Congo (61 page)

Mobutu did all he could to combat ethnic reflexes. A strong nation was incompatible with tribal logic; the younger generation had to be given a new frame of reference. The national soccer team had to include players from all over the country. Girls from each province took part in the Miss Zaïre contests. The army was to be inclusive as well: even Pygmies were allowed to join the military.
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To boost Zaïrian awareness, Mobutu also implemented reforms in higher education. The country’s three universities were fused to form one huge, national super-university with three campuses. You could go to Kinshasa to study law, economics, medicine, the natural sciences, or polytechnics. Kisangani was for psychology, teaching, or agricultural engineering. And Lubumbashi, close to the mines, was for earth sciences. There too, far from the capital, one could follow the “risky” curricula such as social sciences, philosophy, and literature.
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This reform weakened the student movement and resulted in an obligatory tribal mixture among young academics. The most striking example of that was one I came across in a yard in Bukavu one evening, just before dusk. I had been invited to visit Adolphine Ngoy and her family. Her daughter was preparing dinner over a charcoal fire. Adolphine came from Moanda, a seaside town on the Atlantic Ocean. How had she ever ended up two thousand kilometers (almost 1,250 miles) to the east, close to the Rwandan border? “Dodo and I met in Kinshasa. He was doing the polytechnic, I was studying linguistics. He was a Mushi from Bukavu, I was a Mukongo from Moanda. As the eldest son he was supposed to marry within his tribe, but he chose me. I moved here. His family objected strenuously. It took years for the neighborhood and the family to accept me.”
⁴⁰

Just as the Erasmus Program was intended to instill young people with a greater love for Europe, by means of a foreign sweetheart if need be, so too did Mobutu’s education reform create greater Zaïrian awareness. Mobutu liked to surround himself with young, enthusiastic Zaïrians who were completely taken by his national project. The two most influential people from his entourage were Citoyen Sakombi Inongo and Citoyen Bisengimana Rwema.

In April 2008 I traveled from Goma to Bukavu by ship across stunningly beautiful Lake Kivu, which forms the border between Rwanda and Congo. On board I was introduced to a reserved, extremely distinguished young man: the sort of gentleman one would never find out on the windy rear deck of a passenger ship, but who prefers to remain below deck and make phone calls. He was the son of Bisengimana, who had been the number-two man in Zaïre for years. “My father started working for Mobutu in 1966, but in 1969 he was promoted to director of the Bureau du Président de la République. Mobutu trusted him highly. My father was even allowed to disagree with him. They called him
le petit léopard
(the leopard cub). He wore a leopard-skin hat too. He remained Mobutu’s cabinet chief until 1977, when they had a falling out. After my father left, no one ever had as much power again under Mobutu.”
⁴¹

The most unusual thing about that appointment, however, lay outside the ship’s window. The boat roared across the water. On our port side rose up the contours of the island of Idjwi, with Rwanda just behind. Bertrand Bisengimana was from that island and he was on his way home. Idjwi had been a German possession at first, but passed into Belgian hands even before World War I. The population consisted largely of Tutsis from Rwanda. Like him and his father. The Tutsis were an ethnic minority that had for centuries formed the social and political upper crust of the Rwandan empire, a position they owed to cattle breeding. Cows were to the Tutsi what coal had been to the industrial barons: everything. As early as the nineteenth century, Tutsi cattlemen had left overcrowded Rwanda to settle on the lake’s far shore. They moved onto the plateaus of South Kivu, to the volcanic region of North Kivu, and to the island of Idjwi. To the Congolese they were, in every way, “different.” They looked different and spoke differently. Their Kinyarwanda was a highly specific Bantu language, spoken only in Rwanda and the south of Uganda and related to the language of Burundi. The archetypal Tutsi was tall to extremely tall (1.95 meters—about 6 feet 5 inches—was not unheard of), with a pointed noise, a high forehead, and thin lips. A cliché, of course, but every bit as true as the clichés concerning the Irish, Italians, and Swedes. According to that same cliché, they had a reputation in Zaïre for being arrogant and devoid of humor, yet Mobutu still appointed one of them to be his cabinet chief.
⁴²
“In the beginning, Mobutu didn’t want to give preferential treatment to his own tribe,” Bertrand said, “otherwise my father, a Tutsi from Idjwi, could never have become the regime’s second man.” For Mobutu, of course, there were advantages to the fact that his direct associate came from a small tribe of migrants that could pose no threat to him . . . . Little did he know then that, in 1997, Rwandan Tutsis would depose him.

M
OBUTU HAD GIVEN THE PEOPLE
greater prosperity; now his aim was to give them a dream. That dream was Zaïrian nationalism. And that dream’s architect was named Dominique Sakombi, better known—in accordance with the tenets of the day—as Sakombi Inongo.
⁴³
Sakombi was an intelligent, extremely eloquent young man, a greater Mobutist than Mobutu himself. In spring 2008 I spoke to him briefly on the phone: his voice had grown thin as rolling paper, in no way reminiscent of the vocal barrage of yesteryear. He was very ill and could not bring himself to grant me an interview.

In the early 1970s Sakombi’s achievement was a particularly ingenious one: he did not ban tribalism, but raised it to the state level. The Zaïrians were still allowed to love their tribe . . . as long as that tribe was called Zaïre. He said: “For us, the ancestral village extends all the way to the borders of the national territory.”
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The arbitrary domain established by nineteenth-century European politicians now had to feel like a natural phenomenon. More than the head of state, Mobutu was to become the national village chieftain, the headman de luxe. And the citizens were his villagers, his children.

Sakombi was the state commissioner of information. His ministry had fourteen hundred staff members, its budget second only to that of the ministry of defense. Mobutu knew where his priorities lay: in a former lifetime he had been both a soldier and a journalist. If his dictatorship had at first relied on the power of the army, from 1970 on it relied on propaganda.

Sakombi designed a sweeping cultural policy that was marketed to the people under the slogan
Recours à l’authenticité!
Resume authenticity! The changing of the name of the country, of the cities and even of the citizens themselves was a part of that, but it went much further. The resumption of authentic living impacted almost every aspect of daily life. When a Zaïrian got up in the morning he knew what to wear. A ban had been imposed on Western clothing. Men were no longer to wear a suit and tie, but were obliged to put on an
abacost
, a high-necked outfit based on Mao’s own, with an upright collar and cravat. (
Abacost
was yet another Mobutuist neologism: it came from
à bas le costume
[down with the suit]. The language, too, was being changed.) Women were no longer allowed to wear miniskirts, only the traditional
pagne
, an elegant outfit in three parts—skirt, blouse, and headscarf. Only natural hairstyles were allowed. Extensions and the “conking” or straightening of hair was forbidden. Even more strongly forbidden were preparations for lightening the skin. The authentic Zaïrian was the diametrical opposite of the
évolué
, a person who no longer aspired to be what he would never become anyway, but who drew strength from his or her own identity, culture, and traditions.

If the Zaïrian happened to live in the city, he saw on his way to work new monuments being erected everywhere. The statues of Stanley, Leopold II, and Albert I were pulled down. As Sakombi drily stated at the time: “As far as I know, there is no statue of Lumumba in the center of Brussels either.”
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On squares and in front of government buildings arose stylized figures in concrete, their arms raised to the sky or toting baskets. Two hundred sculptors were active in Kinshasa alone.
⁴⁶
Their style was strikingly modern (works influenced by Ossip Zadkine, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancus¸i were legion), but that was all right, for those Europeans had themselves been strongly influenced by African art. The authenticity policy was no exercise in nostalgia, but a complex admixture of tradition and modernity. Of it Sakombi said: “We respond as our forefathers would have done, had their culture not been interrupted by colonial acculturation.”
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He was not out for a
retour à l’authenticité
, a going back, but a
recours
, a resumption. From out of the old visual idiom, a new art was to be born. And so Mobutu had art treasures brought together from all over the country. Tens of thousands of masks and fetishes found their way into the national museums, just as all manner of artifacts had made their way to Tervuren during the colonial days.
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The national ballet was expected to study traditional dances in the interior and reinterpret them. A national theater company was set up, a national literature prize established.
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When a Zaïrian listened to the radio during the day, Zaïrian music was what he heard. Western music was banned. Mobutu set himself up as the great champion of popular music. Franco, the leader of OK Jazz, was placed at the head of a new government institution intended to support the music business. Wasn’t this the man who had stood beaming beside Mobutu at the leader’s birthday party, just before the coup? Tabu Ley toured the country. With Mobutu’s support; he even became the first black man to perform at the Olympia in Paris. Docteur Nico experimented with traditional percussion. Franco brought the old accordionist Camille Feruzi back into the limelight.
Recours à l’authenticité
, one heard him sing. Kinshasa’s music industry experienced its busiest years. Music recorded at five in the evening was in the shops the next morning at nine. There were recording artists everywhere. In Matonge, the absolute heart of the city’s nightlife, the central square of the Rond-Point Victoire was redubbed Place des Artistes. A huge statue was erected there to the pioneers of Congolese, no, Zaïrian music.

When the Zaïrian came home from work in the evening, he ate authentic cuisine.
Pundu, fufu, makayabu
: manioc loaf, grubs, all seasoned with the mother of all peppers:
pilipili
. Before taking a sip of your beer or palm wine you first spilled a few drops on the ground. Making libation to the ancestors, that was part of it too. When you turned on the TV after your wonderful meal, you saw the
animation politique
, huge groups of people in geometrical formation, all dressed in the same outfits (usually of green cloth with the national flag on it), dancing and singing the praises of the MPR. Day in, day out, songs went up to the benevolence of the illustrious leader. This went on for six, sometimes even twelve hours a day.
⁵⁰
Then, at six o’clock, there began the high point of state television: the news. It opened with one of Sakombi’s ideas. The president’s face appeared against a sky full of fluffy clouds and grew larger and larger, until it looked as though Mobutu were floating down from heaven, right into your living room. The children thought that he was God the Father. “Everything the president and his wife did was shown on the news,” Zizi said, “and also everything done by the members of the Political Bureau and the central committee. It became a real personality cult. Sakombi called Mobutu ‘the African pharaoh.’ That kind of thing.”

Even when one crawled into bed at night one could not leave the state’s propaganda behind, for Mobutu had called on the people to be fruitful and multiply—the revolution required many pairs of hands. Even at the most intimate moments of one’s private life, one heard the supreme leader calling. The joke went that, during lovemaking, he himself never cried out “Ça va jaillir!” (I’m going to come!), but “Ça va zaïre!” . . . Just as the missions had dictated their view of the “good” colonial body (the use of soap, the covering of one’s nakedness, the practice of monogamy), so too did the dictator worm his way into the intimacy of personal life and subject it to a new, all-inclusive regime. There was no getting around it. To have an orgasm was to serve the nation.

And it worked. The Zaïrian began feeling Zaïrian. With Sakombi’s help, Mobutu accomplished within a few years what the European Union has failed to achieve after more than half a century: people truly began feeling like part of a greater whole. The British and the French still refused to become Europeans, but the Bakongo and the Baluba were proud to be Zaïrian.

B
UT WAS THERE NO RESISTANCE
? Of course there was, but only discreet resistance. Zizi: “Not being allowed to wear a necktie, that was difficult. In Katanga you sometimes saw men walking down the street wearing a suit and an ascot, out of protest. The police would stop them right away: ‘What’s with the colonial outfit? What are you, a foreigner?’ ‘Yes, from Zambia,’ they would say then. After all, you could be executed for that!” While in Europe the necktie became the symbol of bourgeois values and repression, in Congo it developed into a statement of resistance and the desire for freedom. “Some people would put on a necktie, just to sit in the living room.”

The mandatory name change also prompted sly protest. “My father sent me a list of nine names from our family, from which I could choose my
postnom
. But one of my colleagues was named Gérard Ekwalanga. He was a great sports journalist and very religious, so he was quite attached to his Christian name. In protest, he named himself Ekwalanga Abomasoda. That
postnom
was not an ancestral one at all. In Lingala it means: ‘He who kills soldiers’! Or Oscar Kisema, who chose the name Kisema Kinzundi. That sounds like a normal name in Lingala, but in Swahili it means the ‘big vagina.’”