Congo (67 page)

In 1983 Mertens received the most ceremonious commission of his career. “I had to make new uniforms for all the generals, and no less than four full-dress uniforms for Mobutu himself, two black ones and two white ones. His generals had decided to confer on him the rank of marshal, and I went to work.” Mobutu, commander in chief of the armed forces, who had cut a bad figure indeed during the Shaba uprising, was now to be given the historically rare rank of marshal! The idea, of course, was his own.

Mertens showed me pictures of the ceremony and explained his creations. “Look, that collar, the belt, and cuffs, they were embroidered with real gold thread. That chain is made of gold too. All of it hand tailored. He had two times seven stars on his sleeves. All made from solid gold, from France.”
⁵¹
His uniform cap bore a cockade with the emblem
Paix Justice Travail
, even though his country offered no peace, no justice, and no work. The photographs of his marshal’s inauguration bear witness to unparalleled gaudiness. Mobutu wore white gloves and held a scepter. He was driven around in a white Mercedes and waved to the people along the way. He inspected the troops, the magistrates, and the top officials, and gave a speech from beneath an ornamental canopy. A marshal needs a motto, he told the nation. His would be:
Toujours servir
. To serve at all times. It wasn’t even laughable anymore. It was the sad low point of madness cast adrift.

B
UT DIDN
’
T ANYONE SPEAK OUT
? In December 1980 a group of thirteen members of parliament had the audacity to send a fifty-two-page open letter to the president, calling for political change. Their leader was Étienne Tshisekedi, a former member of Mobutu’s staff who had written the 1967 constitution and occupied a number of ministerial and ambassadorial posts. Like everyone whose name starts with “Tshi,” he was a Muluba from Kasai. His obstinacy was legendary.

For fifteen years we have obeyed you. Look at all the things we’ve done during that time, just to please you? Sing, dance, perform political drama . . . we have been through every form of humiliation, all sorts of insults unlike anything even pressed upon us by our colonizers. And we did all that so that you would lack for nothing as you set about achieving, even if only half, of the social model you presented to us. Did you succeed in that? Unfortunately, no.

After fifteen years of government, which you have carried out without any distribution of power, we are now faced with two absolutely divided camps. On one side we have a few scandalously wealthy members of a privileged caste. On the other we have the masses of the people who live in darkest misery and can depend at most only on international charity to survive after a fashion. And if that charity happens to reach Zaïre, these same wealthy few make arrangements to claim it to the disadvantage of the needy masses! . . .

Citoyen Président-Fondateur
, this dry-eyed analysis shows that our society is faced with grave problems. You have often said that a real chief is one who admits his own mistakes. You have done so often enough. But the tragedy is that you do not always assume the consequences of those mistakes. And the worst thing is that you take one step forward, and three steps back.
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It had been a long time since Mobutu had been spoken to so candidly. The group of thirteen was arrested and sent into exile abroad, but in 1982 a few of its members set up the Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (UDPS), an illegal opposition party that aimed to challenge the MPR’s single-party state. That party would become yet another nail in Mobutu’s coffin.

I talked about this with Raymond Mukoka, one of those involved from the very start. He had helped to write the MPs’ letter. “The cosigners were sentenced to fifteen years in exile. My name wasn’t on it, but as coauthor I was flown first to the Ituri, then on to Kasai. I had to pay for the food and wages of my own guards! We received support from Amnesty International and the Catholic Church, who used its field phones to keep my family informed.
Jeune Afrique
wrote about us. In 1985 I paid a brief visit to the capital. The UDPS arose in exile, just like the Kimbanguists. Some of the party members dreamed of forming a paramilitary wing, but we always remained nonviolent. Tshisekedi said: Our pen and our words, those are our weapons. In 1987 Mobutu invited us to Gbadolite. He said: join the MPR. We said: No! Then he said: Well, then take part in the MPR institutions. He gave us access to the central committee, offered us ministerial posts or management positions in the state-owned companies. A lot of our people took him up on that, but I didn’t want to, and Tshisekedi didn’t either.”
⁵³

Mobutu mollified his critics by giving them gifts and one of his favorite presents was a ministerial post. A political career was too lucrative for most people to refuse. Between 1965 and 1990 no less than fifty-one cabinets were installed, each of them with around forty ministers.
⁵⁴
Regular reshuffles, on the average of every six months, made sure no one could gain real power, while providing the next group with a chance to move up to the buffet.

Mobutu was a political schemer par excellence. “He didn’t like big meetings,” Zizi said, “he always chose for the tête-à-tête, for private consultations that allowed him to play out one politician against the other. He had a frightening ability to generate hatred between individuals.” Mobutu had an entire arsenal of techniques for binding people to him. He could be charming, friendly, and funny, but also manipulative, treacherous, and vicious. The emotional yo-yo was a tool he used consciously. He could be hearty and jovial one day, only to treat you with frosty distance the next. Kibambi Shintwa told me about that: “Mobutu was protean, slippery, impossible to figure out. He was fickle. He changed every day. What he was primarily interested in was showing that his power was not to be toyed with. He was jealous, like an animal clutching its prey.”

The very people he protected were sometimes humiliated in plain public view. Others, who had seemingly blown it for good, like former prime minister Nguza Karl I Bond, might suddenly be forgiven and allowed to return to Kinshasa—Nguza took Mobutu up on that offer and lost all credibility. Still, for a time, Nguza had been the hope of the clandestine opposition. In this way, critics were made to dance to the pipes of the MPR and Mobutu triumphed as wise and mild village chieftain.

Another privilege of the traditional chieftain of which Mobutu made avid use was his
droit de cuissage
(right to deflower). Zizi Kabongo said:

When he traveled around the country, the local chiefs always offered him a virgin. It was a great honor for the family when a girl lost her virginity to the supreme chieftain. It was an old custom, but Mobutu took it even further. He didn’t hesitate to employ women in his power games. He used women from his province to advance his political ends. He slept with the wives of his cabinet ministers, in order to hear their secrets and to humiliate his ministers. When they were summoned to Gbadolite, they never took their wives, they would take a niece instead. They didn’t mind that as much . . . . Mokonda was a legal counsel, one of his closest associates. He had a very beautiful wife. One day Mokonda was in a meeting with Mobutu at Gbadolite. What he didn’t know was that his wife was sleeping in the room next door. The president had had her flown in on a private jet. Mobutu, we used to say, is multipolygamous. He destroyed a lot of marriages.

Political and sexual intrigues were only the tip of the iceberg. The more Mobutu withdrew to his yacht or his palace, the more he wanted to know what was going on in the country. In the 1980s the intelligence services became as important as the propaganda services had been in the 1970s. The president had half a dozen such secret services, all working at cross-purposes, but here too the motto was: divide and conquer. Spies were everywhere. Men distrusted their wives, mothers their sons, sisters their brothers. Mobutu had informants everywhere, even in Belgium. Paranoia became the emotional bottom line. Cabinet ministers asked to dine with the president feigned a strict diet or intestinal problems, afraid as they were of being poisoned. Others brought their own bag lunches.
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Rumor had it that an underground canal ran from the presidential palace on Kinshasa’s Mont Ngaliema and the river; political opponents were thrown into the canal to feed the crocodiles. Belgian diplomats, even among themselves, no longer pronounced Mobutu’s name. During meetings they preferred to speak of “Jefke Van den Bergh”: Jef was the Flemish equivalent of “Joseph,” Van den Bergh meant “of the mountain,” a reference to Mont Ngaliema.

A true reign of terror settled over Congo. The country was ruled by caprice, and there was nothing to be done about it. In 2005, during one of my first visits there, I came in contact with Madame A., an elderly lady and a former newsreader. During dinner she told me her incredible life’s story:

My husband was general editor of the daily news programs. We had five children. He was a handsome man. Mobutu’s sister-in-law saw him on TV and wanted him, married or not. One evening, while we were sitting around the table, armed soldiers suddenly came to the door. My husband had to go along with them. They told me: you keep your mouth shut, or you and your children will end up in the
fleuve
out at Kinsuka. At work they told me: don’t try anything, he hasn’t been taken by just anyone. I never saw him again. Mobutu gave him ambassadorial posts in Togo, Argentina, Austria, and Iran. He died in 1995, while serving as ambassador to South Africa. A lot of people in Kinshasa know the story, but not many of them know it’s about me.
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Mobutu’s secret services were so ruthless that even today Madame A. insists on remaining anonymous. The Division Spéciale Présidentielle (DSP) acquired a particularly sinister reputation. The corps consisted of several thousand specially trained and well-paid soldiers from Mobutu’s native region. The great unifier of the nation had become so neurotic that he now drew his Praetorian Guard only from among his own tribesmen! It was an army within the army. They were loyal and unrelenting. The hard core consisted of
les hiboux
(the owls), so called because they came at night and silently spirited people away. Opponents or suspected opponents were arrested and held without trial in filthy prisons without food. In Zaïre, like everywhere else in the world, the human mind was extremely creative in devising tortures. There was “the fish,” a method in which the prisoners’ hands were tied behind his back and he was hung upside down before being dipped in a tub of water. There was “the Boeing,” in which the prisoner was raised to the ceiling on pulleys, beaten with sticks, and then allowed to fall through “air pockets.” There was the “stenographer,” whereby blocks of wood were shoved between the fingers and then tightened to crush the fingers. There was “the nutcracker,” in which the feet were clamped into wet blocks of wood and the prisoner was then put in the sun; the wood dried and shattered the tarsal bones.
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Electric shocks were applied to genitals and cigarettes stubbed out on lips. Amnesty International submitted an official protest and tried to estimate the scope of the human rights violations, but the exact number has never become clear.
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As in colonial times, people were sent into domestic exile. Others disappeared without a trace.

Pierre Yambuya, the helicopter pilot who had sold his kerosene, flew secret missions on a number of occasions. He was required to fly over the Congo River or a lake, while commandos in the back tossed out dozens of bags; bags containing bodies, he saw. “Between March and October of 1983 I flew four such missions and each time a load was dumped close to the rapids at Kinsuka. To the best of my knowledge, at least one such flight was carried out each week.” Sometimes they didn’t even bother to kill the prisoners first. One day Yambuya had to land his Alouette on the
Kamanyola
, the presidential yacht. Yambani, one of Mobutu’s ranking bodyguards climbed into the helicopter with two bound men and two commandos. Mobutu stood and watched. “When we take off again, Yambani tells me where to fly to. At a certain point he asks me to take it up to a thousand meters [3,250 feet]. He looks around to make sure there’s not a living soul in sight—except perhaps a few hunters in the jungle—and orders the commandos to lock in to their harnesses. The commandos obey, then open the right hatch at the back of the helicopter. They throw the first prisoner out, before he even has time to protest. The second prisoner starts weeping and begging for mercy, but then he too is pushed out of the hatch, in a free fall over the jungle.”
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I
N
K
INSHASA
, the repressive climate gave rise to a circuit of rumors in which truth and fantasy flowed together. That grapevine was referred to as the
radio-trottoir
(the sidewalk radio) because the official media spewed only government propaganda. The street became the venue for suspicion and sarcasm. Clandestine comic books and primitive paintings were sold at the crossings where the taxi-buses came together. Kinshasa developed a lively visual culture. Social, political, and moral topics were portrayed on mimeographed sheets or rudimentary canvases, with no explicit opinion expressed for or against. With virtuoso irony, cartoonists and painters depicted life in the big city under the dictatorship. The subjects were often ambivalent: the artists reveled in portraying transgressions and took potshots at all that was sacred. The scenes resembled something from Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Breughel.

Young people disgusted with Mobutism developed a very unique form of social commentary. They did not protest with words or images, but with clothing. The
évolué
’s suit had been banned, and the mandatory
abacost
they considered old-fashioned. And so they dressed in brand-new, extremely flashy outfits. They saved their money and imported shockingly expensive brand clothing from the boutiques along Louisalaan in Brussels and Place Vendôme in Paris, or at least that’s what they claimed. They christened their movement
la Sape
(Société des Ambianceurs et Personnes d’Elégance, the Society of Mood-Makers and Trendsetters). The musician Papa Wemba, a working-class-boy-become-international-pop-star, was their pope,
le Pape de la Sape
. It was a highly remarkable movement. Seemingly ridiculous at a first glance, a man in Kinshasa during times of crisis in a pair of gaudy sunglasses, a Jean-Paul Gaultier shirt, and a sable coat, but the
sapeurs
’ materialism was a form of social criticism, just as punk was in Europe. It displayed a deep aversion to the misery and repression they experienced, and allowed one to dream of a Zaïre without cares. Materialism is one of the most common symptoms of poverty. La Sape was about success, about visibility, about being in the picture and scoring. A disco was meant to be entered with a combination of
chic
,
choc
, and
chèque
. The true
sapeur
was übercool: he moved and spoke with total control, he treated his friends to beer and picked up girls with a snap of the fingers. He was a dandy, a playboy, a snob. Luxury meant respect. The
sapeur
wasn’t looked down on, but admired. For many dirt-poor young people, the extravaganza he put on kept hope alive.