Congo (64 page)

OTRAG had gone looking for a large, empty spot along the equator, and had already taken a look at Indonesia, Singapore, Brazil, and Nauru, all countries bordered by an ocean. Zaïre entered the picture only late in the game. The savanna of Shaba, former Katanga, was thinly populated enough too. Within ten days in 1977 a deal was signed with Mobutu: the arrangement was stunning in every way. OTRAG became lord and master over an area of one hundred thousand square kilometers (thirty-nine thousand square miles), one and a half times the size of Ireland. It was reminiscent of the nineteenth-century rubber companies with their huge concessions that allowed them to “do business” unobstructed. For a period that extended to the remote year 2000, OTRAG leased almost 5 percent of Zaïre’s territory under extremely favorable terms. The company was exempted from paying import duties and was not to be held responsible for any environmental damage. Its employees paid no taxes and enjoyed legal immunity. And because the savanna was not quite as empty as the ocean, they were even allowed to relocate native settlements if they got in the way of the launch. Mobutu, the man who had fought against secessions and rebellions, was now effectively handing over the control over a substantial part of his country. In return he asked for no more than 5 percent of the net profits, if profits were ever made, and the launching of an observation satellite for domestic security, if such a launch should ever take place.
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But things never got to that point. In anticipation, however, he pulled in $25 million dollars’ rent each year, which immediately disappeared into his own pocket.
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Mobutu, beaming with pride, stood with his cronies and awaited liftoff. The countdown was in German. The first two tests had been successful. One year earlier, in deepest secrecy, the company had fired a six-meter-high (twenty-foot-high) rocket twenty kilometers (about 12.5 miles) into the air. Two weeks before, a heavier projectile had actually reached an altitude of thirty kilometers (about nineteen miles). Today, nothing could go wrong. This colossus was going to make it to a hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles).

Mobutu loved such spectacles. Wasn’t he the man who had invited the moon walkers to Kinshasa? Hadn’t he organized the match of the century in Congo? Hadn’t the public hanging been a spectacle too? But performances alone were not enough. He also wanted to treat the country to a series of megalomaniacal infrastructural works. The Inga Dam on the Congo he had rebuilt into one of Africa’s biggest hydroelectric plants. Upon completion in 1982, the new dam, Inga II, was to produce 1,424 megawatts instead of the former 351. Soon afterward Mobutu began dreaming of Inga III, a station with a capacity of no less than 30,000 megawatts, enough to supply energy for all of Africa and a part of Europe too. Before things got to that point, however, he had a high-tension line stretched from Inga all the way to the mining province of Shaba, an 1,800-kilometer-long (1,100-mile-long) extension cord straight through the jungle. Shaba itself was already well-equipped with power stations, but that line was Mobutu’s way of keeping a finger on the main switch of the rebellious province. The project required 10,000 pylons. In Maluku, on the Congo north of Kinshasa, he had a foundry built that could produce an annual 250,000 metric tons (275,000 U.S. tons) of steel.
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All these prestigious projects bore identical earmarks: they were built by foreign companies and equipped with the very latest gadgetry, they were delivered as turnkey projects—and they never worked as they were meant to. As soon as payment was received, the French, Italian, or American contractor would leave the country, abandoning all the high-tech equipment to people who did not know how to use it or had not had the time to learn. Inga II cost $478 million, but Zaïre continued to be plagued by blackouts.
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Maintenance of the turbines was neglected and the two (of the original eight) that still work today generate only 30 percent of the intended yield. The high-tension line to Shaba cost a dizzying $850 million, but often carried no more than 10 percent of its capacity.
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In addition, the project included no trunk lines to serve the cities and villages along the way. A $182 million price tag came attached to the steel mill at Maluku, but the company never turned a profit: it was unable to process local iron ore, only imported scrap metal.
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All that wasted money . . . That never became clearer to me than in 2007, the first time Zizi Kabongo showed me around the national broadcasting building. Mobutu’s construction craze was not limited to heavy industry; Kinshasa was to be beautified too, just like Brussels in the days of Leopold II. In the borough of Limete a huge traffic cloverleaf was built, with broad exits and entrances and daring overpasses; in the middle of the rotunda there arose a modernistic replica of the Eiffel Tower, a pointed steel-and-concrete structure 150 meters (about 485 feet) high. A panoramic restaurant was to be built at the top of it, but the complex was never finished. Along the banks of the Congo he had built the CCIZ, Zaïre’s international trade center, a high-priced structure that has stood in disrepair for decades. Shortly after the official opening, when the air-conditioning broke down, it turned out that the building’s windows could not be opened—a bit of a nuisance in a tropical country. In the center of the city there arose a chic, multilevel shopping mall called the Galéries Présidentielles. And a few kilometers farther away came the media park for the RTNC, the national broadcasting company, Kabongo’s new place of employment. Cost price: $159 million.

“The French built this,” he said as he showed me around. “They were determined to get the contract. In exchange for the commission, they gave Mobutu free Mirage jet fighters.” He showed me the dilapidated recording studios. Two of the original nine were still in use: massive, unequipped hangars. During live broadcasts, a little band of intrepid journalists availed themselves of two old cameras and a few microphones, at least if the electricity hadn’t gone out. I saw it happen once myself. As part of an artists’ exchange program between Brussels and Kinshasa, I took part in a morning talk show with a few other guests. The ceiling sagged. In the light from the spots we could see the asbestos floating down ceaselessly. Power cables were exposed; mixing consoles were lashed together with rope. I couldn’t understand how they could produce live television here. Before the talk show came a news report. The anchorwoman had no autocue, not even notes, but she presented the items perfectly, by heart, without the slightest hesitation and with amazing presence. The only thing was: after the news had been going for a few minutes, a technician realized that there was no microphone on her table. The broadcast had to be interrupted. While the crew feverishly went in search of a mike that still worked, the Congolese viewers were treated to a long stretch of test pattern. I saw the elegant anchorwoman sitting there at her brightly lit table, in the vastness of a darkened, rundown studio.

“The complex was originally built for six thousand employees,” Kabongo said. “Two thousand people still work here.” The central building was a nineteen-story phallus. The reception desk in the entryway had a switchboard that could accommodate hundreds of incoming calls. It had all been out of order for years, just like the elevators. These days everything went by way of the emergency stairwell, a dark labyrinth like some sketch by Escher that stank terribly of urine because the plumbing on the top floors was broken as well. In the old days the managing director had his office on the building’s top floor, from where he had a majestic view of the whole city. Today no one feels like clambering up to that eagle’s nest. The current director enjoys the great privilege of a ground-floor office. The higher you work in the building, the lower your status. “What a waste of money,” Kabongo sighed as we climbed to his fifth-floor office, “the RTNC, the CCIZ, all those projects . . . and all of it at a point when there was so much poverty elsewhere in the country.”
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It is truly amazing, the way Mobutu kept throwing money around. Ever since 1975 and the start of an endless war of decolonization in neighboring Angola, Zaïre had been unable to use the Benguela Line—the stretch of railroad on which my father had worked and that connected the Katangan mining basin with the Atlantic. It became much harder to export ore and Mobutu missed out on a lot of foreign revenue. The country was crumbling, but he seemed hardly aware of that.

Vier, drei, zwei, eins
. . . a burst of flames lit the surroundings. The roar swelled. Slowly, the rocket rose from the launching pad. A hundred kilometers into the atmosphere, that’s where it was headed, a new step forward in African space travel. A lavish lunch was waiting for the guests. But before the projectile had left the pad, even a child could see that something was going wrong. The rocket listed, cut a neat arc to the left and landed a few hundred meters away, in the valley of the Luvua, where it exploded. As a thick cloud of smoke rose up from the savanna, Mobutu turned away in silence. Against the sky, the spectators could briefly see a dark vapor trail describing the curve the rocket had made.
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A parabola of soot. It looked like a graphic representation of Mobutu’s regime: after the steep rise of the first years, his Zaïre toppled inexorably and plunged straight into the abyss.

A
ND THERE WERE MORE THINGS TO COME DOWN
out of the blue in those years. Between 1974 and 1980, two of the Zaïrian army’s C-130 transport planes, two Macchi fighters, three Alouette helicopters, and four Puma helicopters went down.
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Not a single one of those crashes took place during combat. The reason for so much bad luck? The soldiers were so badly paid that they had started selling the spare parts for their aircraft. Pierre Yambuya, a helicopter pilot in the national army, saw it all happen. His testimony provides a unique glimpse of the state the armed forces were in at the time. “Anyone with a private plane knew that Kinshasa was the world’s cheapest market for spare parts. The soldiers sold them for twenty times less than the factory price.”
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Mobutu showed off with his prestigious projects, but began neglecting the institution that had made his coup possible: the army. Air force pilots supplemented their incomes by selling, wherever they landed, a part of their kerosene to the local population, who used it as lantern fuel. It became such a common custom that children would run with their yellow jerrycans to the landing strip as soon as a government plane arrived. Yambuya knew what he was talking about: “A sergeant-major earned 280 zaïres, a bag of rice cost 1,200 zaïres back then. An adjutant got 430 zaïres. But a school uniform cost 850 zaïres, and with the 5 zaïre allowance he received for each child, you couldn’t even buy a pencil.” That suddenly makes corruption much more understandable. The soldiers did not protest “up through the ranks,” for that could cost them their jobs or even their lives, but repeated at lower levels that which went on over their heads. “To lead a reasonable life, for example, I sold the fuel from my helicopter. My superior stuck the funding intended for my mission in his own pocket and said: ‘If you land somewhere, just sell some fuel. After all, what you do is your own business.’”
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Zaïre became sick. The deeper cause was a shortage of revenues (due to the copper crisis, the oil crisis, failed Zaïrianization, and grotesque public spending), and the worst symptoms were the withdrawal of the state and the spread of corruption. It was in the army that that first became visible. Soldiers took military vehicles away from the base and used them to run their own taxi services. Radios and record players disappeared from the mess halls, bulldozers and trucks from the garages. Officers even took their subordinates home with them and used them as servants. Absenteeism in the barracks was high, sometimes more than 50 percent. The few soldiers who did show up for roll call were not highly motivated. Discipline was something from long, long ago. An internal document, the “Mémorandum du Réflexion,” did not shrink from self-criticism when it came to a concise summary of the troops’ morale: “Everyone wants to command, but no one wants to obey.”
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Meanwhile, on the other side of the Angolan border, Moïse Tshombe’s troops—the veterans of the Katangan secession—were increasingly active. Many of them belonged to the Lunda tribe, a people whose traditional territory reached into Angola. Mobutu had driven them into exile many years ago, after they had defeated the Simba rebels. But now, along with their sons and new recruits, they were out for revenge. These notorious Katangan guardsmen had followed a remarkable course. During the Katangan secession (1960–63) they had fought for a rightist, European-run Katanga, but in Angola they had taken sides since 1975 with the Marxist MPLA, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola. The reason for the ideological turnaround was simple enough: the MPLA, like them, held a grudge against Mobutu.

After the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Angola started in 1975 a violent struggle for decolonization. As in Congo the contest was one for the throne, but in Angola the conflict was far bloodier. There were three factions. Agostinho Neto’s left-wing MPLA faced off against the FNLA of Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA. The superpowers got involved. Angola was the spot where the Cold War experienced its most heated African episode. The MPLA received massive support from Russia and Cuba; the two other militias had American backing. The U.S. support went by way of South Africa and Zaïre: Pretoria backed Savimbi in the south; Kinshasa supported Roberto in the north. Because Roberto also happened to be Mobutu’s brother-in-law, the former Katangan guardsmen chose to join up with the MPLA. Their leader’s name was Nathanaël Mbumba, their new nom de guerre the FLNC (Front pour la Libération Nationale du Congo), their nickname
les Tigres Katangais
(the Katangan Tigers).