In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  The demands on his purse were huge. The US Treasury launched preliminary investigations into the matter when, in the early 1990s, Washington, Paris and Brussels briefly played with the idea of forcing political reform on Mobutu by freezing his foreign assets. The Treasury’s assessment was that, in contrast with public perceptions, Mobutu in his last years had been outstripped by his generals—active in the diamond and oil trade—when it came to revenue-raising. ‘When we tried to get a hold on what he had, we found to our surprise that Mobutu was having serious cash flow problems,’ said one official. ‘He was having problems paying his bills, maintaining his French properties and keeping his entourage happy. It suggested that his ability to plunder various state mechanisms had shrunk enormously as Gécamines and Miba had decayed. He had squandered huge amounts and not squirrelled it away as was supposed.’

  The US Treasury came up with a figure of $40–45 million, an estimate that only involved real estate, the most visible and therefore quantifiable aspect of Mobutu’s wealth. Interestingly, this is close to the sum Mobutu himself revealed to an interviewer when in 1988 he was asked the size of his fortune. Estimating it at under $50 million, he added: ‘What is that after twenty-two years as head of state of such a big country?’ By 1997, there were even signs Mobutu was running out of spending money. Unable to maintain even his personal jet, he was reported to have pillaged funds set aside for the elections to pay for the Kisangani mercenary force. With his own survival in the balance, it seems unlikely he would have stinted on this had the cash been easily to hand.

  When the subject of Mobutu’s fortune arises, Nzanga rolls his eyes to heaven. Since going into exile he has received a letter from the AFDL asking for the return of $8 billion (‘Eight billion!’ he snorts incredulously) and has fended off numerous overtures from enterprising Congolese claiming that as Mobutu’s illegitimate children they deserve a share in his inheritance. He knows, better than anyone, the spell cast by the fabled billions. ‘There’s so much hearsay. But it’s all supposition which began with the Blumenthal report. I’m no beggar, but I drive a ten-year-old car and I can’t afford to go out and buy myself a plane. All we have is some real estate bought by Mobutu, which doesn’t amount to a billion French francs. Yes, there are large sums in the accounts of important men. But it’s not with us. Millionaires tend not to be very generous men, and my father was very generous.’

  The legends of Mobutu’s hoard will endure, fuelled by reports of roomfuls of gold ingots in Gambia, front companies in the Canary Isles, bank statements left lying in the debris of looted Gbadolite. One suspects that Nzanga and his siblings will never be forced to apply for social security, but I am willing to predict that there will be no miraculous discoveries of billion-dollar Mobutu stashes, Africa’s equivalent of the Loch Ness monster. Congo’s stolen fortune is not hidden, but on open display. It has been invested in the luxurious mansions of Uccle and Rhode St Genèse in Brussels, where exiled prime ministers rub shoulders with former heads of industry. It is to be found in the South African compounds where chauffeurs polish gleaming ranks of Mercedes and on the Rolexed wrists of mouvancier wives flourishing credit cards in Parisian designer shops. This is redistribution of wealth at its most inegalitarian, a trickle-down effect that moistened no more than the uppermost layer of a social hierarchy.

  Most Congolese long ago accepted that the elite which rode on Mobutu’s coat-tails will never be brought to justice. And now that their initial enthusiasm for a financial spring-cleaning has subsided, Western governments and banks are secretly relieved by Kinshasa’s indifference to the issue. Not only because the proceeds of the country’s diamonds and copper pad out their balance sheets, or because embarrassing light would be shed on the role they played in condoning massive capital flight. Given the growing reports of Kabila’s own financial mismanagement, the increasing evidence he has learned much from Mobutu, who, after all, could hand over the money with a sense of a wrong righted, a job well done?

  Does the task OBMA was meant to perform, but will never now complete, still matter? There are many, like Daniel Simpson, the former US ambassador to Kinshasa, who regard it as a dangerous irrelevance for a country with far more pressing problems to tackle. ‘It’s a street without joy, the moral equivalent of digging for pirate treasure,’ he says. Yet to track down the missing money, to decide how much was taken and where it went, who turned a blind eye and who took a cut, who deserves to be compensated and who should be punished, would be to start the process of breaking with a hopeless past and building a state forty-five million Congolese might be proud to inhabit.

  Despite the Leopard’s departure, there has been no renewal, no change in mentalities. Mobutu ruled thanks to the support of a mono-ethnic security force. So does Kabila. Mobutu plundered the central bank. So does Kabila. Mobutu destroyed the formal economy. Kabila has gone even further, choking off the informal economy. ‘Kabila,’ as one European politician astutely remarked, ‘has simply replaced Mobutu with Mobutuism.’

  The depressing accuracy of his observation came home to me one winter’s evening in Brussels, when I watched Kabila being interviewed during a rare visit to Belgium. Aimed at improving tense relations between the new regime and the West, the trip had not proved a success. It had been nearly cancelled altogether when the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London suddenly raised the possibility of Kabila being served with an injunction for war crimes for his role in the massacre of Hutu refugees. Unsure of how to treat him, the Belgians had failed to provide military honours at the airport and King Albert had made a point of not shaking his hand. Pinned under the blazing television studio lights, Kabila radiated a kind of suppressed fury. Drops of sweat stood out on the huge bald head that seemed to blend seamlessly with his torso. But he nonetheless refused to remove his dark cashmere coat as he fielded questions with a broad smile of fake bonhomie. He had none of Mobutu’s mastery of the situation, none of the you-know-and-I-know-but-watchme-as-I-tell-you-the-most-massive-whopper humour. Instead, he sounded like what he was: a thug being forced for one brief moment to answer his critics. Asked about a minister’s arrest, he said he was ‘unaware’. Questioned about the lynching of Tutsis, he chuckled. It was not a nice performance.

  Looking at the screen I realised with a slight shock that in his dark coat, buttoned up to the chin, with his neck swathed in a woollen scarf, Congo’s new president looked exactly as though he was wearing an abacost, that symbol of Mobutu’s rule. I was reminded of the moment in George Orwell’s Animal Farm when, staring through the kitchen window, the animals watch their self-important new masters, the pigs, fraternising with the farmers, oppressors of old. ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.’

  EPILOGUE

  ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’

  Heart of Darkness

  —Joseph Conrad

  Every week after Mass in Rabat’s cathedral, the members of a Congolese family, dressed in their Sunday best, are in the habit of making their way to the city’s Catholic cemetery. The cemetery, which dates back to the era of French rule in Morocco, lies in the popular quarter of Akkari and looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. It is already choked with the graves of thousands of French colonials who died in foreign service and Christian families seeking to bury their loved ones are obliged these days to look elsewhere for a resting place.

  Yet room has nonetheless been found within the grounds for a modern tomb, built from Italian marble and holding space for six coffins. The care alloted this particular plot by the cemetery guardians, paid a small allowance to freshen up the flowers placed there, is another particularity suggesting its father-and-son occupants are a little out of the ordinary. Over photographs of the older man two inscriptions have been carved. ‘He
re lies President Joseph Désiré Mobutu, born 14 October 1930 in Lisala, died 7 September 1997, in Rabat’ reads one. The other gives the identity the inventor of ‘authenticity’ would no doubt prefer to be remembered by: ‘President Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, marshal.’

  It is here that Bobi Ladawa and her sister Kossia come with their children and grandchildren to pay tribute to their dead patriarch, Zaire’s Leopard, and frightening son Kongulu, who shared his father’s fate of dying in exile. On the surface at least, the two women appear to have adapted smoothly to life in Morocco. The vast retinue of security guards and doctors, cousins and in-laws, hairdressers and maids that originally followed Mobutu to Rabat has dispersed, to the quiet relief of their Moroccan hosts, and members of the immediate family have moved into flats and villas in the capital’s most exclusive districts.

  In keeping with her former role as ‘mother of the nation’, the former first lady keeps a benevolent eye on the sizeable Congolese community in Rabat, a favourite jumping off point for youngsters bent on building new lives in Europe. She shares with her late husband a sense of the duties incumbent on the tribal chief, and is respected for her many acts of charity towards the less fortunate. She has lost a great deal of the weight put on during the years of plenty and is careful to keep a low public profile, perhaps aware that with the death of King Hassan, her late husband’s last African friend has gone, weakening the position of a family reliant on the Moroccan regime’s continuing hospitality.

  But in truth, the Mobutu children have found their surname less of a hindrance than they might have expected, now that the Leopard’s death has removed the main source of potential political embarrassment. They travel freely between Morocco, Europe and the United States and find, in common with other Big Vegetables who fled abroad, that crossing borders has become ever easier as the world’s amnesia towards Zaire—a country that no longer exists—grows.

  Like all exiles, they try to keep busy. But essentially they are waiting: for the day they can return to Kinshasa without fear of being jailed, for the day they can accompany Mobutu’s body on its last flight, back to his ancestral home. Even the president’s fiercest Congolese critics now feel repatriation is in order. But while longing for just such an outcome, the family hesitates to trust assurances proffered by a new administration. ‘Kabila can talk in the air as much as he likes, but it won’t be under him that we repatriate my father’s body,’ says Nzanga. ‘Certain preconditions have to be met. He was, after all, head of state for thirty years.’

  Maybe only a state funeral for the man they called ‘Papa’, a ceremonial day of reckoning, could put an end to the condition of arrested development in which an orphaned Congo seems stuck.

  Having ducked a confrontation with its past, the country cannot forge an alternative future. If the end of the Cold War has left Congo master of its fate, the country barely appears to have registered the change. Locked into the habits of paternalism, with its political landscape still dominated by personalities that first hit the headlines in the post-independence years, it is running on rails laid by a dead man, bereft of fresh ideas.

  Those who can, get out. I have sat on flights next to some who failed to escape: handcuffed Congolese immigrants, flanked by French gendarmes, who wailed as they returned to the country of their birth. These were not political activists expecting to be tortured on arrival. They were economic migrants frustrated in that most basic of urges: to be able to aspire to something more than mere survival. Whatever bloody deeds were carried out on his orders, this will always constitute Mobutu’s worst human rights violation: the destruction of an economy that quashed a generation’s aspirations.

  But most Congolese will be forced to stay and ride out events, as the country serves as stage for its neighbours’ battles and the number of rebel groups without a cause climbs exponentially. ‘Maybe things have to get worse in Democratic Congo before they get better,’ speculates an ambassador. ‘There are now so many young men with guns out there, I can’t see things improving for ten, twenty, maybe thirty years.’

  It is worryingly easy to imagine that, one day, Congo’s predicament may become so bleak its citizens will actually wax nostalgic for Mobutu, just as under Mobutu they talked with fondness and selective amnesia of the ghastly colonial years. The prospect of a political party, coalescing around one of the surviving Mobutu sons maybe, which would revive the concept of authenticity while glossing over subsequent absurdities, makes one shudder. But similar about-turns are happening across Africa, and for identical reasons. Failing to understand the reasons behind a country’s ruin makes repetition all too easy.

  This is not to say that the post-Mobutu years have been short of memoirs, penned by the key players in the story. But the publications all share one basic characteristic. In each case, responsibility for the disaster that was the Congo has been smoothly shrugged off, to be shifted wholesale onto the dead man’s shoulders.

  Mobutu’s very charisma, the larger-than-life personality that so overwhelmed all those who met him, encourages such scapegoating. The leopardskin cap, the magic cane, the growling voice all lent themselves to caricature, the image of a monster whose sins dwarfed those of lesser men. For mouvanciers and opposition politicians, journalists and diplomats, half in love with the Mobutu myth, it was always easier to rail against Big Man rule than confront a more unsettling reality. Accept that no one figure stood at the nation’s controls in the last years of Zaire’s existence and each aide, general, foreign minister and financier would have had to acknowledge their own contribution to the system.

  Yes, Mobutu was brutal, ruthless and greedy. Possessed of the instincts of the neighbourhood thug, he knew only how to draw out the worst in those around him. Most disastrous was the fact that he lacked the imagination, the sustained vision required to build a coherent state from Belgium’s uncertain inheritance. But if Mobutu traced a Kurtz-like trajectory from high ideals to febrile corruption, he did not pursue that itinerary alone, or unaided.

  The phrase that lingers in my mind was voiced by Nzanga Mobutu. ‘When history judges my father, it will judge in detail,’ he said, meaning blame would eventually be apportioned precisely where it was due. Citing members of a presidential entourage who criticised in exile the former patron they once indulged, he added: ‘I think a bit of mea culpa would be in order.’ Mea culpa. Throughout my interviews, I had kept expecting to find signs of it, only to be constantly surprised by its failure to make an appearance. There was precious little from the Washington financiers who granted billions to a known thief, whose institutions will one day have to explain why the Congolese should be held accountable for loans made in bad faith. Even less from the US and French officials who, motivated by strategic reasons, decided with cool cynicism what was best for this most fragile of post-independence states.

  There was none at all from the Congolese aides, ministers and generals who helped mould the dinosaur’s policies, still adopting the ‘I was only following orders’ excuse judged insufficient at Nuremberg. And with the remarkable exception of Jules Marchal, the guilt-ridden retired Belgian diplomat, the colonial power that first sent Congo on its wayward course had nimbly succeeded in dismissing the very notion of blame.

  To explore the roles they played—from the raids of the slave traders to the amputations carried out by the Force Publique and the wishful thinking of the World Bank—is to move from exasperation at a nation’s fecklessness to wonderment that a population has come through it all with a sense of humour. It seems surprising not that Congo is as shambolic as it is today, but that its condition is not far worse.

  The quality of negative excellence that so unnerves visitors to the Congo, the country’s capacity to take the faults of any normal African state and pitch them one frequency higher, were nurtured by a brutal colonial past, followed by a unique level of meddling by the Western powers.

  Now that the US, France and Belgium have distanced themselves, now that Mobutu is dead, the country has
lost the last excuse for its predicament. A population that has set its sights little higher than survival has to learn to take responsibility for its own destiny. ‘What do the French want of Congo?’ François my driver would ask me when discussing his country’s future, a question that alternated with the equally infuriating, if equally understandable ‘What do the Americans want?’ The question must now become ‘What do the Congolese want?’

  In London one grey day, when news agencies were reporting on yet another breakdown of a supposed ceasefire in the Congo—another chance for some Heart of Darkness similes—I stumbled across a 1956 collection of black-and-white photographs of Leopoldville on the shelves of my London library. Bound in light blue, with the title picked out in gold—the colours of both Kabila and the Belgian Congo—it was published to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the city’s founding.

  Flicking through the pages was like travelling to another world. Blessed with the glorious unselfconsciousness of a time when colonial shame seemed inconceivable, the author proudly paraded a port full of cranes, factories turning out cloth, a modern railway network and ‘one of the only two gyrobus transport systems in the world’. Kinshasa, it was clear, had once been a veritable Milton Keynes. If it was only four years before independence, there was little sense of a nation being prepared to take its destiny into its own hands. Instead there were photos of Congolese obediently bowed over lathes, typewriters and microscopes as white tutors gave instructions. On one page a Belgian housewife taught local women how to run a kitchen, on another, black chefs in white aprons demonstrated their skill at producing Belgian patisserie.

  Before and after…the photographs showed jungle bulldozed to form a city street, oxen making way for cars of the 1950s, a model Congolese family relaxing in a spotless lounge, sipping tea as they listened to the radio. But a vital chapter was missing. Now. That would reveal the wheel turning full circle: the jungle growing back through the potholed tarmac, running water tainted with sewage, neighbourhoods without electricity, walking replacing the car.