In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  For Gbadolite was the ultimate in African presidential follies. There was just too much of everything: too much champagne, too much beer, too much marble, too much gilt. It was Mobutu’s Graceland, a fittingly vulgar monument to a vast ego, part of the answer to the question of just how a single—albeit extended—family could manage to consume quite so much of a country’s wealth.

  So it was poetic justice that Gbadolite should eventually prove a folly in quite a different sense. Mobutu’s move there—a gesture of petulance towards a population that had turned against him, a barely disguised appeal for love—was to be his eventual undoing, the worst mistake of a career until then characterised by a superb instinct for self-preservation.

  Like it or not, every great man is doomed to acquire a dragoman, some lesser mortal appointing himself as interpreter and guide. Intermediary between the world and his boss, he hopes, like some pilot fish leading a Great White shark to its prey, to grow fat on the morsels trailing from the kill. In Mobutu’s case, the position was always bitterly contested, but for one brief moment a young white businessman was naive enough to think it was his for the taking. Pierre Janssen became a member of Mobutu’s court, the only European to join the president’s intimate family circle, thanks to a fortuitous meeting in the Hilton hotel in Brussels.

  A young businessman in a hurry, proud of having worked out early on in life that ‘money creates power’, he was introduced by a Zairean friend to Yakpwa Mobutu, Mobutu’s daughter by his first wife. It was his natural predilection for black women, rather than his fascination with celebrity, he claims, that drew him to ‘Yaki’, as she is known. They chatted, found each other mutually attractive and a courtship began. Two years later they were married.

  Janssen is interesting because, as a newcomer to the Mobutu world, he did not share the blasé vision of the Zairean elite that tagged alongside the president as he jetted around the world. To the son-in-law, it was all new and amazing. His impressions—the excitable commentary of a Belgian social climber sensing untold riches inching within his reach—are those of Everyman, pressing his nose against the windows of the rich and famous.

  He is no James Boswell, dutifully recording the bons mots and thoughtful musings of his master. The book Janssen wrote as a result of his experiences contains florid accounts of voodoo sessions in the Mobutu household and melodramatic descriptions of secretive meetings with freemasons. It also vaunts an intimacy with the president which is challenged by members of the family. ‘You can take that book and put it straight in the bin,’ Mobutu’s son Nzanga told me with distaste. Yet it contains insights that only a man with the most materialistic of fantasies could contribute.

  Janssen has the mind of a grocer. He clearly expended a lot of energy during his time in the Mobutu household making mental estimates: how much Mobutu spent on champagne, how much on cars, how much on jewellery, how badly the restaurant overcharged him, how blatantly his aides stole. The result, in his book, is a shopaholic’s catalogue, an account that sheds fascinating light on the minutiae of a kleptocracy, the lifestyle a former cook’s son had come to regard as normal after three decades in power.

  The son-in-law’s fascination with Mobutu had been heightened by a fall from grace mirroring the president’s own. At thirty-five, he presented himself when we met in Paris as a man abandoned by fortune, paying a high price for his well-meaning involvement in Zaire. Now separated from Yaki, he was no longer on speaking terms with his African in-laws, who regarded him as little more than a gigolo. The French publishers of his memoirs had gone bankrupt, his business ventures had crumbled to nothing, the Cap Ferrat house where he was staying did not, he promised, belong to him. ‘I’m ruined, I’m on the street,’ he said with a bitter laugh. ‘When I went to Kinshasa I had my own career, I earned a good living. Now I’m separated from my wife, I have “Mobutu” stamped on my forehead and I can no longer go back to Congo. My wedding was the worst day of my life.’

  Yet his fleshy, sun-kissed face hardly spelled deprivation. And he had the cocktail-goers’ habit of avoiding eye contact, constantly scouring the expensive Chinese restaurant we had retired to for someone more interesting to talk to. As his search was rewarded (‘Look, there’s John Galliano’), I realised Janssen, who confesses in his book that he always travelled first class because it increased the likelihood of a brush with a VIP, had probably picked the spot on the elegant Avenue Montaigne precisely for its guaranteed celebrity quotient.

  There were certainly plenty of VIPs on offer when he married Yaki in Gbadolite on 4 July 1992. The 2,500-strong guest list included regional presidents, Saudi princes, Middle Eastern dignitaries, foreign ambassadors and the entire Zairean government, although not, to Janssen’s disappointment, members of Monaco’s royal family. A chartered DC10 and two Boeings had shuttled between Europe and Zaire to muster them in Gbadolite. It was one of the rare occasions when Mobutu could put the $100 million complex to good use. The president had gone a little over the top in designing the main palace at Gbadolite. Sprawling across 15,000 square metres, its seven-metre malachite doors were so heavy it took more than one man to open them—this was a building designed for giants. The huge marble-lined salons were impossible to fill.

  Belatedly, Mobutu realised that he could not live with such grandeur and ordered a second palace on more human scale to be built at Kawele, a few kilometres away, complete with discotheque, Olympic-sized swimming pool and nuclear shelter. With its Louis XIV furniture, Murano chandeliers, Aubusson tapestries, monogrammed silver cutlery and walls hung with green silk—green was Mobutu’s favourite colour—Kawele was hardly a hovel. But it was positively cosy compared to the main monstrosity, unused except for special occasions such as his daughter’s wedding.

  For the ceremony, the bride wore haute couture: a hand-embroidered Jean Louis Scherrer wedding dress with a six-metre train, costing $70,000. Later, she donned a Nina Ricci salmon-pink outfit with silk trimmings. Throughout the day she alternated the three gem clusters bought from the jewellers of Paris’s Place Vendôme, a wedding present from her father, Janssen estimated, worth a total of $3 million.

  After the religious ceremony the guests, wilting in the equatorial humidity, moved to the reception, where a meal of lobster, salmon and caviar awaited, washed down with around a thousand Grand Cru wines from Mobutu’s 15,000-bottle wine cellar. There was a massive firework display and three orchestras provided live music. But the tour de force was the wedding cake, a four-metre concoction of chilled meringue and cream in danger of melting in the tropical heat. Prepared by a Paris chef that very morning, it had been dismantled, loaded in pieces onto a special charter, and flown to Gbadolite: a fourteen-hour round trip costing, estimated Janssen, $65,000.

  The honeymoon? A holiday on the Thai beach resort of Phuket, where a local king played host. And a life of ease awaited the couple on their return. Mobutu had been generous with his gifts: a villa in Uccle, the chic district of Brussels, another in Kinshasa, an envelope stuffed with $300,000 in cash and the promise of an apartment in Monaco.

  With an introduction such as this, it would have been almost impossible for a man like Janssen not to aspire to more. Although he states he was the only member of Mobutu’s entourage to turn down regularly offered cash presents, Janssen clearly expected his marriage to open up all sorts of attractive business opportunities. Despite repeated warnings from his more sceptical wife not to meddle in what he did not understand, he set about cosying up to his new father-in-law.

  First Janssen tried to take over the running expenses of the Mobutu household. Then he proposed the president name him Zairean consul to Monaco, a title, he believed, that would put him in an ideal position to court the rich Arabs holidaying in the principality. There was a plan to revitalise Zaire’s failing palm oil industry, another which involved helping Libya break UN sanctions. One by one, the plans were hatched, matured and, as often as not, according to Janssen, torpedoed in a subtle whispering campaign mounted against him by jealous in-laws and
suspicious aides who had nabbed the post of dragoman long before his bumbling arrival on the scene.

  In the process, however, Janssen’s image of Mobutu slowly changed. ‘I’d built up an image of a terrible dictator who killed people,’ recalled Janssen. ‘The man I came to know bore no resemblance to that. I saw a man who was very sensitive, a very good head of the family, a man who loved his children above everything and loved his country, but had weaknesses, like everyone else.’

  Mobutu’s day began at half-past six. At seven a team of masseurs from the Chinese village would knock at his door to give him his daily work-over. At eight, after reading the international press, he would eat breakfast on the terrace, throwing the odd crumb to the peacocks wandering through the formal gardens. At nine he entered his study and the first of what would be a series of bottles of Laurent Perrier pink champagne would be uncorked.

  Lunch was often that Belgian speciality, moules-frites, with the mussels flown in from Zeebrugge, washed down with a 1930 vintage, in tribute to the year of Mobutu’s birth. When a room needed brightening up, flowers would be flown in from Amsterdam. A barber from New York, a hairdresser from Paris, the French couturier Francesco Smalto: they were all summoned and flown in across the continents whenever deemed necessary. ‘They chartered Boeings like most people use supermarket trolleys,’ recalled Janssen.

  To unwind, Mobutu listened to Gregorian chants, a taste he may have acquired during the years spent being educated by Belgian priests. But there were few occasions for that, given the constant stream of visitors. From Kawele, perched on a hill with clear vistas around, both Mobutu and his DSP guards were perfectly positioned to check out arriving visitors before they rolled up at the house. If it was someone special, Mobutu might call for his personal Chevrolet and drive himself and his guests off fishing or to some quiet forest glade for a picnic, washed down with champagne from a monogrammed silver ice-bucket. This could be a hair-raising experience, as Mobutu was not a good driver. One former State Department official, a frequent visitor to Gbadolite, was surprised to find himself hanging on for dear life as Mobutu and his clearly petrified bodyguards careered down the track, sending pedestrians flying into the bushes. ‘It was like a cartoon, people and things were leaping out of the way. The ambassador made some remark and Mobutu said: “It’s OK, these are all my roads.” ’

  Despite the distance from Kinshasa, the queue of supplicants waiting patiently for his attention was endless. Most, whether opposition or MPR politicians, family members, foreign visitors, came in search of one thing—one of the hefty envelopes kept in Mobutu’s desk drawer stuffed with $100 bills. ‘He paid out, and paid out. He was surrounded by leeches thirsting for dollars,’ recalled Janssen. ‘I looked into his eyes and I felt sorry for him.’

  In every man’s life, the same events, the same characteristics can be viewed by his intimates from radically different points of view, perspectives so far apart the final picture may be unrecognisable to rivals claiming exclusive insights. So it was with Mobutu—always at the heart of a fierce ‘war of influences’. For the president’s sons and daughters, the years in Gbadolite were a time when Mobutu, estranged for too many years by the affairs of state, developed a new set of priorities and took a well-merited break. The loss of two sons—Niwa and Konga—to illness had given him a sharp appreciation of the fragility of human relations, the importance of family. ‘We saw him a lot more than we ever did before,’ remembered his son Nzanga. ‘He tasted joys he had never known, he rediscovered family life.’

  To outsiders like Janssen, the same scenario appears in a different light. For them, Mobutu had fallen victim to a predatory family which, exploiting his desire to be a good paterfamilias, was proving as voracious in its demands on Mobutu as he had been in his demands on the state. It is impossible, looking through their eyes, not to pity a man whose personal relations had become, after decades of patronage and bribery, utterly corrupted by the issue of what he was in a position to give.

  Despite his ready generosity—or rather, because of it—Mobutu was hardly getting value for money, Janssen claimed. Talking to the cook at Gbadolite, he discovered that Mobutu was paying three times the wholesale price for the 10,000–12,000 bottles of champagne the household got through each year. In Cap Ferrat, Mobutu paid twice the going rate for the fleet of Mercedes he rented. In Brussels, well-heeled Zairean exiles would actually drive to Mobutu’s residence to talk for hours on the presidential satellite telephone, knowing the bill would be settled without question. He was being ripped off by everyone, from the Belgian steward who was finally sacked when Mobutu twigged to his systematic overcharging, to the ambassadors who arranged his lodging on foreign trips and the Senegalese marabouts (witch-doctors) consulted over every major decision. Trusted implicitly by Mobutu, who effortlessly juggled a belief in the African world of spirits with the Catholic faith, they were paid twice—once by the president, a second time by the politicians who had asked them to guide the president in any given direction.

  The worst offenders, Janssen asserted, were often his own children. He claimed one son, dispatched to the United States to buy six armoured Cadillacs of a type used by George Bush, inflated their price by $40,000 apiece, then telephoned from New York claiming he had lost the $600,000 Mobutu had given him during a mugging. His trusting father wired another $600,000 to New York only to see his son return, empty-handed, claiming the model was no longer available. The 1993 riots, he says, provided the same son with a lucrative sideline: borrowing the presidential yacht Kamanyola, he ferried fleeing mouvanciers across the river to Brazzaville for $2,000 a family. ‘Everyone was stealing from him, exploiting his inexhaustible generosity. And Mobutu appeared not to notice,’ claimed Janssen.

  For many observers, such excesses could be traced back to the death of Marie Antoinette, Mobutu’s first wife, who had expired of heart failure in 1977. Still remembered with fondness by the populace, she had been a restraining influence on Mobutu, bringing out the best qualities in his character, holding his vices in check. ‘When Marie Antoinette was alive she acted as a kind of barrier against the demands of the clan, even though she was a Ngbandi herself,’ claimed a childhood acquaintance. ‘When she died there was a general slackening. The clan began to take over everything.’

  Mobutu’s extraordinary personal arrangements merely added to the problem. Marie Antoinette’s place was taken by Bobi Ladawa, a former mistress. But despite the many dalliances tracked by Kinshasa’s embassies, Mobutu still felt the need for what the Congolese coyly refer to as a ‘second office’. While many married men seek relationships with women who differ radically from their wives in appearance or character, Mobutu opted for the truly familiar. Kossia, none other than Bobi Ladawa’s identical twin, became his mistress. Many Zaireans, spooked by the fact they could never tell which woman, wife or mistress, was perched on Mobutu’s arm during official occasions, believe the arrangement represented a good luck charm for superstitious Mobutu, for twins are regarded in many parts of Africa as possessing totemic significance, a mirror-image combination blessed with magical powers. ‘It was a way of warding off his first wife’s angry spirit,’ one Congolese official explained. ‘With a twin on each side Marie Antoinette couldn’t get at him.’

  Another possibility is that the president felt compelled to bed the sister to avoid being cuckolded, as whoever married Bobi Ladawa’s twin would, in a way, be savouring intercourse with the first lady. The custom of appropriating your wife’s sister is, in any case, practised in the equatorial region. ‘You always go upwards, never downwards,’ my driver François once explained to me. ‘You can sleep with your wife’s elder sister, but not her younger sister.’ For all but the midwife present at the birth a twin, presumably, counted as neither up nor down.

  On the surface, it was a fairly cosy ménage à trois. One diamond trader invited to dinner in Gbadolite remembered joining Mobutu at table with the two women—once strikingly beautiful, their features now blurred by envelopes of fat—s
itting on either side, discussing housekeeping arrangements with no visible tension in the air. But the sisters inevitably competed for attention, joining forces when necessary to champion the interests of Bobi Ladawa’s children against the rival claims of Marie Antoinette’s offspring. ‘There was a problem of rivalry between them, but they were intelligent women and at a certain point they realised they might as well unite their forces,’ was Janssen’s view.

  So the president was surrounded by family members vying for his love, and in the Mobutu household, of course, terms of endearment were expected to be expressed in strictly financial form. In any case, how could a man who had turned embezzlement into a presidential art now lecture his family and servants on honesty?

  There was another factor preventing Mobutu from cleaning out his own Augean stables. Paradoxically for a president branded as one of the greediest heads of state of all time, his lack of understanding of the workings of an economy was only matched by the absence of any grasp over his own domestic expenses.

  Shielded for decades from the practicalities of daily life, he no longer knew what items cost in the real world or what normal people spent on lodging and food, floundering disastrously once when a journalist asked him during an interview what the price of bread was in Kinshasa. ‘For such a big thief he was rather naive about money,’ mused a diplomat.