In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz
Read In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz Online
Authors: Michela Wrong
LIVING ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER IN MOBUTU'S CONGO
To Michael Holman,
who made sure the book got written
Writing this book,
I relied on the hospitality of many. In Brussels, Sarah Lambert provided a home away from home; in Washington Patti Waldmeir welcomed me; in Paris I am indebted to Beatrice Lacoste; and in Geneva my uncle and aunt Mario and Anneke Musacchio were wonderful hosts. In Kinshasa I would have gone mad had it not been for the hospitality and friendship of Serge and Francis.
Journalists are not generally a sharing breed, so I am particularly grateful for help given by Massimo Alberizzi, Marina Rini, Victor Rousseau, Marie France Cros, David Goodhart and Philip Gourevitch. Steve Askins and Carole Collins, experts on Mobutu's financial arrangements, were kind enough to give me access to their papers. I am grateful to the
Financial Times
for funding so many of my African journeys and indulging my bookwriting ambitions. It was a great boon to be able to call on John Caveney, researcher at the
Financial Times
, for help.
My friends Iain Pears, Sarah and Juliette Towhidi were supportive throughout. My parents put up with my short temper and
Julian Harty, my computer-wise brother-in-law, kept me operational by salvaging the ruins of my laptop.
I have bounced questions and ideas incessantly off Peter Vandevelde, Arthur Malu Malu, Julie Mukendi and Professor Mabi Mulumba. Their patience and good humour are much appreciated.
I owe particular thanks to the US magazine
Transition
. At a time when no one else seemed interested in the project, editor Mike Vazquez was appreciative and enthusiastic, keeping me going when I was in danger of flagging. Edited excerpts from the prologue and chapters eight and twelve were first published in
Transition
's pages.
Lastly, my thanks to Chris McGreal, Christian Jennings, Richard Dowden and, above all, Koert Lindyer, my cherished travelling companions throughout the years in Congo/Zaire.
âHe won't be forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honour; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking. No; I can't forget him.'
Heart of Darkness
âJoseph Conrad
The feeling struck home
within seconds of disembarking.
When the motor-launch deposited me in the cacophony of the quayside, engine churning mats of water hyacinth as it turned to head back across the brown expanse of oily water that was the River Zaire, I was hit by the sensation that so unnerves first-time visitors to Africa. It is that revelatory moment when white, middle-class Westerners finally understand what the rest of humanity has always knownâthat there are places in this world where the safety net they have spent so much of their lives erecting is suddenly whipped away, where the right accent, education, health insurance and a foreign passportâall the trappings that spell âIt Can't Happen to Me'âno longer apply, and their well-being depends on the condescension of strangers.
The pulse of apprehension drummed as I stuffed my clothes back into the ageing suitcase that had chosen the river crossing between Brazzaville and Kinshasa as the moment to split at the seams, transforming me into a truly African traveller. It quickened as a sweating young British diplomat signally failed to talk our way through the red tape and a chain of hostile policemen picked through the intimacies of my luggage, deciding which bits to keep. It subsided as we emerged from our three-hour ordeal, a little the lighter, finally crossing the magic line separating the customs area from the city.
But in truth, the quiet thud of fear would be there throughout my time in Zaire, whether I was drinking a cold Primus beer in the bustling Cité or taking tea in the green calm of a notable's patio. This
ominous awareness of a world of infinite, sinister possibilities had become one of the dominant characteristics of the nation led by the man who started life as plain Joseph Désiré Mobutu, cook's son, but reinvented himself as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, âthe all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake'.
By the mid-1990s, Mobutu had become more noticeable by his absence than his presence, a tall, gravel-voiced figure glimpsed occasionally at official ceremonies and airport walkabouts in Kinshasa, or fielding hostile questions at a rare press conference in France with a sardonic politeness that hinted at huge world-weariness. Rattled by the army riots that had twice devastated his cities, belatedly registering the extent to which he was hated, he had withdrawn from a resentful capital to the safety of Gbadolite, his palace in the depths of the equatorial forest, to nurse his paranoia.
His impassive portrait, decked in comic-opera uniform, kept watch on his behalf, glowering from banks, shops and reception halls. âBig Man' rule had been encapsulated in one timeless brand: leopardskin toque, Buddy Holly glasses and the carved cane so imbued with presidential force mere mortals, it was said, could never hope to lift it. He liked to be known as the Leopard, and the face of a roaring big cat was printed on banknotes, ashtrays and official letterheads. But to a population that had once hailed him as âPapa', he was now known as âthe dinosaur', a tribute to how sclerotic his regime had become. Certainly, on a continent of dinosaur leaders, of Biya and Bongo, Mugabe and Moi, he rated as a Tyrannosaurus Rex of the breed, setting an example not to be followed. No other African autocrat had proved such a wily survivor. No other president had been presented with a country of such potential, yet achieved so little. No other leader had plundered his economy so effectively or lived the high life to such excess.
Preyed on by young men with Kalashnikovs, its administration corroded by corruption, a nation the size of Western Europe had fallen off the map of acceptable destinations. My battered copy of the Belgian Guide Nagel, picked up in a Paris bookshop, described
Kinshasa as a modern capital âboasting all the usual attributes of Europe's great cities' and encouraged the tourist to explore its museums, monuments and âindigenous quarters'. But that had been in 1959, when the world was a white man's oyster. Kinshasa was now a stop bypassed even by hardened travellers, where airlines avoided leaving their planes overnight for fear of what the darkness would bring. A hardship posting for diplomats, boycotted by the World Bank and IMF, it was a country every resident seemed determined to abandon, if only they could lay their hands on the necessary visa.
I would be there for the end, and for the beginning of the end.
Less than three years after my arrival, the tables were turned and I was the one to experience the curious intimacy the looter shares with his victim, rifling through Mobutu's wardrobes, touring his bathroom and making rude remarks about his taste in furniture (âAfrican dictator' kitsch of the worst kind). Somewhere at the back of one of my drawers, there is a stolen fishknife that was once part of the presidential dining set. My companions in crime were more ambitiousâthey took monogrammed pillow cases, bottles of fine French wine, even a presidential oil portrait. But looters were being shot on the streets the day we paid our unannounced visit on Marshal Mobutu's villa in Goma, and I wasn't going to risk execution for a souvenir.
It was November 1996 and the new rebel movement that had suddenly risen from nowhere in the far east of Zaire had seized control of the area bordering Rwanda. For weeks the frontier crossings leading into this breathtakingly beautiful region of brooding volcanoes and misty green valleys, all rolling down to the blue waters of Lake Kivu, had been closed while the fighting went on. Then suddenly the victorious rebels opened the frontier, and a small flood of journalists who had been kicking their heels on the other side poured across.
When tour agencies were still brave enough to include Rwanda and Zaire in their African itineraries, Goma was a favourite destination for tourists visiting some of the world's last mountain gorillas. A pretty little town on the black lava foothills, it had now been torn apart by its own inhabitants, who had taken the army's exodus as the
cue for some frenzied self-enrichment. Shops had been eviscerated, the main street was a mess of phone directories, glass and unused condoms, shattered toilet bowls and broken shutters. âThey've attacked me four or five times, but they just won't believe I don't have anything left to take,' gasped a ruined Lebanese trader, waiting at the border post for permission to leave. His eyes were swimming with tears.
The atmosphere was prickly. Starting what was to prove a seven-month looting and raping retreat across the country, Zairean forces had lashed out indiscriminately before pulling out, leaving corpses scattered for kilometres. No one was too sure of the identity of the rebel movement, the new bosses in town. And then there were the roaming Rwandans, whose intervention in Zaire was being denied by the government next door but was too prominent to ignore. Speaking from the corner of his mouth, a resident confirmed the outsiders' presence: âWe recognise them by their morphology.' Then he hurried away as a baby-faced Rwandan soldierâhigh on something and all the more sinister for the bright pink lipstick he was wearingâswaggered up to silence the blabbermouth.
Somehow, Mobutu's villa seemed the natural place to go. The road ran along the lake, snaking past walls draped in bougainvillaea, with the odd glimpse of blue water behind. We surprised a lone looter who had decided, enterprisingly, to focus on the isolated villas of the local dignitaries, rather than the overworked town centre. Thinking we were rebels, he stopped pushing a wheelbarrow on which a deep freeze was precariously balanced and ran for cover. As we drove harmlessly by, he was already returning to his task. A stolen photocopier and computer were still waiting to be taken to what, almost certainly, was a shack without electricity.
In the old days, the villa complex had been strictly off limits behind staunch metal gates manned by members of the presidential guard. Now the gates were wide open and the Zairean flagâa black fist clenching a flaming torchâlay crumpled on the ground. There had been no fight for this most symbolic of targets. No one, it was
clear from the boxes of unused ammunition, the anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs carelessly stacked in the guards' quarters, had had the heart for a real showdown.
In the garage were five black Mercedes, in pristine condition, two ambulances, in case the president fell sick and a Land Rover with a podium attachment to allow him, Pope-like, to address the public. A generous allocation for a man whose visits had become increasingly rare. But like a Renaissance monarch who expected a bedroom to be provided in any of his baron's castles, Mobutu kept a dozen such mansions constantly at the ready across the country, on the off-chance of a visit that usually never came.
It was on venturing insideâcould the property possibly be tripwired?âthat we really began to feel like naughty children sneaking a look in their parents' bedroom, only to emerge with their illusions shattered. From outside the villa had looked the height of ostentatious luxury: all chandeliers, Ming vases, antique furniture and marble floors. Close up, almost everything proved to be fake. The vases were modern imitations, they came with price labels still attached. The Romanesque plinths were in moulded plastic, the malachite inlay painted on.
With an âaha!' of excitement, a colleague whipped out a black and white cravat, of the type worn with the collarless âabacost' jacket that constituted Mobutu's eccentric contribution to the world of fashion. From a distance, the cravats had always appeared complex arrangements of material, folded with meticulous care. Now I saw that they were little more than nylon bibs, held in place with tabs of Velcro. This emperor did have some clothes. But like his regime itself, they were all show and no substance.
Most poignant of all, perhaps, was the pink and burgundy suite prepared for the presidential spouse, although it was impossible to say whether this was the first lady Bobi Ladawa, or the twin sister Mobutu had, bizarrely, also taken to his bed. An outsize bottle of the perfume Je Reviens, which had probably turned rancid years ago in the African heat, stood on the mantelpiece. With their man ravaged
by prostate cancer, his shambolic army collapsing like a house of cards, neither woman would ever be returning to Goma. This irreverent plundering was the only proof required of how rapidly the power established over three decades was unravelling.
Rebel uprisings, bodies rotting in the sun, a sickening megalomaniac. In newsrooms across the globe, shaking their heads over yet another unfathomable African crisis, producers and sub-editors dusted off memories of school literature courses and reached for the clichés. Zaire was Joseph Conrad's original âHeart of Darkness', they reminded the public. How prophetic the famous cry of despair voiced by the dying Mr Kurtz at Africa's seemingly boundless capacity for bedlam and brutality had proved yet again. âThe horror, the horror.' Was nothing more promising ever to emerge from that benighted continent?
Â
Yet when Conrad wrote
Heart of Darkness
and penned some of the most famous last words in literary history, this was very far from his intended message. The title âHeart of Darkness' itself and the phrase âthe horror, the horror' uttered by Mr Kurtz as he expires on a steam boat chugging down the giant Congo river, probably constitute one of the great misquotations of all time.
For Conrad, the Polish seaman who was to become one of Britain's greatest novelists,
Heart of Darkness
was a book based on some very painful personal experience. In 1890 he had set out for the Congo Free State, the African colony then owned by Belgium's King Leopold II, to fill in for a steamship captain slain by tribesmen. The posting, which was originally meant to last three years but was curtailed after less than six months, was to be the most traumatic of his life. It took him nine years to digest and turn into print.
Bouts of fever and dysentery nearly killed him; his health never subsequently recovered. Always melancholic, he spent much of the time plunged into deep depression, so disgusted by his fellow whites he avoided almost all human contact. His vision of humanity was to be permanently coloured by what he found in the Congo, where
declarations of philanthropy camouflaged a colonial system of unparalleled cruelty. Before the Congo, Conrad once said, âI was a perfect animal'; afterwards, âI see everything with such despondencyâall in black'.
Mr Kurtz, whose personality haunts the book although he says almost nothing, is first presented as the best station manager of the Congo, a man of refinement and education, who can thrill crowds with his idealism and is destined for great things inside the anonymous Company âdeveloping' the region. Stationed 200 miles in the interior, he has now fallen sick, and a band of colleagues sets out to rescue him.
When they find him, they discover that the respected Mr Kurtz has âgone native'. In fact, he has gone worse than native. Cut off from the Western world, inventing his own moral code and rendered almost insane by the solitude of the primeval forest, he has indulged in âabominable satisfactions', presided âat certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites' says Conrad, hinting that Kurtz has become a cannibal.
His palisade is decorated by rows of severed black heads; he has been adopted as honorary chief by a tribe whose warriors he leads on bloody village raids in search of ivory. The man who once wrote lofty reports calling for the enlightenment of the native now has a simpler recommendation: âExterminate all the brutes!' When he expires before the steamer reaches civilisation, corroded by fever and knowledge of his own evil, his colleagues are relieved rather than sorryâa potential embarrassment has been avoided.
Despite its slimness, the novella is one of those multilayered works whose meaning seems to shift with each new reading. By the time
Heart of Darkness
was published in 1902, the atrocities being committed by Leopold's agents in the Congo were already familiar to the public, thanks to the campaigns being waged by human rights activists of the day. So while
Heart of Darkness
is in part a psychological thriller about what makes man human, it had enough topical detail in it to carry another message to its readers. Notwithstanding the jarringly racist observations by the narrator Marlow, the way
Heart of Darkness
dwells on the sense of utter alienation felt by the white man in the gloom of central Africa, the book was intended primarily as a withering attack on the hypocrisy of contemporary colonial behaviour. âThe criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilising work in Africa is a justifiable idea,' the writer told his publisher.