In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (7 page)

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.

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 débâcle 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.