Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (20 page)

The scene was now set for Mobutu’s return, and the tension and dramatic potential were such that, even bedridden from chemotherapy, the old dictator, a performer at heart, could not resist. Decades of wretched excess involving money and power had ultimately bored him, but Mobutu still craved the kind of reaffirmation that only attention from others can bring. Indeed, his longing to be needed and the lure of the bright lights he had so often enjoyed on the international stage were what kept him going.

Filthy Kinshasa was being painted and scrubbed. Soldiers dressed in snappy green uniforms were suddenly putting order to the city’s chaotic traffic. Rusted and stripped wrecks that had littered the roadside for months were hauled away, and huge red-and-white banners bearing slogans like “Mobutu = Solution” were being hung everywhere. The sycophants were busy and no amount of hype was being spared. If the Marshal was coming back, it was not merely to join the battle, but to win the war convincingly.

On December 17, 1996, six weeks after the Banyamulenge uprising began, Mobutu returned home. There is a venerable tradition throughout the continent of people lending their shouts and tears to celebrations and mourning in exchange for a fee. Mobutu’s handlers had resorted to the trick countless times, proving just how effective the prospect of a few rounds of free beer or palm wine, or a bolt of printed cloth or some pocket change, could be in generating the appearance of enthusiasm.

As I rode out to the airport to witness his arrival, I thought skeptically at first that Kinshasa’s hordes were just going along for the carnival ride. But as I watched tens of thousands of people pile into buses and every other manner of public transportation to gather at Ndjili airport, and line every inch of the twenty-seven-mile route into town at least four or five deep, my cynicism slowly began to crumble.

Still, there were certain fundamentals that no amount of popular excitement could change. The Marshal’s army, never famous for its resourcefulness, had few means with which to fight a war. More ominous, the foreign friends who had repeatedly flown to the rescue during the Cold War were nowhere to be found. Government troops had scarcely engaged the enemy up to this point. As we waited for a sign from the sky of the president’s arrival, it was tempting to wonder whether the funds required to print the women’s matching outfits and hire the buses and bands would not have been better spent on bullets and bombs.

But at bottom, the army’s problems had little to do with budgets. Rather, as with anything that involved money in this country, they could be attributed to a lack of accounting. Over the years, people had given Mobutu’s famous Article 15, “débrouillez-vous,” an increasingly literal interpretation. It had ultimately come to mean that it was okay to steal anything, even from him, and that is precisely what his generals had been doing, leaving the army unpaid and without ammunition. That is what the governors of the far eastern provinces had done, siphoning off money intended for the care of Hutu refugees and cutting private deals to rearm them. Undoubtedly, that’s also what the organizers of today’s sumptuous festivities were doing, and they would be presenting the president with bills for sums that far outstripped what they had spent.

This dazzling day, though, with a sky free of all but the highest, wispiest clouds, was not meant for settling accounts; it was a day for rallying the nation, for mobilization. At 3:10 in the afternoon, the president’s white Boeing landed, and from his first wave to the crowds from the cockpit until late in the evening, Mobutu threw himself into the task with an eagerness that seemed scarcely diminished by his cancer.

Zairian popular music is famous for its bouncing bass lines and the lyrical staccato runs through the upper ranges of the guitar, sounds that ripple clear and perfectly formed, like the concentric rings of a stone tossed into a pond. The most famous style, soukous, had been invented decades earlier as an inspired response to the Cuban rumbas that were intently studied and lustily danced, as radios spread among the African population in the 1950s. By the 1980s, soukous from Mobutu’s Zaire had become the most distinctive and successful pop sound in all of Africa, and like so much else of import in this country, the dictator had appropriated it subtly for his purposes.

The French word
liesse
hints at the effect of something very near to pure joy that this music seemed to produce so effortlessly. At the same time, the music became symbolic of Mobutu’s rule and of the institutionalization in Kinshasa of Lingala, the trading language that originated in the president’s native region, along the uppermost reaches of the Zaire River. Like a rape drug spiked into the nation’s water supply, the music served to make the northern homeland of the president the cultural center of gravity of this vast and otherwise artificially conceived nation with almost no one the wiser for it.

The same formula of borrowing from abroad and making something imported one’s own lay behind the mass mobilization and hero worship on display this day. Mobutu had carefully studied the personality cults of dictators like Ceauşescu of Romania and Kim Il Sung of North Korea as he set about crafting a cult of his own. By now, although one could still discern some of the inherited features—the use of uniform dress for civilians and mass chants of praise to the great leader—the product was as different from its communist forebears as the soukous heard in nightclubs all over Africa today is from Cuban son or salsa.

Manifestly, the Zairian people had nothing to celebrate, and yet here they were, gathered in huge, choking throngs to welcome home a president disowned by even his staunchest foreign backers. There were phalanxes of teenage girls whose smiles beamed as they bounced cheerfully on their toes, chanting welcome slogans in tight skirts and white tee shirts emblazoned with Mobutu slogans. Thousands of schoolchildren were arrayed class by class, standing under the sun in their uniforms waving fronds. Squadrons of hefty matrons trucked out by neighborhood sweated mightily as they bowed and swayed, laboring their way rhythmically through their dance steps. To top it off were the fighting bands competing fiercely to be heard over the din. The noise was such that there was no way to make out who was dancing to what beat. That could be done only by watching the bodies move and trying to link the motions to the distinctive strain of rhythm that every so often rang clear above the noise.

The music grew ever louder as Mobutu, carefully made up but quite pallid still, descended gingerly from the airplane, bearing his famous trademarks, the carved cane and leopard-skin cap, and strode onto the long red carpet laid out for the welcome. Walking at the same stately pace, but a deferential half step behind him, like a Japanese empress, was Bobi Ladawa, his richly overfed and bleached-skin wife, who, by dint of a queerly incestuous superstition, also happened to be the identical twin of another of the president’s wives. One could not even call the relationship an open secret. Like the long name the dictator, baptized Joseph Désiré Mobutu, gave himself, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga—“the all-conquering warrior who triumphs over all obstacles”—it was a chest-beating howl declaring the great man’s prowess.
⁵
Mobutu’s conjugal arrangements were the ultimate expression of keeping it in the family, but they also served niftily to keep friends and foes alike off guard. The sister often stood in for the first lady at official functions, just as surely as she did in the boudoir, and their resemblance was so great that only Mobutu could reliably tell them apart.

This dictatorship being a family affair, there was a suitable sampling of the rest of the presidential brood on hand as well. There were pampered daughters, women in their twenties, attractive to be sure, but in the preferred Central African way, meaning pleasantly plump. Although far less garish than their mothers, the young women seemed to aspire to the same sort of force-fed and overly dressed look. It was a style that gaudily married the de rigueur local costume of brightly colored African cloth with Parisian
gri fe—
handbags, big gold jewelry and large-framed, face-concealing sunglasses, all conspicuously signed Vuitton, Chanel or Dior.

Then there was his son, the inevitable Kongulu, the twenty-seven-year-old army captain with the sparkplug build and scruffy beard whose nickname, Saddam Hussein, perfectly fit a man whose nocturnal death squad attacks on his father’s enemies made him the terror of Kinshasa. With his perpetual scowl, Kongulu appeared to live on the edge of an outburst. On this day he was running the security for his father’s arrival, and as Mobutu shuffled along the red carpet he exhorted his soldiers from the feared Division Spéciale Présidentielle to thrash anyone in the pressing crowd whose enthusiasm, or perhaps a push from behind, caused him to stray too close to the Guide.

Once Mobutu was atop the reviewing stand, the crowd fell silent for the national anthem, which he, while solemn, only seemed to mouth. To near-universal surprise, there would be no speech. Instead, after a few waves to the crowds, his guards hustled him into a black Cadillac limousine and sped off for the long drive home.

Gradually, as I moved along in the wake of Mobutu’s long motorcade, the landscape mutated from the wide-open plains of the countryside to the cinder block and mortar of the dusty and overcrowded city. As we approached Kinshasa’s center, and Camp Tshatshi revealed itself as the destination, the neighborhoods grew thicker with gawkers and revelers. Mobutu’s outriders honked their horns furiously to announce his arrival and to clear the streets, and trucks full of soldiers doing their best to look fearsome in their sinister, wraparound sunglasses rumbled past just behind them.

Mobutu had remained invisible throughout the ride, hidden behind heavily tinted windows, but this seemed to have no effect on the atmosphere. Even in Matongé, the reputed bastion of the opposition, people choked the sidewalks and looked on from balconies and roof-tops, many of them cheering, or rushing out into the streets a split second before the passage of the motorcade’s first vehicles, in a dare-devil gesture meant to show their excitement. Matongé was home to the famous
parlementaires debout,
or streetcorner legislators—ordinary, often unemployed folks, who gathered there to discuss the news for hours each day, usually condemning Mobutu and demanding a return to democratic rule.

Only a few days earlier, Zairian friends had told me it would be impossible to find a hundred people in Matongé to cheer for Mobutu. Now people were chanting his name wildly, and screaming things like “Papa’s back, the price of beer will fall,” while others, in a more direct reference to the war, shouted, “Kabila souki,” or “Kabila’s finished,” in Lingala.

Mobutu had not lived in the capital since the first pillages had ravaged the city in 1991. When his presence was required in Kinshasa, he had shown his aversion to the place by staying on his luxurious white riverboat, the
Kamanyola,
named for one of the few victories his army had ever truly won. For his belated return, he had elected to establish residence at Camp Tshatshi, a vast, gated military installation that occupies a hilly suburb overlooking the Malebo Pool and the first cataract of the Congo River, which bars access to and from the sea 350 miles downstream.

With many grand residences to choose from, the choice of Tshatshi seemed rather transparently designed to suggest that the Marshal was returning to his military origins, that he had come back to lead the war effort. But with Kabila’s rebels beginning to show signs of making good on their promise to cross the country and mount an assault on the capital, everyone understood that Mobutu felt safe only in a military camp, surrounded by troops from his own Ngbandi ethnic group. Mobutu had always boasted that he would sooner be a late president than an ex-president, but just in case he changed his mind, Tshatshi offered another comfort—powerful speedboats moored just above the cataract and ready to go. In a serious jam, the aging dictator could be hustled off to Brazzaville next door within minutes.

Passing through the base’s heavy iron gates, one realized that Tshatshi also stood firmly for one other thing—segregation. Here there were no ragged masses. The city might be abuzz with excitement, but all here was tranquility and order. Selected visitors, including the accredited press, were told to park their cars in one of the sloping lots on the grounds and were conducted to the manicured gardens behind Mobutu’s grand but sober mansion.

It was late afternoon, and the equatorial sun had finally lost its force and was beginning its ever-startling decline, its molten hues of deep orange and rust exploding as it swelled and then swiftly disappeared. I was jittery with excitement as I entered a scene as bewildering as if I had stepped through the looking glass. Gathered together were the leading representatives of the famous three hundred families, as Mobutu called the elite he had set out to build in the 1960s, after conspiring to take over a country left by the Belgians with a sole lawyer, a handful of doctors and not a single engineer after eighty-four years of colonial and imperial control. Mobutu’s project was inspired, but in the end it had served only to prove the adage about absolute power corrupting absolutely. These were grabbers, not strivers. As they strolled through the gardens eating canapés and drinking cocktails served by waiters in black tie, their clothing and perfume revealed them to be a pampered and indolent lot.

Mobutu’s rule had always depended on the clever manipulation of symbols, and most important was his splendor. Toward that end, the rapids of the Congo River served as a stunning backdrop. Peacocks and geese lent to the rarefied air, strutting freely around the periphery of the gardens, their cooing and cackling punctuating the smooth soukous of Koffi Olomidé, which was piped in on a sound system in tastefully muted fashion.

Save for the birds and for the white noise of the river gurgling in the distance below, all went silent when Mobutu finally emerged from a knot of family members and appeared on the marbled balcony that looked out over the crowd. The Guide had chosen not to speak to
le petit peuple
at Ndjili airport, but rather to
his
people here. For the masses, impatient to know what lay ahead, their radios would have to do.