Congo (68 page)

Kabongo had been too old for that. “Mobutu threw a big party. Franco and Tabu Ley came and played there. The guests wore
abacosts
with the MPR logo on the collar. But Mobutu’s own sons were big fans of Papa Wemba. They wore baggy pants and shirts with flashy collars. Those were two separate worlds! La Sape was really the young people’s music. They considered themselves a new generation and rebelled against their parents. Papa Wemba refused to talk about politics. His music wasn’t made to listen to carefully, but to get the feet moving right away. It was music as anesthesia.”

An entire generation grew up in a world of poverty and misery. Music provided an escape valve, but going to school remained extremely popular. Even if the university auditoriums were a shambles, even if the professors rarely showed up, and even if the workbooks were missing and the mimeographed sheets worn to a tatter, the college classrooms filled week after week with young people who hoped that a university diploma would pull them out of the morass. The thirst for knowledge and diplomas was enormous and that has never changed. But the level of education was miserable, and corruption was found in all walks of life. For many poorly paid professors, everything was negotiable. Many female students exchanged sexual favors for a good grade. “For many girls, the body is no longer a source of beauty, but has necessarily also become a source of profitability,” one worried professor of moral philosophy wrote. The phenomenon even extended down to the secondary schools. Principals, party officials, and magistrates liked to brag about having
une série 7
(a number 7 series), a teenage girl born in the 1970s.
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“Many girls’ schools have been transformed into sexual fishponds for leading figures in political-administrative circles. They leave their offices before the official closing time and mingle with the rows of cars waiting to pick up the children at the school gates. The evenings usually start at a restaurant in a working-class neighborhood, with roast chicken or fish and lots of
pilipili
, and end in the wee hours in some little hotel, ensconced in the darkness of the tropical nights.”
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T
O COUNTER THE CRISIS
, a new parallel economy arose, revolving around home commerce. Women would get up early in the morning and fry a single chicken, then take it to the market. Well-to-do ladies who had acquired a pair of chic foreign pumps through the informal circuit would sell them in their own neighborhoods. Nurses who worked in hospitals by day would take home a strip of pills and sell them one by one. Pilots would flog a few jerrycans full of kerosene. Civil servants haggled over every document they stamped. Policeman were delighted with every traffic violation. There was always something that could be “arranged.” Quid pro quo.
Madesu ya bana
, the people said, beans for the children, in the old tradition of
matabiche
and baksheesh: the Esperanto of the desperadoes.

In response to a state that was withdrawing from its citizens, the citizens withdrew from the state. “Article 15” they called it, in reference to a fictitious article in the Zaïrian constitution that read: “Débrouillez-vous!” (get it while you can!). Often enough, this involved illegal activities (contraband, theft, fraud)—but what does illegal mean when the country itself is criminal? Grassroots corruption was the best way to counter corruption at the top, for faithfully paid taxes would simply evaporate up there anyway. Hadn’t Mobutu Sese Seko himself more or less promised to turn a blind eye? During a huge rally in Kinshasa’s soccer stadium, he had said: “If you must steal, then steal a little bit and leave a little bit for the nation.”
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He should not have said that. During those years, 30 to 60 percent of the coffee harvest was smuggled out of the country, good for a sum of $350 million between 1975 and 1979. Seventy percent of the diamonds, 90 percent of the ivory, tons of cobalt, and hectoliters of gasoline crossed the borders unseen.
⁶³
The country was leaky as a sieve, and the state lost out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. It went little by little, just as the president had suggested, until nothing more was left. “The cockroach can finish a whole loaf of manioc, using only his teeth,” the people said.
⁶⁴
There was no other way to survive. Thanks to the informal economy, people were able to pay teachers and nurses. The country was living on borrowed time, but at least it was alive.

This economics of pillage, of course, could not endure. Congo was being cannibalized. No one gave a hoot about the state anymore. The postal service no longer functioned, water and electricity became scarce, there was less than one telephone line for every thousand inhabitants.
⁶⁵
The country, as Zao said in one of his songs, was becoming
cadavéré
, it was going into rigor mortis. Boats on the river became slowly drifting villages that would perhaps reach their destination someday. Air Zaïre, the national airline and a former source of pride, received the nickname “Air Peut-Etre” (Air Maybe) with as motto “la seule chose au Zaïre qui ne vole jamais,” the only thing in Zaïre that won’t disappear into thin air. Humor was the best remedy.

“Mobutu and Reagan and Mitterand were flying around the world in the Concorde,” began the best joke from the Mobutu era. “Reagan stuck his hand out the window and said: ‘I think we’re flying over America.’ ‘How can you tell?’ the other two heads of state asked. ‘I just felt the Statue of Liberty,’ said Reagan. Then Mitterand stuck his hand out the window. ‘I believe we are now flying over France,’ he said right away. ‘How can you tell?’ Mobutu and Reagan asked him. ‘I just felt the Eiffel Tower.’ Finally Mobutu stuck his hand out the window. ‘I know for sure that we’re flying over Zaïre,’ he told his fellow passengers. ‘But how can you be so sure?’ they protested. ‘Zaïre doesn’t have any towers, does it?’ ‘No,’ Mobutu said, ‘but somebody just stole my watch.’”
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T
HE CRISIS CHANGED THE RELATIONSHIP
between the sexes as well. Many men had lost their jobs and felt humiliated because they could no longer support their families, let alone their mistresses. They were poorer than their parents and often had to turn to them for help. The man had once been the breadwinner, the one who came home with a paycheck, but now it was the woman who saw to the family’s income. A school principal in Kikwit told me: “We would run through my wages in two days. They didn’t add up to anything. And often enough I didn’t even get paid. My wife had a stall on the market. She sold soap, sugar, and salt. That was our family’s main source of income. During that period, many women earned more than their husbands. Sometimes the women even moved out altogether. Young women started going to college and became more independent.”
⁶⁷

The informal economy, however arduous and unpredictable, provided some women with new opportunities. A number of them adopted a more fighting spirit. Manioc saleswomen in Kivu, farming women themselves, refused to simply accept the way that local police and officials kept coming up with new taxes whenever they brought their baskets to market. They filed official protests, all the way up to the provincial governor’s office.
⁶⁸
In Bukavu, Régine Mutjima, headmistress at a girl’s school, noted that the policy of spending cuts implemented by the IMF and World Bank was leading to abuses.

[Léon] Kengo wa Dondo was prime minister in 1983, and he had plans to effect drastic cutbacks. Even the pregnancy leave for female schoolteachers was scrapped, ostensibly because there was no money for that, while government funds were being stolen by the truckload at the same time. I was the leader of the Association des Femmes Enseignantes de Bukavu [the Bukavu League of Women Teachers]. A Canadian colleague had told me about Gandhi. I read his writings and those of Martin Luther King, and the works of Lumumba and Nkrumah, even though that was forbidden. I also read the banned weekly
Jeune Afrique
. In 1986 one of my colleagues died during childbirth. She had kept working right up to the day itself, her baby weighed less than four pounds at birth, less than a little rabbit. I had never experienced anything like it. I decided to organize a sit-in. We went in little groups to the payroll office for the local schools. Three-quarters of the female school teachers took part. At 10 o’clock sharp we all sat down. We were running the risk of being shot at, we knew that, but we wanted to close down the city. That evening I was arrested. A Landrover full of soldiers took me to town hall. All I had on was my nightdress. They were all there: the mayor, the head of State Security, the MPR, the board of education, the borough council. It was one woman against fifty men. One by one, they started calling me names, but all I could think about was that baby that weighed less than four pounds, that little rabbit, whose mother, Madame Rumbasa, a good colleague, had died because she wasn’t given pregnancy leave. I became furious. I exploded. I screamed at the mayor. I had a lump in my throat, it was only the second time I’d cried during my adult life. When my tirade was over, no one spoke a word, that’s how furious I’d been. But then I felt calm. Around midnight, the mayor took me back to my house in his Mercedes.
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It was a unique act of courage. Mutjima was not prosecuted, but was allowed to go to conferences in Nsele and Gbadolite to talk about the problems faced by young people. Things did not always work out so well, however. On the other side of the country, Thérèse Pakasa worked as a cashier at a little supermarket in Kinshasa. She had once met Antoine Gizenga, Lumumba’s deputy prime minister who lived in exile in Brazzaville but came from her native region. She too read Lumumba and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She became enraged when she thought about the situation in her country. “I wanted to organization a demonstration, but the people were so afraid! I could only find three women who were willing to go along. A woman who sold bread and two housewives. We made a banner and pamphlets. In July 23, 1987 we walked down the Boulevard du 30 Juin, where the Belgian embassy was. We were carrying the old, blue Congolese flag.”

Four everyday women who risked their lives walking down the biggest street in the capital with a forbidden banner and a forbidden flag . . .

“After a couple of hundred meters we were arrested. The intelligence service kept me in detention for six weeks. I was tortured, but not very badly, and my determination grew. One year later I did it again, this time with ten women. We were arrested again. I was beaten, then sent under military guard into exile in another part of the country. When I came back to Kinshasa, I went straight to prison and all my children were arrested too, even my two-week-old baby. They couldn’t believe that a woman would do something like that.”
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T
HE BLOOD FLOWING FROM THE WOMAN
’
S HEAD
. The man’s legs bent back like those of a jumping jack. The wintry footage from Romania continued to haunt Mobutu.
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The East bloc was collapsing, the Cold War was coming to an end. Soon he would be an expendable ally to the Americans. Mobutu owed his empire to the fear of communism, but Marx had proven to be a colossus with feet of clay. Loyalty in the struggle against the red menace no longer counted; respect for human rights became the new criterion. At a summit of Francophone countries, President François Mitterand announced that France would from now on support only those developing countries that abided by democratic values and honored human rights. The days of Giscard were over.

Early 1990. Along with the new decade, a new political climate also seemed to descend. In February Nelson Mandela was released from prison, a world event that gave new hope to the entire continent. In the Ivory Coast, in Benin, Gabon, and Tanzania, cries for the introduction of a multiparty system grew louder. The military dictatorships in Congo-Brazzaville and Mali shook on their foundations. The flush of freedom reached Zaïre as well. Mobutu realized that he could no longer ignore his people.

And so he consulted them, just as the Belgians had done in 1958 and Leopold II had done in 1905. On those earlier occasions, those consultations had resulted in a dramatic turnabout, but what would happen now? A group of consultants went from city to city and organized public hearings. All over the country, citizens were allowed to express their opinion of Mobutu’s regime, yes, even to air their grievances. There was no need to fear prosecution. The first hearing was held in Goma and Mobutu was there. He was quite willing to hear constructive criticism; after all, no one was perfect. But it rained, no, it
poured
complaints. Mobutu found himself standing in a tropical downpour of dissatisfaction. Old women stood up and delivered broadsides against him. His new nickname at that point was Mobutu
Sesesescu
, a clear reference to his late Romanian friend. Press secretary Kibambi Shintwa saw his reaction: “Mobutu couldn’t believe it, he was extremely disillusioned. He felt that the country owed him everything, and he withdrew, he was hurt. He didn’t want to admit the truth. He refused to attend the rest of the sittings.”

The investigators did their job. More than six thousands reports were drawn up, most of them absolutely damning. The chairman of the investigating committee presented a summary to the president. Zizi Kabongo remembered how that went: “Mobutu had withdrawn to his yacht, the
Kamanyola
. He called together the political bureau of the MPR for consultations onboard. They were stuck there for two or three days. The cabinet ministers had to come too.” Even the American secretary of state came by to say that Bush Sr. despite all historical ties of friendship, could not go on granting him unconditional support.
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