They were the only ones who could afford to patronise the designer-wear shops in the hotel’s arcade or hire the Junoesque whores—renowned as the most expensive in Kinshasa—who swanned along the corridors. They ran up accounts and left the management to chase payment by the government for years. Kongulu owed the casino a huge amount, but who could force a president’s son to pay?
It was never a place where those who opposed the regime could feel comfortable. Mobutu’s portrait stared out from above the main desk, his personality seemed to invest every echoing corridor. The Popular Movement for the Revolution (MPR), the party every Zairean at one stage was obliged to join, rented a set of rooms here and on at least one embarrassing occasion for management, a handcuffed prisoner was spotted in the lifts, being taken upstairs for interrogation.
Time the placing of your international call right and you could eavesdrop on the telephone conversations of guests down the hall, being monitored by the switchboard operators. The room cleaners showed a disproportionate level of interest in guests’ comings and goings. There was always a sense of being under surveillance. ‘We don’t hire them as such, but what can we do if the staff work as spies?’ a hotel executive once acknowledged, with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders.
By the mid-1990s the Intercontinental had, like the country itself, hit hard times. Zaire had become an international pariah and few VIPs visited Kinshasa any more. With occupancy below 20 per cent, service was stultifyingly slow. The blue dye came off the floor of the swimming pool, leaving bathers with the impression they had caught some horrible foot disease. The aroma of rotting carpet—blight of humid climates—tinged the air, the salade niçoise gave you the runs and the national power company would regularly plunge the hotel into penumbra because of unpaid bills. The first time I used the lift it shuttled repeatedly between ground floor and sixth, refusing to stop. ‘Yes, we heard you ringing the alarm bell,’ remarked the imperturbable receptionist when I finally won my freedom. After that I used the emergency stairs.
But there were considerations weighing against the growing tattiness, which accounted for the hotel’s small population of permanent residents. We were betting on the likelihood that if Kinshasa were to be engulfed in one of its periodic bouts of pillaging, the DSP would secure the hotel. They had done so twice before, in 1991 and 1993, when the mouvanciers had slept in the conference rooms, sheltered from a frenzied populace which was dismantling their factories, supermarkets and villas.
The hotel’s long-term guests were a strange bunch, representative in their way of the foreign community that washes up on African shores: misfits of the First World, sometimes intent on good works but more often escaping dubious pasts, in search of a quick killing, or simply seduced by the possibilities of misbehaviour without repercussions—that old colonial delight.
There was the ageing Belgian beauty, still sporting the miniskirts of a thirteen-year-old, who relentlessly sunbathed her way through every crisis, her appetite for ultraviolet seemingly insatiable. On the pool’s fringes hovered the skinny Chinese acupuncturist, whom everyone mistook for a cook because of his starched white hat. He had come to work on an aid project in Zaire which had never seen the light of day. Given the prevalence of HIV in Kinshasa, demand for acupuncture was minimal. But he had stayed on rather than return to communist China. ‘Here, it is bad. But in China, I think, maybe worse,’ he confessed.
On first name terms with most of the mouvanciers was the blond, big-hearted American with a southern drawl who slopped around in flip-flops and T-shirts. Just what he was doing in Kinshasa was a mystery, but he would often use a vague, collective ‘we’ when referring to those in power. The Zairean staff referred to him openly as ‘the CIA man’, although the American embassy claimed to be unaware of his existence. Somehow, one couldn’t help feeling that a real CIA man would have been a bit put out at having his role so universally recognised.
There were bored foreign pilots who flew supplies into UNITA-held territory in Angola, busting UN sanctions on salaries generous enough to merit turning a few blind eyes. ‘I have told my bosses, the one thing I will never do is fly arms,’ said Jean-Marie, a charming Frenchman. ‘They can ask me to do anything else, but not that.’ I would nod sympathetically, pretending to believe him.
Jean-Marie looked great in his pilot’s uniform and spent a lot of time gently chatting up aid workers around the pool. He had shown me a photograph of his girlfriend back in France, who looked stunningly attractive but was clearly half his age. A Saint-Exupéry gone astray, he would return from trips halfway across the world—not carrying arms—and rave with Gallic lyricism about the beauty of the night sky from the pilot’s cockpit. When he fell out with his bosses, he moved into a house the CIA man had started renting, although he said the mysterious goings-on there made him uneasy. One day he disappeared, never to be heard of again, and with him went the several thousand dollars it emerged he had borrowed from the CIA man and his aidworker girlfriends.
And finally, of course, there was the pony-tailed piano player. Wizened and impassive, he had been playing in the Atrium café as long as anyone could remember. He had tinkled out his lugubrious version of ‘As Time Goes By’ as his frame became more hunched and his hair turned from black, to first salt-and-pepper, and finally to dirty white. By May 1997, it was the piano player’s puzzling absence, as much as any other event, that signalled a fundamental change was looming. A seismic shift in the world as we knew it was about to take place, and the piano player, for one, did not want to be around to see it.
The rebel movement born in Kivu in late 1996, which had triggered hoots of derisive laughter when it had pledged to overturn Mobutu, had proved far more formidable than anticipated. As it had begun capturing territory, sceptical Zaireans had gone from dismissing it as a Rwandan invasion led by a discredited Maoist to welcoming it as a liberation force. Neighbouring countries with long-standing gripes against Mobutu joined the bandwagon and the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) picked up momentum.
Up in Binza, the mouvanciers had gone from haughty dismissals of the rebel problem to frantic questions: why wouldn’t Mobutu DO something? Drained by prostate cancer, the president had curled up in his lair on the hill like a sick animal. ‘When you are a soldier,’ he declared, ‘either you surrender or you are killed. But you don’t flee.’
Days dragged into weeks. Bracing for the worst, anxious Western governments quietly pulled together a force in Brazzaville whose commandos practised the cross-river trip in high-power motor-launches and helicopters. The diplomats were busy, juggling a stream of visa requests from the mouvanciers with preparations for the evacuation of expatriates who were stubbornly refusing to heed the increasingly forceful warnings issued over the BBC World Service.
‘We’ve built a special cement step to allow women with high heels to get into the motor launches. And I’ve even got peanuts and chocolate bars ready for anyone who might starve to death while we’re waiting for our men,’ an ambassador proudly announced. He had gone on a trial run across the river and returned somewhat breathless. ‘Door to door, it took just three and a half minutes.’
The rebels kept marching. National television broadcast footage of General Nzimbi Nzale, head of the DSP, haranguing his troops for hour after hour, ordering them to defend Mobutu to the death. The camera frame was tight and one assumed, from his hoarse tones, that he was addressing an audience of thousands. But the military made the mistake of allowing a foreign television crew to attend the same event. They filmed the general from behind, revealing a couple of dozen nose-picking soldiers, vacant-eyed, barely paying attention. Could these be the same men who had drawn up a list of strategic sites to be blown up and personalities to be assassinated once the rebels reached the city, a list leaked to Kinshasa newspapers?
In the Hotel Intercontinental the shops, anticipating the looting that traditionally preceded the rebels’ arrival, first slashed the prices on their designer brands a
nd then staged ‘everything must go’ sales, trying to shift stock before a more dramatic type of ‘liquidation totale’ occurred.
But their usual customers were no longer interested. Quietly, the mouvanciers were abandoning their villas in the hills and moving down to the Hotel Intercontinental, where they spent fitful nights, armed bodyguards perched on seats outside their rooms. You would spot them in the lobby, surrounded by matched sets of Louis Vuitton luggage, before they boarded planes and headed for properties bought years before in Belgium, France, Switzerland and South Africa in preparation for just such a day. It was almost possible to squeeze out a tiny pang of sympathy for these, the most well-heeled refugees in the world.
As for the expatriates, they had been told by their embassies to keep one holdall at the ready for the eventual evacuation, so shopping was ruled out. The designer stock stayed stubbornly put, and the evening ritual amongst journalists staying at the hotel became a window-shopping tour to mentally select which bargain to snatch as the crowds surged through the plate glass.
‘What you have to realise is you’ll only get the chance to go for one item,’ a veteran correspondent told me with deadly seriousness. ‘There won’t be any time for faffing around. So it’s all about focus. Quick in, quick out.’ I dallied for a while over a pair of yellow lace knickers with matching bra. But in the end a tan leather jacket, worth at least $1,000, I reckoned, by Kinshasa prices, won my vote.
We were not the only ones getting light-headed with anxiety. A dinner hosted by a Zairean friend who worked at one of the ministries was a jolly, noisy meal until one of the guests called for silence. Looking around the gathering of lawyers, university professors and consultants, he raised a glass of pink champagne and reminded them that this was exactly the social class targeted for elimination after Liberia’s 1980 army coup. ‘Let us drink a toast to change, and pray we are all still here in a year’s time to celebrate,’ he said.
Soon after, a curfew was announced, and evening outings came to an end. Defeated soldiers and deserters were trickling into Kinshasa, hijacking the first cars they stumbled upon. It was no longer safe to venture out after dark. Instead, along with a growing number of crop-haired ‘security experts’ brought in by the embassies, we were confined to the Intercontinental’s pizzeria, where the band laughably dubbed ‘Le Best’ serenaded us with a muzak medley which always featured a particularly mournful cover version of ‘Hotel California’. ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,’ they wailed.
All airlines had now cancelled their flights to Kinshasa and the ferries had been requisitioned by the government. After weeks spent wondering whether to go or stay, the decision had been taken out of our hands.
The Hotel Intercontinental manager was finding the experience as claustrophobic as the rest of us. His appearance was as natty as ever, but his face was beginning to show the strain. ‘How much longer is this going to go on? I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. It’s giving me ulcers,’ he confessed over breakfast. Fearing a siege, he had stockpiled enough food, water and diesel to cater for 2,000 people for at least a fortnight. Now he chose to combat the tension the only way he knew how: by entertaining in style. Select, candle-lit dinners were staged in the wine cellars of the hotel. Surrounded by dusty vintages, nestling in the bowels of the building, for one brief night we felt sheltered from the approaching storm.
‘Do you really think these Tutsi troops are going to be as effective as people say?’ asked my neighbour as we savoured the nouvelle cuisine. ‘I suspect it’s all a myth. It’s easy enough beating the Zairean army out in the sticks. But surely when the rebels get to Kinshasa, and the DSP have nowhere left to run, it’ll be completely different?’
It was a view I heard repeatedly, but not one I shared. I had no expectations the DSP would ever do battle. What I feared was that they would go for the soft targets, like journalists. I had developed a habit of shouting in my sleep and regretted now checking into the sixteenth floor. A precise image haunted me: looking through the spy-hole in my door and seeing two DSP men, guns cocked, about to break into the room and toss me out of the window. Even if I hit the main building on the trip down, there was no way I could survive the fall from that height.
Radio Trottoir, ‘pavement radio’, as the city’s gossip network was known, was in overdrive. There were rumours of Chinese mercenaries landing in their hundreds, of Zulu troops being called in from South Africa, of goose-stepping soldiers coming in from North Korea to save Mobutu. Also circulating were leaflets telling residents who wanted change to tie white bandanas around their foreheads when the rebels arrived as a sign of support. On the main routes into town, tanks and artillery had been set up. But with each soldier convinced a rival unit was bent on treachery, they were too busy watching each other to stop the steady flow of infiltrators into Kinshasa.
Given the steady ratcheting of tension, it was no surprise that on 15 May anyone who owned a television sat glued to their set. Since mid-afternoon a message had been running across the screen, promising an important press conference. The word on Radio Trottoir was that Mobutu had been meeting with his generals and his departure was about to be announced.
The hours ticked by and nothing happened. The message continued to unroll. Finally, after midnight, a nervous newscaster appeared. To a rapt audience he read out a bland summary of the day’s events, rounded off with a piece of homely advice: viewers should watch out for the small beetles emerging after the recent seasonal rains, which packed a particularly nasty bite.
Whatever talks had taken place in Zaire’s upper echelons, commonsense had not triumphed. Mobutu, who had always warned his countrymen that ‘ma tête vaut cher’ (‘my head won’t come cheap’) could not let go. When he drove to the airport the following day, heading for the jungle palace where, it was said, he planned to exhume his ancestor’s bodies to save them from desecration by the rebels, he stole away in silence, having taken none of the hard decisions demanded.
And so it was that six hours after the death squad’s first unwelcome visit to the Intercontinental, I found myself peering over the balcony, watching as the parking lot below filled with gleaming jeeps and flashy sports cars. Kongulu and his men were back, and this time they had arrived in force.
The lifts filled with panicking women, their hair in a mess, juggling sleepy children in pyjamas, bulging holdalls and plastic bags full of documents. Not only had we been sleeping alongside the regime’s fifth columnists for the last few days, it emerged, we’d been unwitting neighbours of the DSP chiefs’ extended families.
I could see their menfolk patrolling nervously up and down, toting sub-machine guns and draped in cartridge belts. They were wearing their trademark sunglasses, those gold-rimmed feminine accessories which should look comic on a man but instead manage to look as sinister as the wedding dresses and blonde wigs worn by Liberia’s drugged fighters. They are the modern equivalent of the wooden masks donned around night fires by warriors preparing to do battle, which turn their wearers into something utterly alien—faceless instruments of violence capable of unspeakable acts.
We had chosen the Intercontinental because of its track record of safety. But in a shifting world order, yesterday’s guardians could turn into today’s hostage-takers. Looming all too vividly now was the possibility that the DSP might choose to make its last stand at Mobutu’s hotel. Did our nosy room cleaner and nervous taxi driver, neither of whom had made an appearance that day, know something we didn’t?
I called the British head of a security company downtown. ‘Just let us know if you get too concerned and we’ll come and get you,’ he said breezily, as though it was the easiest thing in the world. But word came that a camera crew trying to leave the hotel had been roughed up by the DSP and turned back. Summoning assistance might simply precipitate a crisis. More hopeful news came from journalists trapped at the Hotel Memling, that other de facto media headquarters in the centre of town. Closer to the action, they were watching retreating Zairea
n soldiers streaming along the boulevards, a retreat turning into a rout. As they surrendered ground, the men were removing their uniforms to emerge as harmless civilians.
Down in the lobby, a similar remarkable metamorphosis had taken place, almost without our noticing. Uniforms and weapons had all disappeared. Scores of muscular young men were lounging about in modish tracksuits, not a hint of camouflage or khaki in sight. The Hotel Intercontinental suddenly appeared to be hosting a well-attended sports convention.
The truth dawned: the Intercontinental was not going to be the stage for a new Alamo. The DSP had laid their plans in advance and were using the hotel as a way station where they could round up their families and change into civilian clothing before heading for the river. From cursing the inaction of the Western force in Brazzaville, we went to praying they would keep away. The last thing we needed now was for the DSP’s exit to be blocked.
Indeed, the DSP were encountering something of a logistical problem, as the first to flee had left their boats on the wrong side of the river. And this was when the Hotel Intercontinental suddenly justified its outrageously inflated prices, making up for all the suspect salads and blue feet, the years of skittering cockroaches and terrible muzak. From his office, our hotel manager called up his Lebanese friends and explained the situation. Swiftly a small fleet of Lebanese-owned motor-launches was assembled to ferry the new-found sports enthusiasts and their families across to Congo-Brazzaville. One convoy after another headed out, the limping wounded bringing up the rear. The hotel miraculously emptied and we heaved a sigh of relief. A showdown that could have cost hundreds of lives had been averted.
Across the deserted city, the Western security experts were at their work. On one street corner, a Belgian sharp-shooter took careful aim as a colleague ushered out a group of terrified nuns. Roaring around Kinshasa in a UN jeep, another leathery veteran had set himself the task of persuading what few soldiers remained to disarm. In the patronising tones you might use with a naughty toddler, he was telling teenagers so drunk they could barely focus to drop their rocket-grenade launchers before they did themselves a mischief.
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz Page 3
