The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  Chadee was sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to life imprisonment. Abbott, after his twenty years for the murder of Skerritt, was sentenced to death for his part in the murder of Benson. His was the true agony: he rotted for nearly six years in a death cell, and was hanged only in April 1979. He never became known outside Trinidad, this small, muscular man with the straight back, the soldierly demeanour, the very pale skin, and the underslept tormented eyes. He was not the X; he became nobody’s cause; and by the time he was hanged that caravan had gone by.

  1979

  A New King for the Congo: Mobutu

  and the Nihilism of Africa

  JANUARY-MARCH 1975

  THE CONGO, which used to be a Belgian colony, is now an African kingdom and is called Zaire. It appears to be a nonsense name, a sixteenth-century Portuguese corruption, some Zairois will tell you, of a local word for “river.” So it is as if Taiwan, reasserting its Chinese identity, were again to give itself the Portuguese name Formosa. The Congo River is now called the Zaire, as is the local currency, which is almost worthless.

  The man who has made himself king of this land of the three Zs—pays, fleuve, monnaie—used to be called Joseph Mobutu. His father was a cook. But Joseph Mobutu was educated; he was at some time, in the Belgian days, a journalist. In 1960, when the country became independent, Mobutu was thirty, a sergeant in the local Force Publique. The Force Publique became the Congolese National Army. Mobutu became the colonel and commander, and through the mutinies, rebellions and secessions of the years after independence he retained the loyalty of one para-troop brigade. In 1965, as General Mobutu, he seized power; and as he has imposed order on the army and the country so his style has changed, and become more African. He has abandoned the name of Joseph and is now known as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga.

  As General Mobutu he used to be photographed in army uniform. Now, as Mobutu Sese Seko, he wears what he has made, by his example, the Zairois court costume. It is a stylish version of the standard two-piece suit. The jacket has high, wide lapels and is buttoned all the way down; the sleeves can be long or short. A boldly patterned cravat replaces the tie, which has more or less been outlawed; and a breast-pocket handkerchief matches the cravat. On less formal occasions—when he goes among the people—Mobutu wears flowered shirts. Always, in public, he wears a leopard-skin cap and carries an elaborately carved stick.

  These—the cap and the stick—are the emblems of his African chieftaincy. Only the chief can kill the leopard. The stick is carved with symbolic figures: two birds, what looks like a snake, a human figure with a distended belly. No Zairois I met could explain the symbolism. One teacher pretended not to know what was carved, and said, “We would all like to have sticks like that.” In some local carving, though, the belly of the human figure is distended because it contains the fetish. The stick is accepted by Zairois as the stick of the chief. While the chief holds the stick off the ground the people around him can speak; when the chief sets his stick on the ground the people fall silent and the chief gives his decision.

  Explaining the constitution and the president’s almost unlimited powers, Profils du Zaire, the new official handbook (of variable price: four zaires, eight dollars, the pavement seller’s “first” price, two zaires his “last” price), Profils du Zaire quotes Montesquieu on the functions of the state. Elima, the official daily, has another, African view of government. “In Zaire we have inherited from our ancestors a profound respect for the liberties of others. This is why our ancestors were so given to conciliation, people accustomed to the palaver [la palabre], accustomed, that is, to discussions that established each man in his rights.”

  So Montesquieu and the ancestors are made to meet. And ancestral ways turn out to be advanced. It is only a matter of finding the right words. The palaver is, after all, a “dialogue”; chief’s rule is government by dialogue. But when the chief speaks, when the chief sets his carved stick on the ground, the modern dialogue stops; and Africa of the ancestors takes over. The chief’s words, as Elima (having it all ways) has sometimes to remind “anti-revolutionary” elements, cannot be questioned.

  It is said that the last five words of Mobutu’s African name are a reference to the sexual virility which the African chief must possess: he is the cock that leaves no hen alone. But the words may only be symbolic. Because, as chief, Mobutu is “married” to his people—“The Marriage of Sese [Mobutu]” is a “revolutionary” song—and, as in the good old days of the ancestors, comme au bon vieux temps de nos ancêtres, the chief always holds fast to his people. This marriage of the chief can be explained in another, more legalistic way: the chief has a “contract” with his people. He fulfils his contract through the apparatus of a modern state, but the ministers and commissioners are only the chief’s “collaborators,” “the umbilical cord between the power and the people.”

  The chief, the lord wedded to his people, le pouvoir: the attributes begin to multiply. Mobutu is also the Guide of the Authentic Zairois Revolution, the Father of the Nation, the President-Founder of the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, the country’s only political party. So that, in nomenclature as in the stylish national dress he has devised, he combines old Africa with what is progressive and new. Just as a Guy Dormeuil suit (160 zaires in the Kinshasa shops, 320 dollars) can, with cravat and matching handkerchief, become an authentic Zairois national costume, so a number of imported glamorous ideas bolster Mobutu’s African chieftaincy.

  He is citizen, chief, king, revolutionary; he is an African freedom fighter; he is supported by the spirits of the ancestors; like Mao, he has published a book of thoughts (Mobutu’s book is green). He has occupied every ideological position and the basis of his kingship cannot be questioned. He rules; he is grand; and, like a medieval king, he is at once loved and feared. He controls the armed forces; they are his creation; in Kinshasa he still sleeps in an army camp. Like Leopold II of the Belgians, in the time of the Congo Free State—much of whose despotic legislation (ownership of the mines in 1888, all vacant lands in 1890, the fruits of the earth in 1891) has passed down through the Belgian colonial administration to the present regime, and is now presented as a kind of ancestral African socialism—like Leopold II, Mobutu owns Zaire.

  MUHAMMAD ALI fought George Foreman in Kinshasa last November. Ali won; but the victor, in Zaire, was Mobutu. A big hoarding outside the stadium still says, in English below the French: “A fight between two Blacks [deux noirs], in a Black Nation [un pays de Nègres] organized by blacks and seen by the whole [world] that is a victory of Mobutism.” And whatever pleasure people had taken in that event, and the publicity, had been dissipated by mid-January, when I arrived. I had chosen a bad time. Mobutu, chieflike, had sprung another of his surprises. A fortnight before, after a two-day palaver with his collaborators, Mobutu had decided on a “radicalization of the revolution.” And everybody was nervous.

  In November 1973 Mobutu had nationalized all businesses and plantations belonging to foreigners—mainly Greeks, Portuguese and Indians—and had given them to Zairois. Now, a year later, he had decided to take back these enterprises, many of them pillaged and bankrupt, and entrust them to the state. What, or who, was the state? No one quite knew. New people, more loyal people? Mobutu, speaking the pure language of revolution, seemed to threaten everybody. The three hundred Belgian families who had ruled the Congo, he said, had been replaced by three hundred Zairois families; the country had imported more Mercedes-Benz motorcars than tractors; one third of the country’s foreign earnings went to import food that could be produced at home.

  Against this new Zairois bourgeoisie—which he had himself created—the chief now declared war. “I offer them a clear choice: those among them who love the people should give everything to the state and follow me.” In his new mood the chief threatened other measures. He threatened to close down the cinemas and the night-clubs; he threatened to ban drinking in public places before six.

  Through the Belgian-desig
ned cité indigène of Kinshasa, in the wide, unpaved streets, full of pits and corrugations between mounds of rubbish sometimes as high as the little houses in Mediterranean colours, in the green shade of flamboyant, mango and frangipani, schoolchildren marched in support of their chief. Every day Elima carried reports of marches de soutien in other places. And the alarm was great, among the foreigners who had been plundered of their businesses and had remained behind, hoping for some compensation or waiting for Canadian visas, and among the gold-decked Zairois in national costume. Stern men, these Zairois, nervous of the visitor, easily affronted, anxious only to make it known that they were loyal, and outdone by no one in their “authenticity,” their authentic Africanness.

  But it is in the nature of a powerful chief that he should be unpredictable. The chief threatens; the people are cowed; the chief relents; the people praise his magnanimity. The days passed; daytime and even morning drinking didn’t stop; many Africans continued to spend their days in that red-eyed vacancy that at first so mystifies the visitor. The night-clubs and cinemas didn’t close; the prostitutes continued to be busy around the Memling Hotel. So that it seemed that in this matter of public morals, at least, the chief had relented. The ordinary people had been spared.

  But the nervousness higher up was justified. Within days the axe fell on many of the chief’s “collaborators.” There was a shake-up; the circle of power around the chief was made smaller; and Zairois who had ruled in Kinshasa were abruptly dismissed, packed off to unfamiliar parts of the bush to spread the word of the revolution. Elima sped them on their way.

  The political commissioner will no longer be what he was before the system was modified. That is to say, a citizen floating above the day-to-day realities of the people, driving about the streets and avenues of Kinshasa in a Mercedes and knowing nothing of the life of the peasant of Dumi. The political commissioners will live with the people. They will be in the fields, not as masters but as peasants. They will work with the workers, they will share their joys and sorrows. They will in this way better understand the aspirations of the people and will truly become again children of the people.

  Words of terror. Because this was the great fear of so many of the men who had come by riches so easily, by simple official plunder, the new men of the new state who, in the name of Africanization and the dignity of Africa, were so often doing jobs for which they were not qualified and often were drawing salaries for jobs they were not doing at all. This, for all their talk of authenticity and the ways of the ancestors, was their fear: to be returned from the sweet corruptions of Kinshasa to the older corruption of the bush, to be returned to Africa.

  And the bush is close. It begins just outside the city and goes on forever. The aeroplane that goes from Kinshasa to Kisangani flies over eight hundred miles of what still looks like virgin forest.

  CONSIDER the recent journey of the subregional commissioner of the Equator Region to the settlement of Bomongo. Bomongo lies on the Giri River and is just about one hundred miles north of the big town of Mbandaka, formerly Coquilhatville, the old “Equator station,” set down more or less on the line of the Equator, halfway on the Congo or Zaire River between Kinshasa and the Stanley Falls. From Mbandaka a steamer took the commissioner’s party up the main river to Lubengo; and there they transferred to a dugout for the twenty-mile passage through the Lubengo “canal” to the Giri River. But the canal for much of its length was only six feet wide, full of snags, and sometimes only twelve inches deep. The outboard motor had to be taken up; paddles had to be used. And there were the mosquitoes.

  At the very entrance to the canal [according to the official report in Elima], thousands of mosquitoes cover you from head to ankles, compelling you to move about all the time … After a whole night of insomnia on the Lubengo canal, or rather the “calvary” of Lubengo, where we had very often to get out in the water and make a superhuman effort to help the paddlers free the pirogue from mud or wood snags, we got to the end of the canal at nine in the morning (we had entered it at 9:30 the previous evening), and so at last we arrived at Bomongo at 12:30, in a state that would have softened the hardest hearts. If we have spoken at some length about the Lubengo canal, it isn’t because we want to discourage people from visiting Bomongo by the canal route, but rather to stress one of the main reasons why this place is isolated and seldom visited.

  Ignoring his fatigue, bravant sa fatigue, the commissioner set to work. He spoke to various groups about the integration of the party and the administration, the need for punctuality, professional thoroughness and revolutionary fervour. The next morning he visited an oil factory in Ebeka district that had been abandoned in 1971 and was now being set going again with the help of a foreign adviser. In the afternoon he spoke out against alcoholism and urged people to produce more. The next day he visited a coffee plantation that had been nationalized in 1973 (the plantations in Zaire were run mainly by Greeks) and given to a Zairois. This particular attribution hadn’t worked well: the labourers hadn’t been paid for the last five months. The labourers complained and the commissioner listened; but what the commissioner did or said wasn’t recorded. Everywhere the commissioner went he urged the people, for the sake of their own liberty and well-being, to follow the principles of Mobutism to the letter; everywhere he urged vigilance. Then, leaving Lubengo, Bomongo and Ebeka to the mosquitoes, the commissioner returned to his head-quarters. And Elima considered the fifteen-day journey heroic enough to give it half a page.

  YET BOMONGO, so cut off, is only twenty miles away from the main Congo or Zaire. The roads of the country have decayed; the domestic services of Air Zaire are unreliable; the river remains, in 1975, the great highway of the country. And for nearly a hundred years the river has known steamer traffic. Joseph Conrad, not yet a novelist, going up the river in the wood-burning Roi des Belges in 1890, doing eight miles in three hours, halting every night for the cannibal woodcutters to sleep on the riverbank, might have thought he was penetrating to the untouched heart of darkness. But Norman Sherry, the Conrad scholar, has gone among the records and in Conrad’s Western World has shown that even at the time of Conrad’s journey there would have been eleven steamers on the upper river.

  The steamers have continued, the Belgian Otraco being succeeded by the Zairois Onatra. The waterway has been charted: white marker signs are nailed to trees on the banks, the river is regularly cleared of snags. The upstream journey that took one month in Conrad’s time now takes seven days; the downstream journey that took a fortnight is now done in five days. The stations have become towns, but they remain what they were: trading outposts. And, in 1975, the journey—one thousand miles between green, flat, almost unchanging country—is still like a journey through nothingness. So little has the vast country been touched: so complete, simple and repetitive still appears the African life through which the traveller swiftly passes.

  When the steamer was Belgian, Africans needed a carte de mérite civique to travel first class, and third-class African passengers were towed on barges some way behind the steamer. Now the two-tiered third-class barges, rusting, battered, needing paint, full of a busy backyard life, tethered goats and crated chickens packed tight among the passengers, are lashed to the bow of the steamer; and first-class passengers sleep and eat outside their cabin doors in a high, warm smell of smoked fish and smoked monkey.

  The cabine de luxe, twice as expensive as first class, is used by the sweating garçon as a storeroom for his brooms and buckets and rags and as a hiding place for the food, foo-foo, he is always on the lookout for: securing half a pound of sugar, for instance, by pouring it into a pot of river-brewed tea, and secreting the tea in the wardrobe until nightfall, when he scratches and bangs and scratches at the door until he is admitted.

  The curtains of the cabine hang ringless and collapsed. “C’est pas bon,” the garçon says. Many light bulbs are missing; they will now never be replaced; but the empty light brackets on the walls can be used to hang things on. In the bathroom the disease
d river water looks unfiltered; the stained and leaking wash basin has been pulled out from the wall; the chrome-plated towel rails are forever empty, their function forgotten; and the holes in the floor are mended, like the holes in a dugout, with what looks like mud. The lavatory cistern ceaselessly flushes. “C’est pas bon,” the garçon says, as of an irremediable fact of life; and he will not say even this when, on an over-cast afternoon, in a temperature of a hundred degrees, the windows of the cabine de luxe sealed, the air-conditioning unit fails.

  The bar is naked except for three bottles of spirits. Beer is terminé, always, though the steamer is full of dazed Africans and the man known as the maître d’hôtel is drunk from early morning. There is beer, of course; but every little service requires a “sweetener.” The steamer is an African steamer and is run on African lines. It has been adapted to African needs. It carries passengers, too many passengers for the two lifeboats displayed on the first-class deck; but it is more than a passenger steamer. It is a travelling market; it is, still, all that many of the people who live along the river know of the outside world.

  The steamer, travelling downstream from Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville, to Kinshasa, stops only at Bumbe, Lisala and Mbandaka. But it serves the bush all the way down. The bush begins just outside Kisangani. The town ends—the decayed Hôtel des Chutes, the customs shed, the three or four rusting iron barges moored together, the Roman Catholic cathedral, then a large ruin, a few riverside villas—and the green begins: bamboo, thick grass spilling over the riverbanks, the earth showing red, green and red reflected in the smooth water, the sky, as so often here, dark with storm, lit up and trembling as with distant gunfire, the light silver. The wind and rain come; the green bank fades; the water wrinkles, the reflections go, the water shows muddy. Jungle seems to be promised. But the bush never grows high, never becomes forest.