In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz

LIVING ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER

IN THE CONGO

Michela Wrong

DEDICATION

To Michael Holman, who made sure the book got written

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave

CHAPTER TWO Plaything for a king

CHAPTER THREE Birth of the Leopard

CHAPTER FOUR Dizzy worms

CHAPTER FIVE Living above the shop

CHAPTER SIX A nation on Low Batt

CHAPTER SEVEN Never naked

CHAPTER EIGHT The importance of being elegant

CHAPTER NINE I get by with a little help from my friends

CHAPTER TEN A folly in the jungle

CHAPTER ELEVEN The night the pink champagne went flat

CHAPTER TWELVE The Inseparable Four

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Nappies on the floor

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Ill-gotten gains

EPILOGUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GLOSSARY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

‘He won’t be forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honour; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking. No; I can’t forget him.’

Heart of Darkness—JOSEPH CONRAD

The feeling struck home within seconds of disembarking.

When the motor-launch deposited me in the cacophony of the quayside, engine churning mats of water hyacinth as it turned to head back across the brown expanse of oily water that was the River Zaire, I was hit by the sensation that so unnerves first-time visitors to Africa. It is that revelatory moment when white, middle-class Westerners finally understand what the rest of humanity has always known – that there are places in this world where the safety net they have spent so much of their lives erecting is suddenly whipped away, where the right accent, education, health insurance and a foreign passport – all the trappings that spell ‘It Can’t Happen to Me’ – no longer apply, and their well-being depends on the condescension of strangers.

The pulse of apprehension drummed as I stuffed my clothes back into the ageing suitcase that had chosen the river crossing between Brazzaville and Kinshasa as the moment to split at the seams, transforming me into a truly African traveller. It quickened as a sweating young British diplomat signally failed to talk our way through the red tape and a chain of hostile policemen picked through the intimacies of my luggage, deciding which bits to keep. It subsided as we emerged from our three-hour ordeal, a little the lighter, finally crossing the magic line separating the customs area from the city.

But in truth, the quiet thud of fear would be there throughout my time in Zaire, whether I was drinking a cold Primus beer in the bustling Cité or taking tea in the green calm of a notable’s patio. This ominous awareness of a world of infinite, sinister possibilities had become one of the dominant characteristics of the nation led by the man who started life as plain Joseph Désiré Mobutu, cook’s son, but reinvented himself as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, ‘the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’.

By the mid-1990s, Mobutu had become more noticeable by his absence than his presence, a tall, gravel-voiced figure glimpsed occasionally at official ceremonies and airport walkabouts in Kinshasa, or fielding hostile questions at a rare press conference in France with a sardonic politeness that hinted at huge world-weariness. Rattled by the army riots that had twice devastated his cities, belatedly registering the extent to which he was hated, he had withdrawn from a resentful capital to the safety of Gbadolite, his palace in the depths of the equatorial forest, to nurse his paranoia.

His impassive portrait, decked in comic-opera uniform, kept watch on his behalf, glowering from banks, shops and reception halls. ‘Big Man’ rule had been encapsulated in one timeless brand: leopardskin toque, Buddy Holly glasses and the carved cane so imbued with presidential force mere mortals, it was said, could never hope to lift it. He liked to be known as the Leopard, and the face of a roaring big cat was printed on banknotes, ashtrays and official letterheads. But to a population that had once hailed him as ‘Papa’, he was now known as ‘the dinosaur’, a tribute to how sclerotic his regime had become. Certainly, on a continent of dinosaur leaders, of Biya and Bongo, Mugabe and Moi, he rated as a Tyrannosaurus Rex of the breed, setting an example not to be followed. No other African autocrat had proved such a wily survivor. No other president had been presented with a country of such potential, yet achieved so little. No other leader had plundered his economy so effectively or lived the high life to such excess.

Preyed on by young men with Kalashnikovs, its administration corroded by corruption, a nation the size of Western Europe had fallen off the map of acceptable destinations. My battered copy of the Belgian Guide Nagel, picked up in a Paris bookshop, described Kinshasa as a modern capital ‘boasting all the usual attributes of Europe’s great cities’ and encouraged the tourist to explore its museums, monuments and ‘indigenous quarters’. But that had been in 1959, when the world was a white man’s oyster. Kinshasa was now a stop bypassed even by hardened travellers, where airlines avoided leaving their planes overnight for fear of what the darkness would bring. A hardship posting for diplomats, boycotted by the World Bank and IMF, it was a country every resident seemed determined to abandon, if only they could lay their hands on the necessary visa.

I would be there for the end, and for the beginning of the end.

Less than three years after my arrival, the tables were turned and I was the one to experience the curious intimacy the looter shares with his victim, rifling through Mobutu’s wardrobes, touring his bathroom and making rude remarks about his taste in furniture (‘African dictator’ kitsch of the worst kind). Somewhere at the back of one of my drawers, there is a stolen fishknife that was once part of the presidential dining set. My companions in crime were more ambitious – they took monogrammed pillow cases, bottles of fine French wine, even a presidential oil portrait. But looters were being shot on the streets the day we paid our unannounced visit on Marshal Mobutu’s villa in Goma, and I wasn’t going to risk execution for a souvenir.

It was November 1996 and the new rebel movement that had suddenly risen from nowhere in the far east of Zaire had seized control of the area bordering Rwanda. For weeks the frontier crossings leading into this breathtakingly beautiful region of brooding volcanoes and misty green valleys, all rolling down to the blue waters of Lake Kivu, had been closed while the fighting went on. Then suddenly the victorious rebels opened the frontier, and a small flood of journalists who had been kicking their heels on the other side poured across.

When tour agencies were still brave enough to include Rwanda and Zaire in their African itineraries, Goma was a favourite destination for tourists visiting some of the world’s last mountain gorillas. A pretty little town on the black lava foothills, it had now been torn apart by its own inhabitants, who had taken the army’s exodus as the cue for some frenzied self-enrichment. Shops had been eviscerated, the main street was a mess of phone directories, glass and unused condoms, shattered toilet bowls and broken shutters. ‘They’ve attacked me four or five times, but they just won’t believe I don’t have anything left to take,’ gasped a ruined Lebanese trader, waiting at the border post for permission to leave. His eyes were swimming with tears.

The atmosphere was prickly. Starting what was to prove a seven-month looting and raping retreat across the country, Zairean forces had lashed out indiscriminately before pulling out, leaving corpses scattered for kilometres. No one was too sure of the identity of the rebel movement, the new bosses in town. And then there were the roaming Rwandans, whose intervention in Zaire was being denied by the government next door but was too prominent to ignore. Speaking from the corner of his mouth, a resident confirmed the outsiders’ presence: ‘We recognise them by their morphology.’ Then he hurried away as a baby-faced Rwandan soldier – high on something and all the more sinister for the bright pink lipstick he was wearing – swaggered up to silence the blabbermouth.

Somehow, Mobutu’s villa seemed the natural place to go. The road ran along the lake, snaking past walls draped in bougainvillaea, with the odd glimpse of blue water behind. We surprised a lone looter who had decided, enterprisingly, to focus on the isolated villas of the local dignitaries, rather than the overworked town centre. Thinking we were rebels, he stopped pushing a wheelbarrow on which a deep freeze was precariously balanced and ran for cover. As we drove harmlessly by, he was already returning to his task. A stolen photocopier and computer were still waiting to be taken to what, almost certainly, was a shack without electricity.

In the old days, the villa complex had been strictly off limits behind staunch metal gates manned by members of the presidential guard. Now the gates were wide open and the Zairean flag – a black fist clenching a flaming torch – lay crumpled on the ground. There had been no fight for this most symbolic of targets. No one, it was clear from the boxes of unused ammunition, the anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs carelessly stacked in the guards’ quarters, had had the heart for a real showdown.

In the garage were five black Mercedes, in pristine condition, two ambulances, in case the president fell sick and a Land Rover with a podium attachment to allow him, Pope-like, to address the public. A generous allocation for a man whose visits had become increasingly rare. But like a Renaissance monarch who expected a bedroom to be provided in any of his baron’s castles, Mobutu kept a dozen such mansions constantly at the ready across the country, on the off-chance of a visit that usually never came.

It was on venturing inside – could the property possibly be tripwired? – that we really began to feel like naughty children sneaking a look in their parents’ bedroom, only to emerge with their illusions shattered. From outside the villa had looked the height of ostentatious luxury: all chandeliers, Ming vases, antique furniture and marble floors. Close up, almost everything proved to be fake. The vases were modern imitations, they came with price labels still attached. The Romanesque plinths were in moulded plastic, the malachite inlay painted on.

With an ‘aha!’ of excitement, a colleague whipped out a black and white cravat, of the type worn with the collarless ‘abacost’ jacket that constituted Mobutu’s eccentric contribution to the world of fashion. From a distance, the cravats had always appeared complex arrangements of material, folded with meticulous care. Now I saw that they were little more than nylon bibs, held in place with tabs of Velcro. This emperor did have some clothes. But like his regime itself, they were all show and no substance.

Most poignant of all, perhaps, was the pink and burgundy suite prepared for the presidential spouse, although it was impossible to say whether this was the first lady Bobi Ladawa, or the twin sister Mobutu had, bizarrely, also taken to his bed. An outsize bottle of the perfume Je Reviens, which had probably turned rancid years ago in the African heat, stood on the mantelpiece. With their man ravaged by prostate cancer, his shambolic army collapsing like a house of cards, neither woman would ever be returning to Goma. This irreverent plundering was the only proof required of how rapidly the power established over three decades was unravelling.

Rebel uprisings, bodies rotting in the sun, a sickening megalomaniac. In newsrooms across the globe, shaking their heads over yet another unfathomable African crisis, producers and sub-editors dusted off memories of school literature courses and reached for the clichés. Zaire was Joseph Conrad’s original ‘Heart of Darkness’, they reminded the public. How prophetic the famous cry of despair voiced by the dying Mr Kurtz at Africa’s seemingly boundless capacity for bedlam and brutality had proved yet again. ‘The horror, the horror.’ Was nothing more promising ever to emerge from that benighted continent?

Yet when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness and penned some of the most famous last words in literary history, this was very far from his intended message. The title ‘Heart of Darkness’ itself and the phrase ‘the horror, the horror’ uttered by Mr Kurtz as he expires on a steam boat chugging down the giant Congo river, probably constitute one of the great misquotations of all time.

For Conrad, the Polish seaman who was to become one of Britain’s greatest novelists, Heart of Darkness was a book based on some very painful personal experience. In 1890 he had set out for the Congo Free State, the African colony then owned by Belgium’s King Leopold II, to fill in for a steamship captain slain by tribesmen. The posting, which was originally meant to last three years but was curtailed after less than six months, was to be the most traumatic of his life. It took him nine years to digest and turn into print.

Bouts of fever and dysentery nearly killed him; his health never subsequently recovered. Always melancholic, he spent much of the time plunged into deep depression, so disgusted by his fellow whites he avoided almost all human contact. His vision of humanity was to be permanently coloured by what he found in the Congo, where declarations of philanthropy camouflaged a colonial system of unparalleled cruelty. Before the Congo, Conrad once said, ‘I was a perfect animal’; afterwards, ‘I see everything with such despondency – all in black’.

Mr Kurtz, whose personality haunts the book although he says almost nothing, is first presented as the best station manager of the Congo, a man of refinement and education, who can thrill crowds with his idealism and is destined for great things inside the anonymous Company ‘developing’ the region. Stationed 200 miles in the interior, he has now fallen sick, and a band of colleagues sets out to rescue him.

When they find him, they discover that the respected Mr Kurtz has ‘gone native’. In fact, he has gone worse than native. Cut off from the Western world, inventing his own moral code and rendered almost insane by the solitude of the primeval forest, he has indulged in ‘abominable satisfactions’, presided ‘at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites’ says Conrad, hinting that Kurtz has become a cannibal.

His palisade is decorated by rows of severed black heads; he has been adopted as honorary chief by a tribe whose warriors he leads on bloody village raids in search of ivory. The man who once wrote lofty reports calling for the enlightenment of the native now has a simpler recommendation: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ When he expires before the steamer reaches civilisation, corroded by fever and knowledge of his own evil, his colleagues are relieved rather than sorry – a potential embarrassment has been avoided.

Despite its slimness, the novella is one of those multilayered works whose meaning seems to shift with each new reading. By the time Heart of Darkness was published in 1902, the atrocities being committed by Leopold’s agents in the Congo were already familiar to the public, thanks to the campaigns being waged by human rights activists of the day. So while Heart of Darkness is in part a psychological thriller about what makes man human, it had enough topical detail in it to carry another message to its readers. Notwithstanding the jarringly racist observations by the narrator Marlow, the way Heart of Darkness dwells on the sense of utter alienation felt by the white man in the gloom of central Africa, the book was intended primarily as a withering attack on the hypocrisy of contemporary colonial behaviour. ‘The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilising work in Africa is a justifiable idea,’ the writer told his publisher.

So when Kurtz raves against ‘the horror, the horror’, he is, Marlow makes clear, registering in a final lucid moment just how far he has fallen from grace. The ‘darkness’ of the book’s title refers to the monstrous passions at the core of the human soul, lying ready to emerge when man’s better instincts are suspended, rather than a continent’s supposed predisposition to violence. Conrad was more preoccupied with rotten Western values, the white man’s inhumanity to the black man, than, as is almost always assumed today, black savagery.

Why then, nearly a century on, has the phrase, and the title, become so misunderstood, so twisted?

The shift reflects, perhaps, the level of Western unease over Africa, a continent that has never disappointed in its capacity to disappoint: Hutu mothers killing their children by Tutsi fathers in Rwanda; the self-styled Emperor Bokassa ordering his cook to serve up his victims’ bodies in Central African Republic; Liberia’s rebels gleefully videotaping the torture of a former president – the terrible scenes swamp the thin trickle of good news, challenging the very notion of progress.

On a disturbing continent, no country, appropriately enough, remains more unsettling than the very birthplace of Conrad’s masterpiece: the nation that was once called the Congo Free State, later metamorphosed into Zaire and has now been rebaptised the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Mobutu’s hands, the country had become a paradigm of all that was wrong with post-colonial Africa. A vacuum at the heart of the continent delineated by the national frontiers of nine neighbouring countries, it was a parody of a functioning state. Here, the anarchy and absurdity that simmered in so many other sub-Saharan nations were taken to their logical extremes. For those, like myself, curious to know what transpired when the normal rules of society were suspended, the purity appealed almost as much as it appalled. Why bother with pale imitations, diluted versions, after all, when you could drench yourself in the essence, the original?

The longer I stayed, the more fascinated I became with the man hailed as inventor of the modern kleptocracy, or government by theft. His personal fortune was said to be so immense, he could personally wipe out the country’s foreign debt. He chose not to, preferring to banquet in his palaces and jet off to properties in Europe, while his citizens’ average annual income had fallen below $120, leaving them dependent on their wits to survive. What could be the rationale behind such callous greed?

Zaireans had demonised him, seeing his malevolent hand behind every misfortune. From mass-murder to torture, poisoning to rape – there were few crimes not attributed to him. But if Mobutu had approached near-Satanic proportions in the popular conception, he remained the lodestar towards which every diplomat and foreign expert, opposition politician and prime ministerial candidate, turned for orientation.

Rail as it might, the population, it seemed, simply could not imagine a world without Mobutu. ‘We are a peaceful people,’ Zaireans would say in self-exculpation, when asked why no frenzied assailant had ever burst from the crowd during one of Mobutu’s motorcades, brandishing a pistol. It was to take a foreign-backed uprising, dubbed ‘an invasion’ by Zaireans themselves and co-ordinated by men who did not speak the local Lingala, to rid them of the man they claimed to loathe. The passivity infuriated, eventually blurring into contempt. Every people, expatriates would shrug, deserves the leader it gets.

My attempt to understand the puzzle kept returning me to Heart of Darkness – not to the clichés of the headline writers, with their inverted, modernistic interpretations, but back to Conrad’s original meaning.

No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responsibility for a nation’s collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull political acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire’s free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.

Exploring the Alice-in-Wonderland universe they created I would belatedly learn respect. Stumbling upon the surreal alternative systems invented by ordinary Zaireans to cope with the anarchy, exasperation would be tempered by admiration. Above all, there would be anger at what Conrad’s Marlow, surveying the damage wrought by colonial conquerors who claimed to have Congo’s interests at heart, described as a ‘flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiful folly’.

CHAPTER ONE
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave

Kinshasa, 17 May 1997

Dear Guest,

Due to the events that have occurred last night, most of our employees have been unable to reach the hotel. Therefore, we are sorry to inform you that we will provide you only with a minimum service of room cleaning and that the laundry is only available for cleaning of your personal belongings. In advance, we thank you for your understanding and we hope that we will be able soon to assure our usual service quality.

The Management

At 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, a group of guests who had just staggered back to their rooms after a heavy drinking session in L’Atmosphère, the nightclub hidden in the bowels of Kinshasa’s best hotel, heard something of a fracas taking place outside. Peering from their balconies near the top of the Tower, the modern part of the hotel where management liked to put guests paying full whack, they witnessed a scene calculated to sober them up.

Drawing up outside the Hotel Intercontinental, effectively barring all exits, were several military armoured cars, crammed with members of the Special Presidential Division (DSP), the dreaded elite unit dedicated to President Mobutu’s personal protection and held responsible for the infamous Lubumbashi massacre. A black jeep with tinted windows had careered up to the side entrance and its owner – Mobutu’s own son Kongulu, a DSP captain – was now levelling his sub-machine gun at the night receptionist.

Kongulu, who was later to die of AIDS, was a stocky, bearded man with a taste for fast cars, gambling and women. He left unpaid bills wherever he went with creditors too frightened to demand payment of the man who had been nicknamed ‘Saddam Hussein’ by Kinshasa’s inhabitants. Now he was in full combat gear, bristling with grenades, two gleaming cartridge belts crisscrossed Rambo-style across his chest. And he was very, very angry.

Screaming at the receptionist, he demanded the room numbers of an army captain and another high-ranking official staying at the Intercontinental, men he accused of betraying his father, who had fled with his family hours before rather than face humiliation at the hands of the rebel forces advancing on the capital.

Up in Camp Tsha Tshi, the barracks on the hill which housed Mobutu’s deserted villa, Kongulu’s fellow soldiers had already killed the only man diplomats believed was capable of negotiating a peaceful handover. With the rebels believed to be only a couple of hours’ march away, Kongulu and his men were driving from one suspected hideout to another in a mood of grim fury, searching for traitors. Their days in the sun were over, they knew, but they would not go quietly. They could feel the power slipping through their fingers, but there was still time, in the moments before Mobutu’s aura of invincibility finally evaporated in the warm river air, for some score-settling.

The hotel incident swiftly descended into farce, as things had a tendency to do in Zaire.

‘Block the lifts,’ ordered the hotel’s suave Jordanian manager, determined, with a level of bravery verging on the foolhardy, to protect his guests. The night staff obediently flipped the power switch. But by the time the manager’s order had got through, Kongulu and two burly soldiers were already on the sixteenth floor.

Storming from one identical door to another, unable to locate their intended victims – long since fled – and unable to descend, the death squad was reaching near-hysteria. ‘Unblock the lifts, let them out, let them out,’ ordered the manager, beginning to feel rattled. Incandescent with fury, the trio spilled out into the lobby. Cursing and spitting, they mustered their forces, revved their vehicles and roared off into the night, determined to slake their blood lust before dawn.

The waiting was at an end. May 17, 1997 was destined to be showdown time for Zaire. And it looked uncomfortably clear that the months of diplomatic attempts to negotiate a deal that would ease Mobutu out and rebel leader Laurent Kabila in, preventing Kinshasa from descending into a frenzy of destruction behind the departing president, had come to precisely nothing.

The fact that so many of the key episodes in what was to be Zaire’s great unravelling took place in the Hotel Intercontinental was not coincidental. Africa is a continent that seems to specialise in symbolic hotels which, for months or years, are microcosms of their countries’ tumultuous histories. They are buildings where atrocities are committed, coups d’état consecrated, embryonic rebel governments lodged, peace deals signed, and when the troubled days are over, they still miraculously come up with almond croissants, fresh coffee and CNN in most rooms.

In Rwanda, that role is fulfilled by the Mille Collines hotel, where the management stared down the Hutu militiamen bent on slaughtering terrified Tutsi guests during the 1994 genocide. In Zimbabwe, it used to be the Meikles, where armed white farmers rubbed shoulders with sanction-busters during the Smith regime. In Ethiopia it is the Hilton, where during the Mengistu years some staff doubled as government informers; in Uganda, the Nile, whose rooms once rang with the screams of suspects being tortured by Idi Amin’s police.

In Congo the honour most definitely goes to the Hotel Intercontinental. I know, because I once lived there. With one room as my living quarters, another as dilapidated office and a rooftop beer crate as the perch for a satellite telex – my link with the outside world – I soon realised that the hotel, as emblematic of the regime as Mobutu’s leopardskin hat, offered the perfect vantage point from which to observe the dying days of the dinosaur.

The hotel was built on a whim. On a visit to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, President Mobutu saw the Hotel Ivoire, and decided he wanted one too. For once, his impulses were based on canny business instincts. The Intercontinental was the first five-star hotel in Kinshasa. Until the restoration of the Hotel Memling, its rival in the town centre, there was simply nowhere else to go for VIPS seeking the bland efficiency only an international hotel chain can deliver. During the prosperous 1970s, the 50 per cent government stake in the building was a share in a certified cash cow.

Constructed on a spur of land in leafy Gombe, a district of ambassadors’ residences and ministries, it enjoys some of the best views in Kinshasa. To the east, the Congo river traces a lazy sweep as it emerges from Malebo pool, an expanse of water so vast that, venturing out in a small boat, you can lose sight of the opposite banks and end up wondering whether, by some miracle of geography, you have drifted out to sea.

Across the water, which is transformed into a disturbed mirror of silver and gold each sunset, gleams the distinctive concave tower that serves as the city of Brazzaville’s landmark. The river, that concourse Marlow described as ‘an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land’ is the frontier, a fact exploited by the fishermen whose delicate pirogues languidly traverse the waterway for a spot of incidental smuggling.

Nowhere else in the world do two capitals lie so close to each other, within easy shelling distance, in fact, a feature that has been of more than merely abstract interest in the past. The proximity allows each city to act as an impromptu refugee camp when things get too hot at home. From Brazzaville to Kinshasa, from Kinshasa to Brazzaville, residents ping-pong irrepressibly from one to another – sinks, toilets and mattresses on their heads, depending on which capital is judged more dangerous at any given moment.

In peacetime, the river offers release to Kinshasa’s claustrophobic expatriates. Roaring upstream in their motorboats, they picnic in the shimmering heat given off by the latest sandbank deposited by the current or scud across the waves on waterskis, weaving around the drifting islands of water hyacinth. Legend has it a European ambassador was once eaten by a crocodile while swimming and freshwater snakes are said to thrive. Yet far more ominous, for swimmers, is the steady pull of the river, the relentless tug of a vast mass of water powering relentlessly to the sea.

Some of this water has travelled nearly 3,000 miles and descended more than 5,000 feet. It has traced a huge arc curving up from eastern Zambia, heading straight north across the savannah as the Lualaba, veering west into the equatorial forest and taking in the Ubangi tributary before aiming for the Atlantic. The basin it drains rims Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville. The catchment area straddles the equator, ensuring that some part is always in the midst of the rainy season. Hence the river’s steady flow, so strong that in theory it could cover the energy needs of central Africa and beyond. In practice, the hydroelectric dam built at Inga is working at a fraction of capacity – one of Mobutu’s many white elephant projects – and even domestic demand is not being met.

The local word for river is ‘nzadi’: a word misunderstood and mispronounced by Portuguese explorers charting the coastline in the fifteenth century. In rebaptising Belgian Congo ‘Zaire’ in 1971, Mobutu was acknowledging the extent to which that waterway, the most powerful in the world after the Amazon, defines his people’s identity. But what should have opened up the region has instead served to isolate it. On the map, the blue ribbon sweeping across the continent looks a promising access route. But the terrible rapids lying between the upper reaches of the Lualaba and Kisangani, Kinshasa and the sea, make nonsense of the atlas.

Looking west from the hotel, you can just glimpse the brown froth from the first of the series of falls that so appalled explorer Henry Morton Stanley when he glimpsed them in 1877. Determined to settle the dispute then raging in the West over the origins of the Nile, he had trekked across the continent from Zanzibar, losing nearly half his expedition to disease, cannibal attack and exhaustion. The calm of Malebo pool, fringed by sandy islands and a long row of white cliffs, had seemed a blessing to him and his young companion, Frank Pocock. ‘The grassy table-land above the cliffs appeared as green as a lawn, and so much reminded Frank of Kentish Downs that he exclaimed enthusiastically, “I feel we are nearing home”,’ wrote Stanley. In his enthusiasm Pocock, the only other white man to have survived this far into the journey, proposed naming the cliffs Dover, and the stretch of open water after Stanley. The reprieve proved shortlived. Three months later, still struggling to cross the Crystal Mountains separating the pool from the sea, Pocock went over one of the rapids and was drowned.

Leopoldville, the trading station Stanley set up here in honour of Leopold II, the Belgian King who sponsored his return to the area to ‘develop’ the region, was originally separate from Kinshasa, a second station established further upriver and dominated by baobab groves. The baobabs have gone now and the two stations have merged to form one inchoate city, a messy urban settlement of fits and starts that always seems about to peter away into the bush, only to sprawl that little bit further afield.

In the city’s infancy, the Belgian colonisers had laid out a model city of boulevards and avenues, sports grounds and parks. But with the population now nudging five million, all thought of town planning has been abandoned, the rules of drainage and gravity ignored. Nature takes its revenge during the rainy seasons, when mini Grand Canyons open up under roads and water-logged hillsides collapse, burying inhabitants in their shacks.

‘It looks as though it’s survived a war and is being rebuilt,’ a photographer friend, a veteran of Sarajevo, remarked after her first visit to Kinshasa. But the damage has been self-inflicted, in two rounds of looting so terrible they have become historical landmarks in people’s minds, so that events are labelled as being ‘avant le premier pillage’ or ‘après le deuxième pillage’, before and after the lootings. It is Congo’s version of BC and AD.

As for rebuilding, the impression given by the scaffolding and myriad work sites dotted around Kinshasa is misleading. The work has never been completed, the scaffolding will probably never be removed. Like the defunct street lamps lining Nairobi’s roads, the tower blocks of Freetown, the fading boardings across Africa which advertise trips to destinations no travel company today services, it recalls another era, when a continent believed its natural trajectory pointed up instead of down.

Down in the valley lies the Cité, the pullulating popular quarters. Matonge, Makala, Kintambo: districts of green-scummed waterways, street markets and rubbish piled so high the white egrets picking through it bob above the corrugated-iron roofs. In heavy rains the open drains overflow, turning roads into rivers of black mud that exhale the warm stink of sewage. On the heights, enjoying the cooler air, are districts like Mont-Fleuri, Ma Campagne and Binza, where spiked walls conceal the mansions that housed Mobutu’s elite and giant lizards in garish purple and orange do jerky press-ups by limpid blue swimming pools.

When the ‘mouvanciers’, as those belonging to Mobutu’s presidential movement were called, ventured downhill, it was usually to the Hotel Intercontinental that they headed in their Mercedes. It was a home away from home. They liked to sit in its Atrium café in their gold-rimmed sunglasses, doing shady deals with Lebanese diamond buyers, ordering cappuccinos and talking in ostentatiously loud voices over their mobile phones while armed bodyguards loitered in the background.

They were the only ones who could afford to patronise the designer-wear shops in the hotel’s arcade or hire the Junoesque whores – renowned as the most expensive in Kinshasa – who swanned along the corridors. They ran up accounts and left the management to chase payment by the government for years. Kongulu owed the casino a huge amount, but who could force a president’s son to pay?

It was never a place where those who opposed the regime could feel comfortable. Mobutu’s portrait stared out from above the main desk, his personality seemed to invest every echoing corridor. The Popular Movement for the Revolution (MPR), the party every Zairean at one stage was obliged to join, rented a set of rooms here and on at least one embarrassing occasion for management, a handcuffed prisoner was spotted in the lifts, being taken upstairs for interrogation.

Time the placing of your international call right and you could eavesdrop on the telephone conversations of guests down the hall, being monitored by the switchboard operators. The room cleaners showed a disproportionate level of interest in guests’ comings and goings. There was always a sense of being under surveillance. ‘We don’t hire them as such, but what can we do if the staff work as spies?’ a hotel executive once acknowledged, with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders.

By the mid-1990s the Intercontinental had, like the country itself, hit hard times. Zaire had become an international pariah and few VIPs visited Kinshasa any more. With occupancy below 20 per cent, service was stultifyingly slow. The blue dye came off the floor of the swimming pool, leaving bathers with the impression they had caught some horrible foot disease. The aroma of rotting carpet – blight of humid climates – tinged the air, the salade niçoise gave you the runs and the national power company would regularly plunge the hotel into penumbra because of unpaid bills. The first time I used the lift it shuttled repeatedly between ground floor and sixth, refusing to stop. ‘Yes, we heard you ringing the alarm bell,’ remarked the imperturbable receptionist when I finally won my freedom. After that I used the emergency stairs.

But there were considerations weighing against the growing tattiness, which accounted for the hotel’s small population of permanent residents. We were betting on the likelihood that if Kinshasa were to be engulfed in one of its periodic bouts of pillaging, the DSP would secure the hotel. They had done so twice before, in 1991 and 1993, when the mouvanciers had slept in the conference rooms, sheltered from a frenzied populace which was dismantling their factories, supermarkets and villas.

The hotel’s long-term guests were a strange bunch, representative in their way of the foreign community that washes up on African shores: misfits of the First World, sometimes intent on good works but more often escaping dubious pasts, in search of a quick killing, or simply seduced by the possibilities of misbehaviour without repercussions – that old colonial delight.

There was the ageing Belgian beauty, still sporting the miniskirts of a thirteen-year-old, who relentlessly sunbathed her way through every crisis, her appetite for ultraviolet seemingly insatiable. On the pool’s fringes hovered the skinny Chinese acupuncturist, whom everyone mistook for a cook because of his starched white hat. He had come to work on an aid project in Zaire which had never seen the light of day. Given the prevalence of HIV in Kinshasa, demand for acupuncture was minimal. But he had stayed on rather than return to communist China. ‘Here, it is bad. But in China, I think, maybe worse,’ he confessed.

On first name terms with most of the mouvanciers was the blond, big-hearted American with a southern drawl who slopped around in flip-flops and T-shirts. Just what he was doing in Kinshasa was a mystery, but he would often use a vague, collective ‘we’ when referring to those in power. The Zairean staff referred to him openly as ‘the CIA man’, although the American embassy claimed to be unaware of his existence. Somehow, one couldn’t help feeling that a real CIA man would have been a bit put out at having his role so universally recognised.

There were bored foreign pilots who flew supplies into UNITA-held territory in Angola, busting UN sanctions on salaries generous enough to merit turning a few blind eyes. ‘I have told my bosses, the one thing I will never do is fly arms,’ said Jean-Marie, a charming Frenchman. ‘They can ask me to do anything else, but not that.’ I would nod sympathetically, pretending to believe him.

Jean-Marie looked great in his pilot’s uniform and spent a lot of time gently chatting up aid workers around the pool. He had shown me a photograph of his girlfriend back in France, who looked stunningly attractive but was clearly half his age. A Saint-Exupéry gone astray, he would return from trips halfway across the world – not carrying arms – and rave with Gallic lyricism about the beauty of the night sky from the pilot’s cockpit. When he fell out with his bosses, he moved into a house the CIA man had started renting, although he said the mysterious goings-on there made him uneasy. One day he disappeared, never to be heard of again, and with him went the several thousand dollars it emerged he had borrowed from the CIA man and his aid-worker girlfriends.

And finally, of course, there was the pony-tailed piano player. Wizened and impassive, he had been playing in the Atrium café as long as anyone could remember. He had tinkled out his lugubrious version of ‘As Time Goes By’ as his frame became more hunched and his hair turned from black, to first salt-and-pepper, and finally to dirty white. By May 1997, it was the piano player’s puzzling absence, as much as any other event, that signalled a fundamental change was looming. A seismic shift in the world as we knew it was about to take place, and the piano player, for one, did not want to be around to see it.

The rebel movement born in Kivu in late 1996, which had triggered hoots of derisive laughter when it had pledged to overturn Mobutu, had proved far more formidable than anticipated. As it had begun capturing territory, sceptical Zaireans had gone from dismissing it as a Rwandan invasion led by a discredited Maoist to welcoming it as a liberation force. Neighbouring countries with long-standing gripes against Mobutu joined the bandwagon and the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) picked up momentum.

Up in Binza, the mouvanciers had gone from haughty dismissals of the rebel problem to frantic questions: why wouldn’t Mobutu DO something? Drained by prostate cancer, the president had curled up in his lair on the hill like a sick animal. ‘When you are a soldier,’ he declared, ‘either you surrender or you are killed. But you don’t flee.’

Days dragged into weeks. Bracing for the worst, anxious Western governments quietly pulled together a force in Brazzaville whose commandos practised the cross-river trip in high-power motor-launches and helicopters. The diplomats were busy, juggling a stream of visa requests from the mouvanciers with preparations for the evacuation of expatriates who were stubbornly refusing to heed the increasingly forceful warnings issued over the BBC World Service.

‘We’ve built a special cement step to allow women with high heels to get into the motor launches. And I’ve even got peanuts and chocolate bars ready for anyone who might starve to death while we’re waiting for our men,’ an ambassador proudly announced. He had gone on a trial run across the river and returned somewhat breathless. ‘Door to door, it took just three and a half minutes.’

The rebels kept marching. National television broadcast footage of General Nzimbi Nzale, head of the DSP, haranguing his troops for hour after hour, ordering them to defend Mobutu to the death. The camera frame was tight and one assumed, from his hoarse tones, that he was addressing an audience of thousands. But the military made the mistake of allowing a foreign television crew to attend the same event. They filmed the general from behind, revealing a couple of dozen nose-picking soldiers, vacant-eyed, barely paying attention. Could these be the same men who had drawn up a list of strategic sites to be blown up and personalities to be assassinated once the rebels reached the city, a list leaked to Kinshasa newspapers?

In the Hotel Intercontinental the shops, anticipating the looting that traditionally preceded the rebels’ arrival, first slashed the prices on their designer brands and then staged ‘everything must go’ sales, trying to shift stock before a more dramatic type of ‘liquidation to tale’ occurred.

But their usual customers were no longer interested. Quietly, the mouvanciers were abandoning their villas in the hills and moving down to the Hotel Intercontinental, where they spent fitful nights, armed bodyguards perched on seats outside their rooms. You would spot them in the lobby, surrounded by matched sets of Louis Vuitton luggage, before they boarded planes and headed for properties bought years before in Belgium, France, Switzerland and South Africa in preparation for just such a day. It was almost possible to squeeze out a tiny pang of sympathy for these, the most well-heeled refugees in the world.

As for the expatriates, they had been told by their embassies to keep one holdall at the ready for the eventual evacuation, so shopping was ruled out. The designer stock stayed stubbornly put, and the evening ritual amongst journalists staying at the hotel became a window-shopping tour to mentally select which bargain to snatch as the crowds surged through the plate glass.

‘What you have to realise is you’ll only get the chance to go for one item,’ a veteran correspondent told me with deadly seriousness. ‘There won’t be any time for faffing around. So it’s all about focus. Quick in, quick out.’ I dallied for a while over a pair of yellow lace knickers with matching bra. But in the end a tan leather jacket, worth at least $1,000, I reckoned, by Kinshasa prices, won my vote.

We were not the only ones getting light-headed with anxiety. A dinner hosted by a Zairean friend who worked at one of the ministries was a jolly, noisy meal until one of the guests called for silence. Looking around the gathering of lawyers, university professors and consultants, he raised a glass of pink champagne and reminded them that this was exactly the social class targeted for elimination after Liberia’s 1980 army coup. ‘Let us drink a toast to change, and pray we are all still here in a year’s time to celebrate,’ he said.

Soon after, a curfew was announced, and evening outings came to an end. Defeated soldiers and deserters were trickling into Kinshasa, hijacking the first cars they stumbled upon. It was no longer safe to venture out after dark. Instead, along with a growing number of crop-haired ‘security experts’ brought in by the embassies, we were confined to the Intercontinental’s pizzeria, where the band laughably dubbed ‘Le Best’ serenaded us with a muzak medley which always featured a particularly mournful cover version of ‘Hotel California’. ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,’ they wailed.

All airlines had now cancelled their flights to Kinshasa and the ferries had been requisitioned by the government. After weeks spent wondering whether to go or stay, the decision had been taken out of our hands.

The Hotel Intercontinental manager was finding the experience as claustrophobic as the rest of us. His appearance was as natty as ever, but his face was beginning to show the strain. ‘How much longer is this going to go on? I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. It’s giving me ulcers,’ he confessed over breakfast. Fearing a siege, he had stockpiled enough food, water and diesel to cater for 2,000 people for at least a fortnight. Now he chose to combat the tension the only way he knew how: by entertaining in style. Select, candle-lit dinners were staged in the wine cellars of the hotel. Surrounded by dusty vintages, nestling in the bowels of the building, for one brief night we felt sheltered from the approaching storm.

‘Do you really think these Tutsi troops are going to be as effective as people say?’ asked my neighbour as we savoured the nouvelle cuisine. ‘I suspect it’s all a myth. It’s easy enough beating the Zairean army out in the sticks. But surely when the rebels get to Kinshasa, and the DSP have nowhere left to run, it’ll be completely different?’

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.

His country was young, its sense of self-identity distinctly shaky. He was only the second monarch of an independent Belgian state, whose people had staged a revolution in 1830, turning their backs on centuries of Spanish, Austrian, French and Dutch rule. Despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm on the part of the population, he was determined to use a colony to transform his tiny country, divided by religion and language, into a world power commanding respect.

‘No country has had a great history without colonies,’ Leopold wrote to a collaborator. ‘Look at the history of Venice, of Rome and Ancient Greece. A complete country cannot exist without overseas possessions and activity.’ Scouring the world, he had looked at China, Guatemala, Fiji, Sarawak, the Philippines and Mozambique as possible candidates, but had been stymied at every turn. Then, cantering to the rescue like a moustachioed crusader, had come Henry Morton Stanley.

Stanley was a poor Briton who had emigrated to America, where he had reinvented himself as a war correspondent known for his racy copy and fearlessness under fire. An illegitimate child, he had been abandoned by his mother and sent to the workhouse, circumstances that left him with a deep need to prove himself. Fated to spend his life in a swirl of controversy, Stanley had first seized the public’s imagination by penetrating darkest Africa in 1871 and tracking down David Livingstone, the British missionary who had gone missing five years earlier. Their legendary meeting was one of the great journalistic scoops of all time.

In 1877 he pulled off an even more impressive feat. Proposing to settle the dispute that had festered for years between British explorers John Speke and Richard Burton over the source of the Nile, he set off once more from Zanzibar, tracing the course of the Lualaba river for 1,500 miles. Braving rapids, ambushes, smallpox and starvation, he followed the river, emerging at the Atlantic Ocean after a journey that lasted nearly three years. He had not only established that the Lualaba had no connection with the Nile, which he had shown to spring from Lake Victoria, he had also opened up a huge swathe of central Africa until then known only to the ‘Arab’ merchants (in actual fact Swahili-speaking, Moslem traders from Africa’s east coast) to greedy Western eyes.

In the books Stanley wrote after each extraordinary trip he showed a near-obsession with the dangers posed by perspiration and sodden underwear, which he blamed for malarial chills. But his eccentricities did not prevent him from accurately sizing up the potential of the land he had passed through. Its forests were full of precious woods and ivory-bearing elephants. Its fertile soils supported palm oil, gums and, most significantly, wild rubber, about to come into huge demand with the invention of the pneumatic tyre. Its inhabitants presented a ready market for European goods and, once the rapids were passed, the river offered a huge transport network stretching across central Africa.

Stanley was far from being the first white man to reach this part of central Africa. Late fifteenth-century emissaries from Portugal, looking for the fabled black Christian empire of Prester John, had stumbled on the Kongo kingdom, a Bantu empire spreading across what is today northern Angola, western Congo and edging into Congo-Brazzaville.

A feudal society led by the ManiKongo, this kingdom proved surprisingly open to the arrival of the white man, perhaps encouraged by a spiritual system which identified white, the skin colour of these strange visitors, as sacred. It had welcomed missionaries, embraced Christianity and entered into alliance with the Portuguese. But by the time Stanley was tracing the course of the river, the Kongo kingdom had been in decline for more than two centuries, devastated by endless wars of succession, attacks by hostile tribes and, above all, the flourishing slave trade.

Although it was clearly in his interest to play up the horrors of what he found, for it made the alternative of colonial subjugation seem so much more attractive, Stanley appears to have been genuinely horrified at the damage the ‘Arabs’ had wrought along the river.

‘The slave traders admit that they have only 2300 captives in their fold, yet they have raided through the length and breadth of a country larger than Ireland, bearing fire and spreading carnage with lead and iron,’ he reported in The Congo and the founding of its free state. ‘Both banks of the river show that 118 villages, and forty-three districts have been devastated, out of which is only educed this scant profit of 2300 females and children and about 2000 tusks of ivory … The outcome from the territory with its million of souls is 5000 slaves, obtained at the cruel expense of 33000 lives!’

But his hopes that Britain, his mother country, would seize the opportunities presented were dashed. With London refusing to take the bait, King Leopold II stepped in. One of the last pieces of unclaimed land in a continent being portioned off by France, Portugal, Britain and Germany, Congo fitted his requirements perfectly. Leopold recruited Stanley to return to the Congo, set up a base there and establish a chain of trading stations along the navigable main stretch of the river which would allow the European sovereign to claim the region’s riches.

Stanley found himself in a race against Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, a naval officer who was energetically signing up local chiefs on France’s behalf. With the northern shoreline lost to him – hence the eventual establishment of French Congo, with Brazzaville as its capital – Stanley had to content himself with the southern shore of the river, pushing his treaties on hundreds of chieftains. Leopold’s insignia – the gold star on a blue background later, bizarrely, revived by the anti-colonial Laurent Kabila – was raised over village upon village.

Further exploration confirmed Stanley’s first impressions of vast natural riches just waiting to be exploited. ‘We are banqueting on such sights and odours that few would believe could exist,’ he wrote after another trip up river. ‘We are like children ignorantly playing with diamonds.’

Leopold had found his colony. Privately he raved about the potential of ‘this magnificent African cake’. But he was careful to present the situation in less enthusiastic terms to other European powers, wary of signs of expansionism by the Belgian newcomer. The flag flown at the newly established Congo stations ostensibly belonged to the International African Association, a philanthropic organisation Leopold had set up with the stated aim of wiping out the slave trade and spreading civilisation. Leopold encouraged missionaries to set out for the Congo and at the Berlin conference of 1884–5, at which the world powers carved up Africa, he triggered unanimous applause by proposing the Congo as a free trade zone, open to all merchants. His ambitions for the nation, he said, were purely philanthropic. In return, the Congo Free State was recognised as coming under his personal – as opposed to Belgium’s – control.

But, as Marchal’s work makes clear, the situation on the ground was to prove rather less high-minded. Clearing the jungle to build roads, stations and – eventually – a railway linking the hinterland with the sea, Stanley’s ruthless treatment of his native labourers won him the sobriquet ‘Bula Matari’ (Breaker of Rocks).

Unable to read the treaties they had signed, local chiefs discovered they had handed over both their land and a monopoly on trade. King Leopold, noted Stanley, in words that could have been used of Mobutu a century later, had the ‘enormous voracity to swallow a million of square miles with a gullet that will not take in a herring’.

If the signatures were given ‘freely’, Stanley left the clan leaders in no doubt that he had the force with which to pursue his interests. He took great delight in demonstrating the wonders of the Krupp canon, the latest in modern weaponry. ‘Notwithstanding their professions of incredulity as to its power,’ he recounted with satisfaction, ‘it was observed that the chiefs took great care to keep at a respectful distance from the Krupp, and when finally the artillerist, after sighting the piece to 2,000 yards, fired it, and the cannon spasmodically recoiled, their bodies also instantaneously developed a convulsive moment, after which they sat stupidly gazing at one another.’

Later on, the Force Publique, a 15,000–19,000-strong army of West African and Congolese mercenaries, was established to ensure Leopold’s word became law. Weapons and ammunition poured into the region. Just as Mobutu was later to give the nod to a system of organised looting by instructing his soldiers to ‘live off the land’, Leopold expected the Force Publique to provide for itself, pillaging surrounding villages in search of food.

Far from being a free trade zone, the colony’s very raison d’être was to make money for the King. Anxious to attract the foreign capital needed to build railways and bridges, Leopold divided part of the country into concessions held by companies in which he held a 50 per cent stake, with exclusive rights over tracts of forest, ivory, palm oil and mineral wealth. The rest of the country was defined as Crown property, where state agents enjoyed a business monopoly. Independent merchants who ventured into the area in search of ivory found their way physically blocked by Leopold’s officials. When the Arab traders operating in the north and eastern reaches of Congo were eventually driven out after a vicious war against the Force Publique, it was not – whatever the Tervuren museum may claim – because of any outrage over their slaving activities, it was because they threatened Leopold’s commercial interests.

By then, as the boom in the motor industry escalated Western demand for rubber, Leopold’s agents were knowingly mimicking the techniques of the Arab traders that Stanley had decried. Villagers, who had to tap the wild vines growing in the forest for gum, were set cripplingly high production quotas. If they failed to meet the targets, the Force Publique would descend on a village, burn its huts, kill at random and take womenfolk, children or chiefs prisoner until the villagers came to heel. Hostages were used as porters or sold as slaves to rival tribes in exchange for rubber or ivory, and thousands of orphaned children were marched off to Catholic missions to be trained as soldiers for the Force Publique.

Driving the state agents on was a cynical commission system that could double their miserly salaries depending on output and a sliding scale of payment which ensured that those who paid the villagers least for their deliveries of ivory or rubber were rewarded most highly. The lack of compassion seems a little more understandable when one considers the risks inherent in working in the Congo Free State. A staggering one in three state officials desperate enough to try their luck in Africa did not survive their postings, felled by malaria, typhoid or sleeping sickness. With the likelihood of dying in service so high, these young men were none too fastidious about the methods used to ensure output targets were met.

Looking at the mournful black and white photographs taken by appalled missionaries, it is sobering to register that around a century before the amputations carried out by Sierra Leone’s rebel forces sent shudders through the West – reinforcing stereotypes of African barbarism – a white-led, European-commanded force had already perfected the art of human mutilation. Soldiers in the Congo were told to account for every cartridge fired, so they hacked off and smoked the hands, feet and private parts of their victims. Body parts were presented to commanders in baskets as proof the soldiers had done their work well. Hence the photographs that, disseminated by the pioneering British journalist Edmund Morel, a precursor of campaigning human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, eventually shocked the outside world into action.

The chicotte, the gallows, mass executions were all liberally applied in a campaign that often seemed to have extermination of races deemed inferior as an incidental aim. The brutality inevitably triggered uprisings. The ferocity of those revolts was glossed over by colonial officers and subsequently downplayed by academics. But Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem records the words of a Captain Vangele, who was attacked four times by canoes manned by tribesmen from Mobutu’s own equatorial region, as proof the Congolese were no walkover: ‘It was the fiercest battle I have ever experienced in Africa … During that fight that lasted nearly three hours, the Yakoma did not cry out once, there was something terrifying about their silence, their cold determination.’

The Force Publique put down the resistance with ruthless effectiveness. Then, as today, no reliable census data existed in the Congo. But as the Force Publique stole children, destroyed families and spread hitherto unfamiliar diseases in its wake, missionaries began to notice an alarming incidence of depopulation taking place. Marchal hesitates to quantify the phenomenon, but Belgian officials were eventually to estimate that the country’s population had been halved since the founding of the Congo Free State, implying that 10 million people either died or fled the region. Professor Ndaywel puts the figure even higher, at 13 million.

Leopold had done his best to keep Congo’s contacts with the outside world to a minimum, trying to ensure a good press by discouraging visitors and systematically bribing politicians and journalists in Europe. But by the first years of the twentieth century, works such as Heart of Darkness were echoing what Roger Casement, a British diplomat, was to officially establish in a 1903 report commissioned by the European powers. Detailing cases of natives being forced to drink white men’s urine, having their bound hands beaten till they dropped off, being eaten by maggots while still alive and fed to cannibal tribes on death, Casement destroyed any remaining illusions. What had been laughably dubbed the Congo Free State was an exploitative system premised on forced labour, terror and repression.

Under pressure from foreign allies and his own parliament, the ailing Leopold agreed in 1908, after long negotiations, to hand over Congo to the Belgian state, instead of bequeathing it to his country on his death as he had originally planned. He died a little more than a year later, having never once set foot in the colony his policies had so devastated.

But he had achieved his aim. Congo’s massive contribution to Belgium’s development is still on show in the capital, if only you know where to direct your gaze. Leopold was a king who wanted to leave his mark on the city of Brussels, and brand it he did, thanks to this independent monetary source he could tap at will.

For visitors interested in the history of Brussels, several companies today offer themed coach trips around the city. A favourite is the Art Nouveau tour, which traces the rise and fall of the design movement that blossomed on the cobbled streets of the hilly city as nowhere else, and the high moment of the tour is undoubtedly the apricot-coloured Hotel Van Eetvelde on Avenue Palmerston, around the corner from the Jamaican embassy and a stone’s throw from the plate-glass horrors of Euroland.

Here architect Victor Horta, guiding light of the Art Nouveau movement, was given free reign by Edmond Van Eetvelde, a wealthy diplomat who wanted a fitting venue in which he and his wife could receive business guests. ‘I presented him with the most daring plan I had ever, until that point, drawn up,’ recalled Horta. Taking advantage of the blank cheque issued him, he produced a building so lavishly decorated, so consistent in its artistic vision, the overall effect is almost nauseating.

From the octagonal drawing hall to the mosaic floors, from the delicate tendrils of the wrought-iron banisters to the motif on the coloured glass roof, the Hotel Van Eetvelde is pure Horta. It is also pure Congo. The hardwoods that lined the ceilings, the marble on the floors, the onyx for the walls and the copper edging each step of the curving staircase all came from the colony. What did not come directly from the colony was paid for with its proceeds, for Van Eetvelde was more than just a well-connected diplomat – he was secretary-general to the Congo. One of Leopold’s most trusted collaborators, he was rewarded in 1897 for his loyal services with a baronetcy, before eventually being sidelined by a king whose judgement he had dared to question.

The Hotel Van Eetvelde is only one of the many architectural extravagances Congo’s exploited labourers made possible. The Cinquantenaire arch, the grandiose baroque gateway to nowhere, built to celebrate Belgium’s golden jubilee; the endless improvements to the Royal Palace at Laeken, including the vast royal greenhouses, Chinese pavilion and Japanese tower; the museum at Tervuren; Ostend’s golf course and sea-side arcade and a host of other works were all provided by the Congo. But there was more, much more, and not all of it quite so obvious to public eyes: presents for Leopold’s demanding young mistress; a special landing stage for the yacht he, like Mobutu later, would use as a place to hide away from an increasingly hostile public, spending sometimes months aboard; Parisian châteaux; estates in the south of France and a fabulous villa in Cap Ferrat, not far from where Mobutu would buy a mansion.

The two men shared more than just a knack for large-scale extortion and lavish spending tastes. Indeed, in money matters, the present echoes the past to an almost uncanny extent. Both leaders were to prove remarkably adept at squeezing loans out of gullible creditors and luring private investors with a taste for adventure to Africa. Both covered their tracks with a system of fraudulent book-keeping. Both indulged in similar stratagems in an attempt to cheat the taxman after their deaths and both, having feathered their own nests, left Congo with a heavy burden of debts to be settled after they quit the scene.

In contrast to most African colonies, the Congo Free State was a money-maker almost from birth, thanks to Leopold’s eye on the bottom line. But the king did his best to conceal that fact, succeeding so well in obscuring the true situation that a British journal of the day erroneously reported: ‘It is by no means certain that Belgium will not tire of the Congo. Already this vast area has been a huge disappointment to the mother country. Its resources and population have not proved in any way equal to Mr Stanley’s florid accounts.’

Pleading near bankruptcy, Leopold managed to win two major loans worth a total of 32 million francs from the Belgian state in 1890 and 1895, paid out in yearly instalments. But while the faithful Van Eetvelde was drawing up fictitious budgets underestimating revenues, thereby ensuring the government maintained subsidies for a colony the public had never wanted in the first place, profitability was sharply on the rise. By 1901 ivory exports stood at 289,900 kilograms and rubber production had gone from 350 to 6,000 tonnes a year. Congo was providing more than a tenth of world production of this key raw material, bringing in somewhere between 40 and 50 million francs a year. The king also made money by issuing more than 100 million francs worth of Congo bonds, effectively printing money with the same liberality as Kinshasa’s central bank was later to show when it came to issuing notes.

When Leopold was finally forced to hand the colony over to Belgium, he did so at a high price, wheedling 50 million francs from the government in recognition of his endeavours. The Belgian government, which had always been assured it would never be sucked into the king’s African adventures, found itself agreeing to assume Congo’s 110 million francs in debts – much of that sum comprising the bonds Leopold had issued – and contribute nearly half as much again to completing the building projects the king had drawn up in Belgium.

No one will ever know for certain how much profit Leopold himself drew from the Congo Free State. He adopted the methods beloved of many a modern-day African strongman when it came to trying to hide the extent of the wealth he had accumulated. Real estate was bought through aides, money secretly funnelled into a foundation dedicated to building projects, and shadowy holding companies set up in Belgium, France and Germany. Before handing over responsibility for his African colony, Leopold was careful to burn much of the Congo documentation, protecting himself as far as he could from the scrutiny of future scholars. Belgian investigators only succeeded in unravelling the complex network of his investments in 1923.

By then the world’s attention had moved elsewhere, satisfied that the human rights abuses in Congo had halted with the Belgian’s government takeover. Not so, insisted Marchal, who aimed to challenge this comfortable myth in the book he was currently writing about the system of forced labour imposed by Belgium’s Union Minière, the company that continued running the mines in Congo’s southern Katanga region well after independence. ‘When I finished writing about Leopold, I thought it would be over for me, because I believed all those professors who said when Belgium took over everything was wonderful. But I’ve seen that things remained the same, the system was nearly as brutal, it just became more hypocritical. I now have material for another three or four books.’

Marchal’s own memories might have suggested as much. The system of forced cultivation in the cotton industry he enforced as a young man lasted until independence in 1960; use of the chicotte, that mainstay of colonial rule, was outlawed only ten months before Belgium pulled out. The officials who had worked under Leopold had a new master but largely remained in situ. Reforms were applied only slowly. It was only after the Second World War, Marchal now believed, that the Belgian Congo became ‘a colony like the others’.

Even then, Belgium hardly distinguished itself. True, it had established an infrastructure whose modernity was marvelled at by European visitors. To take just one example, Congo at independence had more hospital beds than all other black African countries combined. But daily life resembled that adopted in South Africa under apartheid rule.

The capital was divided into the indigenous quarters and the Western zone, where blacks were not allowed after a certain time and would be refused drinks in hotels and restaurants which were reserved for whites only. Referred to as ‘macaques’ (monkeys) – a term still contemptuously spat out by heavy-drinking expatriates in Kinshasa – Congolese were set the qualification of ‘évolué’ as a target. This was a certificate indicating they were Africans who had ‘evolved’ far enough to adopt European attitudes and behaviour. But it was not enough to allow them to accede to positions of responsibility and power.

Certain experiences are calculated to stick in the gullet. Long, long after independence, one of the MPR’s leading lights would sometimes recall the time when a Belgian colonial official came round to verify the cleanliness of his parents’ toilet before issuing the permit that allowed them to buy wine. In schools, children from such ‘evolved’ Congolese families would be taken aside each week to be checked for fleas, an indignity spared their white classmates.

Acting on the principle of ‘pas d’élites, pas d’ennemis’, – the theory that an educated African middle class would prove dangerously subversive – the Belgians did virtually nothing to pave the way for independence, expected in 1955 to be decades off. When the government was forced to hand over in the face of growing protests in 1960, only seventeen Congolese youths had received a university education. The withdrawal was one of the most abrupt in African history.

Why did this small European nation prove such an appalling colonial power? One gets the impression that Leopold was rushing so desperately to catch up with his foreign allies, self-restraint and principles were simply jettisoned along the way. Maybe a country in its infancy did not possess the self-confidence necessary to show magnanimity when imposing nationhood on others. As tribally divided as the nations hacked arbitrarily from Africa’s land mass by the colonisers, Belgium barely had a sense of itself, let alone itself in the novel role of master.

Marchal, convinced modern Belgium owed the Congolese some kind of reparation in recognition of its errors, even if it only took the form of a more relaxed visa system, seemed to lay the blame on a failure of imagination. A ‘small country with small horizons’, as Leopold himself contemptuously described it, Belgium regarded the Congo as a money-making opportunity, and little else, unlike colonial nations with longer imperial traditions behind them and loftier ideals.

One former ambassador – not a Belgian – put it rather more bluntly: ‘The Belgians were awful in Congo because they had no grandeur themselves. This was the Zaire of Europe, a ratty little country divided amongst itself, and it proved incapable of aspiring to the heights.’

Not long ago, strange notices began appearing over the clothes racks in the slick designer shops and perfumeries lining Boulevard de Waterloo, the broad thoroughfare that carves an ugly swathe through the heart of Brussels.

They were written in Lingala, a language incomprehensible to most Belgians. They warned their readers anyone caught stealing would not only be arrested and charged, but expelled from Belgium and sent back to their country of origin. Their appearance, somewhat at odds with the fur-coated, poodle-carrying sophistication of this most European of cities, was a tribute to the effectiveness of the Congolese women hit-squads who had taken to systematically shop-lifting designer labels in the area.

‘It’s time to repay the colonial debt. On va kobeta’ (‘We’re going on a raid’), the women would say, as, with the rumbustious energy only an African market trader can bring to her task, they set off in search of Versace and Yamamoto jackets, Gianfranco Ferre and Jean-Paul Gaultier slacks, Kenzo accessories and Church shoes – anything decreed cool by the trendsetters of the day.

The designer shops had only themselves to blame. They were, after all, displaying their goods within temptingly easy striking distance of the poor Congolese ghetto that nestles compactly in the covered galleries and cobbled streets of Ixelles, just off the Porte de Namur. Few districts in the Belgian capital can rival ‘Matonge’, focal point for the Congolese community, when it comes to juxtaposing inordinate personal vanity with the chronic inability to meet the cost of a heightened sense of style.

Nicknamed after Kinshasa’s heaving popular quarters, because, like its namesake back home, this is a district where ‘ça bouge’ (things move), Matonge is like a long draught of Congolese essence that has been decanted and boiled down to its purest concentrate. There is something brave, almost foolhardy, about the way this tiny ghetto turns its back on the Belgian present of tramlines, dark streets and narrow houses to recreate a more familiar reality.

In the hairdressers – and every second shop seems to be a hairdresser, its window crammed with wigs and hair extensions – Congolese women have their hair straightened or young blades chat. The greengrocers here sell fat stalks of sugar cane, nobbly sweet potatoes, heaps of the greens used to make pondu, the Congolese alternative to spinach, deadly red chillies and small, pale green aubergines. The front pages of Congolese newspapers, Le Soft, Le Palmarès, Le Phare – with all their tunnel-vision, their obsession with the domestic political scene – are stuck against café windows; ‘waxes’, the bright Dutch prints used to make women’s wraps, lie folded on display in neat rows and even the gold on sale in the jewellers has that pinkish tinge associated with Africa.

Restaurants serve chicken in peanut sauce, fish wrapped in palm leaves and it is even possible to find such delicacies as caterpillar, crocodile – the oysters and caviar of Kinshasa’s culinary scene – or chikwange, the leaf-wrapped blocs of fermenting cassava paste that, to the uninitiated, resemble nothing quite so much as warm carpet glue.

In the old days, a tailor here turned out the awkward abacost jackets made obligatory by Mobutu. The ghetto even has its own radio station. Broadcasting from an abandoned military barracks, Radio Panik feeds its listeners a diet of Koffi Olomide, Zaiko Langa Langa, Papa Wemba, or whoever dominates the Congolese music scene of the day, plus, most crucially for a public hungry for information from home, a weekly resume of Congolese news.

Silting squat in the city centre, Matonge is a psychological world away from the leafy suburbs of Rhode St Genesè, Uccle and Waterloo to the south of Brussels, where Mobutu’s former aides live in marble-floored mansions, over garages where the Mercedes is parked alongside the BMW. Just as the presence of Mobutu’s château in Brussels’s chic suburbs acted as a magnet for the Congolese elite, who set up their court around the big man, Matonge, at the other end of the social scale, owes its existence to the Maison Africaine, a hostel where those shaking the red dust of the continent from their feet could stay for next to nothing, often lingering for years on end.

Cafés sprang up serving the food homesick new arrivals missed, as did music shops and the nightclubs, Le Mambo, La Référence, Hollywood City, which only come alive in the early hours. Matonge became an area the 15,000 Congolese living, studying and working in Belgium recognised as a second home, a place where the Congolese genius for finding creative solutions to the problems of existence surfaced.

Family in dire straits at home? There are agencies here where you can go, deposit 100 dollars, sure in the knowledge that a dependant at the other end in Kinshasa will receive another 100-dollar bill, all without going through a bank. Relatives going hungry or can’t afford the price of an electrical appliance? The same procedure is available for a sack of rice or a fridge. And when disaster really strikes you can even, through these tiny offices, arrange a funeral back in Congo.

The entrepreneurship extends well beyond the law’s reach. A vibrant trade in second-hand cars, drugs and forged cheques, prostitution and fake visas, plus the designer brand shoplifting, has prompted Belgium’s police to establish a unit specialising solely in crime committed by members of the Congolese community, something of a mark of distinction given the far greater numbers of Moroccans and Turks in Brussels.

Despite all the cheering inventiveness, there’s a tragic poignancy about Matonge. The alliterative Lingala slang residents use to refer to life abroad is premised on vaunting ambition, but the aspirations come tinged with a sense of inferiority. For those abandoning Kinshasa, despairingly dubbed ‘Kosovo’, Belgium is ‘lola’, or ‘paradise’. Paris, another favourite destination, is known as ‘Panama’. Europe is ‘mikili’, ‘the promised land’, inhabited, appropriately enough, by ‘mwana Maria’, ‘the children of the Virgin Mary’ – whites.

This is a community determined to outstay its welcome, made up of forty-year-old students with a smattering of children and fistfuls of degrees; of young men playing up their brushes with the law in Kinshasa in the hope of winning the sobriquet of ‘political asylum-seeker’; of youths plotting marriages of convenience with Belgian mates: all and any methods are acceptable in the quest for the ultimate prize – a permit allowing an indefinite stay in Europe.

When it is won, such documentation rarely goes to waste. ‘Whites say that all blacks look alike,’ explained Leon, a philosophy graduate studying accountancy, ‘so someone with papers will lend them to a friend who wants to cross into France or Switzerland, who will then post them back to Brussels.’ Without the paperwork, work outside the informal sector is impossible. So Brussels’s restaurant kitchens, its building sites, its minicab firms, are staffed by Africa’s most well-qualified students.

The sense that only the West offers hope of improvement is enough to make even the uninspiring seem acceptable. ‘I have friends who are vegetating here. They do nothing, they stagnate, but they don’t dare go back,’ said Leon. ‘In the eyes of their families, returning from Europe means they have failed. And the worst thing you can have happen to you, the most humiliating, is to be expelled.’

Other African communities forced into exile organise guerrilla campaigns from abroad, hatch plots, or draw up political programmes for the distant day when they hope to take power. For decades, Eritrean émigrés ran an efficient informal tithing system which funded the rebel movement that eventually pushed Ethiopian occupiers out of their territory. Despite boasting one of the continent’s most formidable dictators as an antagonist to rally against, the Congolese have nothing to match this. If a rebel campaign is being fought in the east of their country, amongst the young men of Matonge there is no talk of donning camouflage and signing up. The biggest opposition party had closed its offices ‘for security reasons’, I was told, but administrative incompetence was more likely to be the cause. The collective sense is missing.

Congolese themselves acknowledge the lack, with a shrug of the shoulders and the rueful honesty that is in itself part of the problem of proscribed ambitions and low expectations. Each man’s aim is to leave Congo, acquire qualifications, and build a life somewhere else. Let someone else draw up a constitution. Let someone else rebuild the country. Experience has taught that politics is a game played by conmen and hypocrites.

What adds a bitter edge to this undignified scramble for the exit is the realisation that while thousands of Congolese immigrants would not be living in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Liège were it not for their country’s historical ties with Belgium, a younger generation of Belgians is virtually unaware of that painful colonial past.

‘There is no African memory left,’ acknowledges Marcelin, who works for a struggling Congolese state company with offices in Brussels. ‘There are very few Belgians left in parliament or the ministries who worked in the colony, so the sentimental attitude of the past has gone. All that is left is a sense of disappointment with our leaders and negative associations of disaster, death and dictatorship. Young Belgians assume Congolese either make music all the time or are petty crooks. There is no sense of responsibility for what their country did in the Congo, let alone guilt.’

Despite the intimate historical relationship, no Belgian newspaper or radio station has a foreign correspondent permanently based in Kinshasa. In a country struggling with its own contradictions, preoccupied with prickly Francophone-Flemish relations, Belgian colonial history is not taught at school. The distorted vision of history the Royal Museum at Tervuren set out to sanctify has been incidentally fostered by the political sensitivities of modern Belgium.

Young Bruxellois live in a city dotted with baroque monuments funded with the proceeds of the Congolese state, scattered with antique shops selling Congolese masks and home to the biggest community of Congolese living abroad. Yet King Leopold’s Ghost, the first book in years to stir a general debate on the topic, was written by an American, not a Belgian.

As Jean Stengers, a retired professor who has written copiously on the Congo Free State, freely admitted, his pet subject remains almost exclusively in the narrow intellectual domain, a closed book to most fellow nationals. Working from a study crammed with leather-bound volumes and papers looking out on the bleak Rue de Couronne, the white-haired academic had criticised Marchal for his interpretation of history, arguing that the former diplomat ignored the fact that national glorification, rather than personal enrichment, was Leopold’s prime motivating factor. But if they differed in their views of the king, the two men shared a rueful awareness the topic they both regarded as of such importance was a matter of general indifference.

What feelings existed, Stengers said, were amongst a disappearing generation and – astonishingly – they were scarcely feelings of shame. ‘In the older generation, many of whom served in the Congo, the strongest feeling is one of injustice done. There’s a deep sense that magnificent things were given to the Congolese and we were rewarded with huge ingratitude. But the public at large has lost interest in the Congo. For the new generation, ignorance of Belgian history is nearly as great as ignorance of Congo’s history.’

Knowing nothing about the past, of course, frees a population from any sense of blame for the present. How convenient was all this forgetting, I wondered as I walked down the steps of Stengers’ house, given the débâcle of modern-day Congo?

The question Belgian researchers into the Congo Free State hate to be asked is whether there is any causal link between Belgium’s exploitative regime and the excesses of Mobutu’s rule, whether a frighteningly efficient kleptocratic system effectively softened up a community for a repeat performance.

Marchal had brushed it anxiously away, pleading that he was a historian rather than an intellectual, and it was not for him to make such judgements. When put to Professor Stengers, the question had been rejected with a categorical shake of the head. Citing sociological studies conducted in the Great Lakes region, he said what was striking was the lack of memories of the Leopold era amongst the local population. So how could there be any causal link?

But that, I thought, seemed to be missing the point. Plunging into the dreadful detail of Leopold’s reign, I, too, had been surprised by how few of these horrors – surely the stuff of family legends passed down from patriarch to grandson – had ever been mentioned to me by Zairean friends. But it wasn’t necessary to be an expert on sexual abuse to know it was possible to be traumatised without knowing why; that, indeed, amnesia – whether individual or collective – could sometimes be the only way of dealing with horror, that human behaviour could be altered forever without the cause being openly acknowledged.

In Belgium I began to sense the logic behind many of the peculiarities that had puzzled me living in Kinshasa, a city where everyone seemed to complain about how awful things were but no one seemed ready to try changing the status quo; where grab-it-and-run was the principle of the day and long-term planning alien. Page after page, the picture painted by Marchal had struck a chord.

Coming after the raids of the hated Force Publique and the slave traders, Mobutu’s looting soldiers were just more of the same. After the crippling production targets set by Leopold’s agents, the informal ‘taxes’ levied by corrupt officials must have seemed benevolent in comparison. Having seen their revolts against the Belgian system crushed by troops wielding such horrors as the Krupp cannon, who still had the courage to rise up against Mobutu’s army, however shambolic it came to seem to Western eyes? And how could the Congolese ever value or build on an infrastructure and administration imposed from above, using their sweat and blood as its raw materials?

Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo’s population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.

CHAPTER THREE
Birth of the Leopard

‘Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.’

CHARLES DE GAULLE

There was a moment in 1960, when, if a white man had stayed his hand and decided not to get involved, the newly independent Congo’s history would have taken a very different course. It was the split second when a young CIA station chief who had crossed a tense capital walked around a corner at one of Leopoldville’s military camps and surprised a man in civilian clothing taking aim at a figure walking away.

‘I guess I was a Boy Scout too long, because without thinking I jumped at the man with the pistol. Then I was sorry, because it turned out he was very strong,’ he recalled. ‘We rolled around in the dirt and I finally remembered something I’d learnt in army training. He had his hand in the trigger guard and I pulled it back until the bone snapped.’ The scuffle attracted the attention of the intended victim’s bodyguards who, misunderstanding the situation, promptly started beating up the Good Samaritan. ‘All I could think about,’ he chuckled, ‘was why the hell did I get involved?’

A generation of Zaireans might today ask themselves the very same question, but with a greater degree of asperity and rather less humour. For the target of the botched assassination attempt, staged at the orders of an aspiring Congolese politician with Soviet contacts, was Colonel Joseph Désiré Mobutu, who had just taken over the running of the country. If the white man in question – Larry Devlin – had not intervened, who knows what route the country would have followed?

But then, interference, whether muscular or subtle, was always something of a forte of Mr Devlin’s. His role in the traumatic events of Congo’s post-independence period was to leave him one of the most notorious CIA men in history, an example of just how far the United States was willing to go in that epoch to sabotage the Soviet Union’s plans for global communist expansion.

Mr Devlin’s life had been one of commotion: a bête noire for a generation of Africans still fuming over the way superpower intervention dictated events on the continent during the Cold War, he had been accused by conspiracy theorists of engineering the murder of Patrice Lumumba – Congo’s first, inspirational prime minister. Grown fragile and snowy-haired in his seventies, he had survived wars (two), uprisings (two), crash landings (four), heart attacks (several), beatings and assassination attempts (many) and a medical death sentence (two months to live, delivered, mistakenly, in 1984 when doctors spotted what they thought was an inoperable brain tumour).

It had not all been pain and suffering. He learned to dance in Leopoldville’s sweaty nightclubs, argued politics into the small hours with the young men who were to become Congo’s movers and shakers and got tipsy on the sun-baked sandbanks of the Congo river.

But it had all taken its toll, leaving him unsteady on his feet, floating above the pavement with the uncertain grace of a fifteenth-century schooner setting out on its first journey to the New World, an old-fashioned gentleman who opened car doors for a lady, gently insisted on paying and who dressed with a studied elegance wholly appropriate for a man who once, during some bizarre career interlude, ghosted articles for French fashion designer Jacques Fath.

The consultancy work Devlin continued doing on Africa from his home in Virginia did not take up all his time and in retirement he had grown chatty. Two instincts were warring within him. On the one hand, he had been attacked too many times by the press as the kingmaker who put Mobutu in power, starred as the ruthless secret agent in too many thinly fictionalised accounts of the Congo crisis, not to be wary. On the other hand, with time on his hands and as the kind of man who clearly enjoyed female company, this was a not entirely unpleasant opportunity to set the record straight.

His voice had the gravelly timbre of a man who smoked three packets of cigarettes a day until a brush with open-heart surgery. His hands – creased by a million experiences, the wedding ring so deep-set in the flesh it seemed welded to the bone – would give a palm-reader pause for thought. But the brain was as keen and irreverent as ever. And with his defiant insistence that he regretted nothing about the CIA’s support for Mobutu, Larry Devlin was a reminder that whatever happened in the end, there was a time when Mobutu was not just the hope of interfering Americans obsessed with domino metaphors, but of a population exasperated by the dithering, squabbling and tribalism of its civilian leaders.

‘What you must never forget is that there were many periods to Mobutu. You saw the pitiful end. But he was so different at the start. I can remember him as a dynamic, idealistic young man who was determined to have an independent state in the Congo and really seemed to believe in all the things Africa’s leaders then stood for.’

They first met in Brussels in early 1960, when members of Congo’s embryonic political establishment found themselves negotiating independence terms with their colonial master. Five years earlier, a Belgian expert had triggered an uproar at home by putting forward a thirty-year programme for a pull-out. Most Belgians believed they had another 100 years to go, plenty of time to train up and educate their eventual replacements. Subsequent events had exposed how out of touch even that supposedly accelerated schedule really was: riots in Congo’s major cities, increasingly vocal demands by the country’s ‘evolués’ and France’s and Britain’s disengagement from their own African possessions had forced Belgium to realise decolonisation was due.

Having accepted the principle, Brussels set about formalising its withdrawal with indecent haste. But while Belgium was pulling up the colonial drawbridge, other powers were becoming interested in the new opportunities the postwar configuration was throwing up. The two sessions of round-table talks in Brussels provided a rare chance for their representatives to size up the future leadership of the Congo, whose size, geographical position and huge resource base made it the natural linchpin of central Africa.

Devlin was working in Brussels at the time. He was a young man who already had a lifetime’s experience behind him. A committed anti-Nazi, he had interrupted his college studies to sign up as a private in the US Army, had served in Italy and been injured. Returning to college, he had been recruited by a Central Intelligence Agency no doubt impressed by his war record, his sharp mind and his mastery of several languages. His speciality was Soviet operations and he had become skilled at ‘turning’ Soviet bloc officials, a process he remembered now as being ‘better than an orgasm’ when successfully pulled off.

But he had angered a superior in the process and his career had fallen into something of a slump when the Congolese negotiations opened and he began picking up alarming signs of Soviet activity in Brussels: ‘I noticed that Soviets were contacting one by one every member of the various delegations at the round table conference. I got curious as to what they were doing and why. What I found was that they were essentially spotting, assessing and trying to recruit. It was a classic effort on their part. The Russians wanted to use the Congo as their stepping stone into Africa.’

The Soviets knew they had a potential ally in Patrice Lumumba. A public speaker with a near-miraculous ability to win round his audience, this former post office employee had become the spearhead of Congo’s independence campaign. Inspired by the pan-Africanism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sekou Touré, he was a flamboyant, erratic figure, bubbling with ideas. Released from jail to attend the Brussels meeting, he was brimming with resentment over Western imperialism in Africa.

The Soviet contacts with the delegations from Leopoldville were enough to ensure the US embassy in Brussels got involved. The American ambassador threw a reception for the Congolese and Devlin and his embassy colleagues launched themselves in a very deliberate bout of networking. ‘Each of us drew up a list of 10 or 12 people we had to meet and afterwards we all got together to discuss our impressions. One name kept coming up. But it wasn’t on anyone’s list because he wasn’t an official delegation member, he was Lumumba’s secretary. But everyone agreed that this was an extremely intelligent man, very young, perhaps immature, but a man with great potential. They were right, because that was Mobutu.’

The next time Devlin met Mobutu was in the Congo Republic – his new posting – as all hell broke loose. Less than a week after independence on 30 June 1960, Belgium’s haste was having inevitable consequences. Told there were to be no immediate moves to ‘Africanise’ an army exclusively commanded by Belgian officers, Congo’s troops mutinied, whites were beaten and raped and the Belgian technicians who ran the country’s administration headed en masse for the airport.

Prime Minister Lumumba appointed Mobutu army chief of staff. Touring the country’s military bases, playing up his own army experience, Mobutu persuaded the soldiers to return to barracks. But the mutiny was not Lumumba’s only problem. Belgian paratroopers had landed in what the Congolese assumed to be a second colonial takeover. The new state seemed doomed to break up as, encouraged by a former colonial master bent on ensuring continued access to Congo’s mineral wealth, first copper-producing Katanga and then diamond-rich Kasai seceded.

The UN responded to the crisis with extraordinary speed. Its reaction time, like the hordes of journalists who flooded into Congo to cover those years, was a measure of the enormous hopes the West was pinning on Africa during those years. Impossible as it is to imagine in the year 2000, when the renewed threat of national fragmentation raises barely a flicker of international interest, the Congo of the 1960s was one of the world’s biggest news stories.

The first UN troops landed in Leopoldville the day after Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu called on the UN Security Council for protection from foreign aggression. But Lumumba, who had hoped they would help snuff out the secession movements in the south, was bitterly disappointed by their limited mandate, which barred them from interfering in Congo’s internal conflicts.

Feeling betrayed by the West, -Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for help, requesting transport planes, trucks and weapons to wipe out the breakaway movements in Kasai and Katanga. Nikita Khrushchev obliged. The military aid arrived too late to prevent a bloody debacle in Kasai, where the Congolese army lost control, slaughtering hundreds of Luba tribespeople. But for Washington what mattered was that this was the first time Moscow had intervened militarily in a conflict so far from its own borders. It represented a dangerous ratcheting up of the Cold War game.

‘I had a little Congolese sitting at the airport counting any white man who came off a Soviet aircraft in batches of five. Roughly 1,000 came in during a period of six weeks. They were there as “conseillers techniques” and they were posted to all the ministries,’ recalled Devlin. ‘To my mind it was clearly an effort to take over. It made good sense when you stopped to think about it. All nine countries surrounding the Congo had their problems. If the Soviets could have gotten control of the Congo they could have used it as a base, bringing in Africans, training them in sabotage and military skills and sending them home to do their duty. I determined to try and block that.’

It was a line of argument that was to justify more than three decades of American support. But if for Washington Lumumba was showing a worrying resemblance to Fidel Castro, Devlin himself, ironically enough, never believed in the sincerity of Lumumba’s conversion to the Soviet cause. ‘Poor Lumumba. He was no communist. He was just a poor jerk who thought “I can use these people”. I’d seen that happen in Eastern Europe. It didn’t work very well for them, and it didn’t work for him.’

The wave of Soviet arrivals triggered the collapse of Lumumba’s strained relations with Kasavubu, Congo’s lethargic president. At times, too many times, politics in Congo resembled one of those hysterical farces in which policemen with floppy truncheons and red noses bounce from one outraged prima donna to another. ‘I’m the head of state. Arrest that man!’ ‘No, I’M the head of state. That man is an impostor. Arrest him!’ Only the reality was more dangerous than amusing. In a surreal sequence the prime minister and president announced over the radio that they had sacked each other. Mobutu was put in an impossible position, with both men ordering him to take their rival into custody.

The army chief of staff was already unhappy with the turn events were taking. ‘The Russians were brutally stupid. It was so obvious what they were doing,’ marvelled Devlin. ‘They sent these people to lecture the army. It was the crudest of propaganda, 1920s Marxism, printed in Ghana in English, which the Congolese didn’t understand. Mobutu went to Lumumba and said “let’s keep these people out of the army”. Lumumba said “sure, sure I’ll take care of that”, but he didn’t. It kept happening and finally Mobutu said: “I didn’t fight the Belgians to then have my country colonised a second time.”’

Exactly what role Devlin played in determining subsequent events was not clear. Cable traffic between Leopoldville and Washington shows he received authorisation for an operation aimed at ‘replacing Lumumba with a pro-Western group’ in mid-August 1960. Despite his friendliness, Devlin remained bound by the promises of confidentiality made to the CIA, contemptuous of those in the intelligence services who leaked government secrets. All he would say was that it was during those dramatic days that he really got to know Mobutu. The army chief was already being leaned on by the Western embassies – whose advice was given added weight by the fact that they were helping him pay his fractious troops – President Kasavubu, the student body and his own men. No doubt the CIA station chief brought his own persuasive skills, that talent acquired during years of ‘turning’ Soviet personnel, into play as Mobutu edged towards one of the hardest decisions of his life.

The eventual outcome, Devlin acknowledged, came as no surprise. On 14 September 1960, Mobutu neutralised both Kasavubu and Lumumba in what he described as a ‘peaceful revolution’ aimed at giving the civilian politicians a chance to calm down and settle their differences. Soviet bloc diplomatic personnel were given forty-eight hours to leave. The huge African domino had not fallen: Congo had been kept safely out of Soviet hands.

It was exactly what Washington wanted. But Devlin nonetheless rejected any notion of Mobutu being an American tool. ‘He was never a puppet. When he felt it was against the interests of the Congo, he wouldn’t do it, when it didn’t go against his country’s interests, he would go along with our views. He was always independent, it just happened that at a certain point we were going in the same direction.’ And like many commentators of the day, he still believed that Mobutu, an earnest twenty-nine-year-old pushed to prominence by a failure of leadership and a jumble of cascading events rather than personal ambition, was genuinely reluctant to take over in 1960. Such modesty would not last very long.

Who was the man who so impressed Devlin and the diplomats as they circulated, glasses in hand and mental notebooks at the ready, at the reception in Brussels?

Joseph Désiré Mobutu was born on 14 October 1930 in the central town of Lisala, where the Congo river runs deep and wide after its grandiose circular sweep across half a continent. That early proximity to the river, he always claimed, left him with a visceral love of the water. ‘I can say that I was born on the river … Whenever I can, I live on the river, which for me represents the majesty of my country.’

He was a member of the Ngbandi tribe, one of the smaller of the country’s 200-plus ethnic groupings. Anthropologists believe the Ngbandi trace their lineage back to the central Sudanese regions of Darfur and Kordofan, an area that was repeatedly targeted by Moslem Arab conquerors from the sixteenth century onwards. Fleeing the slave raids and Islamicisation, his animist ancestors fled south, heading for the very equatorial heart of the continent, where they in turn subjugated the local Bantus. Safe in the glowering forests that later so terrified Western explorers, they intermarried and the Ngbandi – who took their name from a legendary fighter – gradually acquired an identity. They emerged as a loose affiliation of war-like tribes speaking the same language and straddling the Ubangi, a subsidiary of the great Congo river, with one foot in what is today Central African Republic and another in Congo.

Like all autocrats, Mobutu was later to mythologise his own upbringing. In one story, almost certainly apocryphal, he described walking in the woods with his grandfather. When a leopard leaped from the undergrowth, the boy shrank away. The grandfather remonstrated with him and, ashamed and piqued, the young Mobutu seized a spear and slew the leopard. ‘From that day on,’ said Mobutu, ‘I am afraid of nothing.’ He was to use the animal at the centre of this coming-of-age fable as his personal insignia, a symbol of pride, strength and courage. It was also the origin of his trademark leopard-skin hats which, in a curious juxtaposition of machismo and decadence, he had made by a Paris couturier, keeping a collection of at least seven on hand.

The truth of those early years is somewhat less romantic. Some of Mobutu’s contemporaries recall that in the pre-independence era, there was a tendency amongst city dwellers to sneer at the Ngbandi, marooned in one of the least accessible zones of Africa, as coarse rustics who had barely shed their loin-cloths in favour of Western-style clothing; good hunters, yes, but in need of some urban refinement.

Mobutu would later ensure that changed. But when he was growing up, he belonged to a tribe regarded as ‘sous-evolué’ – under-evolved. He shared with many prominent men a keen awareness of his humble origins, a source of resentment pushing him ceaselessly, fruitlessly, to try and prove his superiority. And if Mobutu’s ethnic origins were not enough of a burden, there was another issue calculated to niggle at the confidence of an impressionable youngster – his parentage.

His mother Marie Madeleine Yemo, whom he adored, was a woman who had notched up her fair share of experiences. She had already had two children by one relationship when her aunt, whose marriage to a village chief was childless, arranged for her niece to join her husband’s harem. It was a kind of brood-mare, stand-in arrangement that, while strictly in accordance with local custom, must have contained its share of bitterness and humiliation for both of the women concerned.

Mama Yemo, as she was eventually to be known to the nation, bore the chief two children, then twins who died. Suspecting her aunt of witchcraft, she fled on foot to Lisala. It was there that she met Albéric Gbemani, a cook working for a Belgian judge. The two staged a church wedding just in time, two months before Joseph Désiré Mobutu’s birth. The boy’s name, with its warrior connotations, came from an uncle.

Recalling his youth, Mobutu later had more to say about the kindness shown by the judge’s wife, who took a shine to him and taught him to read, write and speak fluent French, than his own father, who barely features. ‘She adopted me, in a way. You should see it in its historical context: a white woman, a Belgian woman, holding the hand of a little black boy, the son of her cook, in the road, in the shops, in company. It was exceptional.’

Given that Albéric died when Mobutu was barely eight years old, the dearth of detail about his father is perhaps not surprising. But that lacuna was later seized upon by Mobutu’s critics, who would caricature their leader as the bastard offspring of a woman only a few steps up from a professional prostitute.

With his mother relying on the generosity of relatives to support her four children, Mobutu’s existence became peripatetic as she moved around the country. Periods in which he ran wild, helping out in the fields, alternated with stints at mission schools. He later claimed that religious exposure left him a devout Catholic, but as with many Congolese, his Christianity never ruled out a belief in the African spirit world which left him profoundly dependent on the advice of marabouts (witch-doctors).

Mobutu finally settled with an uncle in the town of Coquilhatville (modern-day Mbandaka), an expanding colonial administrative centre. The placing by rural families of their excess offspring with urban relatives who are then expected to shoulder their upkeep and education for years, often decades, is extraordinarily prevalent in Africa. Puzzling to Westerners, such generosity is a manifestation of the extended family which ensures that one individual’s success is shared as widely as possible. But the burden is often almost too heavy to bear, and such children never have it easy. For Mobutu, life was tough. Perhaps the austerity of those days, when he depended on a relative for food and clothing, explains his love of excess, the unrestrained appetites he showed in later life.

In Coquilhatville he attended a school run by white priests, and the child whose precocity had already been encouraged by a white woman began to acquire a high profile. Physically, he was always big for his age, a natural athlete who excelled at sports. But he wanted to dominate in other ways as well. ‘He was very good at school, he was always in the top three,’ remembers a fellow pupil who used to play football with Mobutu in the school yard. ‘But he was also one of the troublemakers. He was the noisiest of all the pupils. The walls between classrooms were of glass, so we could see what was going on next door. He was always stirring things up. It wasn’t done out of malice, it was done to make people laugh.’

One favourite trick was making fun of the clumsy French spoken by the Belgian priests, most of whom were Flemish. ‘When they made a mistake he would leap up and point it out and the whole room would explode into uproar,’ said a contemporary. Another jape involved flicking ink darts at the priest’s back while he worked at the blackboard, a trick calculated to get the class giggling.

In later life, like any anxious middle-class parent, Mobutu would drum into his children the importance of a formal education. One such lecture occurred when the presidential family was aboard the presidential yacht, moored not far from Mbandaka. On a whim, Mobutu sent for the priests from his old school and ordered them to bring his school reports. Miraculously, they still had them and Nzanga, one of Mobutu’s sons, remembered his father proudly showing his sceptical offspring that, academically at least, he had been no slouch.

Given that he did well academically, Mobutu, known as ‘Jeff’ to his friends, was forgiven a certain amount of unruliness. But the last straw came in 1949 when the school rebel stowed aboard a boat heading for Leopoldville, the capital of music, bars and women regarded by the priests as ‘sin city’. Mobutu met a girl and, swept away by his first significant sexual experience, extended his stay. After several weeks had passed, the priests asked a fellow pupil, Eketebi Mondjolomba, where Mobutu had gone.

‘Since we lived on the same street, I was supposed to know where he was and I said, in all innocence, he’d gone to Kinshasa,’ remembered Eketebi, who was still grateful that Mobutu later laughingly forgave – while definitely not forgetting – this youthful indiscretion. ‘At the end of the year, that was one of the reasons why he was sent to the Force Publique. It was the punishment the priests and local chiefs always reserved for the troublesome, stubborn boys.’

The sudden expulsion was a shock. It meant a seven-year obligatory apprenticeship in an armed force still tainted by a reputation for brutality acquired during the worst excesses of the Leopold era. But for Mobutu the Force Publique was to prove a godsend. Here the natural rebel found discipline and a surrogate father figure in the shape of Sergeant Joseph Bobozo, a stern but affectionate mentor. In later life, bloated by good living and corroded by distrust for those around him, he would wax nostalgic about the austere routines of army life and the simple camaraderie of the barracks. Looking back, he recognised this as the happiest period of his life.

In truth, Mobutu was never quite as much of a military man as he liked to make out. Of more importance in furnishing his mental landscape was the fact that he managed to keep his education going in the Force Publique, corresponding regularly with the mission pupils he had left behind, who kept him closely informed of how their studies were progressing. On sentinel duty, carrying out his chores, he read voraciously, working through the European newspapers received by the Belgian officers, university publications from Brussels and whatever books he could lay hands on. It was a habit he retained all his life. He knew tracts of the Bible off by heart. Later, his regular favourites were to give a clear indication of the sense of personal destiny that had developed: President Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill and Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince, that autocrat’s handbook.

He took and passed an accountancy course and began to dabble in journalism, something he had already practised at school, where he ran the class journal. And he got married. Marie Antoinette, an appropriate name for the wife of a future African monarch, was only fourteen at the time, but in traditional Congolese society this was not considered precocious. Still smarting from his schoolroom clashes with the priests, Mobutu chose not to wed in church. His contribution to the festivities – a crate of beer – betrayed the modesty of his income at the time.

Photos taken during those years show a gawky Mobutu, all legs, ears and glasses, wearing the colonial shorts more reminiscent of a scout outfit than a serious army uniform. Marie Antoinette, looking the teenager she still was, smiles shyly by his side. Utterly loyal, she was nonetheless a feisty woman, who never let her husband’s growing importance cow her into silence. ‘You’d be talking to him and she would come in and chew him up one side and down the other,’ said Devlin. ‘She was not impressed by His Eminence, and he would immediately switch into Ngbandi with her because he knew I could understand Lingala or French.’

A Belgian colonial had started up a new Congolese magazine, Actualités Africaines, and was looking for contributors. Because Mobutu, as a member of the armed forces, was not allowed to express political opinions, he wrote his pieces on contemporary politics under a pseudonym. Given the choice between extending his army contract and getting more seriously involved in journalism, he chose the latter. Although initial duties involved talent-spotting Congolese beauties to fill space for an editor nervous of polemics, Mobutu was soon writing about more topical events, scouring town on his motor scooter to collect information. The world was opening up. A 1958 visit to Brussels to cover the Universal Exhibition was a revelation and he arranged a longer stay for journalistic training. By that time he had got to know the young Congolese intellectuals who were challenging Belgium’s complacent vision of the future, staging demonstrations, making speeches and being thrown into jail.

One man in particular, Lumumba, became a personal friend. The two men shared many of the same instincts: a belief in a united, strong Congo and resentment of foreign interference. Thanks to his influence Mobutu, who had always protested his political neutrality, was to become a card-carrying member of the National Congolese Movement, the party Lumumba hoped would rise above ethnic loyalties to become a truly national movement.

But even in those early days there are question marks over Mobutu’s motives. Congolese youths studying in Brussels were systematically approached by the Belgian secret services with an eye to future cooperation. Several contemporaries say that by the time Mobutu had made his next career step – moving from journalism to act as Lumumba’s trusted personal aide, deciding who he saw, scheduling his activities, sitting in for him at economic negotiations in Brussels – he was an informer for Belgian intelligence.

What were the qualities that made so many players in the Congolese game single him out? Some remarked on his quiet good sense, the pragmatism that helped him rein in the excitable Lumumba when he was carried away by his own rhetoric. It accompanied an appetite for hard work: Mobutu was regularly getting up at 5 in the morning and working till 10 p.m. during the crisis years. But the characteristic that, more than any other, eventually decreed that he won control of the country’s army was probably the brute courage he attributed to that childhood brush with the leopard.

Bringing the 1960 mutiny to heel involved standing up in front of hundreds of furious, drunk soldiers who had plundered the barracks’ weapons stores and quelling them through sheer force of personality. And Mobutu carried out that task, one that civilian politicians understandably balked at, not once but many times. ‘I’ve been in enough wars to know when men are putting it on and when they really are courageous,’ said Devlin. ‘And Mobutu really was courageous.’ Once, he watched Mobutu curb a mutiny by the police force. ‘They were hollering and screaming and pointing guns at him and telling him not to come any closer or they’d shoot. He just started talking quietly and calmly until they quietened down, then he walked along taking their guns from them, one by one. Believe me, it was hellish impressive.’

The quality was to be tested repeatedly. The assassination attempt foiled by Devlin’s intervention was one of five such bids in the week that followed Mobutu’s ‘peaceful revolution’. Such was the danger that Mobutu sent his family to Belgium. Marie-Antoinette deposited her offspring and returned in twenty-four hours, refusing to leave her husband’s side. ‘If they kill him they have to kill me,’ she told friends.

What constitutes charm? A presence, a capacity to command attention, an innate conviction of one’s own uniqueness, combined, as often as not, with the more manipulative ability of making the interlocutor believe he has one’s undivided attention and has gained a certain indefinable something from the encounter. Whatever its components, the quality was innate with Mobutu, but definitely blossomed as growing power swelled his sense of self-worth. In the early 1960s European observers referred to him as the ‘doux colonel’ (mild-mannered colonel), suggesting a certain diffidence. Nonetheless he was a remarkable enough figure to prompt Francis Monheim, a Belgian journalist covering events, to feel he merited an early hagiography. By the end of his life, whether they loathed or loved him, those who had brushed against Mobutu rarely forgot the experience. All remarked on an extraordinary personal charisma.

‘I’ve never seen a photograph of Mobutu that did him justice, that makes him look at all impressive,’ claimed Kim Jaycox, the World Bank’s former vice-president for Africa, who met Mobutu many times. ‘It’s like taking a photograph of a jacaranda tree, you can’t capture the actual impact of that colour, of that tree. In photos he looked kind of unintelligent and without lustre. But when you were in his presence discussing anything that was important to him, you suddenly saw this quite extraordinary personality, a kind of glowing personality. No matter what you thought of his behaviour or what he was doing to the country, you could see why he was in charge.’

He had a gift for the grand gesture, a stylish bravado that captured the imagination. Setting off for Shaba to cover the invasions of the 1970s, foreign journalists would occasionally disembark to discover, to their astonishment, that their military plane had been flown by a camouflage-clad president, showing off his pilot’s licence.

There were some of the personal quirks that can count for much when it comes to political networking and pressing the flesh, whether in a democracy or a one-party state. He had a superb memory and on the basis of the briefest of meetings would be able, re-encountering his interlocutor many years later, to recall name, profession and tribal affiliation. ‘It was phenomenal,’ remembers Honoré Ngbanda, who as presidential aide for many years was responsible for briefing Mobutu for his meetings. ‘Whether it was a visual memory or a memory for dates, he could remember things that had happened 10 years ago: the date, the day and time. His memory was elephantine.’

Mobutu had another of the characteristics of the manipulative charmer: he could be all things to all men, holding up a mirror to his interlocutors that reflected back their wishes, convincing each that he perfectly understood their predicament and was on their side. ‘He could treat people with kid gloves or he could treat them with a steel fist,’ remembered a former prime minister who saw more of the fist than the glove. ‘It was different for everyone. He was very clever at tailoring the response to the individual.’

Not for him the rigid stances that had doomed Lumumba. He would dither for days, leaving his collaborators in a state of nervous ambiguity, often uncertain over what instructions had actually been issued. This was the negative side of his adaptability. But while colleagues tried to second-guess his wishes, he would be assessing the mood of the day, ready to change direction with all the panache of a born actor. ‘He was very good at putting on a show,’ acknowledged a contemporary. ‘He could be absolutely furious and two minutes later, when he saw it wasn’t the right thing to do, he’d change completely.’

And finally, there was the humour: sardonic, worldly wise, it deepened as the years turned against him until, listening to Mobutu fielding questions about human rights and corruption at a hostile press conference in Biarritz, it was difficult not to feel a certain grudging admiration for the impeccable politeness, the fake innocence, the ironic demeanour that all broadcast one defiant message: I know your game and I am far too old and wily a fox to be caught out.

This was the man who seized control of Congo in September 1960. He was to prove as good as his word, swiftly handing power to a group of ‘general commissioners’ – a collection of the country’s few university graduates – who were supposed to run the country while the politicians took stock of the problems confronting Congo. With four separate governments in existence – one in the eastern city of Stanleyville, loyal to the ousted Lumumba; one in Katanga under Moise Tshombe, supported by the Belgians; one in Kasai under Albert Kalonji; and one in Leopoldville under President Kasavubu – national partition was now a reality rather than a threat. But the disappearance of probably the key player in this game was about to alter the situation.

In the space of a couple of months, Lumumba had managed to outrage the Belgians by insulting their king, appal the West with his flirtation with Moscow and alienate the United Nations. He had also frightened former colleagues by hatching a series of cack-handed assassination plots against his Congolese rivals. With Mobutu in charge, Lumumba was now in detention, but his Napoleon-like ability to whip up the crowds and convert waverers to his cause – even at times his own jailers – meant he remained a dangerous loose cannon.

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