods or into buildings that were officially off limits or into meetings where he had no business being than from anyone else. It was almost impossible to turn him away whether you had a big gun or a big title, and on those rare occasions when he was refused, he always figured out a new angle of attack. When I asked Pierre once how he managed his magical access, he looked genuinely surprised by my question, the answer so obvious, so natural. “Monsieur French, you can go anywhere you want to go as long as you look like you are sure of where you are heading and that you belong there once you arrive,” he said, smiling sheepishly.

  Our last stop in pursuit of travel authorizations was the Ministry of Information, a huge skyscraper in the center of the city built in Mobutu’s heyday, when his regime was still busily creating monuments. The Americans had “given” him the biggest, the Inga Dam, near Kinshasa. This pharaonic project had required the erection of high-tension power lines across 1,100 miles of jungle, all the way to Shaba Province, home to the copper and cobalt mining industries in the far south of the country, and home to secessionist movements ever since the Belgians schemed to break the province—then known as Katanga—off from the rest of the country shortly after independence.

  Abundant hydroelectric potential already existed in the south of Zaire, but the rationale for projects like these was never economic—at least it had little to do with Zaire’s very real economic needs. What the dam offered, instead, was huge contracts for GE, and for Morrison Knudson, and for Citibank, which would make a handsome profit from the financing—all guaranteed with American tax dollars through the Export-Import Bank. Mobutu and his minions would undoubtedly get giant kickbacks, too. For the Leopard, the biggest selling point of all, however, may have been the idea of using an extravagant power project to lash Shaba to the capital. Secessionists would have to think twice about making a break with Kinshasa knowing that Mobutu had his hand on the power switch. What good, after all, would the world’s richest copper deposits and 65 percent of the earth’s cobalt be if there was no electricity to drive the heavy machinery needed to extract and refine it?

  The skyscraper that housed the Ministry of Information was part of another grandiose scheme, this one largely promoted by France under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. A vast array of state-of-the-art microwave transmitters was intended to give Zaire the continent’s most advanced communications infrastructure. The truth was much sadder. It was nearly impossible to make an ordinary telephone call anywhere in Zaire. “The Domain, with its shoddy grandeur, was a hoax,” V. S. Naipaul writes of a ruler very much in the mold of Mobutu in his African masterpiece, A Bend in the River. “Neither the president who had called it into being nor the foreigners who had made a fortune building it had faith in what they were creating. But had there been greater faith before?”

  When we pulled up to the ministry’s outer gates, a sleepy-looking soldier approached swinging his old, rusted rifle and told us to halt. It was sheer redundancy, given that a chain stretched across the entrance. Pierre reached in front of me to hand his driver’s license to the soldier through the passenger’s side window and, instead of asking any questions, shouted, “Ba journaliste,” identifying us as reporters. His sudden assertiveness took the soldier aback and the chain dropped immediately, allowing us into the sprawling complex.

  The rest of the way would be more difficult, judging from the darkness inside the skyscraper. We had to reach the sixteenth floor of the building, but not even a distant hum could be heard from the elevator sha
ft. Even on the best of days, only one of the building’s elevators worked, and since there were no functioning buttons to push, the only way to summon an elevator was by tapping on the metal doors, as Pierre began doing with his keys—to no avail. So we walked up the sixteen flights, passing breathless stragglers on our way up the pitch-black staircase, and receiving news from people on their way down, happily confirming that the people we needed to see were in their offices.

  The sixteenth floor had two saving graces: It was never hot, because of the steady breeze that blew through the open windows at this elevation, and it offered majestic views of the city. We paid our fee for the travel papers and waited for them in a large conference room, watched over by a wall-length black-and-white photograph of a much younger Mobutu resplendent in his leopard-skin cap. The portrait was as faded as the regime, and yet like Mobutu himself, it still bore traces of a former grandeur.

  After a long wait, Robert and I received our visas and were finally set. In the morning we were planning to head for Mbuji-Mayi, the capital of East Kasai Province and the diamond-mining capital of the entire country. We had chosen Zaire Airlines, one of the country’s many makeshift carriers, all of which gamely attempted to make up in hustle for whatever they lacked in safety precautions. Never having been to Mbuji-Mayi before, and having heard many stories about the immediate arrest of “uninvited” foreigners, we decided to travel with one of the Times’s Kinshasa fixers, Kamanga Mutond. Pierre had also given us the name of an army colonel who, he said, might help us in case we ran into trouble there.