Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  Back in Kinshasa, I got a call on my satellite phone from a very well informed Catholic cleric late on the afternoon of March 15, just as the sun started its dappling descent over the cascades of the Zaire River. The river’s beauty, which I could take in from my hotel room, was a rare comfort during weeks-long stays covering Zaire’s downward spiral. The caller told me that a rumor was sweeping the city that armored vehicles and heavy weaponry—artillery pieces and Chinese-made mortars—were being rushed forward toward Kisangani, down the road from Bafwasendé.

  By early evening, the smoke and dust of afternoon rumors had settled into a reasonably solid picture of what was happening, although the news was nowhere to be found yet on the news wires or the international radio stations. A UN relief worker in Kisangani who had given me mail for his family forty-eight hours earlier called to say that bombs and explosions could be heard going off here and there. A little while after that, all the aircraft controlled by the mercenaries and loyalists were ablaze, hit by artillery fired from as far away as seven or eight miles, according to John. As he described the scene, full of details about the operational range of this or that heavy weapon, he could hardly contain his excitement. The 24th Regiment of the Angolan army had joined the battle, which explained, he said, the unusual accuracy of the attacking gunners.

  In the end, there was hardly a fight. The mutinous Serbs slipped out of town aboard their Russian-built Mi-24 attack helicopters, coming under fire from Mobutu’s own 31st Paratroop Brigade as they flew away. The mercenaries put down in Gbadolité, Mobutu’s fantasyland capital in the northern jungles. Mobutu’s soldiers ran wild in Kisangani for a few hours, stripping off their uniforms and looting whatever they could. And then the invaders arrived.

  General Kalumé changed his uniform but not his job, staying on as the local commander for the AFDL, and for a time, life went on just as it usually had in Kisangani, meaning nothing much happened and nothing much changed. In Kinshasa, though, nothing would ever be the same. “Everyone is making new calculations about their future,” one of Mobutu’s senior counselors told me. “The old game is up. The next few days will show what the new game is all about.”

  The verdict on the street was much the same. Overnight, the people of the capital had understood that Mobutu’s days were now numbered. The only uncertainty was over what lay ahead. For years, in the political struggle for hearts and minds, Kinshasa—indeed, much of the country—had belonged to Etienne Tshisekedi, the stubborn and courageous leader of the country’s democracy movement, and once and future prime minister. Though many in the capital cheered on the rebellion, people said they could not imagine a future under Kabila that did not also include an important role for Tshisekedi. The people of Kinshasa dreamed that somehow the democrats and the rebels would work side by side to finally deliver on some of their country’s elusive promise.

  In Matongé, the vast slum that had been the African quarter during the years of Belgian rule, the so-called parlementaires debout loitered around the newspaper stands to read the headlines and debate each day’s momentous events. “We had been very worried for our brothers and sisters in Kisangani before the fall, because we all felt that Kabila was a killer and a puppet of the Tutsi,” Patrice Makambu, a thirty-two-year-old electrical engineering student, told me. “But nothing bad has happened at all, and we can see that Kabila stands together with all of Zaire’s forty-five million sons and daughters.”

  A cheer went up among the twenty or so people who had gathered at the newsstand, and then someone shouted a question about Tshisekedi, who, although he was sacked as prime minister by Mobutu during a previous crisis, many people still considered as their legitimate leader. The answer came swiftly. “Today, we are applauding Kabila, but if he thinks he can govern Zaire without our prime minister, we will drop him like a sack of rice.”

  Even the Kinshasa multimillionaires, the barons of the Mobutu system who fought Tshisekedi for years, had changed their tune. For men like Bemba Saolona, whose immense fortune from mining, agriculture and transportation had been built in connivance with the president-for-life, Tshisekedi’s reputation for incorruptibility was a lesser evil compared to the sheer unpredictability of a revolution led by Kabila. “Tshisekedi is a strong personality, and that’s exactly what we need in this situation,” Bemba told me in his luxurious house, decorated with all the nouveau riche warmth of a four-star hotel. “If he is allowed to set up a national unity government, Tshisekedi can go and sit down with Kabila and ask him just what he wants.”

  The United States had other ideas, however, and was beginning to weigh in more and more heavily in favor of the rebels. With the fall of Kisangani, Ambassador Simpson was deep in the throes of his eleventh-hour conversion. He could now bring himself to say flatly that Mobutu was finished. Kengo wa Dondo, the mulatto prime minister whom Washington had worked so hard to prop up, was now suddenly, in Simpson’s words, a “world-class crook,” and Tshisekedi, the man designated to lead the nation by the people in the 1992 National Conference, the most democratic national event Zaire had seen in a generation, was a nuisance to be ignored.

  The future envisioned by the United States was Kabila and only Kabila. “There is a consensus that we have to deal with Kabila,” the ambassador told me, growing annoyed with my questions as we sat across a low table from each other in his chilly office. “Tshisekedi is an obstacle, and we don’t see him as a player anymore. I just don’t see any reason why Kabila at this point should deal him into the game.”

  Ironically, in the time it took Simpson to get with the Kabila program supported so enthusiastically by American embassies in East Africa, and ostensibly in Washington, too, strong doubts were cropping up within Simpson’s own mission. John, for one, had early on applauded the rebels’ pluck, but now that they had swallowed half of the country, and were girding for an assault on the capital, he was expressing serious reservations. “Mobutu destroyed Zaire militarily and politically, and brought this thing down on himself,” John told me over beers at his home that same evening. “But now we have a guy taking over the country by military versus political means, and that is clearly going to debase political opposition movements all across Africa.

  “We are welcoming Kabila without knowing who he is,” he continued. “Is this a George Washington or a megalomaniac? Is this a period of enlightenment coming to Central Africa or a new dark age we’ve just signed up for? Personally, I have a hard time believing a man who trained at Nanjing University and who ran with Che Guevara can save this country.”

  John did not mention Tshisekedi by name, but implicit in his comments was a questioning of the betrayal Tshisekedi’s supporters were already bracing for. It echoed a betrayal in the country’s earliest independent history, when the United States preferred another strongman, Mobutu, over Lumumba, also a proud and democratically minded leader who was widely supported by his people. The United States had helped engineer Africa’s first coup d’état, overthrowing Lumumba after less than ten weeks in power, over unsubstantiated concerns about his communist leanings. Lumumba was murdered less than a year later, in a political assassination that was also promoted by Washington.

  With the fall of Kisangani, things were indeed moving quickly. Mobutu returned home for the third time from his coddled convalescence in the south of France. Once more, the crowds were carefully turned out, using all the old tricks of beer and pocket change, but from his airplane, angry, hurting and doubtless full of despair, Mobutu ordered that the festivities be called off, and slipped off to Camp Tshatshi virtually undercover.

  In Kinshasa, the political significance of this sudden bout of camera shyness escaped no one. Albert Kisongo, the editor of Demain le Congo, captured the common feeling in a telling phrase. “We Bantus love a good spectacle, and that is why we have put up with Mobutu for over thirty years. Now he is telling us himself that the show is over.”

  That very same day, March 21, Kabila arrived in Kisangani. Thirty-two years earlier, in 1965, Mobutu’s Cub
an and Rhodesian mercenaries had defeated the Simba rebellion, and run Kabila, one of its leaders, out of Kisangani. This time, the mercenaries and their white magic had failed. Triumphant, Kabila was being greeted by huge crowds who turned out entirely of their own accord. Kisangani toasted him as its liberator, and the cheering crowds urged him onward to Kinshasa. To be sure, the old warrior had earned his credentials as a survivor, but he had to be as surprised as anyone else to be plucked out of his obscurity, more than two weeks into the supposed Banyamulenge rebellion, to head a creation of Rwanda and Uganda called the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire.

  The fall of Kisangani was followed a few days later by the fall of Mbuji-Mayi, lending added drama to Mobutu’s predicament. Mobutu had now lost his last major source of income, the $20 million or so in monthly revenues from official diamond sales there. Deprived of cash, he now turned in desperation to his longtime nemesis, Etienne Tshisekedi, naming him as prime minister for the third time, in a stop-gap gesture that had the distinct odor of a poisoned gift.

  Tshisekedi responded with boldness, hoping to make the best of his weak hand with a series of dramatic gambits. He announced a new cabinet that included no Mobutu loyalists, and said that six positions would be held open for Kabila appointees. Infuriated by the slight, Mobutu moved to get rid of his rival even before his government could be formally seated. Security forces were told to prevent Tshisekedi from entering the prime minister’s offices. Meanwhile, Kabila’s response to Tshisekedi’s olive branch dripped with contempt. “If Tshisekedi wants to pilot a ship that is going down, he must learn how to swim,” said Kabila’s uncle and close aide Gaëtan Kakudji. “Because this ship is going to sink.”

  Tshisekedi’s Democratic Union for Social Progress (UDPS) boasted a large and disciplined network of activists in Kinshasa and throughout the western half of the country. In a three-way showdown in which the other two figures fielded men with guns, they were his only soldiers, and the time had come to call them out into the streets. If Kabila was to be prevented from storming Kinshasa, and if Zaire was to be spared a political takeover by force, Mobutu would have to be defied convincingly, through mass civil action. Tshisekedi’s final option, in effect, was to have his own legitimacy validated by the people.

  For two days, Kinshasa boiled with tension, and it seemed impossible to tell how things would unfold. Mobutu enjoyed some residual support in the parliament, largely as a result of payoffs from his ruling party, and Tshisekedi loyalists—mostly students and other young people—set up roadblocks using burning tires and the chassis of abandoned cars on the roads leading to the building, and roughed up many of Mobutu’s supporters. Mobutu responded by calling out the army, and the green trucks of the feared Division Spéciale Présidentielle, or DSP, rumbled through the streets of Kinshasa, smashing the students’ barricades and breaking up demonstrations. The street scenes were passably reminiscent of Beijing in 1989, during the Tiananmen protests. Young people armed with nothing more than their courage stood in front of armored personnel carriers and trucks full of troops, lecturing Mobutu’s soldiers on the need for democracy and peaceful change until their drivers, whether convinced or merely discouraged, changed course.

  Students rode around the city banging on the sides of the decrepit minivans that were the most common form of transportation, or formed clusters, ready to disperse at the first sign of a threat, and chanted slogans like “Mobutu, don’t you know the name of the people’s prime minister? It’s Tshisekedi.” Others warned the soldiers to be on guard when Kabila’s forces arrived, treating the matter as an inevitability. Above all, they urged, the military must protect civil authority. “Once Mobutu has fled into exile, let Kabila come. Don’t resist him,” said Didier Bitini, a twenty-seven-year-old student. “The only thing you must insist upon is that Tshisekedi be given a free hand as prime minister.”

  It was a tall order, too much, in fact, even to dream of from an army that had known only dictatorship, an army that was disintegrating wherever there was combat. I asked a soldier who was looking on impassively what he made of the demonstrations. “Let them do whatever they want,” he told me. “Politics is none of our business.”

  If what was left of Mobutu’s army could not conceive of fighting for Zairian democracy, the outside world was not much moved by the idea, either. Setting aside the continent’s immense natural resources, for the West the only reliably compelling subject in Africa is the theater of misery and suffering. In such a universe, scenes like the peaceful uprising of Tshisekedi’s supporters simply did not compute. No statement of support for Tshisekedi would be coming from Washington. There would be nothing even resembling a strong call for a freeze of the fighting on the ground so that a civil solution could be found.

  On Capitol Hill, George Moose contented himself with stating the obvious, while avoiding the essential: the future stability and integrity of Africa’s third-largest nation. “It is clear,” he said, “that Mobutu, the Mobutu regime, is a thing of the past.”

  In late April, Tshisekedi decided to step personally into the fray. The international press had been alerted that the renegade prime minister would lead his supporters on a march along the broad avenues that led from his home in the leafy Limeté district to the seat of government in Gombé, to assume his office by popular force.

  Pierre drove me to Tshisekedi’s house that morning in his dilapidated Fiat, together with Robert and a couple of other colleagues. The crowds were already impassably thick for many blocks surrounding the prime minister’s villa. Militants from the UDPS acted as lookouts on every corner, and for extra measure, large trees had been cut down and laid across the streets leading to their leader’s residence.

  After two days of muscular street demonstrations, and a huge turnout of supporters that morning in Limeté, Tshisekedi’s lieutenants exuded confidence. One advisor, Martin Tshibanga, bragged to me that the boss was still sleeping. “He hasn’t even gotten up yet. He hasn’t lifted a finger to call people out. They have come of their own accord.”

  Later that morning, in sweltering heat, Tshisekedi finally emerged from the office in the back of his home to discover a thick crowd of reporters who had been allowed into the courtyard. With a wan little smile, and a simple “Bonjour,” he turned on his heels and disappeared. There would be no press conference, we were told. “Toujours énigmatique,” Tshibanga said, nodding approvingly. I was far less sure. A few minutes later, though, Tshisekedi reemerged before the large crowds that choked the surrounding streets and suddenly the march looked as if it was on. Just moments after setting out, however, the scene erupted into total panic with the arrival of Mobutu’s shock troops.

  Trucks full of DSP troops had completely surrounded the area, and when the order was given, they began firing off tear-gas canisters and shooting live rounds, sending people scurrying for their lives in a terrified frenzy. Pierre had taken the precaution of parking on the heavily shaded carriage lane on the road leading to the center of town, and not on one of the narrow side streets that were now completely blocked off. Dodging rifle butts as we ran, Pierre, ever trusty, got us out of there.

  Working my cell phones on the ride into town, I quickly learned that Tshisekedi was safe. The huge army trucks that had besieged his neighborhood now began appearing in Pierre’s rearview mirror. Cars were being forced off the road, and reporters were being pulled out and beaten. Pierre went back onto the carriage lane to park and wait out the storm, while Robert set off to take pictures of this menacing convoy.

  Pierre and I sat in the shade for what seemed like an eternity as the huge green military vehicles passed by, and just as we began to fear that something serious might have happened to Robert, he showed up. He was filthy and looked pained and crumpled. He had been hurt somehow, but most of all he was piping angry. “Fuck. Fuck,” he kept repeating. “Those bastards stole my cameras.”

  Robert had been shooting dramatic compositions of the trucks rolling down the avenue with angry,
rifle-waving soldiers leaning from the sides, when a driver suckered him, opening the door to the passenger’s cabin just as he pulled up alongside him. Robert had been knocked senseless, and the next thing he knew, the soldiers were striking him with their rifle butts and stripping him of his cameras and other valuables.

  When we reached Mandela Square, a dusty traffic circle on Boulevard 30 Juin, where the UDPS was telling its supporters to mass, Tshisekedi’s supporters were already there in the thousands, chanting, “The power is in the streets. Mobutu and his ragged prostates are finished.” It was as if they had walked there faster than we could drive. The circle is bisected by several avenues, and without forewarning, Tshisekedi soon materialized at the head of a cluster of close supporters. The air was already electric, and the crowd roared its approval and fell in behind Tshisekedi, who bore the grim expression of a man who knew this might be his last act.

  Mobutu’s thuggish son Kongulu entered the circle from another boulevard, heavily armed and accompanied by his close aide, Guy Vanda. Guy, who was hoisting an automatic rifle, had become one of my best contacts inside the Mobutu entourage and had even become a friend of sorts. He saw me and beckoned, and when I approached him he warned me to leave the area. There might be violence. People could be killed.

  I thanked him for the advice and wisely or unwisely ignored it, getting as close as I could to Tshisekedi, who was blanketed by chanting supporters like a queen bee surrounded by her drones. A clutch of Mobutu’s agents, all armed with machine guns, moved to cut off the march, blocking Tshisekedi’s forward progress. The enigma then began to speak. “This is a dictatorship in its final agony that refuses to die. A fraction of the army is trying to prop it up. But it goes without saying that in the days ahead, we will maintain our pressure until the results of the National Conference are respected.”

  At that moment, a beige Peugeot split the crowd, and there was a lot of desperate, panicked pushing and shoving. The air crackled with gunfire, and people were again scattering frantically as the shooting grew wild and sustained. Tear gas thickened the air. I hid behind a tree and could see Tshisekedi being forced into the car, which sped off quickly. Soldiers were savagely beating whomever they could grab hold of.