Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

by Jason Stearns

  Within days, the tide had turned. With no escape route, the rebels made a desperate run for Kinshasa, hoping they would be able to fulfill their mission with the ammunition and food they had left. At night, rebel troops in civilian dress began infiltrating the densely populated Masina and Njili neighborhoods on the northwestern outskirts of town, close to the airport. Bolstered by Zimbabwean and Angolan troops, Laurent Kabila returned to Kinshasa and announced that victory was theirs. Exhorting people to take up sticks and spears to defend the city, he declared that, “ The people must be completely mobilized and armed to crush the aggressors.”28 His cigar-smoking chief of staff was less subtle. “The rebels are vermin, microbes which must be methodically eradicated,” he said on state radio.29

  The population heeded the call. They pounced on a dozen people they suspected were rebels, looped tires around their necks, doused them in gasoline, and made them into human torches. Charred bodies lined one of the main streets in the popular Masina neighborhood. A foreign television crew captured on film two Congolese soldiers throwing a man off a bridge and shooting him dead as he tried, with his legs broken, to crawl out of the water to safety. The images went around the world and were later memorialized on the Internet. It isn’t clear, however, whether these final casualties were Tutsi. The Rwandans had recruited many of Mobutu’s former soldiers. Eyewitnesses suggest that it was these recruits, mostly youths from the western Congo, who were sent as spies into Kinshasa, as they knew their way around and could blend into the local population.30 The last part of the battle for Kinshasa featured a group of several hundred of these soldiers stripping off their uniforms before being cornered in a field of eucalyptus trees outside Kinshasa. Kabila’s chief of staff laughed as he told the story at a press conference, cigar in mouth: “The rebels are like monkeys, swinging in the trees with no clothes.”31

  As with many episodes of the war, the battle for Kinshasa was not without its share of surreal moments. A group of around seventy Tutsi was stuck in the Burundian embassy for several weeks, unable to move because of the fighting. They had congregated there from throughout Kinshasa in the hope that the Tutsi-led government of Burundi would provide them protection. The nearby Swiss embassy sent packages of food and water to keep them afloat, but the living conditions were deteriorating by the day. The embassy was housed in a small building, and a dozen people slept in each room. Ambassador Martin Sindabizera, himself a Tutsi, paced back and forth through the corridors, speaking with Burundian president Buyoya about possible evacuation plans. His phone rang nonstop with requests from Tutsi throughout Kinshasa—and even several Hutu who also felt targeted—to come and get them. “I wasn’t able to do anything for most of them. It was soul-wrenching to hear their pleas hour after hour and feel so helpless.”32

  When he received word that there was an influential Rwandan family trapped not far from the embassy, Sindabizera decided to go himself. On the street in front of their hideout, several policemen stopped his car and told him to get out. As he stepped out, one of them yelled: “Betaye masasi!” After a year in Kinshasa, the ambassador knew enough Lingala to understand what that meant: Shoot him! The policeman loaded his gun, but an older soldier stopped him. “He has diplomatic license plates,” he pointed out calmly. “You can’t shoot him just like that. We have rules in this country.” Giving way to this reasoning, the soldiers took him in for interrogation. In a small cell at the nearby police station, the ambassador found a bizarre group of people, all of whom were alleged to be guilty of plotting against the state: two of his own advisors, whom he had sent ahead to evacuate the Rwandan family; a group of five mixed-race women in tight jeans and makeup, accused of having been mistresses of Tutsi politicians in Kinshasa; and a dozen cowed street children and soldiers who may have been involved in the rebellion or were just victims of a shakedown. “It was generalized paranoia,” the ambassador remembered. “They pulled in people to make money, for the shape of their noses, for anything at all.” After four hours of interrogation, the ambassador was set free. “Don’t talk to the BBC!” they ordered.

  Back at the embassy, the situation was getting worse by the day. Several of the people seeking refuge had medical conditions, and he didn’t think they would be able to hold out much longer. The sewage system was breaking down, and the water pumps only worked intermittently. Finally, Burundian president Pierre Buyoya decided on a risky evacuation. He sent a jet from Bujumbura with several trusted soldiers, while the ambassador sent a trusted Indian businessman with several thousand dollars down the fifteen-mile road to the airport to dole out bribes to all of the roadblock commanders. He kept the biggest sum for the commander of the airport. They would make a run for it.

  The ambassador laughed when he remembered the operation. “The pilot thought he was flying to Brazzaville. Only a fool would have accepted to fly a Burundian aircraft into Kinshasa airport during that mess.” Since the Brazzaville airport was just several miles across the river from the Kinshasa landing strip, it was easy to pull off. Several minutes before landing, the Burundian army officer on board pulled out a pistol in the cockpit. “Change of plans,” he told the terrified pilot. “We are landing in Kinshasa.”

  The Burundian convoy, crammed to capacity with children, women, and diplomats, hurtled through the deserted streets as the bribed policemen and soldiers pulled away the roadblocks they had set up. At the airport, the passengers rushed onto the plane. At the last moment, just as the plane was beginning to taxi onto the runway, several pickups full of soldiers sped in front of it, blocking its path. The ambassador called the airport commander, alarmed, asking him what had happened with their arrangement.

  “I can’t do anything, sir,” he responded. “It’s the presidential guard.” The ambassador sighed, looking down the rows of the airplane, full of anxious faces and crying children. “I thought the game was over,” he remembered. “I was sure that Kabila must have pulled the plug on our operation.” Having seen what had happened to other Tutsi in Kinshasa, they expected the worst. The ambassador told the pilot to lower the boarding ramp so he could talk to the Congolese commander. The few Burundian officers on the plane loaded their pistols and waited anxiously.

  The passengers gawked through the windows as they saw Kabila’s soldiers, the same ones who had been rounding up their friends and relatives, help a Tutsi woman in expensive clothes out of a black SUV with tinted windows. Soldiers grabbed her suitcases and designer bags and made for the Burundian airplane. Not a word was exchanged between the Congolese and Burundian soldiers. The woman brushed past the dumbfounded ambassador in a cloud of perfume, only to be greeted by irate shrieks from the rest of the passengers. Several Banyamulenge women got up and began attacking the newcomer, cursing, spitting, and pulling at her clothes. “Traitor!” “Bitch!” The Burundian soldiers, pistols in the air, had to intervene to break up the melee.

  “I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry,” the ambassador remembered. “This was Kabila’s mistress! My other passengers had recognized her. The president obviously didn’t think it was a good thing for her to stay on.”

  The pilot, perplexed and nervous, came on the intercom, ordering everybody to sit down as he taxied the plane to the runway.

  14

  THE REBEL PROFESSOR

  KIGALI, RWANDA, AUGUST 1998

  Ernest Wamba dia Wamba was an unlikely candidate to lead a movement to overthrow Laurent Kabila. A quiet, unassuming man with a professorial demeanor, he had spent most of his life in academic institutions in the United States and Tanzania, far more familiar with the intricacies of existentialist philosophy than with revolutionary politics. When he became the president of the new Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) rebellion on August 16, 1998, it came as a surprise even to his family. His story illustrates the tragic state of Congolese leadership: Even when a man with pristine political and ethical credentials tries to effect change, the results are poor.1

  Wamba had been fascinated by politics since he was a b
oarding student at a Swedish missionary school in western Bas-Congo Province, close to the Atlantic Ocean, in the 1950s. It was a turbulent time for the region. Wamba was born not far from the birthplace of Simon Kimbangu, a local Christian prophet and anticolonial activist who rejected the white clergy’s monopoly on religion. Wamba was from the Kongo ethnic community, which had made up one of Central Africa’s oldest and largest kingdoms and was at the forefront of the Congolese independence movement. While still a teenager, he was swept up by the weekly rallies and protest marches that embroiled the region. Even at Wamba’s high school, when the Swedish missionaries were out of earshot, the Congolese teachers would encourage them to chant:“What do we want? Independence!”

  Wamba was a precocious student. He mined the school library for books on contemporary philosophy. “He wasn’t content with village life, with the state his country was in,” Mahmood Mamdani, a fellow political scientist and a close friend, remembered. Studying continental philosophy was a means of emancipating himself, of feeling part of something larger. Engrossed by Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings, he sent the famous philosopher a letter when he was in his early teens. To his surprise, Sartre wrote back, and the two had a brief correspondence.

  After graduating with high marks, he was one of three students from his school to receive a scholarship to study in the United States. He went to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, about as far from his tropical homeland as he could imagine, where he wrote his senior thesis on French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre and was admitted for graduate study at Claremont University in California.

  As with many Africans in the diaspora, distance from his homeland catalyzed his interest in its politics. “ I was not radicalized about Africa until I came to the United States,” he later reflected. “ It is strange, but I became much more aware of what was going on in Congo in the United States than I had ever been in Congo.”2 He followed developments in his home country closely and became a strident critic of Mobutu’s dictatorship. He married an African American woman and became active in the American civil rights movement through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In academic circles, he was known as a pan-Africanist; he advocated a version of democracy more in tune with traditional African forms of government.

  In 1980, Wamba returned to the continent with his family to take up a position at the University of Dar es Salaam, which President Julius Nyerere was promoting as a center of African learning, attracting academics and political activists from around the region. A year later, Wamba was arrested during a visit to Kinshasa, an incident that drew the attention of Nyerere, who helped get him out of prison. Nyerere then called on him for advice on Great Lakes politics, in particular the Burundian peace process.

  When the war in the Congo started, the former Tanzanian president had been retired after several decades as head of state but remained closely involved in regional politics. Ugandan president Museveni had asked Nyerere to endorse Kabila, but the former president was skeptical. Nonetheless, Kabila was well connected, which was crucial: His right-hand man was married to the daughter of Nyerere’s former vice prime minister.3 Nyerere finally met Kabila in his rural hometown, and the Congolese rebel leader spoke passionately about self-determination and his vision for the Congo. Nyerere asked Wamba for advice. The professor was critical of Kabila, given his reputation as a smuggler and thug, but Nyerere was swayed by other leaders in the region. He authorized Tanzanian intelligence officers, trainers, and artillery to support the AFDL—and to keep an eye on Kabila. He even lent the rebel leader one of his personal bodyguards.

  Kabila visited Dar es Salaam several more times, and each time Nyerere made sure that Wamba was on hand. The more he saw of Kabila, however, the more doubts he had. Kabila seemed aloof and stubborn, always friendly and charismatic in their private meetings, but unwilling to implement suggestions the Tanzanians made. On one occasion Nyerere organized a meeting between Kabila and several of his close friends, including Wamba, to help develop a coherent political ideology; the rebel leader stood them up. Wamba remembered Nyerere shaking his head. “He can’t even show up to meetings on time,” he told Wamba. “His deputy [Kisase Ngandu] was assassinated in mysterious circumstances. This is not looking good.” To top it off, Nyerere’s intelligence officers based in the field reported confusion and infighting within the rebel alliance.

  When the AFDL took power in Kinshasa, Kabila invited Nyerere to visit. The elder statesman was deeply disappointed. Traveling in a presidential convoy from the airport, he sighed impatiently as he saw Kabila’s security detail chase other cars off the road and bring traffic to a halt. “That’s not how a president is supposed to behave,” he muttered to Wamba, who was accompanying him. Together they toured the capital, Bas-Congo, and a military base in the south, where Tanzanian officers were training the new army. There his men told him that the new recruits increasingly only came from Kabila’s own Lubakat tribe. In a private meeting, he warned Kabila, “Our support was not for you; it was for the Congolese people. If you don’t watch out, the same thing will happen to you as happened to Mobutu.”4 Before he left, Nyerere gave a press conference at his hotel, where he told journalists: “ I came to the Congo and saw its leaders. But I didn’t see a single new road, hospital or school.”5

  The Congo war spun its leaders like a centrifuge; the more ruthless, politically adept ones managed to stay at the center and reinvent themselves through new business deals or political alliances. The lightweights, however, were flung to the fringes of political life. Dozens of these figures are scattered through Kinshasa’s suburbs, living off money they had set aside or real estate they manage. The revolution devoured many of its children, spitting them out when it had sucked what it needed out of them. Wamba was one of these pieces of flotsam: After the end of the war, he had obtained a position as a senator in Parliament, but soon he was unemployed. He had preferred to stay in his country, enveloped by memories of past achievements and friends, than return to the anonymous surroundings of Dar es Salaam. In 2007, during a research trip to Kinshasa, I managed to track him down. He appeared to have given up any political ambitions. When I told his former rebel colleagues that I was going to see him, they were all surprised that he was still in town.

  “I would be happy to meet,” he told me over the phone, “but I live a bit outside of downtown, and my car has broken down. Could you come to my place?”

  I hadn’t realized what Wamba meant by “a bit outside of downtown.” I drove about twenty miles through grimy suburbs, until the pavement gave way to sandy side streets lined by broken-down houses with fading paint and rusty, corrugated iron roofing. Wamba had given me a street address, but there were no numbers on the houses. I asked around, but nobody seemed to know a Professor Wamba dia Wamba. Finally, a matronly woman selling sugar and manioc flour on a piece of gunnysack recognized the name—“Ah! That old politician!” I had passed his house several times. In the courtyard, a scrawny dog barked at me. A polite lady showed me into the living room and asked me to wait—Professor Wamba was having a bath.

  The living room was simple. A glossy, generic picture of a waterfall hung on one wall. The other had a picture of Wamba in a suit signing the 2002 peace deal in Pretoria, South Africa. The sofa was decorated with circular doilies crocheted in neon yellow and purple yarn. I leafed through several magazines on the table; there was a three-month-old issue of Jeune Afrique and the newsletter of Mbongi a Nsi, a Kongo cultural organization he headed. When I used the bathroom, there was no light or running water.

  Several minutes later, Wamba welcomed me into his study, a small room lined with books and magazines. On the wall next to his desk was a series of A4-size laminated photographs of people. There was his son Philippe, who had died in a car accident in 2002; Rashid Kawawa, the former Tanzanian vice prime minister; as well as Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, and a row of fading pictures from the 1950s of Wamba’s family. As he began to speak, I mentally went over all the things I
had heard about him from people who had known him in Dar es Salaam or during the rebellion, trying to reconcile the image of a misguided rebel leader, dressed in army fatigues and with a nine-millimeter pistol at his side, with this avuncular, soft-spoken man. How could someone invested for so many years in promoting democracy and civil rights have become derailed?

  In early 1998, as the Rwandans began falling out with Kabila, Kigali began piecing together a new rebellion. Vice President Paul Kagame sent emissaries throughout the region and contacted others by phone in Brussels and the United States. When Wamba arrived in Kigali in early August 1998, most of the other future leaders of the RCD were already there.

  Wamba was baffled when he arrived at the small guesthouse in Kabuga, in the suburbs of the Rwandan capital, where the prospective leaders had gathered. Former Mobutist ministers sat next to former AFDL rebels who had fought against Mobutu. Opposition politicians who had been imprisoned and tortured by Kabila sat next to Rwandan security officers who had been in charge of Kabila’s army. It was an alliance of malcontents; the only thing they had in common was their disdain for Kabila. How could they ever work together?

  Despite the disparate backgrounds, many of them, like Wamba, had solid credentials. For example, there was Zahidi Ngoma, a former high-ranking official for UNESCO, based in Paris. Zahidi had been a long-standing opponent of both Mobutu and Kabila and had been arrested in Kinshasa shortly after the AFDL’s victory, beaten, and nearly starved to death in prison. Also present was Joseph Mudumbi, a human rights lawyer from South Kivu who had reported on abuses in the Rwandan refugee camps in the face of harassment and death threats. He had been awarded a prestigious prize by Human Rights Watch in 1995. Other members included Jacques Depelchin, a Stanford-trained historian who, together with Wamba dia Wamba, had drafted the African Declaration Against Genocide, and Etienne Ngangura, the head of the philosophy department at the University of Kinshasa. To western diplomats, they seemed genuinely bent on bringing about a responsible and functional government. Surely the idealism of these scholars and activists would help this rebellion to succeed where the previous one had failed?