In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (24 page)

Whether undertaken for hard-headed or high-minded reasons, intervention did no more than fix the country in a kind of purulent agar. True, the country did not fall apart as it had threatened to do after independence. The succession of uprisings, military
coups
and secession attempts that would have probably followed Mobutu's ousting was averted. But it is from just such ghastly experiences that political maturity, inspirational leadership and a sense of direction are eventually born.

Deprived of the chance to learn the lessons of its own history, Zaire's population was kept in a state of infantilism by a more insidious form of colonialism. Instead of the roller-coaster of war, destruction and eventual rebirth, the intervention of the US, France and Belgium, of the World Bank and IMF, locked the society into one slow-motion economic collapse. Balked of expression, unable to advance, mindsets froze over somewhere in the 1960s, leaving the country's leadership at the turn of the century stuck in an ideological time-warp.

A travel writer
of lurid brilliance, Henry Morton Stanley claimed never to have forgotten the horror of his march through the dank forests of eastern Congo, searching for the fabled river he hoped would carry him smoothly through the jungle. ‘The trees kept shedding their dew upon us like rain in great round drops,' he recalled in
Through the Dark Continent
. ‘Every leaf seemed weeping. Down the boles and branches, creepers and vegetable cords, the moisture trickled and fell on us. Overhead the wide-spreading branches in many interlaced strata, each branch heavy with broad thick leaves, absolutely shut out the daylight. We knew not whether it was a sunshiny day or a dull, foggy, gloomy day; for we marched in a feeble solemn twilight.

‘We had certainly seen forests before,' Stanley concluded. ‘But this scene was an epoch in our lives ever to be remembered for its bitterness; the gloom enhanced the dismal misery of our life; the slopping moisture, the unhealthy reeking atmosphere, and the monotony of the scenes; nothing but the eternal interlaced branches, the tall aspiring stems, rising from a tangle through which we had to burrow and crawl like wild animals, on hands and feet.'

But if it seemed terrifying to this Briton-turned-American, this verdure, one of the largest expanses of rainforest left in the world, was where Mobutu felt most relaxed. Looking out over the tree tops, an undulating expanse of giant broccoli heads, or driving through the simple villages with their thatched huts, the burden of office seemed
less heavy, his spirits quietly lifted and he breathed more easily. He was, after all, a Ngbandi, and this was home.

It was here that, in the late 1970s, Mobutu ordered work to start on a palace. At first this was part of a larger plan to bring development to Gbadolite, the home town he tried, like many an African leader, to transform into a state capital with a simple wave of the presidential wand. But as the years passed and Kinshasa's urban elite showed little inclination to move 700 miles north-east into the depths of the jungle, the president focused his energies on building a citadel fit for a king.

Jumbo jets came and went, ferrying in construction materials, Israeli paratroopers to train the DSP contingent stationed here, hundreds of Chinese workers to build a Chinese village and rare animals, from chimpanzees to Zaire's famous okapi—a curious cross between an antelope, giraffe and zebra—for the private zoo. If he could not force the Big Vegetables to up sticks, he could create a marvel they would discuss over their Kinshasa dinner parties.

Envoys brought Italian marble for a vast mausoleum and chapel, French antiques for the rooms, glassware from Venice. Ironically, the author of authenticity, who had campaigned for the rediscovery of African cultural values, fell for every arriviste cliché in the book. ‘I want a marquee for the garden, and I want it now,' the petulant president would tell aides. So the marquee would be brought in by plane, at vast expense.

The airstrip was specially extended to be able to receive Concorde, which Mobutu routinely chartered from Air France and was often to be glimpsed idling on the tarmac. When asked to justify leasing such an expensive plane by a journalist from
Der Spiegel
, Mobutu was unapologetic. ‘I cannot sleep at all on a plane and I am terribly scared of sleeping pills,' he explained. ‘To accuse me of wasting money—no, I am sorry. Just think of the time I save.'

Initially Gbadolite was a paradise with no Adam and Eve to gambol in it. A restless Mobutu would fly in four or five times a year, his 100-member entourage piling into three aircraft, then touring the grounds in twenty-car convoys. He would stay a few days and be off.
But after Mobutu ceded to domestic and international pressure for political reform in 1990 and announced the end of the one-party state, Gbadolite really came into its own. Mobutu abandoned his base in Kinshasa and spent his time shuttling between his equatorial retreat, the three-storey riverboat moored on the Zaire river and his villas abroad.

The land of his ancestors, Gbadolite was always bound to be of enormous symbolic and spiritual importance to him. But this remote site at Africa's very heart boasted another major attraction, although one rarely mentioned in public. Situated on the Ubangi river, Gbadolite lay only a short hop away from the frontier with Central African Republic, a key selling-point for a man who now had to constantly bear in mind the possibility of an eventual exile. Every hour he spent flying over the rolling forests, away from a capital plagued by protests, was an hour closer to safety. Mobutu left the city a frightened man, having been warned by his generals he ran the risk of assassination if he stayed in Kinshasa. He was also in a state of high dudgeon. In the wake of a brutal security crackdown on Lubumbashi university, staged, awkwardly, a matter of weeks after his groundbreaking political liberalisation speech, foreign allies had started cold-shouldering him. Domestically, the politicians he had showered with riches, nurtured and built up were seizing the opportunity presented by the Sovereign National Conference to turn on their former mentor.

Mobutu always tried not to dwell on his acolytes' hypocrisy. Politicians who denounced him abroad would be welcomed back like prodigal sons. No matter how rude the newspaper article, he never sued. ‘He did a lot of forgiving, because there were a lot of betrayals,' said son Nzanga. ‘He would say, “Never forget but never take revenge. Because your judgement is not good when you're harbouring hard feelings.” ' But the treachery rankled nonetheless.

If Mobutu had read Machiavelli's dictum that it is better for a leader to be feared than loved by his subjects, he had not taken it to heart. Remembering an era when he was fêted in the streets, hailed as the man who had saved Congo from anarchy, Mobutu could not
get used to being hated. ‘Something died in him from that moment on,' judged his closest former aide, Honoré Ngbanda. He noted how the president would interrupt important audiences aboard his yacht to rush on deck and acknowledge the chants of praise from passengers on passing ships, so desperate had he become for applause.

In a fury of ‘I'll show them', he decided to leave his ungrateful countrymen to the multi-party democracy they wanted, taking bitter satisfaction from the ease with which he sabotaged the process with the gift of a Mercedes here, a bank deposit there. His revenge was to live in style. Nothing pleased him more than to invite a group of Western VIPs up to what had been nicknamed ‘Versailles in the Jungle' by the press and watch them gawp. ‘It was so incongruous your mouth fell open,' remembered one regular US visitor. ‘There was this big golden pagoda at the airport. The reception area was so enormous if someone was sitting on the other side you couldn't recognise them. Then you'd drive past thatched huts and untouched, indigenous villages and there would be this palace like the Louvre. It was indescribable.'

The VIPs came, duly gasped over the musical fountains, the swans gliding over ornamental lakes, the model farm with its 500 Argentine sheep, and Mobutu's heart swelled with proprietorial pride. But he was blind to the true nature of their amazement. It was not astonishment at a job well done. Mingled with the patronising contempt of the Old World sophisticate for the tackiness of the nouveau riche was shock at Mobutu's insensitivity, disbelief that the leader of a country in such desperate straits should have permitted himself such extravagance without registering the message such crassness carried to the outside world, and, underlying it all, the horrified realisation that this was where large amounts of Western aid had ended up.

For Gbadolite was the ultimate in African presidential follies. There was just too much of everything: too much champagne, too much beer, too much marble, too much gilt. It was Mobutu's Graceland, a fittingly vulgar monument to a vast ego, part of the
answer to the question of just how a single—albeit extended—family could manage to consume quite so much of a country's wealth.

So it was poetic justice that Gbadolite should eventually prove a folly in quite a different sense. Mobutu's move there—a gesture of petulance towards a population that had turned against him, a barely disguised appeal for love—was to be his eventual undoing, the worst mistake of a career until then characterised by a superb instinct for self-preservation.

 

Like it or not,
every great man is doomed to acquire a dragoman, some lesser mortal appointing himself as interpreter and guide. Intermediary between the world and his boss, he hopes, like some pilot fish leading a Great White shark to its prey, to grow fat on the morsels trailing from the kill. In Mobutu's case, the position was always bitterly contested, but for one brief moment a young white businessman was naive enough to think it was his for the taking. Pierre Janssen became a member of Mobutu's court, the only European to join the president's intimate family circle, thanks to a fortuitous meeting in the Hilton hotel in Brussels.

A young businessman in a hurry, proud of having worked out early on in life that ‘money creates power', he was introduced by a Zairean friend to Yakpwa Mobutu, Mobutu's daughter by his first wife. It was his natural predilection for black women, rather than his fascination with celebrity, he claims, that drew him to ‘Yaki', as she is known. They chatted, found each other mutually attractive and a courtship began. Two years later they were married.

Janssen is interesting because, as a newcomer to the Mobutu world, he did not share the blasé vision of the Zairean elite that tagged alongside the president as he jetted around the world. To the son-in-law, it was all new and amazing. His impressions—the excitable commentary of a Belgian social climber sensing untold riches inching within his reach—are those of Everyman, pressing his nose against the windows of the rich and famous.

He is no James Boswell, dutifully recording the
bons mots
and thoughtful musings of his master. The book Janssen wrote as a result of his experiences contains florid accounts of voodoo sessions in the Mobutu household and melodramatic descriptions of secretive meetings with freemasons. It also vaunts an intimacy with the president which is challenged by members of the family. ‘You can take that book and put it straight in the bin,' Mobutu's son Nzanga told me with distaste. Yet it contains insights that only a man with the most materialistic of fantasies could contribute.

Janssen has the mind of a grocer. He clearly expended a lot of energy during his time in the Mobutu household making mental estimates: how much Mobutu spent on champagne, how much on cars, how much on jewellery, how badly the restaurant overcharged him, how blatantly his aides stole. The result, in his book, is a shopaholic's catalogue, an account that sheds fascinating light on the minutiae of a kleptocracy, the lifestyle a former cook's son had come to regard as normal after three decades in power.

The son-in-law's fascination with Mobutu had been heightened by a fall from grace mirroring the president's own. At thirty-five, he presented himself when we met in Paris as a man abandoned by fortune, paying a high price for his well-meaning involvement in Zaire. Now separated from Yaki, he was no longer on speaking terms with his African in-laws, who regarded him as little more than a gigolo. The French publishers of his memoirs had gone bankrupt, his business ventures had crumbled to nothing, the Cap Ferrat house where he was staying did not, he promised, belong to him. ‘I'm ruined, I'm on the street,' he said with a bitter laugh. ‘When I went to Kinshasa I had my own career, I earned a good living. Now I'm separated from my wife, I have “Mobutu” stamped on my forehead and I can no longer go back to Congo. My wedding was the worst day of my life.'

Yet his fleshy, sun-kissed face hardly spelled deprivation. And he had the cocktail-goers' habit of avoiding eye contact, constantly scouring the expensive Chinese restaurant we had retired to for someone more interesting to talk to. As his search was rewarded (‘Look, there's John Galliano'), I realised Janssen, who confesses in
his book that he always travelled first class because it increased the likelihood of a brush with a VIP, had probably picked the spot on the elegant Avenue Montaigne precisely for its guaranteed celebrity quotient.

There were certainly plenty of VIPs on offer when he married Yaki in Gbadolite on 4 July 1992. The 2,500-strong guest list included regional presidents, Saudi princes, Middle Eastern dignitaries, foreign ambassadors and the entire Zairean government, although not, to Janssen's disappointment, members of Monaco's royal family. A chartered DC10 and two Boeings had shuttled between Europe and Zaire to muster them in Gbadolite. It was one of the rare occasions when Mobutu could put the $100 million complex to good use. The president had gone a little over the top in designing the main palace at Gbadolite. Sprawling across 15,000 square metres, its seven-metre malachite doors were so heavy it took more than one man to open them—this was a building designed for giants. The huge marble-lined salons were impossible to fill.

Belatedly, Mobutu realised that he could not live with such grandeur and ordered a second palace on more human scale to be built at Kawele, a few kilometres away, complete with discotheque, Olympic-sized swimming pool and nuclear shelter. With its Louis XIV furniture, Murano chandeliers, Aubusson tapestries, monogrammed silver cutlery and walls hung with green silk—green was Mobutu's favourite colour—Kawele was hardly a hovel. But it was positively cosy compared to the main monstrosity, unused except for special occasions such as his daughter's wedding.

For the ceremony, the bride wore haute couture: a hand-embroidered Jean Louis Scherrer wedding dress with a six-metre train, costing $70,000. Later, she donned a Nina Ricci salmon-pink outfit with silk trimmings. Throughout the day she alternated the three gem clusters bought from the jewellers of Paris's Place Vendôme, a wedding present from her father, Janssen estimated, worth a total of $3 million.