In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  The purse strings were firmly in the hands of the twins and their own lack of sophistication—the simplicity of the African peasant who keeps her money tucked under her mat and never goes near a bank—was manifest in their preference for cash. Cheques and credit cards appear to have been almost unheard of in the Gbadolite household, where debts were settled and presents made with piles of banknotes. Before each trip, $100 bills would be packed, gangster-style, in Louis Vuitton briefcases, which would be lined up in the hall in descending order of size.

  The president had no idea of daily incomings or outgoings. According to Janssen, ‘Mobutu never checked a bill. He would say to his aides: “I’m going to Switzerland tomorrow, get me three million dollars.” But where that money came from, he just didn’t care. It was up to them to find it.’

  Nevertheless, the huge drain on his resources represented by the palaces and their denizens was not to be the cause of Mobutu’s downfall. By withdrawing to his jungle hideout, he had made a mockery of the post of president, rendering himself increasingly irrelevant to unfolding events. Theoretically, a well-equipped rebel movement would only have had to bomb the airstrip at Gbadolite and jam his satellite telephone signal to render him utterly redundant. But Mobutu was carrying out the task of progressive isolation voluntarily. Insidiously, his decade-long sulk was depriving him of the first-hand contact he needed to gauge the mood of the country, the public and his armed forces.

  For prime ministers, ambassadors and visiting foreign envoys, any presidential ruling now involved a four-hour round trip into the heart of the jungle and sometimes days spent waiting for an audience. In a nation which had become the repository for the world’s obsolete aircraft, the trip could prove fatal. A foreign minister, a Tunisian ambassador and a contingent of soldiers were amongst those who paid with their lives for a Gbadolite visit when their jets crashed approaching Kinshasa’s Ndjili airport.

  Jack Lunzer, a British diamond dealer, narrowly escaped a similar fate during a flight that underlined how marooned Mobutu was becoming. Summoned to Gbadolite, he became alarmed as the hours passed with no sign of imminent descent. The Belgian pilot then confessed that he was getting no navigational signals from the Gbadolite control tower, which appeared to have run out of fuel. With the cloud cover low over the trees, landing unaided was out of the question and the plane had only 50 minutes worth of fuel for the one-hour trip to the nearest Zairean airstrip. Slowing the engines to a crawl, the pilot nursed the aircraft back to the town of Mbandaka as his passengers counted the minutes. ‘As we touched the runway, the engines went splutter, splutter, splutter and stopped. When we got out, I was dripping with sweat,’ said Lunzer.

  Once in Gbadolite, the president’s attention had to be captured. Increasingly, visitors found planned tête-à-têtes hijacked as the court headed off on one of the country jaunts Mobutu adored. Honoré Ngbanda, the president’s closest political aide, recalled the difficulty of focusing the president’s mind on such pressing problems as the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire and the burgeoning Kabila rebellion while his boss insisted on playing the part of country squire. ‘The President of the Republic no longer had an office! We would meet in farms on the outskirts of Gbadolite, in the middle of fields of maize and manioc, amid the commotion of farm machinery and labourers’ cries. It was difficult to discuss urgent and sensitive issues in depth. Even if his capacity to assimilate dossiers and issue orders was legendary, this method of working was no longer appropriate given the seriousness of the crisis facing the country.’

  Mobutu’s horizons, visitors noticed, were shrinking with every passing year. Like the French royal courtiers in Versailles who played at being shepherds and dairy maids as the shadow of the guillotine crept closer, Mobutu had developed a passion for glad-handing local farmers, talking about crops, soils and rains.

  The agricultural interest had initially seemed contrived. Andreas Wagner, a Swiss vet hired by Mobutu, accompanied forty high-yielding dairy cattle on a C130 flight that took them straight from Switzerland to Gbadolite in 1979. Struggling with a desperate shortage of grazing, Wagner, who had been told this was a project aimed at bringing agricultural development to the area, swiftly realised he was working on a cosmetic showcase, the result of a presidential whim. ‘Mobutu came once for ten minutes to inspect the cattle and I tried to explain the various problems. But you can quickly tell when someone isn’t listening. He wasn’t interested at all,’ said Wagner, who left in a hurry when he discovered his complaints had triggered the issuing of an arrest warrant against him.

  Yet, by the 1990s Mobutu had become more engaged. This was where he had started out, running barefoot through the fields, helping his mother plant cassava, living off the land. He was rediscovering both his tribal roots and the simple pleasures of childhood. He loved being able to reach up from his open-backed car and pick fruit from a tree planted under his instructions. At times, he wondered if he had missed his vocation. ‘He’d always say—“if I could do it all again I’d be a farmer”,’ said Nzanga. ‘I think that is what he really would have liked.’

  Daniel Simpson, the US ambassador during those last years, once drove out to Goroma, the model farm Mobutu had planted 10 kilometres from Gbadolite, for talks. ‘He’d picked up cuttings in Egypt and on his various trips and he and his wife were personally supervising the planting of orange and lemon trees.’ As Mobutu passed, Gbadolite’s residents lined the route to cheer the man who had brought them electricity and telephones, just as Kinshasa’s population had done in the good old days, before they turned ungrateful. Increasingly, Mobutu spent his days outdoors, his attention focused on clan disputes, village problems, handing out cash presents. If he had failed in the task of ruling his enormous country, he could still play the part of tribal chief with conviction.

  It was all utterly maddening to top-ranking visitors needing decisions and it was made more infuriating by the ‘Uncle Fangbi’ factor. Just as Ngbanda or Vundwawe Te Pemako, Mobutu’s other key adviser, were broaching some subject of enormous sensitivity, Uncle Fangbi, the brother-in-law, would interrupt to remind the president his siesta was due, or that he had promised to drive to a nearby village.

  A former nurse’s assistant, Uncle Fangbi knew little of politics or military matters. But in the final years the man who had dubbed himself ‘Representative of the Presidential Couple’ had enlarged his field of influence so that it expanded from responsibility for Mobutu’s daily schedule to approval of his private and professional audiences, control of the household budget and, finally, the power to suspend officials working in Gbadolite.

  Uncle Fangbi would arrange outings without revealing the destination until five minutes before departure, making security checks impossible. He allowed Mobutu to drive the first car in the convoy and encouraged the president, whose paranoia jostled with a desperate desire for some spontaneity, some freedom in his life, to go village walkabout and sample the local palm wine. The DSP hated Uncle Fangbi not only for overruling them, they claimed he was pocketing their salaries. But when aides remonstrated, Mobutu would say ‘I’ll see to it’—his way of signalling a conversation was closed.

  The president’s fantasy appeared to be a quiet old age, culminating in a deathbed scene surrounded by family and adoring dependants. He had built a marble mausoleum which held Marie Antoinette’s body, and his own name and those of his children had been carved into the stone in expectation of their eventual demise. Despite all the precautions, despite all the investments abroad, Mobutu hoped never to leave his country. ‘He never anticipated a life in exile,’ said Janssen. ‘He used to tell his aides: “I will never read the Cap Martin (one of the Riviera newspapers).” ’

  Did Mobutu not realise the risk he was running by indulging in such escapism? Today, each aide, each politician, each family member will tell you how many times he warned Mobutu, how often he sought to persuade the president to return to Kinshasa, how thoroughly it suited various ill-intentioned players for Mobutu to marginalise himself.
‘My conscience is clear. He was listening to Vundwawe and Ngbanda at the time,’ insisted Nzanga, the son. ‘I know it suited them for him to stay away from Kinshasa. They came to Gbadolite and made my father sign decrees, name heads of enterprises. All that was to their benefit.’ Not so, claimed Ngbanda. ‘We tried to bring him back to Kinshasa, but without success. He had been engulfed by the family.’

  As the power vacuum widened, the refrain was even taken up by increasingly anxious foreign heads of state—to no avail. ‘I’m waiting for the elections. If I win, I’ll return to Kinshasa. If I lose, I’ll stay here,’ Mobutu would growl in response. The man who had entranced the crowds must have known better than anyone the importance of contact with the public, a constant monitoring of the nation’s temperature. If intellectually he registered the danger he was running, it is clear that he simply could not bring himself to do anything about it. Like Mr Kurtz, he had been swallowed up by the forest and the fantasies it spawned.

  One by one, he was calling a halt to the duties that had formed the framework of his working existence. ‘At one time Mobutu would personally swear in all army officers. They would swear allegiance to him, eyeball to eyeball,’ recalled Daniel Simpson. ‘By 1986 he’d stopped doing that. Another thing that stopped was his travelling around the country. His officials drew up a schedule of trips and tours for the electoral campaign and he said “forget it”. It just didn’t give him any pleasure any more.’ The arch manipulator appeared to have lost his taste for politics, hardly able to summon a flicker of interest even in the workings of government that had once obsessed him. ‘At first he used to sit in on every cabinet meeting. But then he became less and less interested. It became once a month and then he practically didn’t chair any at all,’ said a former prime minister.

  Who can blame him for feeling jaded? One senses a colossal fatigue with leadership and the burdens of office, the weary boredom Larry Devlin first caught a glimpse of when, returning to Kinshasa in the 1970s, he found his old ally drowning in sycophancy. As the former CIA chief put it: ‘Having accepted the fact that he was a genius, what more could he do?’ He had seen human nature at its least inspiring: grasping, insincere and treacherous. He had learned, like some emissary from Hades sent to test humanity’s depravity, how to encourage and exploit those very qualities.

  Despite all the money and attention lavished on it, the Gbadolite complex never seemed a very permanent fixture. Waiting once for an audience with Mobutu, Leo Tindemanns, a frequent visitor, noticed the monkeys scampering over the grounds. ‘I was struck by the fact that once Mobutu left the place would return very rapidly to the bush,’ said the former Belgian prime minister.

  So it proved. When Kabila’s forces seized the area the site was trashed by Mobutu’s loyal villagers and rebels alike. They emptied the wine cellars, barbecued the imported herds, drove off with the fleets of Mercedes and stripped the palaces of furniture and fittings, which ended up gracing market stalls in Bangui, capital of Central African Republic.

  The walls once hung with green silk are scrawled with graffiti now, weeds have sprouted in the empty swimming pool and broken glass crunches underfoot in the salons where Janssen celebrated his short-lived union to Yaki. The chandeliers have been used as target practice by bored soldiers. Only the Chinese palace, with its ornamental ponds and dragon statues, has been left structurally intact, along with the monstrous marble baths, too big even for the most determined looter.

  Kabila’s Tourist Ministry played briefly with the idea of turning Gbadolite, and the yacht Kamanyola, into a destination for travellers with a taste for the unusual, stops on a guided tour entitled, perhaps, ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous’. A group of French businessmen even flew to Gbadolite to assess possibilities, but were discouraged by how few of the original fittings were left.

  Tourism had to be put on hold, in any case, when a new war broke out in 1998 and an army unit from Chad, one of the African countries that took Kabila’s side in this second conflict, set up headquarters in Gbadolite. When the Chadians tired of their foreign military adventure, rebel forces led by Jean Pierre Bemba, the son of one of Mobutu’s businessman friends, seized control of the area. The Ugandan soldiers backing Bemba’s campaign moved into the palace at Kawele, after first reinterring the bodies of family members dragged—in just the nightmare scenario Mobutu always dreaded—from the marble mausoleum. ‘There are limits to revenge,’ explained one of the rebels.

  Bemba has been hailed as a liberator by a hungry local population, desperate to see a return of the investment and jobs of the Mobutu era. But Gbadolite’s moment in the sun has passed. A future president is unlikely to be a Ngbandi, and only the most self-assured successor would be so foolhardy as to risk retiring to Gbadolite. Like many another presidential home town suddenly deprived of the protection of its local hero, the region Mobutu was so determined to help is now doomed to return to the obscurity from which it briefly emerged.

  Like the Swiss cows and Argentine sheep that slowly wasted in the tropical heat, Gbadolite was an artificial construct, wholly dependent on Mobutu for its existence, incapable of surviving his demise. And that had become inescapable. For while the president picnicked under the trees, admiring the scenery and bonding with his relatives, younger men with their own voracious extended families to satisfy were plotting and scheming. His failure to heed the constant warnings ensured that when he finally left Zaire he did so not with the dignity appropriate to one of Africa’s longest serving leaders, but in a sweat-soaked flurry of terror, humiliation and betrayal.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The night the pink champagne went flat

  ‘It’s when it rains that you can pee your pants with a quiet mind.’

  Kasaian proverb

  Just as every baby boomer knows what they were doing when they heard that John Kennedy was shot, I can pinpoint where I was on 6 April 1994—a day that was to mark a generation of Africans as deeply as the Dallas shooting marked Americans.

  I had been invited, along with a handful of Zairean journalists, to a late-night meeting with the then head of the country’s customs office. Thanks to the huge opportunities his job offered him for bribe-taking, he was said to be one of the richest men in Zaire, richer even than Mobutu, who allowed him such leeway because he regarded this man, who had once tutored his children, as a kind of adopted son.

  One of the generation of what had been dubbed ‘the baby dinosaurs’, he was inordinately vain, and his ballooning wealth had made him ambitious for a role in politics. He was now gunning for the prime minister’s job. No one who knew the political scene believed he could get it, but for some inexplicable reason he seemed to think that getting the press to talk about him would convince the old man of the value of his candidacy.

  Sporting the Sunday best appropriate for such a social event, we wound our way up through the streets of Binza, home of the Kinshasa elite, and hooted our way into the courtyard of a new house. It was the usual white-washed, heavily guarded Zairean pile, although, as building was still in progress, the décor had not yet reached its full, tacky potential. I sneaked a visit to the bathroom and confirmed, to my enormous satisfaction, that it would have gold bath-taps.

  Sitting on the balcony overlooking Kinshasa, with the lights of Brazzaville in the distance, we listened politely as our host boasted, with all the subtlety of a second-hand car salesman, of his political acuteness. He had the president’s ear, we were to understand, knew so much but could, unfortunately, tell us so little. His wife was not in evidence. Instead, playing hostess was a sultry female presenter who read the television news, the ultimate rich man’s trophy.

  While we could hear the sounds of dependants tucking into a hefty meal inside, on the balcony the diet was liquid—Mobutu’s beloved pink champagne. Leave your glass untouched for more than a couple of minutes and our host would throw the contents ostentatiously over the balcony and pour a top-up, exclaiming: ‘You can’t drink this, it’s lost its fizz.’ Staged for the
benefit of guests who probably earned less in a month than he was tossing into the night sky, it was a crudely effective display of wealth.

  We were all fairly muzzy by the time the Telecel rang. There was a brief exchange in Lingala and when our host put the mobile phone down his eyes were big. A plane carrying Rwanda’s and Burundi’s presidents had been shot down coming in to land at Kigali airport in Rwanda. Mobutu, it was said, had been planning to take the same flight but had changed his plans at the last moment. Both leaders were dead.

  There was a baffled silence. Who could have done it? What did it mean for Africa, and Zaire in particular? The party broke up, murmuring unanswered questions.

  The consequences were to be cataclysmic. And it was appropriate that I heard the news on that balcony, with a man who epitomised all that was worst about the Mobutu regime. For the downing of that distant presidential jet in a tiny hilly country half a continent away represented the toppling of the first in a row of dominoes stretching 1,000 miles, all the way from the cool hills of Rwanda’s capital to the torpid heat of Kinshasa.

  Mobutu spent that night in tears, mourning Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a personal friend, fearful for the future. He was right to weep. The tremors set in motion on 6 April were to bring down his regime three years later, lowering the curtain on Cold War politics in Africa and marking the continent’s entry into new, uncharted waters.

  The dead Habyarimana was probably offered up as sacrificial lamb by the extremists in his own Hutu community. Angered by their leader’s attempts to hammer out a power-sharing agreement with the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a rebel group dominated by the minority Tutsi ethnic group, the fanatics in one fell swoop rid themselves of a supposed traitor and gave the Hutus an excuse for a ruthless crackdown on the Tutsi minority living among them.