Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  It all began with an implausible fiction. One of Zaire’s most marginal ethnic groups, the Banyamulenge, had mounted a rebellion, and for Zairians in the west of their country, as for the international press stampeding into the region attracted by the scent of flowing blood and cordite, the question of the hour was, who are the Banyamulenge?

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, all along a hundred-mile corridor of Zaire’s Great Lakes region, an eastern hinterland a thousand miles removed from the capital, city after city—Uvira, Bukavu and then, finally, the provincial capital, Goma—was falling under a rain of mortar fire marshaled with uncanny precision. When the dust and smoke settled, a newly minted, and yet strangely disciplined, rebel army had materialized. Somehow, in a region of desperately poor countries, they showed up freshly tricked out with shiny new Kalashnikovs and Wellington boots.

  In a matter of days the mysterious new rebels had achieved their first objective. While UN workers were being evacuated in neat convoys across the border to Rwanda, and relief officials from a hodgepodge of international nongovernmental organizations were still pinned down in their homes, unable to go outside safely, the rebels had emptied some of the world’s largest refugee camps of their populations.

  To be sure, the routed victims ranked high on any list of international pariahs. They were ethnic Hutu who had fled Rwanda after carrying out that country’s 1994 genocide against the Tutsi minority. Nearly a million of them had been given temporary shelter in UN camps just across the border, on the unyielding lava flows in Zaire’s North Kivu Province, where farming was next to impossible and even wells or proper latrines could not be dug.

  Within two years of the genocide, the world had largely forgotten Rwanda’s Hutu exiles, but the exiles had forgotten nothing, least of all the zero-sum game of hatred that once again had cast them as the losers to the much less numerous Tutsi. And with the connivance of the Mobutu government in Kinshasa, they had spent their time in exile sharpening their knives for another death match with their blood rivals.

  The revenge-minded Hutu were discreet enough to eschew uniforms and military forms of address in the camps, but under the complacent eye of the UN refugee agency, which ran their huge camps, elements of the defeated Hutu army, and members of the machete-wielding Interahamwe militia, the main foot soldiers of Rwanda’s terrible genocide, rebuilt their units and prepared for a new war.

  The Rwandan genocide was not halted by any international intervention. Rather, after some 800,000 people had been slaughtered in a slow motion, low-tech, hundred-day bloodbath, an exiled Tutsi army that invaded from its bases in Uganda managed to take over. Since the end of the civil war, Rwanda’s new Tutsi leaders had been demanding the arrest of the Hutu authors of the genocide, but the world had shown no stomach for a task that would have required a major international security operation to seal the region’s porous borders and disarm the Hutu living in the camps. This was Central Africa, after all, a region where life had always been regarded as cheap, not Bosnia or Kosovo, places where European lives and interests were at stake.

  The Clinton administration had already proved how feckless it could be in Central Africa. During the murderous summer months of 1994 in Rwanda, officials in Washington pointedly avoided use of the term “genocide” even as press accounts and intelligence reports detailing the extent of the slaughter—on average, eight thousand murders a day—flooded over the transom. For three months, throughout one of the greatest slaughters of the twentieth century, the Clinton administration never once held a meeting of its top foreign policy advisors to discuss Rwanda.

  The aversion to the word “genocide” had nothing to do with honest disagreements in the American capital about the extent of the killing. Rather, it was all about ducking international calls for intervention. At one interagency meeting in Washington that April, Susan Rice, a rising young black star on Clinton’s National Security Council, argued another justification for the semantic evasion—politics. “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?” said Rice, who would later be named assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

  In a perverse repeat of that performance, scarcely three years later, Washington was doing its utmost to soften the condemnations of Rwanda for its cross-border attacks on the refugee camps in Zaire. Clinton’s policy aides attempted to justify their hands-off approach as a reflection of their wish to promote “African solutions to African problems.” But even a catchphrase this cynical doesn’t begin to hint at the sludge of putrid crimes and misdemeanors that the United States was, in effect, sanctioning by turning a blind eye to the Rwandan blitzkrieg on refugee camps in Zaire.

  Since independence, instability and bad governance had been Africa’s twin Achilles’ heels. They were the two internal weaknesses most immediately responsible for the continent’s persistent misery, and the fighting that had just begun under Washington’s generous political cover would spew both of these plagues across Central Africa, sowing political unrest, armed conflict and humanitarian disasters for at least the next decade.

  With the camps in Zaire now under attack, hundreds of thousands of refugees were suddenly on the move. As they gathered their meager belongings and pressed forward together, footfall after terrified footfall back into Rwanda, the televised images of the pitiful fleeing hordes strangely mimicked the seasonal migrations of wildlife on the East African plains. Many other Rwandans, including thousands of ex-militiamen with guns, disappeared into the Zairian forest. Mass slaughter was anything but a new feature in Rwandan history, and it had cut both ways. Now, in the Congo, it was the Tutsis’ turn to attempt a sort of final solution. But all was not as it seemed.

  During those awful early days of the crisis, we in the Western press understood precious little. The usual sources of information in times of conflict in Africa were generally nowhere to be found. The United Nations had itself evacuated its workers from the main centers of the fighting, and where they had not been evacuated, they were in hiding. Scrambling for someone to unravel the mystery of the Banyamulenge, many of us fell back on the ever handy, ever available “Western diplomats” to explain what was going on. In principle, this has almost always meant American diplomats. But the problem with our heavy reliance on them this time was not just their usual ignorance about what was really happening in the thick of an African crisis. Rather, as would only slowly become clear over the coming weeks and months, it was that they were playing sides in the conflict and doing all they could to avoid owning up to it.

  In time, we began piecing together the complicated picture of the mysterious Banyamulenge. They were pastoral migrants from present-day Rwanda who began settling in the Ruzizi plains, an area of Zaire’s mountainous South Kivu Province, in the early nineteenth century. Their name meant, simply, “people of Mulenge,” and was adopted from the name of a local mountain. Complicating things greatly, however, was that in time much more recent Tutsi immigrants into eastern Zaire, specifically relative newcomers to North Kivu, borrowed the Banyamulenge identity to bolster their citizenship claims.

  The scramble to do some rudimentary ethnic detective work brought to mind just how normal it was for reporters to operate in nearly perfect ignorance of their surroundings on this continent. Africa remained terra incognita for most within my profession, whose job it was to inform the world, and for many of us an assignment here involved little more preparation than thumbing through a Lonely Planet guide. Anywhere else in the world we would have been judged incompetent, but in Africa being able to get somewhere quickly and write colorful stories was qualification enough. It was a repeat performance of the same contemptuous glossing over that characterized so much of Europe’s colonial involvement with the continent, and though I had more experience here than most of my peers, I was in no way exempt. Only midway through Kabila’s campaign against Mobutu did I finally get around to reading The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, Crawford Young and Thomas Tur
ner’s seminal 1985 study of Zairian politics and history, which should have been a prerequisite for any reporter. Scales fell from my eyes in the face of such detailed knowledge, and I felt a deep, physical sense of embarrassment at my own ignorance.

  Before most of us could even begin applying our newfound wisdom about the Banyamulenge to the story at hand, the plotline had shifted dramatically. With the Hutu refugee camps suddenly emptied, the original pretense of a “tribal war” between the Banyamulenge and hostile local ethnic groups who had been persecuting them gave way to a newer, somewhat more plausible explanation: This was a Rwandan-led campaign to empty the refugee camps and thereby prevent a repeat of the 1994 genocide.

  With eastern Zaire’s biggest cities falling, however, it seemed obvious that we were witnessing something even bigger than a mere preemptive strike. The other shoe did not take long to fall, though, and the dramatis personae was rounded out by the sudden stage entrance of Laurent Désiré Kabila, a shadowy, retro-chic rebel who had been living on the murkiest fringes of East African life for two decades and was proclaiming the start of a Zairian revolution.

  It was hard to take the first few audacious statements by this orotund figure seriously, and the initial reflex of the press was indeed to write off with a chuckle this would-be revolutionary challenger to Mobutu. But from the moment the international news networks began broadcasting images of the man, whose braggadocio strut seemed straight out of the South Bronx, his true aim—the overthrow of the government in Kinshasa—was announced for all to hear.

  “We must remove Mobutu and throw him into the dustbin of history,” Kabila exclaimed in Swahili, the language of the east, gesticulating confidently as he reviewed a battalion of his bug-eyed followers in Uvira, on the northern banks of Lake Tanganyika. “The alliance appeals to the rest of the Zairian population to rise up against the repressive system that has plunged the people of this country into misery. This is your movement. It is a movement against tyranny and corruption. It is a movement for freedom and human life.”

  From the very start it was a ludicrous boast from a man whose known past included illegally trafficking in gold, diamonds and elephant tusks for years, hiding out in the mountains, dabbling in Maoism, and even kidnapping Western tourists and holding them for ransom. But at least now Kinshasa had some fix on its foe, an army of boys supplied by Rwanda—and kitted out in Wellington boots and shiny AK-47s—which Kabila called his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo.

  The mood in Kinshasa was one of shock, an emotion that is usually, indeed almost by definition, transitory. For the government, though, it would be both prolonged and paralyzing. Mobutu was absent and stricken with cancer, and although he had rarely kept a firm hand on the tiller these last years, with the Helmsman gone, his country had become totally rudderless.

  For the time being, the task of trying to hold Zaire’s pieces together was left to the prime minister, Kengo wa Dondo, himself half Tutsi, raised under the name Léon Lubitsch. Under the circumstances, this glaring ethnic liability only spurred the already frenetic jockeying for position of Mobutu’s elite, a motley collection of bemedaled generals and sticky-fingered grabbers dominated by relatives and fellow northerners who had been rendered fat and plodding by years of unbridled greed.

  With Kinshasa approaching the boiling point, Kengo had little choice but to take a hard line toward Rwanda and its Tutsi-governed ally, Burundi, which he accused of attacking his country. He would even lend his voice to the anti-Tutsi frenzy that was sweeping the capital. “We will not negotiate with anyone while a part of our national territory is being occupied by foreign forces,” the prime minister shouted to an angry mob of students who surrounded his office. Armed with bamboo sticks and branches, which they wielded like guns, groups like these had been hunting down people in the capital for days, singling out anyone who had the long slender build and distinctly angular features of the Tutsi.

  Kengo had every right to point an accusing finger at Rwanda, but that did not excuse the ugly reprisals against Tutsis in Kinshasa’s streets. Moreover, Mobutu had provided the perfect excuse for the invasion by allowing the governor of South Kivu to order the expulsion of 300,000 Banyamulenge from the province in early October, just days before the fighting erupted in the east. Even at this early stage of the game, Washington and its key East African allies, Uganda and Rwanda, were alone in pretending that Kabila, a frontier bandit and small-time terrorist whose efforts to overthrow Mobutu had flopped disastrously years ago, was the real moving force behind the rebellion.

  Everyone else in the region, indeed in Europe and within the relevant agencies of the United Nations, spoke openly of Kabila as the cat’s paw for a Rwandan military operation. What no one could imagine yet, perhaps least of all the two principals most directly concerned, Mobutu and Kabila, was how quickly this African puppet would grow legs and take off on his own. Life was breathed into him by the jubilation his rebels met in Mobutu’s long-neglected countryside, and by Kabila’s own treachery in eliminating potential rivals in what was originally conceived as a collective leadership. The most important of them was André Kissasse Ngandu, a man from eastern Zaire’s Nandi ethnic group, who, like Kabila, had spent years struggling, with little effect, against Mobutu. Kissasse became the alliance’s first military commander and nominal vice president, but was assassinated under mysterious circumstances on January 6, 1997, in what was widely believed to be a hit arranged by Kabila.

  The scene was now set for Mobutu’s return, and the tension and dramatic potential were such that, even bedridden from chemotherapy, the old dictator, a performer at heart, could not resist. Decades of wretched excess involving money and power had ultimately bored him, but Mobutu still craved the kind of reaffirmation that only attention from others can bring. Indeed, his longing to be needed and the lure of the bright lights he had so often enjoyed on the international stage were what kept him going.

  Filthy Kinshasa was being painted and scrubbed. Soldiers dressed in snappy green uniforms were suddenly putting order to the city’s chaotic traffic. Rusted and stripped wrecks that had littered the roadside for months were hauled away, and huge red-and-white banners bearing slogans like “Mobutu = Solution” were being hung everywhere. The sycophants were busy and no amount of hype was being spared. If the Marshal was coming back, it was not merely to join the battle, but to win the war convincingly.

  On December 17, 1996, six weeks after the Banyamulenge uprising began, Mobutu returned home. There is a venerable tradition throughout the continent of people lending their shouts and tears to celebrations and mourning in exchange for a fee. Mobutu’s handlers had resorted to the trick countless times, proving just how effective the prospect of a few rounds of free beer or palm wine, or a bolt of printed cloth or some pocket change, could be in generating the appearance of enthusiasm.

  As I rode out to the airport to witness his arrival, I thought skeptically at first that Kinshasa’s hordes were just going along for the carnival ride. But as I watched tens of thousands of people pile into buses and every other manner of public transportation to gather at Ndjili airport, and line every inch of the twenty-seven-mile route into town at least four or five deep, my cynicism slowly began to crumble.

  Still, there were certain fundamentals that no amount of popular excitement could change. The Marshal’s army, never famous for its resourcefulness, had few means with which to fight a war. More ominous, the foreign friends who had repeatedly flown to the rescue during the Cold War were nowhere to be found. Government troops had scarcely engaged the enemy up to this point. As we waited for a sign from the sky of the president’s arrival, it was tempting to wonder whether the funds required to print the women’s matching outfits and hire the buses and bands would not have been better spent on bullets and bombs.

  But at bottom, the army’s problems had little to do with budgets. Rather, as with anything that involved money in this country, they could be attributed to a lack of accounting. Over the year
s, people had given Mobutu’s famous Article 15, “débrouillez-vous,” an increasingly literal interpretation. It had ultimately come to mean that it was okay to steal anything, even from him, and that is precisely what his generals had been doing, leaving the army unpaid and without ammunition. That is what the governors of the far eastern provinces had done, siphoning off money intended for the care of Hutu refugees and cutting private deals to rearm them. Undoubtedly, that’s also what the organizers of today’s sumptuous festivities were doing, and they would be presenting the president with bills for sums that far outstripped what they had spent.

  This dazzling day, though, with a sky free of all but the highest, wispiest clouds, was not meant for settling accounts; it was a day for rallying the nation, for mobilization. At 3:10 in the afternoon, the president’s white Boeing landed, and from his first wave to the crowds from the cockpit until late in the evening, Mobutu threw himself into the task with an eagerness that seemed scarcely diminished by his cancer.

  Zairian popular music is famous for its bouncing bass lines and the lyrical staccato runs through the upper ranges of the guitar, sounds that ripple clear and perfectly formed, like the concentric rings of a stone tossed into a pond. The most famous style, soukous, had been invented decades earlier as an inspired response to the Cuban rumbas that were intently studied and lustily danced, as radios spread among the African population in the 1950s. By the 1980s, soukous from Mobutu’s Zaire had become the most distinctive and successful pop sound in all of Africa, and like so much else of import in this country, the dictator had appropriated it subtly for his purposes.