The French word liesse hints at the effect of something very near to pure joy that this music seemed to produce so effortlessly. At the same time, the music became symbolic of Mobutu’s rule and of the institutionalization in Kinshasa of Lingala, the trading language that originated in the president’s native region, along the uppermost reaches of the Zaire River. Like a rape drug spiked into the nation’s water supply, the music served to make the northern homeland of the president the cultural center of gravity of this vast and otherwise artificially conceived nation with almost no one the wiser for it.
The same formula of borrowing from abroad and making something imported one’s own lay behind the mass mobilization and hero worship on display this day. Mobutu had carefully studied the personality cults of dictators like Ceauşescu of Romania and Kim Il Sung of North Korea as he set about crafting a cult of his own. By now, although one could still discern some of the inherited features—the use of uniform dress for civilians and mass chants of praise to the great leader—the product was as different from its communist forebears as the soukous heard in nightclubs all over Africa today is from Cuban son or salsa.
Manifestly, the Zairian people had nothing to celebrate, and yet here they were, gathered in huge, choking throngs to welcome home a president disowned by even his staunchest foreign backers. There were phalanxes of teenage girls whose smiles beamed as they bounced cheerfully on their toes, chanting welcome slogans in tight skirts and white tee shirts emblazoned with Mobutu slogans. Thousands of schoolchildren were arrayed class by class, standing under the sun in their uniforms waving fronds. Squadrons of hefty matrons trucked out by neighborhood sweated mightily as they bowed and swayed, laboring their way rhythmically through their dance steps. To top it off were the fighting bands competing fiercely to be heard over the din. The noise was such that there was no way to make out who was dancing to what beat. That could be done only by watching the bodies move and trying to link the motions to the distinctive strain of rhythm that every so often rang clear above the noise.
The music grew ever louder as Mobutu, carefully made up but quite pallid still, descended gingerly from the airplane, bearing his famous trademarks, the carved cane and leopard-skin cap, and strode onto the long red carpet laid out for the welcome. Walking at the same stately pace, but a deferential half step behind him, like a Japanese empress, was Bobi Ladawa, his richly overfed and bleached-skin wife, who, by dint of a queerly incestuous superstition, also happened to be the identical twin of another of the president’s wives. One could not even call the relationship an open secret. Like the long name the dictator, baptized Joseph Désiré Mobutu, gave himself, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga—“the all-conquering warrior who triumphs over all obstacles”—it was a chest-beating howl declaring the great man’s prowess.5 Mobutu’s conjugal arrangements were the ultimate expression of keeping it in the family, but they also served niftily to keep friends and foes alike off guard. The sister often stood in for the first lady at official functions, just as surely as she did in the boudoir, and their resemblance was so great that only Mobutu could reliably tell them apart.
This dictatorship being a family affair, there was a suitable sampling of the rest of the presidential brood on hand as well. There were pampered daughters, women in their twenties, attractive to be sure, but in the preferred Central African way, meaning pleasantly plump. Although far less garish than their mothers, the young women seemed to aspire to the same sort of force-fed and overly dressed look. It was a style that gaudily married the de rigueur local costume of brightly colored African cloth with Parisian gri fe— handbags, big gold jewelry and large-framed, face-concealing sunglasses, all conspicuously signed Vuitton, Chanel or Dior.
Then there was his son, the inevitable Kongulu, the twenty-seven-year-old army captain with the sparkplug build and scruffy beard whose nickname, Saddam Hussein, perfectly fit a man whose nocturnal death squad attacks on his father’s enemies made him the terror of Kinshasa. With his perpetual scowl, Kongulu appeared to live on the edge of an outburst. On this day he was running the security for his father’s arrival, and as Mobutu shuffled along the red carpet he exhorted his soldiers from the feared Division Spéciale Présidentielle to thrash anyone in the pressing crowd whose enthusiasm, or perhaps a push from behind, caused him to stray too close to the Guide.
Once Mobutu was atop the reviewing stand, the crowd fell silent for the national anthem, which he, while solemn, only seemed to mouth. To near-universal surprise, there would be no speech. Instead, after a few waves to the crowds, his guards hustled him into a black Cadillac limousine and sped off for the long drive home.
Gradually, as I moved along in the wake of Mobutu’s long motorcade, the landscape mutated from the wide-open plains of the countryside to the cinder block and mortar of the dusty and overcrowded city. As we approached Kinshasa’s center, and Camp Tshatshi revealed itself as the destination, the neighborhoods grew thicker with gawkers and revelers. Mobutu’s outriders honked their horns furiously to announce his arrival and to clear the streets, and trucks full of soldiers doing their best to look fearsome in their sinister, wraparound sunglasses rumbled past just behind them.
Mobutu had remained invisible throughout the ride, hidden behind heavily tinted windows, but this seemed to have no effect on the atmosphere. Even in Matongé, the reputed bastion of the opposition, people choked the sidewalks and looked on from balconies and roof-tops, many of them cheering, or rushing out into the streets a split second before the passage of the motorcade’s first vehicles, in a dare-devil gesture meant to show their excitement. Matongé was home to the famous parlementaires debout, or streetcorner legislators—ordinary, often unemployed folks, who gathered there to discuss the news for hours each day, usually condemning Mobutu and demanding a return to democratic rule.
Only a few days earlier, Zairian friends had told me it would be impossible to find a hundred people in Matongé to cheer for Mobutu. Now people were chanting his name wildly, and screaming things like “Papa’s back, the price of beer will fall,” while others, in a more direct reference to the war, shouted, “Kabila souki,” or “Kabila’s finished,” in Lingala.
Mobutu had not lived in the capital since the first pillages had ravaged the city in 1991. When his presence was required in Kinshasa, he had shown his aversion to the place by staying on his luxurious white riverboat, the Kamanyola, named for one of the few victories his army had ever truly won. For his belated return, he had elected to establish residence at Camp Tshatshi, a vast, gated military installation that occupies a hilly suburb overlooking the Malebo Pool and the first cataract of the Congo River, which bars access to and from the sea 350 miles downstream.
With many grand residences to choose from, the choice of Tshatshi seemed rather transparently designed to suggest that the Marshal was returning to his military origins, that he had come back to lead the war effort. But with Kabila’s rebels beginning to show signs of making good on their promise to cross the country and mount an assault on the capital, everyone understood that Mobutu felt safe only in a military camp, surrounded by troops from his own Ngbandi ethnic group. Mobutu had always boasted that he would sooner be a late president than an ex-president, but just in case he changed his mind, Tshatshi offered another comfort—powerful speedboats moored just above the cataract and ready to go. In a serious jam, the aging dictator could be hustled off to Brazzaville next door within minutes.
Passing through the base’s heavy iron gates, one realized that Tshatshi also stood firmly for one other thing—segregation. Here there were no ragged masses. The city might be abuzz with excitement, but all here was tranquility and order. Selected visitors, including the accredited press, were told to park their cars in one of the sloping lots on the grounds and were conducted to the manicured gardens behind Mobutu’s grand but sober mansion.
It was late afternoon, and the equatorial sun had finally lost its force and was beginning its ever-startling decline, its molten hues of deep oran
ge and rust exploding as it swelled and then swiftly disappeared. I was jittery with excitement as I entered a scene as bewildering as if I had stepped through the looking glass. Gathered together were the leading representatives of the famous three hundred families, as Mobutu called the elite he had set out to build in the 1960s, after conspiring to take over a country left by the Belgians with a sole lawyer, a handful of doctors and not a single engineer after eighty-four years of colonial and imperial control. Mobutu’s project was inspired, but in the end it had served only to prove the adage about absolute power corrupting absolutely. These were grabbers, not strivers. As they strolled through the gardens eating canapés and drinking cocktails served by waiters in black tie, their clothing and perfume revealed them to be a pampered and indolent lot.
Mobutu’s rule had always depended on the clever manipulation of symbols, and most important was his splendor. Toward that end, the rapids of the Congo River served as a stunning backdrop. Peacocks and geese lent to the rarefied air, strutting freely around the periphery of the gardens, their cooing and cackling punctuating the smooth soukous of Koffi Olomidé, which was piped in on a sound system in tastefully muted fashion.
Save for the birds and for the white noise of the river gurgling in the distance below, all went silent when Mobutu finally emerged from a knot of family members and appeared on the marbled balcony that looked out over the crowd. The Guide had chosen not to speak to le petit peuple at Ndjili airport, but rather to his people here. For the masses, impatient to know what lay ahead, their radios would have to do.
“No words, no verbal expression would be capable of expressing the depth of my gratitude and the contentment I felt when my feet touched the soil of Zaire,” Mobutu said in a grave baritone that had suddenly gone tremolo with emotion. “Your warm welcome comforts me more than ever in my belief in our solidarity, which is the foundation upon which our Zairian fatherland was built.
“Recently, we have watched as the enemies of our people have chosen the moment when I was floored with disease to stab me in the back. They did this because they know that I represent the territorial integrity of our great Zaire, for which I have consecrated my entire life to the defense of its sacred values.”
At that moment, Mobutu burst into tears, but after collecting himself and asking people to pray for his health, he delivered what amounted to a call to arms. “I have never retreated, and once again, this time there can be no question of retreat,” Mobutu said dramatically. “Zaire has become a victim of its African hospitality, and has been wronged. . . . But together we will restore the tarnished image of our beloved country.”
Alas, the depths of this country’s social fracture were too deep to be papered over, even amid a remarkable surge of patriotism. Zaire had the misfortune of having been ruled by the Belgians, a small, tribally divided European people who gave full vent to their pettiness as they set about colonizing one of Africa’s largest territories. The Belgians imagined and enforced tribal distinctions everywhere they went. On the rear terrace of his colonial-era mansion in the old European quarter of Gombé, Cléophas Kamitatu, a onetime advisor to Mobutu, put it this way: “In every region of the country they favored one group over another. Here it was the Bakongo over the Bakaya. In Kasai it was the Baluba against the Lulua, the Basonge and the Bakete. In Shaba it was the Lunda against all the ethnic groups of the south. The Mongo enjoyed the ear of the Belgians in the north. But just as a precaution, they recruited their neighbors, the Bangala, to serve in the army.
“Our greatest misfortune was to be colonized by a country with such a small spirit. You will say that’s all old history now, but the effects are with us still today. When I asked an official Belgian delegation that was here the other day if they were seeking investments in the country, they replied that Belgium would only invest once there had been elections. In the meantime, they said we are here to prevent anyone else from taking our place.”
Kamitatu’s quick history lesson was fine as far as it went. What he left out, though, was no prettier. Like almost everyone else in the political elite, in his own small way the weary old former diplomat, who somehow still managed to live quite well amid the country’s ruin, had had his hand in Zaire’s mess, too. It was said that he had sold the country’s embassy in Tokyo while in residence there, and had simply pocketed the money.
Mobutu’s generals were even worse than the civilian elite. During the first Shaba war, in 1977, when rebels from Angola occupied the country’s southern copper belt, the chief of staff, General Eluki Monga Aundu, pulled off a train heist worthy of Butch Cassidy, robbing the entire payroll for the troops he was about to lead into battle. That he was quickly defeated was hardly a surprise. More surprising is that he was never punished, whether because of his kinship with Mobutu or because the Guide may have admired his audacity.
In the streets, everyone knew the code by which the country was ruled. But if Article 15 governed daily life, by no means did everyone subscribe to the degradation it wrought. Those who lived in roadside shacks and wore rags for clothes could not easily turn down a free drink or a bite to eat, and it was no different with a chance to party. But sobbing at a funeral or shouting hurrahs at a wedding for a few coins never made anyone a member of the festival, and the people rocking on the tarmac to the sensuous soukous or swaying in the streets cheering on the president’s motorcade were no different. Theirs was little more than a dance of death for a country that was already on its way out of this world.
The truth was that Mobutu had no one to lean on anymore, least of all the vaunted masses that had turned out to salute him. For proof, with incomparably smaller means, Etienne Tshisekedi, the popular leader of the opposition and head of the Democratic Union for Social Progress, staged a return to Kinshasa that same week after a prolonged absence from the country and managed to draw crowds nearly as large as Mobutu’s. More perplexing still, given that the two men were bitter political rivals, many of the revelers had turned out for both events.
“This is the Zaire we have become. The same youth that cheers Mobutu today will cheer Tshisekedi with the same fervor tomorrow, and eventually, why not Kabila, too,” said Jean-Baptiste Sondji, a political activist doctor at Mama Yemo, Kinshasa’s biggest hospital, which was named for Mobutu’s mother. “That is the real legacy of Mobutu: the compromising of an entire generation of young people who have grown up without schools and without values.”
The Great Man had chosen the practicable end of the Great River to issue his rallying cry. Ten miles or more across in places and almost unimaginable in its power, the Zaire River unfurls like an immense serpent whose tail lies in the deep south, its midsection running west along the equator, and its head basking at the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. It has not only given the country its name, but its very definition. But for all of its magnificence, for all of its much vaunted potential to light an entire hemisphere with hydroelectric power, it is a river impeded by huge boulders, broken in the image of the country itself, and sadly condemned never to fulfill its promise.
From the other navigable limit of the river, the end was already approaching for Mobutu. Though quiet still, Kisangani was about to assume the role that it had played so often in the short and tragic history of Zaire. Battles for the city had served as hinges slamming the doors on entire eras, helping close the book on every regime the country had known, from colonial rule to the indépendantiste struggle after Lumumba’s assassination, and it would soon lower the boom on the famous survivor himself, Mobutu.
I flew into Kisangani aboard a Caravelle jetliner with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata. By that time, early in February 1997, the government had declared Kisangani a strategic zone, and hitching a ride on a relief flight was virtually the only way to get there. The UNHCR had promised the handful of reporters that it allowed aboard the flight a tour of a makeshift camp for Rwandan Hutu refugees at a place called Tingi-Tingi, and we were all expected to return to Kinshasa that evening aboard an
other chartered plane, or continue onward to Uganda with Ogata. I harbored a secret plan, however, to drop out of sight at the end of the day and make my way into the city by the bend in the river to report from there.
The scene at Kisangani’s airport reminded me of the way split personalities were depicted in old Hollywood films. With an invisible line the only thing dividing them, fierce-looking Serbian and Romanian mercenaries leading Mobutu’s war effort shared the tarmac with international relief workers who were running a major humanitarian operation. The foreign staffers from UNHCR and the World Food Programme winced as they acknowledged, just outside Ogata’s earshot, that crated weapons and ammunition, along with uniforms and other supplies, were making their way into the bellies of the shiny old DC-3s, the aluminum-skinned workhorses that were ferrying sacks of food and medicines to the desperate Hutu. They insisted this was the price of cooperation from the local authorities.
It was unclear how much Ogata’s aides knew of this piggybacking. But the surrealistic scene of mercenaries and aid workers sharing the same workspace led to equally surreal conversations when Ogata and local officials began exchanging greetings in the stifling hangar that served as the arrival lounge. Omar Léa Sisi, the potbellied governor of Manièma Province, either did not understand or was feigning confusion over the purpose of an international relief operation.
Dressed in a silk abacost, the buttoned tunic and pants outfit that Mobutu had once decreed as the only formal clothing fitting for Zairian men,6 the governor spoke of obtaining UN help in winning back lost territory, and warned there would be stricter conditions on relief operations if such assistance was not forthcoming. Ogata, a handsome woman whose petite stature and crusty upper-class Japanese manners belied her toughness, stood her ground, and hammered away at UN demands for safe corridors for the refugees and for the relief operations that were helping them.
The reality on the ground in this part of Zaire, where the war was quickly moving toward a defining moment, would yield to neither of these visions, although ultimately the governor’s take would prove far closer to reality. East of Kisangani, the government was employing a few dozen Serbian mercenaries and a few thousand Hutu fighters to hold off the rebels, and just as they had done since the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Hutu fighters were hiding among tens of thousands of Hutu refugees to shield themselves from attack.
Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa Page 18