by Al Venter
The 20 minutes or so that we spent at the bar seemed like hours. The two hours on the road to Lubumbashi might have been a whole night. Every mile seemed like ten and every promise of distraction offered relief.
After we had passed through the second roadblock, Gilles leaned forward and, in English, asked what he should do with the set of Ché Guevara’s writings that he had in his baggage? ‘Christ!’ was about all that I could utter just then. I turned my head in his direction.
‘You serious?’ The revelation was absurd and I was incredulous.
There are about six books, he whispered. I could hear that he was breathless as he whispered and suddenly I was too. It was like asking an airline pilot what you should do with the bomb we had brought on board. Could things get any worse?
To me it was incomprehensible that a Frenchman with a modicum of sense should enter Zaire, one of the most reactionary countries in the world, with a bag full of revolutionary tracts. Had he intended converting the locals? Everybody, everywhere, knew who Guevara was. Ché had actually visited the Congo clandestinely some years before and Gilles Hertzog knew it. He was innocent all right; with the kind of stupid, unthinking naïveté that could get us both killed.
We drove on in silence. I could see no solution. Then Gilles leant over once more and told me that he could reach his baggage with his one hand and that perhaps he could get at the books, one by one, and throw them out of the window.
We were travelling at about 80 miles an hour. In my imagination I could hear the wind ripping open the pages of a half-a-dozen Marxist dissertations as they tore apart in the dark. There was no way that André and his friend would not hear the noise and obviously, they’d investigate. That would be inviting disaster!
In as few words as possible I told the Frenchman not to be a total fucking asshole. ‘Don’t even think about it!’ I spat the words out under my breath. Anything like that would be tantamount to suicide, I quietly inferred. Which was when I asked myself whether this idiot had rocks in his head?
The driver slowed again; another roadblock. Soldiers came forward and one couldn’t miss their weapons. For a few seconds we were blinded by headlights. André spoke in Lingala, the Zairean language of the north and I recognized only one word, an aside in French: mercenaire. So did Gilles.
We were being represented to the others as a captured pair of mercenaries! My French colleague was in a state of apoplexy, sweat running down his face and I wasn’t faring much better.
It didn’t help to recall that only a few years before, Hoare’s mercenaries had ravaged the old Congo. Those irregulars had sometimes killed more innocents than guilty parties. Consequently, any hired gun in Zaire was a hated breed, especially if the subject happened to be white.
Not long before our visit a dozen Italian airmen, all members of an ‘aid’ group in Zaire, had been hacked to death in the belief that they were mercenaries. An apology of sorts was offered to their families by Mobutu, but what galled was the fact that at the time, no one had bothered to ask them who or what they were. Or what they were doing there. They were murdered without questions asked.
Now we were in that galere and we had Ché Guevara’s lucubrations in our baggage to prove it.
It was a time for some quick thinking. André was obviously the man in charge; dour and uncompromising. Yet, I sensed, somehow, he was a man of contradictions: he clearly had authority and hadn’t yet abused us in any way, even though his mind was made up about who we were supposed to be. Our only hope lay in trying to win him over. Money was part of the answer. What else? I had a jack of whisky in my bag.
‘Could I have a drink?’ I asked in my fractured French. ‘I have some Scotch in my baggage.’
‘Whisky?’ the man sounded interested. If I had known then that Scotch was selling for $50 a bottle in Lubumbashi – if you could get your hands on it – I’d have been better prepared. He stopped the car.
The bottle went round, I took a large swig myself because I needed it and then it went round again. The alcohol warmed me, even though the temperature outside was a stifling 35 degrees with humidity to match. It was even hotter inside the vehicle because there was no air conditioning.
Two more swigs and André had become talkative. By the next roadblock he was garrulous, but by then the bottle was empty. At least I had achieved a small victory because the man guarding us was tipsy.
He spoke of many things, with Gilles translating. His real name, he told us, was Betué Robert. His position at the border was that of military policeman. His rank in the Zairean Army was lieutenant and he’d been trained in military intelligence by the Israelis, spending three months at a camp for airborne forces in the Negev.
Then he said something that knocked us sideways: ‘My name among my friends is l’Assassin. I am the official assassin for General Mobutu in these parts.’ This was a real shock to us because the man was obviously proud of his dubious role as executioner.
Gilles asked him what he got paid for ‘eliminating’ someone. ‘Five hundred Zaire’, he answered (then about $1,000). That was for killing an important person, he added. ‘Less for someone like you’, he smirked, which didn’t help. It was his first joke and he enjoyed it. His laughter was like a fury unleashed. God knows, I suddenly felt we’d already been condemned! The assassin was playing with us; a cat with two captive mice. Meanwhile, my palms were sweating. Gilles’s eyes, I could see whenever I swivelled round in my seat, stood out like saucers in the half-light.
As we approached Lubumbashi, André turned to Gilles after he had asked where we were being taken and answered with a raucous laugh: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see you through to the end. Right to the very end’, were his words. The driver smiled and I felt like puking. I asked André if we could stay at the Park Hotel in Lubumbashi. I didn’t expect him to consent, but I wanted to gauge his mood. He replied blandly that that wouldn’t be a problem. ‘But first we must report to the barracks.’
I knew then that it was vital to get the man to take us to some place where we could notify our consulates, the most obvious being the hotel or a restaurant. But it was already well after midnight and there was little chance that anybody who mattered would be about. Our only salvation, I decided, was to make contact with another white man; possibly one of the British or Belgian expatriates working in the copper mines.
Speaking English and no longer caring whether the driver could understand or not, I suggested to Gilles that if all else failed he should try to bribe the man, which might have been a mistake. If l’Assassin had spent any time in Israel he’d have picked up some English. We talked quietly for a few moments and by now the car was on the outskirts of town. Our driver was being signalled to stop at the last roadblock. While André was busy with the soldiers, I told Gilles to offer him $50 to stop first at the hotel.
André got back into the car. The main road into Lubumbashi stretched ahead, past wrecked cars and derelict buildings that still bore the marks of the civil war a dozen years before. One had taken a direct mortar hit on the roof and, after all this time, there were still broken tiles lying scattered about beside the road.
A sign indicating that we were entering Lubumbashi appeared out of the dark. There were no street lights and for all we knew, there might never have been. Worse, the place seemed deserted because there was no other traffic. There was clearly a curfew in force.
Gilles again spoke hastily to André about the hotel. I could see out of the corner of my eye that money had changed hands. The bribe was working! Thank God.
The car passed down a long avenue of trees and we passed a big barracks, the first of several. I had been to Lubumbashi several times before and I knew that we had a mile or two to go before we reached the centre of the ville.
André leaned forward and again spoke to the driver in Lingala. The car slowed. He pointed towards a dirt road on the right and both our spirits sank. Looking back on the events of the previous 12 hours, that specific moment was the most chilling of all: we suddenly re
alized that we were heading for the unknown. Nobody was even vaguely aware that we were even in Zaire, never mind in the hands of people who could do us harm. Nobody was likely to know either. It was a sensation like nothing else I had ever experienced, not even in Nigeria at its worst, and the darkness didn’t help.
From the direction we were travelling, I sensed we were being taken out of town again, on the far side of the city. I turned round to Gilles and voiced my fears but he could only nod. ‘Ask him where we’re going’, I urged. ‘This isn’t the fucking way to the hotel!’ Gilles uttered a few hasty words in French but André stared fixedly ahead. Then he mumbled something about having to report in first. Suddenly the man was sober.
We turned on to a better road, and a row of lights shone ahead. A turret with a heavy-calibre gun loomed out of the darkness. André motioned to the driver to turn left at a big building guarded by a sentry and answered the challenge when called. A set of steel gates opened outwards.
We didn’t know it then, but we’d arrived at a Zairean military camp. Our fate was totally in the hands of a man who’d earned his spurs with a select group of Israeli security forces in which he’d been awarded his honorary title: l’Assassin!
CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE
Jailed for Espionage in Lubumbashi
An institutionalized custom, together with a Zairean security organization that had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, were to play vital roles in our lives during the course of the next few weeks.
THE FIRST WAS MATABISH , the greasing of the palms, a tradition in Africa with which all travellers in Central Africa have long been accustomed. In the case of André, the man who clearly held our joint fate in his hands, it was a seller’s market.
The second was the Centre National de Documentation, with which we would now have an opportunity to become acquainted. To be generous, the CND was something akin to the old KGB, only this was the Zairean version and it was ground roots basic.
We soon found that Europeans who lived and worked in Zaire and who’d been taken into custody were generally treated a good deal better than their African counterparts. However, to Zaireans there were ‘whites’ and, as we were to discover soon enough, other people with white skins, such as European Portuguese. If we were to judge by the privations to which some of the Portuguese prisoners had been subjected at the hands of this security organization, President Mobutu had already made the distinction long before he came to power.
Angus McDermid, a hugely experienced man who had got to know Central Africa well over several decades, said that Mobutu had once told him that while the Portuguese had been involved with the tribal chiefs of the Congo Basin for five centuries, their record had been tarnished both by history and by blood. ‘They fucked our women, they mishandled our men and they constantly deceived us,’ were the words, he used during a visit to Lagos.1
In short, decreed the Eminent One, all those people who originally came from Lisbon, were oppressors. ‘Imperialists’, was how he would sometimes refer to them in public pronouncements, to which he would add: ‘All of Africa, all black people, have good cause to be rid of them.’
Matabish, by contrast, is a time-honoured part of African tradition. It’s much the same as the tip on a restaurant bill in Europe or America. However, a few adjustments needed to be made, and that depended solely on the gravity of a situation. Exactly who you were dealing with also counted. If you gave too little, it reversed its significance, so to speak, and became an insult.
A German was arrested in Lubumbashi before we arrived and was kept in jail for three months while Bonn tried to sort out his problems. The charge was obscure. However, the man had been trying to export the semi-precious stone malachite in bulk to Europe. Ostensibly his papers (which themselves cost a lot in matabish) were valid. Evidently somebody in the CND had made the decision that the deal warranted a lot more of the kind of cash that usually came ‘under the table’.
While not precisely calculated, such matters have a feel about them. You instinctively know the difference between too little largesse and too much; apparently the German didn’t. He should have, because he had been in Zaire for some time and was routinely taking out of the country several tons of the semi-precious stone each year.
His never-made-public ‘derisory token’ earned him a further charge of bribing a government official, unusual for a country where corruption was so widespread that nothing was achieved without it. By the time the man was released, it had cost him at least $10,000 to win a few friends and influence the powers-that-be. In addition, his stones – already paid for – were forfeited and delivered in a truck to the CND headquarters.
Then there was the case, worse still, of a British pilot who was held in custody by the CND in Kinshasa while we were in Lubumbashi. He’d flown from Luanda and landed at N’djili Airport outside Kinshasa. Technically, he had come from a ‘hostile’ area and it was assumed that like us, he was an MPLA spy. By the time Gilles and I left the country, he’d been locked up for several months, eventually extended to more than a year. He had his stay extended while Harold Wilson, the then British Prime Minister, had found it necessary to write a cringing letter of appeal to Mobutu, or perhaps it was a series of cringing letters – one never knows with such things.
Our first contact with CND officialdom was hardly encouraging. We’d only vaguely heard of the organization across the bar at the Ridgeway and, frankly, had we known what we were into, both Gilles and I would probably have taken a rain check.
In any event, CND headquarters was our first stop after we had been taken to the barracks on the outskirts of Lubumbashi to register. It was late, and there were few soldiers about, most of them drunk. All were armed. Meanwhile, André told Gilles to stop talking about the hotel. That was out of the question, he told him brusquely at one of the stops. What also became apparent was that this guy was no longer our friend.
Each time the vehicle was stopped at a roadblock, we were suddenly the objects of great interest, almost as if the troops manning them had never seen a white man before. Then, once we arrived at the base, scores of soldiers in their American fatigues surrounded the building we were escorted to, armed guards in front, with more following behind us.
We sat on stools and our surprise was genuine when l’Assassin produced three beers. He watched benevolently as our unsmiling black guard demanded another ten American bucks in payment. We were being screwed, but what could we do?
Our guardian spoke on the telephone, again, in Lingala. As before, the only word we could recognize was mercenaire. This time it was Gilles’ face that flushed. Of deep concern to us both was not so much that we’d been arrested, but that we were isolated from the world outside. There wasn’t a soul we could ask to get in touch with someone.
I’d experienced a little of this kind of routine earlier in Angola, though from the other side of the desk, so I had a rough idea of what came next. That was when I said quietly to Gilles, in English: ‘Now comes the real test.’
André had spoken to his superiors in Kinshasa and said that we would have to wait and see what happened. I sensed that if more soldiers arrived we were possibly done for. We didn’t have long to wait.
Finally the gates to the camp were thrown open. From where we were being held, we had a view of the parade ground outside through a large window in the office. We could also see the portal through which we’d originally entered. Minutes later a car arrived with a single occupant; a good sign, I thought. As we found out later, the newcomer was Mobutu’s emissary in the southern Shaba region, an army officer who was clearly not amused at being hauled out of his bed in the middle of the night.
Unlike André, this man tended to remain beyond immediate matters of contention. His job was to issue orders and he barely glanced at us when he walked in. He listened impassively while André spoke and read out the contents of the letter from the Director of Immigration at the border. It was all in Zairois and we understood none of it. Then he strode ov
er, carefully brushing down the front of his jacket as he did so.
He spoke in clipped French: ‘Who sent you to Zaire? In whose pay are you? For whom have you been fighting? Have you taken any photographs of Zairean establishments?’ Gilles said afterwards that all that was missing was Von Stroheim. The Frenchman answered each question in turn, and afterwards, many more.
Then came the crunch, one that had pretty serious implications: ‘When last were you in Luanda?’ Before I could warn Gilles to be vague, he’d answered for both of us: ‘Only a few weeks ago’, were his words.
‘Aha!’ The man displayed his satisfaction with a smile, though a Gotcha! would have served equally well. ‘So you are MPLA!’ he barked. He had an intense look on his face and the implications were clear. We had been in Luanda! Therefore we were communists, was his thrust. I tried to explain that it wasn’t that way at all, that I’d been with the FNLA.
‘Quiet!’ ordered l’Assassin.
The officer gestured to the soldiers next door and they put our bags in a military transport outside. Gilles could only stare ahead. I tried to remain nonchalant but it was difficult. At that point I raised my hand, almost as if I was in a schoolroom.
‘Can I talk?’ I asked. André nodded. ‘Where are you taking us?’ I asked. He avoided eye contact and said nothing. At least they hadn’t beaten us. Not yet, anyway. It was also curious that we hadn’t been properly searched: Ché’s tracts were still intact, for the time being at any rate.
We spent the rest of the night in a cell in one of the western suburbs of Lubumbashi. A fairly big city by African standards and number two in Zaire, it was the country’s mining capital. Without copper, it would still have been the tiny village it was when the first white prospectors had arrived from Europe half a century before. During our drive through town there wasn’t a white face anywhere. As Gilles ventured, why should there have been at three in the morning?