In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo

It was a view I heard repeatedly, but not one I shared. I had no expectations the DSP would ever do battle. What I feared was that they would go for the soft targets, like journalists. I had developed a habit of shouting in my sleep and regretted now checking into the sixteenth floor. A precise image haunted me: looking through the spyhole in my door and seeing two DSP men, guns cocked, about to break into the room and toss me out of the window. Even if I hit the main building on the trip down, there was no way I could survive the fall from that height.

Radio Trottoir, ‘pavement radio’, as the city’s gossip network was known, was in overdrive. There were rumours of Chinese mercenaries landing in their hundreds, of Zulu troops being called in from South Africa, of goose-stepping soldiers coming in from North Korea to save Mobutu. Also circulating were leaflets telling residents who wanted change to tie white bandanas around their foreheads when the rebels arrived as a sign of support. On the main routes into town, tanks and artillery had been set up. But with each soldier convinced a rival unit was bent on treachery, they were too busy watching each other to stop the steady flow of infiltrators into Kinshasa.

Given the steady ratcheting of tension, it was no surprise that on 15 May anyone who owned a television sat glued to their set. Since mid-afternoon a message had been running across the screen, promising an important press conference. The word on Radio Trottoir was that Mobutu had been meeting with his generals and his departure was about to be announced.

The hours ticked by and nothing happened. The message continued to unroll. Finally, after midnight, a nervous newscaster appeared. To a rapt audience he read out a bland summary of the day’s events, rounded off with a piece of homely advice: viewers should watch out for the small beetles emerging after the recent seasonal rains, which packed a particularly nasty bite.

Whatever talks had taken place in Zaire’s upper echelons, commonsense had not triumphed. Mobutu, who had always warned his countrymen that ‘ma tête vaut cher’ (‘my head won’t come cheap’) could not let go. When he drove to the airport the following day, heading for the jungle palace where, it was said, he planned to exhume his ancestor’s bodies to save them from desecration by the rebels, he stole away in silence, having taken none of the hard decisions demanded.

And so it was that six hours after the death squad’s first unwelcome visit to the Intercontinental, I found myself peering over the balcony, watching as the parking lot below filled with gleaming jeeps and flashy sports cars. Kongulu and his men were back, and this time they had arrived in force.

The lifts filled with panicking women, their hair in a mess, juggling sleepy children in pyjamas, bulging holdalls and plastic bags full of documents. Not only had we been sleeping alongside the regime’s fifth columnists for the last few days, it emerged, we’d been unwitting neighbours of the DSP chiefs’ extended families.

I could see their menfolk patrolling nervously up and down, toting sub-machine guns and draped in cartridge belts. They were wearing their trademark sunglasses, those gold-rimmed feminine accessories which should look comic on a man but instead manage to look as sinister as the wedding dresses and blonde wigs worn by Liberia’s drugged fighters. They are the modern equivalent of the wooden masks donned around night fires by warriors preparing to do battle, which turn their wearers into something utterly alien – faceless instruments of violence capable of unspeakable acts.

We had chosen the Intercontinental because of its track record of safety. But in a shifting world order, yesterday’s guardians could turn into today’s hostage-takers. Looming all too vividly now was the possibility that the DSP might choose to make its last stand at Mobutu’s hotel. Did our nosy room cleaner and nervous taxi driver, neither of whom had made an appearance that day, know something we didn’t?

I called the British head of a security company downtown. ‘Just let us know if you get too concerned and we’ll come and get you,’ he said breezily, as though it was the easiest thing in the world. But word came that a camera crew trying to leave the hotel had been roughed up by the DSP and turned back. Summoning assistance might simply precipitate a crisis. More hopeful news came from journalists trapped at the Hotel Memling, that other de facto media headquarters in the centre of town. Closer to the action, they were watching retreating Zairean soldiers streaming along the boulevards, a retreat turning into a rout. As they surrendered ground, the men were removing their uniforms to emerge as harmless civilians.

Down in the lobby, a similar remarkable metamorphosis had taken place, almost without our noticing. Uniforms and weapons had all disappeared. Scores of muscular young men were lounging about in modish tracksuits, not a hint of camouflage or khaki in sight. The Hotel Intercontinental suddenly appeared to be hosting a well-attended sports convention.

The truth dawned: the Intercontinental was not going to be the stage for a new Alamo. The DSP had laid their plans in advance and were using the hotel as a way station where they could round up their families and change into civilian clothing before heading for the river. From cursing the inaction of the Western force in Brazzaville, we went to praying they would keep away. The last thing we needed now was for the DSP’s exit to be blocked.

Indeed, the DSP were encountering something of a logistical problem, as the first to flee had left their boats on the wrong side of the river. And this was when the Hotel Intercontinental suddenly justified its outrageously inflated prices, making up for all the suspect salads and blue feet, the years of skittering cockroaches and terrible muzak. From his office, our hotel manager called up his Lebanese friends and explained the situation. Swiftly a small fleet of Lebanese-owned motor-launches was assembled to ferry the new-found sports enthusiasts and their families across to Congo-Brazzaville. One convoy after another headed out, the limping wounded bringing up the rear. The hotel miraculously emptied and we heaved a sigh of relief. A showdown that could have cost hundreds of lives had been averted.

Across the deserted city, the Western security experts were at their work. On one street corner, a Belgian sharp-shooter took careful aim as a colleague ushered out a group of terrified nuns. Roaring around Kinshasa in a UN jeep, another leathery veteran had set himself the task of persuading what few soldiers remained to disarm. In the patronising tones you might use with a naughty toddler, he was telling teenagers so drunk they could barely focus to drop their rocket-grenade launchers before they did themselves a mischief.

By the river’s edge lay what remained of Kongulu’s sports car. Abandoned when he boarded a speed boat, it had already been stripped by looters of tyres, seats and spare parts. Along the same waterfront, Prime Minister Likulia Bolongo had also made his escape, ushered by French commandos onto a helicopter. Driving past the Hotel Memling, we noticed a dozen camera tripods laid out in a surreally neat row. The Japanese journalists, it seemed, had decided that the rebels would oblige them with a historic photo opportunity by marching down Kinshasa’s main boulevard. In fact they were being a little more unpredictable, fanning through the surrounding districts. We finally stumbled upon them near the sports stadium: a group of quiet, disciplined Tutsi youths allowing themselves to be appraised by a curious crowd while they rested near a shot-out BMW. Its DSP passengers had abandoned their uniforms, but the strategy had not saved them. Riddled with bullets, they lay face-down in pools of blood.

Back at the Intercontinental, the Belgian sun-worshipper was already in her bikini, catching up on missed rays. But the hotel’s official liberation did not come until the following day. Leaving the breakfast table, I had gone to see whether our taxi drivers had returned to their normal spot under the trees. And suddenly, there the rebels were. In flip-flops and bare feet, most of them no more than boys, staggering under the weight of shells and pieces of equipment, the column of AFDL fighters stretched as far as the eye could see down the Avenue des Trois Z.

Housewives ran in their dressing gowns across the lawns, brandishing cartons of Kellogg’s Cornflakes and Cocopops as placatory offerings. But the adult commanders kept chivvying the exhausted ‘kadogos’ (little ones) along, afraid they would fall asleep as soon as they stopped moving. ‘You must be tired,’ sympathised an onlooker. ‘Yes. I’ve walked all the way from Kampala,’ replied one boy, artlessly spilling the beans on Uganda’s involvement in the rebel uprising. ‘Sshhh,’ remonstrated his superior.

Abandoning their coffees, the hotel guests emerged to watch. There was a smattering of excited applause as the khaki procession wove its weary way up the hill to Binza, home of the mouvanciers and the site of Camp Tsha Tshi, Mobutu’s last bolt-hole. From start to finish, the capture of a city of five million people, climax of the rebel campaign, had taken less than twenty-four hours. For the first time in history, a group of African nations had banded together to rid the region of a despot. The event was hailed as the start of an African Renaissance, spearheaded by a ‘new breed’ of African leader.

Over the next few days, Kinshasa made the changes appropriate to its new role as capital of the rebaptised Democratic Republic of Congo. The word ‘Zaire’ was removed from public buildings and road signs, leopard statues were blown up and the national flag – the flaming torch of the Mobutu era – painted over with the AFDL’s blue and yellow. To jog rusty memories, newspapers printed the words to ‘Debout Congolais’ (‘Congolese Arise’), the post-independence anthem being revived by Laurent Kabila, who traced his political lineage back to Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first prime minister.

With ironic inevitability, the rebel leader who had promised to retire from the fray once Mobutu was toppled declared himself president and moved his administration into the Hotel Intercontinental. One day there was a peremptory knock at the door while I was in the shower. Looking through the spy hole I finally saw my nightmare vision made flesh: two twitchy young soldiers, rifles at the ready. But it was only the AFDL, checking for weapons, not a DSP unit intent on my defenestration.

In the hotel corridors, where the shops swiftly removed their ‘sale’ signs and jacked their prices back up, a new generation of lobbyists milled in search of advancement. The Atrium echoed with English and Swahili, instead of French and Lingala, and in the restaurants ragged AFDL fighters replaced the sinister DSP. But they shared their predecessors’ habit of never paying. The manager’s face grew taut once more. He was not amused when one of the rebels caused a bit of a ruckus at breakfast one day, carelessly dropping a grenade which rolled under the selection of almond croissants and pains au chocolat.

In theory, the AFDL was now in charge of one of Africa’s richest states, a country blessed with diamonds and gold, copper and uranium, oil and timber. In practice, it had inherited a country reverting to the Iron Age society first encountered by the Portuguese explorers of the fifteenth century. The infrastructure was shattered, the army hopelessly divided. The state boasted more than half a million civil servants, who did little but wanted compensation for months of salary arrears. Foreign debts had accrued to the tune of $14 billion; the country had disastrous relations with all international institutions of importance and, worst of all, a population cynically inured to breaking the law.

With a simplistic rigour that could only be explained by the decades its cadres had spent outside the country, the AFDL set about the task of moral spring-cleaning. There were to be no Liberia-style executions. Instead, the new government declared the independence of the central bank, the institution Mobutu had treated as his personal cash reserve, and sacked the heads of the state enterprises Mobutu had milked for revenue. They went to join the former ministers and presidential business associates awaiting trial in Kinshasa’s infamous Makala jail, specially repainted for its VIP intake.

Top of the investigators’ list, of course, was Mobutu himself. The rebels had started legal proceedings well before reaching Kinshasa, firing off requests for the president’s assets to be frozen in a dozen European and African countries while still on the move. Claiming he had evidence that Mobutu had appropriated a staggering $14 billion, with $8 billion of that stored in Switzerland alone, incoming Justice Minister Celestin Lwangi pledged to reverse the flight of capital.

But as the vestiges of Mobutu’s reign were painted over and the Hotel Intercontinental, symbol of his rule, appropriated, the departed dinosaur did manage to exact his petty revenge. One of the last actions performed by the DSP families before heading out was to rid themselves of their Mobutu mementoes, stuffing MPR T-shirts and cloth printed with the president’s face down the hotel lavatories. For the first week of the new regime, the AFDL leaders had to go outside to relieve themselves. Mobutu was literally clogging up the system.

CHAPTER TWO

Plaything for a king

‘In every cordial-faced aborigine whom I meet I see a promise of assistance to me in the redemption of himself from the state of unproductiveness in which he at present lives. I look upon him with much of the same regard that an agriculturist views his strong-limbed child; he is a future recruit to the ranks of soldier-labourers. The Congo basin, could I have but enough of his class, would become a vast productive garden.’

The Congo and the founding of its free state —HENRY MORTON STANLEY

Kinshasa possesses its own version of Ozymandias. In a field bordering the river, grounds owned by the Ministry of Planning, a grey metal giant lies ignored, his face buried in the grass. The raised arm that once beckoned flagging followers on to conquer new horizons now cradles the ground in a meaningless embrace. Too big to fit inside the warehouses holding smaller statues, this is the figure of Stanley that once towered over Mount Ngaliema, a hill overlooking Kinshasa. Congo’s founder was unceremoniously dumped here in the 1970s, when Mobutu told the crowds it was time the country finally shrugged off the colonial mantle.

The anger that prompted the toppling of these grandiose monuments by Zaireans who decided they preferred a capital dotted with empty plinths to one tainted by Belgium offers a hint that Mobutu should not be regarded as sui generis, a monster out of time and place. Yet you will find no trace or explanation of that popular fury back in Brussels, in the museum specially constructed to commemorate a truly extraordinary colonial episode.

Built at the turn of the century on the orders of King Leopold II, the only European monarch to ever personally own an African colony, the Royal Museum for Central Africa boasts one of the largest collections of Congolese artifacts in the world. But the quantity of items stored inside this elegant building in Tervuren – the Belgian equivalent of Versailles – has done nothing to prevent a strikingly simplistic vision of history from emerging.

On the day I visited, the woman handing out tickets inside the marble-lined entrance hall seemed surprised I wanted to see the permanent collection, rather than a special exhibition of West African masks on temporary display. Strolling under the gilded cupolas and tip-tapping my way through the halls designed by French architect Charles Girault, Leopold’s favourite, I began to see why even its staff might regard the museum as an anachronism and feel a sense of relief that a large number of the exhibits were currently hidden from view, undergoing refurbishment.

Political correctness, the modern sense that colonialism is something to be regretted rather than gloried in, had made the barest of inroads here. King Leopold’s bust, with its unmistakable spade-shaped beard and beak nose, stared with proprietary ferocity from frozen courtyard and chilly hall. Under his watchful eye, history was still being sieved through the mental filter of the nineteenth-century capitalist and driven missionary – colonialism as economic opportunity and soul-saving expedition, all wrapped up into one convenient package.

One section, dedicated to Congo’s flora and fauna, displayed scraps, sheets and lumps of natural rubber. But there was no mention of the methods used to extract the raw material or ensure a steady supply back to Europe. Wall paintings showed Congo’s jungle being stripped to make room for copper mines, but the struggle over mineral assets between Belgium and the post-independence government did not feature. Was it a symbolic accident or deliberate, I wondered, that the lights in the rooms displaying the battered suitcase and worn khaki bag used by Stanley were barely working, discouraging any lingering over Congo’s controversial pioneer?

Sly omission blurred effortlessly into blatant wishful thinking. In the Memorial Hall, where the paint was peeling off the ceiling, labels promised to reveal ‘the King’s intentions towards the Congo’. But the anti-slavery medals struck at Leopold’s behest made the same point as the rusting slave chains in the glass cases and the melodramatic tableaux vivants, all buxom negro wenches and noble savages wincing under the whip of the sneering Arab overseer. Leopold, it seemed, colonised the Congo not for commercial reasons or vainglorious imperialist ambition, but to snuff out the barbaric slave trade that for centuries had robbed central Africa of its strongest and its best.

I had expected rose-coloured spectacles, but this complacent rewriting of Belgium’s past took me by surprise. No explanation here, then, for why things went so wrong under Mobutu. This was a tale – the wall frieze commemorating the hundreds of young Belgians who found their graves in the Congo Free State made clear – of selfless commitment and higher motives.

From this self-satisfied tableau, one item nonetheless grabbed my attention. Under the roll-call of dead heroes, an 1884 painting by Edouard Manduau, a painter unknown to me, injected an incongruous note. The artist, who had clearly been somewhat disturbed by his brush with the Congo, had painted a native being held to a post. On his knees, writhing, he is being whipped until the blood flows down his back. Looking on without expression is a white man, scientifically taking notes.

In the whole museum, it was the only object on display that had the sour ring of truth. Those bright oils, that unexpected depiction of what was clearly an everyday, a banal event, pointed in a very different direction, one that would show how the seeds of Mobutism found fertile ground in which to sprout.

Jules Marchal knew all about watching coolly as a man was whipped. As a young district commissioner working in the Congo in the 1950s, he used to order labourers who had failed to meet the cotton quotas set by the Belgian state to be punished with the chicotte, a whip made from a strip of hippopotamus hide that had been dried in the sun. Applied sparingly, it flayed the skin and left permanent scars; used enthusiastically, it could kill.

‘We would tour the country, taking our prison with us and then we’d call the villagers to assemble and we would beat three or four of our prisoners to show them what could happen to them,’ he recalled, with a rueful shake of the head. ‘I used that punishment very sparingly. But its effect was terrible. We were so proud to be members of the administrative service, we felt so powerful. But all our power had its roots in the chicotte.’

Shame and guilt have a long reach. Nearly half a century after the events, Marchal was still trying to expunge what he did as a thoughtless young administrator flush with the excitement of an exotic posting and overwhelmed by new responsibilities. Long since retired, he had dedicated the previous twenty years to contradicting the version of history presented at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, a white-washing so clumsy it prompted an explosion of exasperated contempt. ‘It’s ridiculous! They even show an Arab trader whipping a slave! Absurd,’ he snorted.

I had spotted Mr Marchal’s name in the historical section of one of Brussels’s bookshops, something of a miracle in itself, I was subsequently to discover, given his self-imposed low profile. His name had also cropped up in King Leopold’s Ghost, the bestseller by US author Adam Hochschild, which was creating a stir amongst the Brussels intelligentsia in 1998. After my visit to the museum, I wanted to meet the man campaigning, virtually single-handed, to awaken a slumbering national conscience.

He had given me careful instructions over the phone, speaking with that slight Belgian twang that always sounds vaguely comic to anyone used to hearing French as spoken by Parisians. ‘You want to get off at St Truiden. But make sure if you take the train to Liège that you sit in the right part, as the train splits in two and some of my visitors have gone missing that way.’

An hour and a half out of the capital, I was already a world away from the smart shopping streets of French-speaking Brussels. This was fruit-producing Flanders, proud of its Flemish identity and language, resentful and suspicious of Francophone dominance. The train slid past frosty piles of mangelwurzels, snow-dusted fields and rows of denuded orchards, stopping at every sleepy station.

Now a portly pensioner, Mr Marchal had a distinguished career behind him. After nearly two decades in Zaire, he became a diplomat, rising to the rank of ambassador. His were not the easy postings: he served in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Chad, Niger and Liberia. His wife, who nonetheless remembered their years in Africa with huge nostalgia, still drove the ageing blue Mercedes that was the ambassador’s car on their last foreign assignment.

His earlier responsibilities made his new role as iconoclast all the more unexpected. For Mr Marchal, the former career diplomat, was busy energetically kicking the system that had sustained him. Trawling through the national archives, basing his findings on official memoranda, private correspondence, diaries kept by Belgian colonial agents, he was bent on exposing what he believed was the most brutal colonial system ever practised on a continent which saw more than its fair share of oppressive regimes.

While he worked with passionate commitment, he felt unhappy enough about the devastating light his discoveries shed on his former employers to shun the public stage. His first books had been published under a pseudonym. Some, printed by a company set up by his wife, verged on vanity publishing. Resolutely factual, the bare bones on which other, more florid writers – Mr Marchal hoped – would some day base their work, the volumes only featured on the shelves of the largest and most specialised Belgian bookshops. In the absence of active promotion, sales of 700 counted as a good result and Marchal was happy to hand out remaindered stock. ‘I have to tell these things because they are true, I want to put history right. But I cannot promote my message as an ordinary author does. It is too sad,’ he explained. ‘Whatever you do, please don’t present me as a traitor who is trying to bring down my country.’

Marchal had been accused by academic contemporaries studying the era of drawing up a ‘personalised charge sheet’. Indeed, he was near-obsessed with the qualities, or lack of them, of the man he saw as holding the key to Congo’s dark story. Certainly, the huge central African land mass that today occupies 905,000 square miles, nearly eighty times the size of Belgium, its colonial master, would never have been defined as a nation at all had it not been for the determination of the Duke of Brabant to acquire a colony.

Even as a young man, waiting in the wings for his father to die, the man who was to become Leopold II had taken careful note of how England, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands had all built their power and wealth on a panoply of colonies, using foreign resources to rise above what often seemed the limitations of geography and natural assets.