Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (11 page)

At this, one of the foreign experts, a Frenchman named Rodier, snapped, telling me that the hordes of poorly behaved foreign reporters had made it nearly impossible for them to work. “We have had enough of your types looking for people with blood coming out of their ears,” he said. “The epidemic is over. You are too late. Go back home!”

With what time we had left, I told our driver that I wanted him to take us through Kikwit’s poorest neighborhoods, where we could inquire if there had been any reports of unusual deaths. The mention of poor neighborhoods in this city of half a million—a place without lights, telephones or even running water for most people—appeared to create some confusion. Poverty was everywhere, and in such circumstances its very definition begins to change. But within fifteen minutes, after winding and crossing back through a dusty quarter called Mkwati, where mud-walled houses were separated by bramble hedges, we had found what we were looking for.

There, a man who sat in the shade repairing a bicycle near a bend in the road told us what the all-knowing WHO experts had been unable or unwilling to say. “Six people died in that house right there,” said Mpouto Kalunga, a peanut farmer who wore a worried look and said he lived nearby. “There are others dying, too. They are not my friends, just my neighbors.”

Kalunga was clearly wary of us. A carload of foreigners was a rare sight in this neighborhood, and in these times of plague it was unlikely to mean good news. We told him that we were journalists, but he seemed scarcely mollified. All over town there had been wild rumors of suspected carriers of the virus being rounded up and disappearing.

“After the first deaths, the foreigners came and sprayed all of the houses,” he said, as if he hoped we would disappear. “Are you going to spray again?”

We insisted that we merely wanted to see the sick, and finally he pointed up the slope toward a house on the right. There, three young women, girls really, their heads shaven in a sign of mourning, sat morosely in a dusty courtyard. I asked them if a relative had died from the virus, and immediately regretted having been so direct. “Our father died of the hiccups that he got from eating bad fruit,” said the eldest of the sisters.

She was the only one of the three who could manage a bit of French, which made it easier for me. She continued in her defensive vein, “The disease you are looking for is not around here. It is in the hospital. You must go back there.” As she spoke, a man arrived on a bicycle and interjected himself casually into the conversation of total strangers, as had happened so often to me in Africa. As Westerners, the privacy we are accustomed to is one of large homes and separate living quarters, of a life with telephones and automobiles. This, I was reminded, was the world of villages, where secrets were much harder to keep.

“Their father died of Ebola,” he shouted, once he had confirmed our interest in the outbreak. “Don’t believe what they are telling you.”

With that, a small fight broke out, and though I did not understand the specifics, it was clear that an exchange of insults was under way. We continued onward by foot up the red dirt road’s incline. One block away we found Mula Kinvita, a slender twenty-nine-year-old man wearing pink rubber gloves, washing himself painstakingly with a bucket filled with soapy water. “My mother died this morning at ten a.m.,” he said, confirming my suspicion that there had been a death in his house. “She got sick with a fever last week, and it just kept getting worse and worse. Yesterday she began vomiting and having diarrhea. This morning, she just lay there trembling, and then she was dead.”

I asked why he was washing himself this way, and he told me that he had just finished washing his mother’s body in preparation for her burial. When I asked where she was, he pointed meekly to their one-room, mud-walled home.

Sure enough, inside his house, lit at this hour only by the fading rays of late-afternoon sunshine that streaked in through a small square window, lay his emaciated mother. She was stretched out on a straw mat, partially covered with a sheet of faded cloth.

The washing of cadavers is a solemn family duty in the Central African hinterland, and in a world of short lives and infrequent joys, sending one’s loved ones off properly into the hereafter becomes all the more important. By tragic coincidence, this ceremonial preparation of the dead had become one of the prime means of transmission, and yet even after it was known that the virus was spread this way, it was difficult to persuade people to forgo their last rites.

Kinvita insisted that nobody had warned him of the danger. “A couple of days ago, when the Red Cross people came through here, I told them about my mother and they gave me some Tylenol to give her. When they returned in their truck this morning, I asked them to help me bury her, but they told me they are not allowed to carry the dead, and drove away in a hurry.”

With the hour of our charter’s return flight to Kinshasa fast approaching, numbed by our neighborhood tour, I asked our driver to take us back to the airfield. We boarded the plane with a minimum of fuss from the soldiers there. Once again, the colonel sat in the front seat of the plane. Back in the capital, only he would know how much of the soldiers’ pay had actually reached the troops. Indeed, back in Kinshasa, only he would care.

Once airborne, we spoke little among ourselves. Perhaps as a release, David took pictures as we flew. My thoughts turned to Kinvita. I had urged him to go to the hospital and tell the people there about his mother’s death. I had no idea if he would heed my advice, but I was skeptical. What good had the hospital ever been to him before?

Perhaps he would be coming down with the headaches soon, I thought. Perhaps the virus would kill him next. Perhaps there would be others in the neighborhood. It seemed clear that I would never know, and perhaps neither would the experts who sat in their makeshift office compiling their reports.

Discouraged by these thoughts, I began watching the landscape down below, and once again was hypnotized by the awesome tables and folds of earth. There was the natural, and there was the man-made.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Golden Bough

The easiest way back to Abidjan was a return flight from Brazzaville. So we decided to go home just the way we had come, taking the westbound ferry back across the Congo River and stopping off for a few days. I wanted to reacquaint myself with a country I had known well a decade earlier, when I had visited often as a translator at World Health Organization conferences, and later as a journalist.

As the ferry made its return passage, I recognized the same languid Zairian rumbas playing on the tinny speakers on the open deck above that I had heard from my seat in the cabin on my way to Kinshasa. As the boat rocked gently and its engines chugged against the river’s strong currents, cutting silently through huge clusters of floating hyacinths, instead of the deep anxiety I had felt a couple of weeks before, I found myself fighting off sleep.

Somnolence seemed like an altogether appropriate state for my return to Congo-Brazzaville. Other than an intense but brief burst of killing during the country’s transition from its Central African variant of “Marxism” to an equally tropical form of “democracy” back in 1992, nothing much ever seemed to happen here. Indeed, bored foreigners often joked about the place, calling it Rip Van Winkle’s village, because of its reputation for immutable sleepiness.

The broad boulevards cut decades ago by the French during colonial times were filled as ever with sand. The polio-afflicted beggars with their loopy limbs and wooden crutches gathered in clusters at the stoplights, just as I had remembered them. And you could still set your watch by the abrupt halt to business activity at the start of the noon-time siesta.

I had been rereading one of my favorite novelists, the Congolese author Sony Labou Tansi, and having heard that he was secluded in a village somewhere, together with his wife, Pierrette, both of them dying of AIDS, I was thinking of trying to find him.

If an African god had set out to make a country, a land resembling the Congo would not be an unlikely result. Zaire next door had always been spoken of as Africa’s “geological scandal,” because of its disproportionate share of the continent’s mineral wealth, but the real scandal was here, and it merely began with minerals. This little country seemed rich in just about every way that nature allowed—large oil deposits, huge expanses of virgin tropical forests, untouched minerals of just about every kind, great rivers, the sea. Congo-Brazzaville was as big as Montana and almost as empty, with barely two million souls to share all of this wealth. But in the end, the folly of the country’s leaders, propelled by the boundless greed of outsiders, proved too much to overcome in spite of the innate wealth.

Governance in Congo had been as deranged as any other in Africa, but the place was too small ever to command much attention. The dividends it paid to its benefactors in France, the former colonial master, were too generous for them to complain about the political mess. Indeed, the French had long profited from the chaos by deftly pulling the strings. Most of all, Congo had remained obscure because it never had a dictator like Mobutu, who dominated the much larger country next door, commanding attention on the world stage with his solicitude toward the West during the Cold War and through his outrageously colorful style. When Congo-Brazzaville did rouse itself from long bouts of quiet, the place became very complicated.

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was squeezed out of Zaire—then also confusingly known as the Congo—in the CIABACKED coup that overthrew Patrice Emery Lumumba in 1960. It is hard to imagine world powers competing fiercely for influence anywhere in today’s Africa, but in the 1960s intense rivalry was the name of the game all over the continent. So when a group of young officers in Brazzaville took power in a 1968 coup, creating the purest version Africa had yet seen of a Marxist-Leninist state, Moscow rushed in with aid and advisors, seeking the much smaller, former French Congo as its consolation prize.

The heavy industrial and agricultural machinery sent to Congo was intended to turn the country into the Soviet Union’s showcase in the region. Moscow was about to learn that among the political forces at work in Central Africa, entropy has few rivals, least of all an imported ideology from the cold lands of the north called Marxism. For the Russians, even with all of the latent and unexploited wealth of Congo-Brazzaville at hand, trying to create a New Man there would prove as futile as it had back home.

The French at least had the advantage of their lengthy colonial experience, which allowed them to better understand the Congolese. When commercially viable quantities of oil began to be discovered in Congo in the early 1970s, Paris easily outmaneuvered Moscow, restoring what it called
relations privilégiés
with the country that had been the base of the Free French forces during World War II.

For all of the Soviet Union’s advisors, for all the MiGs that took off and landed at the airports in Brazzaville and Pointe Noire, lending the leadership a macho blush of power, for all of the model farms created and for all of the monuments to Marx and the streets named for Lenin, the French had an answer. It was a softer, more seductive form of power, something called joie de vivre—bespoke suits,
les meilleurs crus,
haute cuisine,
hôtels particuliers
on Paris’s most prestigious boulevards for the richest—and the Congolese elites, like their peers just about everywhere else in Central Africa, lapped it up.

Once the oil began flowing in earnest, nothing but fat years seemed to lie ahead for this obscure little land, but in fact, all the pieces were in place for a big fall. The country’s predicament was part of a recurring drama in Africa, where the outside world’s lust for some raw material, be it rubber, timber, cocoa, cotton, uranium or oil, knocks a society off balance and sends it careering into disintegration. The basket cases of tomorrow can be fairly easily predicted today. One need only glimpse quickly at the oil rushes under way in Equatorial Guinea, Chad and Angola or, on a smaller scale, at the scramble in eastern Congo for exotic minerals, like coltan (there was also a fad among Japanese for African ivory for use in carved personal seals in the 1980s), to sense the approaching disaster. And yet the consequences of this commercial predation are no more debated today than in the time of Leopold; perhaps less.

In Congo, the beginning of the end was ushered in by Denis Sassou-Nguesso, a strikingly handsome army officer with a keen taste for the good life. It has long been said that even tinier, oil-rich Gabon next door was the world’s leader in per capita champagne consumption. But surely under Sassou, Congo’s Pierre Cardin Marxists were not far behind.

After a brief interim, Sassou had succeeded Marien Ngouabi, a more earnest communist who was mysteriously assassinated in 1977, just as the petroleum boom was starting, and under the new leader it wasn’t long before an arrangement was reached that seemed to leave all the big players happy. Congo’s communist elite went through the motions of Marxism-Leninism, holding as many plenums and Central Committee purges as it wished. For many, ideology became a hair-splitting, almost religious obsession, allowing leaders and party cadres to live up to the Congolese reputation, built up by generations of brilliant sculptors, musicians, priests and writers, for creative imagination. The Russians contented themselves with the country’s Marxist label, and with its supportive votes at the United Nations. Paris’s main demand—and it was one that the Congolese elite, never too keen on dirtying its hands in the battle for national construction in the first place, was only too eager to grant—was to stay out of the way while Frenchmen ran the oil industry.

In its own absurd and tragic way, Congo functioned reasonably well like this for nearly two decades, on the surface, at least. The Marxist leaders ran a tightly policed dictatorship, providing meager but steady returns to the population while they and their foreign partners salted away billions of dollars worth of oil revenues in Western banks and luxury real estate in Paris, Switzerland and the French Riviera.

“Your situation is rich with rewards. But you’ll have to be resourceful,” a minister of national education instructed a newly appointed minister of health in a telling passage in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel of the wretched excesses of sudden wealth and absolute power,
La Vie et
Demie.
“A minister is made from his 20 percent share in the expenditures of his ministry. If you are clever, you can even tease that figure up to 30 percent, even 40 percent. . . . You must build things. We build all the time, because building pays the minister. In short, be daring and you will see how little streams turn into big rivers.”

A hallucinatory tale that remains purposely ambiguous about the identity of the country where its action takes place, the novel speaks equally well to the situation of both its author’s native Congo and of Zaire. The only thing is that in both countries, as ruin set in like a bad case of gangrene, the greed grew so intense that ministers were soon too busy stealing to build anything at all.

In a brief foreword to
La Vie et Demie,
which was published in 1979, Tansi calls his work an attempt to see “tomorrow with the eyes of today.” In a reference to the repression on both sides of the Congo River that prevented artists like himself from describing their countries’ situations more openly, he writes, “when the occasion comes to speak of the present day, I won’t take such a roundabout path; nothing, in any event, so torturous as a fable.”

From the time of brutal tribal kingdoms that competed with one another to sell slaves to the Europeans, to European colonization itself, with its forced labor and Draconian punishments for failure to meet production quotas for things like rubber or cotton, the Congolese people had never known a good deal. Strong-arm tactics were used to keep intellectuals quiet during the Marxist era, too, and few others were inclined to complain during this period, when amazingly, the majority of the population was kept on the public payroll. In effect, the latest triumph of the Congolese imagination was building a workers’ state without workers. But despite having absorbed the worst lessons from Moscow (including dictatorship of the proletariat and hopelessly inefficient heavy industry) and from Paris (limitless bureaucracy and Latin-style corruption), as long as ever more oil kept flowing, the semblance of a functioning state could be maintained.

“This was the capital of l’Afrique Centrale Française, so what did the French do when they set up here? They put all the elite grandes écoles for Central Africa here and began training bureaucrats and officials,” said an American diplomat whose cynicism was the fruit of several tours in the region. “Then the Soviets came, and the Congolese who already had a centralized state began adopting the idea that the government does everything for the people.

“I served here through some of the period of Marxism-Leninism and Scientific Socialism, and even then it struck me as a bunch of baloney. I don’t think that Sassou and his friends believed any of it, not for even a minute. It was simply a wonderful tool for maintaining control, and it coincided perfectly with the tribal model that everyone here already knew inherently: The leader is chosen through some form of consensus, but rules with a pretty heavy hand. Under the old system, whenever you had an enemy, you accused him of sorcery. Under communism you call it deviation from the ideological line, and you purge him. The results are the same: liquidation, banishment or reeducation.”

One such victim was Bernard Kolelas, the mayor of Brazzaville and a leader of the Bakongo ethnic group. Kolelas was a voluble and head-strong politician whose messianic crusade against one-party dictatorship was fueled in equal parts by Christian zeal and by his outsized ego. “Nine times I was arrested for speaking out against totalitarianism,” Kolelas told me in his spacious Brazzaville home, which was heavily guarded by unsmiling youths with machine guns. “They would keep me tied up from morning till night, and torture me with an electric cable.”

This treatment may not have kept Kolelas quiet for long, but most other Congolese got the message, and sought refuge in beer and palm wine, in the loose and easy sensuality of this land near the equator, or if they couldn’t bear it at all, in exile. But as well as it seemed to work for a while, the Congolese system was just as surely never built to last. Oil prices fell throughout the late 1980s, creating huge problems for a state that had grown addicted to the manna. Simply put, no one had made provisions for declining oil prices or for declining reserves.

By the time the bottom finally fell out at the start of the 1990s, the little Congo that hardly anybody had ever heard of accounted for one quarter of the French state-owned oil giant Elf Aquitaine’s proven reserves, and according to many estimates, an even higher percentage of the firm’s profits. “They didn’t know a thing about the oil business and let the foreign companies define all of the terms,” an American diplomat said. “Throughout this period, Elf was the leader, and all they had to do was deal with Sassou and a few other people, buying them off at a fairly modest price. We are talking about a few tens of millions of dollars skimmed off of the top.”

So what do you do when you can no longer pay salaries in a country full of civil servants? In February 1991, after Congo had been refused new credits by France and by the International Monetary Fund, Sassou convened an extraordinary meeting that he called the Sovereign National Conference to discuss the jam he had gotten himself into. An unprecedented debate about the state of the nation took place there, one that was intended to lance the boil of public discontent, while reinforcing Sassou’s rule. But instead the conference turned into a raucous, three-month-long trial of the communist leadership.

“The national conference basically boiled down to one central question,” said Kolelas. “The people said that we have been laboring all of these years and you’ve been pocketing our money. We refuse to go along with a system like that any longer. There’s no point in working anymore.”