In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (15 page)

Even death, it emerged, offered no escape from debt. Just as living patients could be held hostage, bodies could be retained in the morgue until the family settled—a practice, the doctor acknowledged, that violated every moral precept in a culture where ensuring that a body was properly laid to rest had always been of enormous spiritual importance. ‘Impounding a body is scandalous, a monstrosity, it's simply unacceptable. Those who can will pay up immediately to get the body out of the morgue.' But not everyone could. Hence the growing tendency for poverty-stricken families to abandon their relatives' bodies. Every three or four months, Mama Yemo's morgue filled with unclaimed corpses. Given the hot climate and intermittent electricity supplies, its refrigerators usually proved unequal to the task and the bodies began to decompose. At a certain point, when the problem became overwhelming, volunteers with strong stomachs would remove the corpses and bury them in a mass grave. National television sometimes broadcast images of these heroes at their terrible work. Behind their face masks, they retched as the corpses fell apart in the process of being lifted, shedding hands, feet, limbs.

Such horrors helped ensure that patients still waited until all other options were ruled out before admitting themselves to Mama Yemo. Doctors, for their part, avoided surgery unless absolutely necessary, for fear of infection, aware that poor medicine was encouraging diseases once beaten into submission to flare back into prominence. ‘Sleeping sickness, leprosy, typhoid. All these illnesses that were nearly under control are coming back, and it's not a pure coincidence.'

Kasongo himself was entitled to a $20 monthly salary, but he had not been paid for five months. Most doctors in the state sector, he said, dreamed of moving abroad. He was one of the few who wanted to improve conditions here, despite his scepticism. His hair was thinning, he was no longer a young man. Sometimes, he acknowledged dourly, he wondered whether he had made a mistake choosing to become a doctor at all. ‘I didn't study medicine to cure people on the
basis of wealth, to extort money from patients or to let people die without intervening. I get demoralised. If I met someone who wanted to go into medicine today I'd say, think twice. It's a big disappointment. There's something sub-human about this way of life.'

As we walked towards the exit and the uniformed sentinels, standing like Cerberus at the gates to Hades, we paused at the plinth which once supported Mama Yemo's bust. Within hours of Kabila seizing power, the bronze had been toppled by members of staff. Maybe they recalled another symbolic statue-felling, staged at the bidding of the leader they then believed in, who left his mother's namesake to rot. ‘It's funny how an event will suddenly reveal what everyone feels,' pondered the doctor. ‘Everyone hated that bust, but no one dared say it.'

 

If a state of Low Batt
often proved fatal for the unfortunate individuals admitted to Mama Yemo, there was one public institution where the chronic condition held out potential risks for an entire city. On a hill looking out over Kinshasa is a one-storey building that briefly became the focus of local media attention a couple of years after Kabila's takeover.

A metal projectile, the newspapers reported, had ploughed into the wall of the establishment. As no one was hurt in the incident, debate focused on the puzzling question of where the missile had come from. True, a civil war was raging across the river in Brazzaville. But it seemed unlikely that a missile, however badly aimed, could stray as far inland as this. The other possibility was that the ‘missile' was in fact a fragment from a small plane that had recently crashed near Ndjili airport. But, once again, it was difficult to work out how the debris could have ended up so far from any known flight path.

The matter would have remained of purely academic interest had it not been for one key point—the building happened to be a nuclear reactor, the first reactor ever built on the African continent. With its one megawatt capacity, it is dwarfed by the likes of Chernobyl's 1,000 megawatt installation. Nonetheless, if damaged, it could spew
radioactivity for kilometres around, leaking contamination into the city's water supply. No wonder when I visited the site on the university campus, a white-coated technician, leaning over to inspect the punctured wall, was shaking his head: ‘This is more than just worrying, it's a threat. If it had hit the centre it wouldn't have been funny at all.'

Few clues to the building's purpose are available on the meandering approach to the reactor. To get there, you must cross the district of Limete, stronghold of Etienne Tshisekedi. Once the champion of the opposition movement, he is now a stubborn old man who likes to sleep late and rarely strays beyond his own courtyard. The highway is a blaring ribbon of buses overloaded to the point where they develop a permanent slouch, honking Mercedes driven by army captains and taxi-buses with urchins dangling from the fenders, all maintaining top speed as they swerve around the potholes. At the end of the thoroughfare, you circle around the monument to Patrice Lumumba, erected by Mobutu to beatify the national hero he helped destroy. Kinshasa's equivalent of the Eiffel Tower, the monument was ultimately meant to hold a restaurant with panoramic views, but the cranes on its airy platform stopped moving long ago. Like Lumumba's nation-building project itself, it has never been completed; with every passing year, more panels and constituent parts go missing, cannibalised by pragmatic patriots.

At this point you turn inland, climbing through the district of Lemba and a series of haphazard markets redolent with the sharp stink of chicken droppings, where women sell bread baguettes from large metal basins, lorries load up young labourers, and girls sit patiently plaiting yellow, mauve and orange tresses into each other's hair. Eventually, the Ministry of Information and other skyscrapers become toy blocks shimmering in the haze of the valley and you reach the cool air and open green hills where the city finally begins to sputter to an end. This is the entrance to the University of Kinshasa and the sudden deluge of neat white shirts and young faces sheltering from the sun under coloured umbrellas is a reminder that this is a very young country.

Once on campus, there are no carefully monitored perimeter fences, guard dogs or electric warning systems. Only a small sign—one of those electrons-buzzing-around-an-atomic-core logos that once looked so modern and now seem so dated—alerts you to the presence of radioactive material. Behind the reactor's rusting gates, secured with a simple padlock, the courtyard resembles a wrecker's yard, littered with the rusting hulks of cars being tinkered with in the hope of eventual revival. The grounds are being put to the usual culinary use, with cassava bushes and papaya trees growing on either side of the main entrance.

The day I visited, the only formality involved signing a book held out by a man in a dingy sideroom. It was only later, when the head of the reactor mentioned that a crack team of gendarmes had been assigned to guard the building, that I realised I had already made contact with this elite unit. If at the Mama Yemo hospital, staff were all too bitterly aware of the extent to which a state on permanent Low Batt had abandoned them, Professor Felix Malu Wa Kalenga showed a blissful ignorance of that overwhelming reality. ‘I have absolutely no worries about security,' he assured me, moments before casually mentioning that a fuel rod which had gone missing two decades earlier had recently, to the administration's astonishment, been unearthed by the Italian police, property of the Sicilian Mafia. ‘I think one of the previous directors was a little careless with his keys,' he explained. ‘He probably lent them to someone, not realising that the key to the reactor was on the same bunch.' Well, anyone can make mistakes.

Professor Malu was a gangly, spider-like man with long arms and legs, even longer fingers and a head of bristly greying hair. He wore a hearing aid, but it didn't seem to work. I asked questions and he gave long, detailed answers. Sometimes, for brief interludes, the two would coincide. But most of the time he answered questions I had not asked and I put questions he did not answer. His deafness made him seem evasive and unhelpful, but I suspect embarrassment at his affliction left this intelligent man constantly trying to second-guess conversations. The deafness also had its advantages for the veteran
physicist. It reinforced a wall of inexplicable serenity he had built around himself in order to allow his pet project to remain in existence.

The missile impact and theft of the rod were not, after all, the only time the nuclear reactor had triggered a panic spreading well beyond the country's frontiers. Realising they faced defeat at the hands of Kabila's advancing forces, Mobutu's presidential guard had drawn up plans to blow the reactor up in 1997—plans that were luckily never put into action. Periodically, local politicians have warned of the risks of a landfall sweeping away the reactor. The university campus, like much of Kinshasa, is built on sandy soil disastrously prone to erosion, with entire hillsides regularly subsiding overnight. ‘Obviously it's not a good thing having a land fall near a nuclear centre,' acknowledged the professor. ‘But the last one was at least 100 metres from here. There was no real danger.'

Given that Kinshasa had lived through two rounds of looting, one military takeover and a major rebel attack in the last eight years alone, I suggested, wouldn't it be sensible to ask the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna to send officials to remove all radioactive material and close down the facility for good? ‘Certainly not,' retorted Professor Malu. ‘We have never had any real problems, although I do get the impression that the IAEA regards us with some suspicion because our country is in ruins.'

The fact that Kinshasa possesses a nuclear reactor at all, surely that most inappropriate of institutions for a country incapable of providing millions of its citizens with electricity or clean running water, is really a fluke of history. When I first heard of it, I automatically assumed it was a
folie de grandeur
on the part of Mobutu, one of the more perilous of his white elephants. But I was wrong. Kinshasa's reactor was a gift from God. It was the brainchild of Monsignor Luc Gillon, a ferociously energetic Belgian priest who had trained as a nuclear physicist, studied at Princeton, and in later life poured his energies into setting up Belgian Congo's first university. Like a colonial administrator who uses his years in the tropics as a chance to
build up his butterfly collection, Mgr Gillon seized the opportunity to indulge in his hobby: nuclear research.

In the run-up to the Second World War, when the likes of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer were growing interested in nuclear fission, Belgian Congo was the world's biggest producer of uranium. Found in concentrations almost unheard of anywhere else in the world, the bright yellow substance was dug from the mines of Shinkolobwe, in the southern province of Katanga. But since the colonial authorities themselves had no interest in the metal—they sought the radium excavated alongside, used to treat cancer—the state-owned mining company Union Minière du Haut Katanga allowed a prescient director to ship three years' worth of uranium stocks to the United States, where it was on hand when work began on the Manhattan Project. The bombs the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were made with Congolese uranium.

Under the secret supply deal signed with the US, Belgium agreed to sell Congo's uranium at a nominal price in return for American help funding its peacetime nuclear energy programme. For Mgr Gillon, it seemed only right that the colony that had provided the raw material that effectively ended the Second World War should benefit. The head of Belgium's atomic energy programme, perhaps understandably, disagreed. ‘He believed an atomic reactor would serve no purpose in Congo and indicated that the American dollars on which I was counting for funding had all been spent,' Mgr Gillon recalled in his memoirs. But the priest, whose self-confidence comes across as bordering on bumptiousness, steamed forward regardless.

He set about buying a US-made, 50-kilowatt Training and Research Reactor for Isotope Production General Atomic (TRIGA) he had ‘fallen in love with' at an exhibition in Geneva. Despite the fact that Leopoldville had been swept by violent riots just a few days before the Triga reactor arrived in Congo in early 1959, the question of whether this potentially hazardous invention would be
an appropriate inheritance for an unstable government terrified of its own mutinous army does not appear to have troubled the well-intentioned Mgr Gillon. ‘At the time people were talking about independence in 30 years' time,' shrugged Professor Malu. ‘It wasn't envisaged.' Less than a year and a half later, Congo was on its own.

And so Congo became the first African member of the IAEA, an achievement that was a source of huge subsequent pride to Mobutu. In 1970, Gillon and Malu, his young sidekick, decided to upgrade the reactor to its present capacity. By this time, Shinkolobwe had closed and Congo could no longer provide the raw material required. It was forced to buy its own uranium back from the Americans. The humiliation still rankles, contributing to a profound feeling of grievance in Congo, where the secrecy surrounding the 1944 supply deal has left locals convinced Belgium made a killing on the uranium sales and that on this issue, as with so many others, their country was ripped off by a cynical West.

Professor Malu remains inordinately proud of having managed to carry out the upgrade. ‘It was a very, very dangerous operation. One slip, and you could be irradiated. We had no help from anyone, we financed it ourselves and we did it all on our own.'

Why bother? I was tempted to ask. For the Triga reactor serves no conceivable practical purpose. It was never designed to provide electricity to a nation that in theory already had the hydroelectric capacity to export power to the region. Its
raison d'être
was purely educational: producing isotopes used in scientific experiments, such as irradiating seeds in the hope of producing disease-free varieties. Now even that abstruse function has fallen by the wayside, as producing the radioactive elements needed for such research costs more than buying them abroad, leaving the institution little more than a tempting, if ultimately unrewarding, target for the nimble-fingered. In one of Kinshasa's looting sprees—‘après le deuxième pillage'—it was said, animals being used in experiments at the reactor were stolen and eaten, radioactive or not.