Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  I did a few more interviews in the camp, but soon I felt too ill to work. Camille offered to escort me back to the UN workers’ encampment, but I excused myself and trod back through the heat alone. “I’ll be back for more interviews tomorrow, early, before it gets so hot,” I told him, though I knew I was falling seriously ill. I already suspected malaria and wondered if I would ever make it back there at all.

  I retired immediately to the tent I had been assigned, and took a triple dose of Fansidar, one of the strongest medications available for acute malaria. I had already been taking daily doses of a prophylactic drug, but I knew it was not 100 percent effective in Central Africa, and I counted myself lucky for never having come down with the disease before.

  Dinner was still a couple of hours off, and I felt too sick to do anything but lie down on my cot and listen to the radio. There was a small fan, but as soon as I turned it on I went from boiling heat to maddening chills. I joined the UN folks for dinner and tried to force some food down, but had to excuse myself halfway into the meal. I wanted to call my father in Virginia on the satellite phone, since he is a doctor with extensive experience in Africa. When I called, it was comforting to hear from him that I had already done all that I could.

  As the night wore on, though, it became apparent that my health was getting far worse. I could not stop shaking, even with the fan off. I went through fits of violent vomiting and diarrhea. My cot was soaked through with sweat. At dawn, I crawled out of my tent and summoned the UN staff. I was too weak to walk, and my vision had gone blurry. “There’s no doctor here,” someone said. “The nearest medical help is the Médecins sans Frontières doctor who is working a few villages away from here. We’ll try to get her on the radio.”

  My teeth chattered as I lay on a cot outdoors in the morning sun, trying to get warm. I overheard someone say that fighting in the area had prevented the doctor from coming. Later, I could hear the sound of gunfire. Then, when I had all but given up hope, the doctor appeared, like a vision in a dream, a beautiful Colombian woman, and we spoke in a mixture of Spanish and French. She told me that I probably had cerebral malaria. “Your condition is very dangerous,” she said, injecting me with a dose of morphine to settle me down. Then she gave me a fistful of quinine tablets, which she said I should chew until they were gone. “They are going to make you feel even sicker, but it is the only thing that can break your infection.”

  The doctor said I should be near a hospital, if not in one, and urged the UN people to call in an airplane to fly me to Kinshasa, and then she was off. Her warning about the quinine proved right, but she had told me only half of the story. Soon, my ears were ringing as if I were trapped in a belfry. The medicine, which was originally derived by Native Americans from the bark of the cinchona tree, was the most bitter thing I had ever tasted, and although my stomach was empty, it made me retch even more violently than I had the night before.

  I ducked miserably in and out of consciousness for the next few hours. In fact, the passage of time completely escaped me. Eventually someone from the UN encampment roused me to say that a small plane had arrived to pick me up.

  I reached the Intercontinental Hotel late that afternoon and saw my Reuters colleague and friend William Wallis exiting the huge copper-trimmed doors of the reception area as I arrived. Why had I mysteriously disappeared for a couple of days? Where had I been? he asked. Perhaps he suspected I had a big scoop. But as he took a closer look at me, the banter quickly ended, and he helped me into the elevator.

  William must have called the UN offices to tell them I was gravely ill, because as another equatorial sunset exploded gaudily over the Congo River, my phone began ringing with inquiries from concerned officials and friends. In the morning, the United Nations sent someone to take me to its Kinshasa clinic, where a blood test was ordered to see if I had been cured or not. The UN doctor looked at me in shock as he took my history, when I told him the dosage of quinine the Colombian doctor had given me in the field.

  “Are you sure of that?” he asked. I produced the little white envelope upon which she had written her instructions. “That is enough quinine to stop someone’s heart,” he said. It was apparently not enough to kill the parasites still circulating in my bloodstream, however. When the test results came back, the infection still rated a three out of four on the simple scale used to measure the presence of falciparum malaria, meaning that I was still in serious condition.

  The doctor gave me a new drug, Malarone, and ordered me to stay in bed. I promised to stay put in my hotel room and call him if I felt any worse.

  After years of bad roads and horrible flights, separation from family, arrests, unsafe water and contaminated food, and finally now malaria, I began to conclude that Africa was starting to kill me. So many loves had kept me going here: the beauty and the unfussy grace of the people, the amazing food—yes, the food—music rich beyond comparison, the sheer immediacy of human contact, the pleasure of living by my wits. But the grim truth was that a single mosquito bite had contained enough deadly force to lay me very low indeed, and left me feeling seriously weakened and vulnerable as never before.

  I had decided to return to Africa as a journalist in 1994 because I wanted to dig into the kinds of stories about African people and culture that do not often get told. In the beginning of my tour I had done a fair bit of that, but then Nigeria exploded, followed by Liberia and Ebola and the Kabila invasion, and too many smaller crises to recount. In short, I became something of a glorified fireman, despite my best intentions. In the process, though, I came to appreciate more than ever why it is wrong for us to push African news—and not just the riotously colorful features that one editor once described to me as the continent’s “oogah-boogah”—to the margins.

  The chances for the kind of pure discovery that had lured me back to Africa had dwindled, as had my energy. But I did make it a point to get to Cameroon as soon as I had recovered sufficiently from my illness. The subject was pure magic, a mountain kingdom that dated back over six hundred years, whose king, Ibrahim, a renaissance man who reigned early in the twentieth century, had commissioned an original, indigenous written script called Shumom in order to modernize his culture. Ibrahim designed his own printing presses and built one of sub-Saharan Africa’s first museums. He wrote a poetic treatise on esthetics, which included nearly two hundred criteria for the appreciation of feminine beauty. He produced an elaborate written history of his kingdom, and he commissioned a pharmacopoeia of local plants and traditional medicines.

  Then, with the advent of World War I and the takeover by the French of a zone that had been a loosely administered German protectorate, French was imposed as the official tongue, and Ibrahim, suspected of harboring sympathies for the British, who ruled in Nigeria next door, was sent into exile.

  The Congo dragged me back down to earth from my Cameroonian idyll soon enough. Madeleine Albright was coming to town, and I had to get to Kinshasa. There had been a last-minute invitation from the State Department to join her on her inaugural trip to the continent as secretary of state.

  I was immediately struck by the itinerary, which I fancied as the “renaissance tour,” because it included most of the gang the Clinton administration was touting as Africa’s new leaders. The choices filled me with skepticism and even chagrin, but my reasons for declining to travel with Albright were rather more practical. The notice was simply too short. Physically, I could not countenance another zigzagging marathon around the continent, and deep down, I felt I had seen far too much hypocrisy and wrongheaded diplomacy in Africa already, too much suffering and neglect, and too many hollow slogans and broken promises to be cooped up in a small airplane and slathered in spin.

  It grated on me how thoroughly we had come full circle, renouncing an old guard of “Big Men” only to embrace a brand-new crop of them. The renaissance leaders Albright was visiting were Africa’s new soldier princes, men who had come to power not through the ballot box but at gunpoint. The Clinton administratio
n was, in effect, endorsing a supposedly enlightened authoritarianism as just what Africa needed to close some of the yawning gap that separated it from the rest of the world.

  Albright made a formulaic stab at promoting democratic values before leaving for Africa, saying that “in our efforts to help postconflict societies, we should always bear in mind that democracy provides the best route to long-term reconciliation.” The message, delivered as a statement rather than in a high-profile speech, made her words seem more like a fig leaf than a heartfelt declaration.

  On her first stop, in Ethiopia, Albright made a go at apologizing for the Clinton administration’s failure to halt the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “Let me begin that process here today by acknowledging that we—the international community—should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994 and called them what they were: genocide,” she told the Organization of African Unity, whose headquarters is in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Bill Clinton used much the same tepid language in the apology he delivered in person in Rwanda in March 1998. But what, I wondered, is the worth of an appeal for forgiveness that avoids acknowledgment of the original transgression? “In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda,” said a minutely researched critique of the Clinton administration’s behavior during the Rwandan genocide that appeared in The Atlantic magazine. “It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term ‘genocide,’ for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing ‘to try to limit what occurred.’ Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.”

  In her speech to the OAU, Albright denounced a “culture of impunity that has claimed so many lives and done so much to discredit legitimate authority throughout the region,” yet she said nothing publicly about the roundup of journalists there days before she landed in Ethiopia, or the banning of the local rebroadcast of news from radio stations like the BBC and Voice of America. “Africa’s best new leaders,” Albright said, “have brought a new spirit of hope and accomplishment to their countries. . . . They are challenging the United States and the international community to get over the paternalism of the past, to stop thinking of its Africa policy as a none-too-successful rescue service and to begin seizing the opportunities to work with Africans to transform their continent.” These words were being spoken a week before she landed in Kinshasa to embrace Laurent Kabila.

  If getting over paternalism meant such patronizing speeches, Africans could probably do just as well without them. America’s choice of African friends—countries that were not only not democratic but, for the most part, had no plans of ever becoming democratic—was bad enough. That the Clinton administration was endorsing this new authoritarianism at the very moment when vibrant but fragile democracies were taking root here and there across the continent was more than a pity. It was a disgrace.

  Joseph Kapika, a senior aide to Etienne Tshisekedi, put it best to me a few days before Albright touched down in Kinshasa. “It is America that has decided that Paul Kagame is a great leader, and that Yoweri Museveni is a great leader. And now they want us to consider Kabila as a great leader. What we want to know is why it is that what was bad for the countries that lived under Soviet influence should be good for the Congolese?”

  Albright’s party arrived in Kinshasa on December 11, 1997, and immediately plunged into private meetings with Kabila and members of his government.

  Two days earlier, UN investigators had arrived in Mbandaka hoping to finally begin their investigation into the reported massacre there, only to be surrounded by a hostile mob and forced to take refuge in their hotel. The following day, 271 Tutsi, refugees who had fled to Congo to escape the strife in Rwanda, were slaughtered near Bukavu by marauding bands of Hutu militiamen armed with rifles, grenades and machetes. Later came reports of another anti-Tutsi attack inside Rwanda. Clearly, in Central Africa there was more than enough evil to go around.

  On the morning of the twelfth, after Albright delivered a speech to a polite audience at the Intercontinental Hotel, I ran into her spokesman and closest aide, James Rubin, in a corridor nearby, and he seemed unusually eager to deliver his talking points. “The feeling is that we have to take a risk in Congo, because the danger to the entire region of chaos in this country is so great. Rather than wait until Kabila does everything we want on democracy, on inclusion, on human rights, the feeling is that he is a clear improvement on Mobutu, and [Albright’s] feeling was that we should emphasize the positive. The secretary believes that as the Congo goes, so goes the region, and this region matters, and so therefore does the Congo.”

  Rubin was on such a roll I could scarcely get a word in. “If you look at Museveni, you look at Meles [prime minister of Ethiopia], and you look at Kagame, they are not saying they want huge amounts of money from us. They are saying they want us to help them work through their problems. . . . We want to show that this is a region where we can do diplomatic business, and hopefully a place where businesspeople can do business. Our best intelligence info tells us that this group of leaders is not personally corrupt, so that gives you an added sense of confidence.

  “Actually a lot of my take comes from an even better source, and it comes to me directly. Philip Gourevitch is my sister’s boyfriend.” And with that, Rubin said he had to run. Albright was rushing to the Palace of the Nation, where she was to meet Kabila, and then give a joint news conference. I rode over to the palace a little while later with Pierre in his battered and wheezing Fiat. Kabila’s security detachment would not allow him to drop me in front of the gates, which give access to the large grassy grounds that surround the coldly formal Chinese-built presidential offices. I had to hoof it the last hundred yards or so, and as I turned the corner and crossed the street, nearing the entrance in the morning’s soupy air, I stumbled upon a beating. Uniformed soldiers with black truncheons were furiously laying into a handful of would-be protesters. When a couple of the soldiers turned toward me with what looked like hostile intent, I held up one of my collection of press cards and shouted repeatedly in Lingala, “Ba journaliste!” (I’m a journalist), to which they shrugged and returned to whacking the victims at hand.

  The press had been asked to assemble early, and we found ourselves in a large marble hall, a clutch of American reporters who were traveling in the plane with the secretary and me off to one side, and several dozen Congolese and other African reporters across a small divide of empty space. I had been told that there would be time for only one or two questions each from the foreign and the Congolese press, so I tried to work with some of the traveling press on devising questions that would get at the heart of the human rights crisis in the country.

  I felt certain that the news of the day would be dominated by the massacre in Bukavu. It was yet another monstrous crime, like so many atrocities before it in the eastern borderland with Rwanda, but in a way it made for a softball of a question, guaranteed to produce ringing condemnation but little new light. I wanted to make sure that Albright and Kabila faced a question about the arrest of opposition leaders in the Congo, and if time permitted, about the government’s failure to allow the forensic inspection team to set up operations in Mbandaka.

  The traveling press was unaware of the arrest, beating and detention without charge of Arthur Zahidi Ngoma a couple of weeks earlier. This reflected a structural problem that afflicts any traveling press corps. There is rarely time for much advance preparation when they travel. They are moving about in lockstep with the president or the secretary of state, and have little time to report anything on the ground for themselves.

  Working quickly, I filled in the reporter who seemed
most intrigued by the political situation in Congo, Roy Gutman, then of Newsday, focusing on Ngoma’s arrest. Gutman asked me if I was sure of my facts, and I said I was, producing a printout of an article I had written about it in the Times a few days before. Ngoma had ran afoul of the Kabila government when his group, Forces of the Future, organized a political forum at the Memling Hotel. Kabila had pledged to hold “free” elections two years after seizing power, but in the meantime, only his ruling AFDL was allowed to function openly as a political party, and function it did, flying its blue flag outside the little store-front offices it opened in nearly every neighborhood of Kinshasa.

  Kabila’s secret police had ordered Ngoma to cancel the forum, but a determined group of activists set up bunting downtown announcing the meeting, and distributed flyers on street corners urging people to come. On the second day of the meetings, security forces cordoned off the area around the hotel and began arresting people. Ngoma, who had not yet arrived, was tipped off and urged to stay away. Bravely, he sent word back to his lieutenants that they should invite the participants to his house, where the meeting could continue in the privacy of his courtyard.

  When Ngoma’s compound began to fill with activists, journalists and curious passersby, Kabila’s police smashed the iron gate and began firing off live rounds and saturating the air with tear gas. Nearly everyone present was arrested. Once in detention, activists and journalists alike were stripped and beaten, one by one, some receiving as many as forty lashes.

  A few days after that, I received a call from Arthur Ngoma’s brother, Kitwanga, who asked to meet me. Arthur had managed to send me a handwritten note from jail that he wanted published. It read, in part, “we have been subjected to illegal detention, physical and moral torture, and inhumane conditions of detention. But if this is the price we must pay, it is worth it for democracy.”