Congo (58 page)

Zizi, of course, wouldn’t have expected them to address it to “Zizi.” There weren’t very many people who knew his real name, but in official correspondence he remained plain old Isidore—especially in France, where
zizi
is another word for
weenie
. But the address didn’t mention Isidore either. Kabongo Kalala, that had been his official name for the last two years. Born in 1940 as Isidore Kabongo, he had gone through life since 1972 as Kabongo Kalala. With no first name. Christian names were now forbidden as being, once again, too colonial.

The people’s minds, Mobutu felt, had been bent beneath the old yoke for too long. His plan was to liberate them mentally as well. A whole host of name changes would help in that process. Léopoldville was to become Kinshasa, Stanleyville Kisangani, and Elisabethville Lubumbashi. Lesser towns also received a new, indigenous name: Ilebo for Port Francqui, Kananga for Luluabourg, Moba for Baudouinville, Mbandaka for Coquilhatville, Likasi for Jadotville. Lake Leopold was renamed Maï Ndombe, the black water. Lake Albert became Lake Mobutu. And, in order to puncture local pride, Katanga was now to be called Shaba.

But a different toponymy was not enough, according to Mobutu. People’s names had to reflect the change as well, for there were some who still looked up far too much to Belgium. Individuals bearing the name Lukusa continued to corrupt that to De Luxe. Kalonda sometimes became De Kalondarve. The singer Georges Kiamuangana preferred the Flemish-sounding Verckys as his stage name. And Désiré Bonyololo, the stenographer from Kisangani, liked to call himself Désiré Van-Duel. This was an affront to the ideologists of the Second Republic: the new Zaïrian should be proud of what he was, rather than ridiculously try to flaunt what he wanted to be. From now on, only native names.

And so Christian names were axed as well. They had been introduced by missionaries who had christened each baptized child with the name of a European saint: Joseph, Jean, Christophe, Thérèse, Bernadette, Marie. Shouldn’t the true Zaïrian, the president said, prefer to describe himself in relation to his ancestors rather than to some remote saint? That is why he banned Christian names and prescribed the use of ancestral ones. The
prénom
vanished, the
postnom
(an unintentionally comic Mobutian neologism) took its place. It was a sly attempt to undermine the power of the church. Isidore Kabongo became Kabongo Kalala. Under Mobutu, everything, but then everything, was different.

“A
T FIRST WE WERE QUITE PLEASED
with Mobutu’s coup,” Zizi Kabongo told me during one of our many conversations in Kinshasa. There were few informants with whom I met as often as I did Kabongo.
¹
He spoke about his country’s complex history with great lucidity and finesse. He had attended seminary for a time, like so many of his generation, but was stranded halfway in his calling as a teacher of Latin and Greek in Katanga. He would ultimately choose the path of journalism. Today, at sixty-nine, he is a manager for the national radio broadcaster. “‘Whew!’ we said back then. At last, a little organization! The First Republic had been a huge mess. All that sniping back and forth between Kasavubu and Tshombe . . . . [I]t was a great disillusionment. The trains had stopped running, prosperity had been crushed, unemployment was on the rise. And meanwhile you saw the politicians being driven around in limousines, and sending their children to study in Europe. Mobutu abolished the political parties for five years, and everyone was quite satisfied about that.”

Mobutu did, indeed, introduce a sudden change in style. Shortly after his coup d’état he spoke to the masses in Kinshasa’s big soccer stadium. Here one had a slim young orator who wore no extravagant tuxedo, but a khaki uniform and a beret.
²
He railed vigorously against “the sterile conflicts between politicians who sacrificed the country and their countrymen to their own interests.” His listeners could only agree to that. “For them, the only thing that counted was power and what they could do with it. Fill their own pockets, exploit Congo and the Congolese, that was their motto.” Mobutu called it as he saw it. His language was robust, his reasoning clear. “I will always speak the truth to you, no matter how hard that may be to hear. It is over, the time of assurances that all is well when all is not well. And now I will tell you right away: in our beloved country, everything is going very badly indeed.”

He went on to treat the packed stadium to a lecture on national economics. He produced sobering statistics. The production of corn, rice, manioc, cotton, and palm oil had fallen drastically. State spending had grown exponentially. Buying power had plummeted. Corruption was alive and kicking. Things could not go on like this. “Special circumstances, special measures, and that in every area.” Mobutu announced a five-year moratorium on political parties. During that period he planned to get the country back on track and to do that he needed the help of every man and woman. “To achieve this plan of recovery, we need hands, a great many hands.” Mobutu rolled up the sleeves of his own uniform, to set the right example. “We will see each other again here in five years’ time. In five years’ time you will see the difference between the first and the second legislature. I am certain that you will notice then that the Congo of today, with its misery, its hunger and its adversities, will have changed into a rich and prosperous country where the living is good, the envy of the world.”
³

Since Patrice Lumumba, no politician had spoken in the capital with such passion. Mobutu employed Lumumba’s vigorous idiom and supplemented it with a concrete plan of action. He radiated confidence and conviction. Congo was going to become a modern country.

What Zizi really wanted was to go to Europe and write his thesis about Charles Baudelaire, but Mobutu felt that the young intelligentsia should serve their country in a more tangible fashion. Along with a few other of his countrymen, Zizi was therefore sent to Paris to learn the business of television. State television was to become an essential instrument in Mobutu’s attempts to get the country back on its feet. On November 23, 1966, exactly one year after the coup, the first Congolese TV program was broadcast. One year later, the first Lingala-language programs began.

“Antennae and relay stations began popping up everywhere,” Zizi told me. “Congo had color television long before large parts of Eastern Europe. An entire generation of journalists received excellent training. We went to Paris and from Mobutu we received student grants that were two times the French minimum wage. I had my own apartment, I went to the movies. I earned more than a French worker!” When Mobutu came to Paris once to visit his students, they were all taken out to the Champs-Élysées to buy five suits, at his expense.
⁴
When they went to Brussels to shoot some footage, his chief of protocol came by to check the camera crew’s baggage and make sure their clothes were up to snuff. Even the cameraman had to wear a bow tie. In the end, the per diems were so exorbitant that Zizi was able to build his own house.

And then came that letter, in September 1974. In it, Zizi read that he was to come to Kinshasa at the end of the month for a visit of no longer than forty-eight hours. All the Zaïrian students at the INA were summoned because if your studies are being paid for by Mobutu, it is only normal that you do something in return. The reason for such great urgency? An important boxing match was going to take place, and it had to be broadcast live. A boxing match featuring Muhammad Ali.

T
HE FIRST DECADE
of Mobutu’s thirty-year reign was a time of hope, expectations, and revival. “Mobutu was electric,” the writer Vincent Lombume told me once.
⁵
And not only because he brought in television and built hydroelectric power stations, but also because he himself delivered a moral jolt to a nation in disrepair. The period 1965–75 is remembered as the golden decade of an independent Congo. And indeed, Kinshasa was hopping as never before; the beer flowed, the nights never stopped. “Kin-la-Belle,” the city was called. From 1969, beer production rose by 16 percent annually. In 1974, the year of the heavyweight bout, a total of 5 million hectoliters (about 190,000 gallons) was brewed.
⁶
But the first five years, as Mobutu set about consolidating his own power, were also marked by extremely grim moments. Moments surrounding the euphoria like shards of glass cemented to the top of a concrete wall.

It was early in the morning of a gloomy Thursday in Kinshasa that the first people arrived at the big, open field in the
cité
, the wasteland beside the bridge west of Ndolo airport. Was it really going to happen? Young women carrying baskets of sugarcane on their head slowed for a look. Mothers with babies on their back stopped and stared. Civil servants in suits departed from their usual route to the office. Urchins in torn T-shirts came running up. Was it really true? Hundreds, thousands of feet crossed the big field. Chic Italian loafers stepped through the dust beside bare, callused feet. Spike-heeled slippers poked little holes in the sand. Trucks full of soldiers were waiting. In the midst of the military detachment stood proof enough for everyone to see: a wooden podium had been built, topped by a gallows.

It was Thursday, June 2, 1966, and Mobutu had been in power for six months. On Monday he had read a radio statement saying that a plot against him had been thwarted. Four days earlier, on Pentecost Sunday, the people all heard, four members of the old regime had been caught planning a coup. They were Alexandre Mahamba, a former cabinet minister under Lumumba, Joseph Ileo, and Cyrille Adoula; Jérôme Anany, defense minister under Adoula; Émmanuel Bamba, minister of finance in that same government and also a prominent Kimbanguist leader; and above all Évariste Kimba, the man who had briefly served as prime minister at Joseph Kasavubu’s request, just before Mobutu staged his coup. Had they really been planning to overthrow the regime? Most probably, they had walked into a trap. Army officers pretending to be turncoats had asked them to draw up a list of candidates for a new government. The trial that followed was a mockery. None of the officers involved were called to the witness stand; the four civil defendants didn’t stand a chance. When one of them tried to come to his own defense, the court-martial chairman said: “Gentlemen, we are here for the military tribunal, not for a debate. We are here to mete out punishment, the court-martial therefore won’t take long.”
⁷
A few moments later the verdict was handed down: the four were to be hanged. None of them had ever committed an act of violence, been in possession of a weapon, or even started to implement a plan against the regime.

The people converged. Many tens of thousands of them. The French AFP wire service spoke of no less than three hundred thousand.
⁸
It was the biggest crowd in Congolese history. Kinshasa’s population had doubled in recent years and now numbered more than eight hundred thousand souls.
⁹
More than half of them were under the age of twenty.
¹⁰
Due in part to the civil war going on in the interior, migration to the city had picked up again after independence. Kinshasa was bursting at the seams. Across a fifteen-kilometer (about 9.3-mile) zone there now stretched out an endless sea of corrugated iron and makeshift huts, most of them only with a ground floor, all of them overcrowded. The only tall buildings were in the city center. All of these old and new inhabitants of Kinshasa, the “Kinois,” now thronged together on that one Thursday morning after Pentecost. In the 1930s, the colonizer had held executions publicly, as a deterrent. Would Mobutu dare to go that far? To execute four former cabinet ministers, no less?

Mobutu, as the people had found out by now, was no mama’s boy. His former opponents had no choice but to seek refuge elsewhere immediately after the coup. Kasavubu fled to his native region, Tshombe returned to exile in Spain. They were taking no chances. Kasavubu had written to Mobutu to say that he would accept the coup as “being in the country’s greater interests.” As an elected official he could perhaps claim his seat in the parliament, but he “considered it more useful at this point to leave his post.” Kasavubu had always had something monastic about him, but he had never spoken this meekly before. “What I want most is to take a bit of a rest in Bas-Congo,” he went on to note. He wanted to go back to his village, exchange his European clothes for native garb, and tap palm wine for visiting friends and guests.
¹¹
And as though it were not clear enough already, he added: “I have no desire to stir up any agitation whatsoever.”
¹²
Exit Kasavubu, in other words. Four years later, at the age of fifty-two, he died of cancer.

But Tshombe was cut from very different cloth, the people knew. Many of them had voted for him at some point. After his resounding electoral victory, he, as the nation’s savior, continued to nurture major political ambitions. He shuttled back and forth between Paris, Madrid, and Palma de Mallorca, brooding over a possible return. Mobutu was dead set against that. Hadn’t he publicly stated that he would apply himself to “l’élimination pure et simple de la politicaille” (the elimination, once and for all, of the political weasels)?
¹³
None of those gathered around the gallows now could imagine it, but one year later Tshombe—even though democratically elected, like Lumumba—would be condemned to death, in absente, for “subversive activities.” In June 1967 a shady French businessman with contacts in the highest Congolese circles invited him for a airborne jaunt from Palma to Ibiza. On the return flight the man suddenly drew a pistol, fired two shots, and ordered the pilots to fly to Algiers. Upon arrival, Tshombe was thrown straight into prison. Congo demanded his extradition but, going against the recommendation of the Algerian supreme court, President Houari Boumédienne refused to let him go. He originally hoped to extradite Tshombe in exchange for Congo’s breaking diplomatic ties with Israel, but French President Charles de Gaulle personally called on him to forgo any such exchange. An extradition would most certainly have resulted in another murder, like that of Lumumba.
¹⁴
Two years later, on June 29, 1969, three months after Kasavubu, Tshombe died in his Algerian prison cell. A heart attack, the physicians said. Murdered, according to many in Congo. He was only forty-eight.