In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  His mother Marie Madeleine Yemo, whom he adored, was a woman who had notched up her fair share of experiences. She had already had two children by one relationship when her aunt, whose marriage to a village chief was childless, arranged for her niece to join her husband’s harem. It was a kind of brood-mare, stand-in arrangement that, while strictly in accordance with local custom, must have contained its share of bitterness and humiliation for both of the women concerned.

  Mama Yemo, as she was eventually to be known to the nation, bore the chief two children, then twins who died. Suspecting her aunt of witchcraft, she fled on foot to Lisala. It was there that she met Albéric Gbemani, a cook working for a Belgian judge. The two staged a church wedding just in time, two months before Joseph Désiré Mobutu’s birth. The boy’s name, with its warrior connotations, came from an uncle.

  Recalling his youth, Mobutu later had more to say about the kindness shown by the judge’s wife, who took a shine to him and taught him to read, write and speak fluent French, than his own father, who barely features. ‘She adopted me, in a way. You should see it in its historical context: a white woman, a Belgian woman, holding the hand of a little black boy, the son of her cook, in the road, in the shops, in company. It was exceptional.’

  Given that Albéric died when Mobutu was barely eight years old, the dearth of detail about his father is perhaps not surprising. But that lacuna was later seized upon by Mobutu’s critics, who would caricature their leader as the bastard offspring of a woman only a few steps up from a professional prostitute.

  With his mother relying on the generosity of relatives to support her four children, Mobutu’s existence became peripatetic as she moved around the country. Periods in which he ran wild, helping out in the fields, alternated with stints at mission schools. He later claimed that religious exposure left him a devout Catholic, but as with many Congolese, his Christianity never ruled out a belief in the African spirit world which left him profoundly dependent on the advice of marabouts (witch-doctors).

  Mobutu finally settled with an uncle in the town of Coquilhatville (modern-day Mbandaka), an expanding colonial administrative centre. The placing by rural families of their excess offspring with urban relatives who are then expected to shoulder their upkeep and education for years, often decades, is extraordinarily prevalent in Africa. Puzzling to Westerners, such generosity is a manifestation of the extended family which ensures that one individual’s success is shared as widely as possible. But the burden is often almost too heavy to bear, and such children never have it easy. For Mobutu, life was tough. Perhaps the austerity of those days, when he depended on a relative for food and clothing, explains his love of excess, the unrestrained appetites he showed in later life.

  In Coquilhatville he attended a school run by white priests, and the child whose precocity had already been encouraged by a white woman began to acquire a high profile. Physically, he was always big for his age, a natural athlete who excelled at sports. But he wanted to dominate in other ways as well. ‘He was very good at school, he was always in the top three,’ remembers a fellow pupil who used to play football with Mobutu in the school yard. ‘But he was also one of the troublemakers. He was the noisiest of all the pupils. The walls between classrooms were of glass, so we could see what was going on next door. He was always stirring things up. It wasn’t done out of malice, it was done to make people laugh.’

  One favourite trick was making fun of the clumsy French spoken by the Belgian priests, most of whom were Flemish. ‘When they made a mistake he would leap up and point it out and the whole room would explode into uproar,’ said a contemporary. Another jape involved flicking ink darts at the priest’s back while he worked at the blackboard, a trick calculated to get the class giggling.

  In later life, like any anxious middle-class parent, Mobutu would drum into his children the importance of a formal education. One such lecture occurred when the presidential family was aboard the presidential yacht, moored not far from Mbandaka. On a whim, Mobutu sent for the priests from his old school and ordered them to bring his school reports. Miraculously, they still had them and Nzanga, one of Mobutu’s sons, remembered his father proudly showing his sceptical offspring that, academically at least, he had been no slouch.

  Given that he did well academically, Mobutu, known as ‘Jeff’ to his friends, was forgiven a certain amount of unruliness. But the last straw came in 1949 when the school rebel stowed aboard a boat heading for Leopoldville, the capital of music, bars and women regarded by the priests as ‘sin city’. Mobutu met a girl and, swept away by his first significant sexual experience, extended his stay. After several weeks had passed, the priests asked a fellow pupil, Eketebi Mondjolomba, where Mobutu had gone.

  ‘Since we lived on the same street, I was supposed to know where he was and I said, in all innocence, he’d gone to Kinshasa,’ remembered Eketebi, who was still grateful that Mobutu later laughingly forgave—while definitely not forgetting—this youthful indiscretion. ‘At the end of the year, that was one of the reasons why he was sent to the Force Publique. It was the punishment the priests and local chiefs always reserved for the troublesome, stubborn boys.’

  The sudden expulsion was a shock. It meant a seven-year obligatory apprenticeship in an armed force still tainted by a reputation for brutality acquired during the worst excesses of the Leopold era. But for Mobutu the Force Publique was to prove a godsend. Here the natural rebel found discipline and a surrogate father figure in the shape of Sergeant Joseph Bobozo, a stern but affectionate mentor. In later life, bloated by good living and corroded by distrust for those around him, he would wax nostalgic about the austere routines of army life and the simple camaraderie of the barracks. Looking back, he recognised this as the happiest period of his life.

  In truth, Mobutu was never quite as much of a military man as he liked to make out. Of more importance in furnishing his mental landscape was the fact that he managed to keep his education going in the Force Publique, corresponding regularly with the mission pupils he had left behind, who kept him closely informed of how their studies were progressing. On sentinel duty, carrying out his chores, he read voraciously, working through the European newspapers received by the Belgian officers, university publications from Brussels and whatever books he could lay hands on. It was a habit he retained all his life. He knew tracts of the Bible off by heart. Later, his regular favourites were to give a clear indication of the sense of personal destiny that had developed: President Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill and Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince, that autocrat’s handbook.

  He took and passed an accountancy course and began to dabble in journalism, something he had already practised at school, where he ran the class journal. And he got married. Marie Antoinette, an appropriate name for the wife of a future African monarch, was only fourteen at the time, but in traditional Congolese society this was not considered precocious. Still smarting from his schoolroom clashes with the priests, Mobutu chose not to wed in church. His contribution to the festivities—a crate of beer—betrayed the modesty of his income at the time.

  Photos taken during those years show a gawky Mobutu, all legs, ears and glasses, wearing the colonial shorts more reminiscent of a scout outfit than a serious army uniform. Marie Antoinette, looking the teenager she still was, smiles shyly by his side. Utterly loyal, she was nonetheless a feisty woman, who never let her husband’s growing importance cow her into silence. ‘You’d be talking to him and she would come in and chew him up one side and down the other,’ said Devlin. ‘She was not impressed by His Eminence, and he would immediately switch into Ngbandi with her because he knew I could understand Lingala or French.’

  A Belgian colonial had started up a new Congolese magazine, Actualités Africaines, and was looking for contributors. Because Mobutu, as a member of the armed forces, was not allowed to express political opinions, he wrote his pieces on contemporary politics under a pseudonym. Given the choice between extending his army contract and getting m
ore seriously involved in journalism, he chose the latter. Although initial duties involved talent-spotting Congolese beauties to fill space for an editor nervous of polemics, Mobutu was soon writing about more topical events, scouring town on his motor scooter to collect information. The world was opening up. A 1958 visit to Brussels to cover the Universal Exhibition was a revelation and he arranged a longer stay for journalistic training. By that time he had got to know the young Congolese intellectuals who were challenging Belgium’s complacent vision of the future, staging demonstrations, making speeches and being thrown into jail.

  One man in particular, Lumumba, became a personal friend. The two men shared many of the same instincts: a belief in a united, strong Congo and resentment of foreign interference. Thanks to his influence Mobutu, who had always protested his political neutrality, was to become a card-carrying member of the National Congolese Movement, the party Lumumba hoped would rise above ethnic loyalties to become a truly national movement.

  But even in those early days there are question marks over Mobutu’s motives. Congolese youths studying in Brussels were systematically approached by the Belgian secret services with an eye to future cooperation. Several contemporaries say that by the time Mobutu had made his next career step—moving from journalism to act as Lumumba’s trusted personal aide, deciding who he saw, scheduling his activities, sitting in for him at economic negotiations in Brussels—he was an informer for Belgian intelligence.

  What were the qualities that made so many players in the Congolese game single him out? Some remarked on his quiet good sense, the pragmatism that helped him rein in the excitable Lumumba when he was carried away by his own rhetoric. It accompanied an appetite for hard work: Mobutu was regularly getting up at 5 in the morning and working till 10 p.m. during the crisis years. But the characteristic that, more than any other, eventually decreed that he won control of the country’s army was probably the brute courage he attributed to that childhood brush with the leopard.

  Bringing the 1960 mutiny to heel involved standing up in front of hundreds of furious, drunk soldiers who had plundered the barracks’ weapons stores and quelling them through sheer force of personality. And Mobutu carried out that task, one that civilian politicians understandably balked at, not once but many times. ‘I’ve been in enough wars to know when men are putting it on and when they really are courageous,’ said Devlin. ‘And Mobutu really was courageous.’ Once, he watched Mobutu curb a mutiny by the police force. ‘They were hollering and screaming and pointing guns at him and telling him not to come any closer or they’d shoot. He just started talking quietly and calmly until they quietened down, then he walked along taking their guns from them, one by one. Believe me, it was hellish impressive.’

  The quality was to be tested repeatedly. The assassination attempt foiled by Devlin’s intervention was one of five such bids in the week that followed Mobutu’s ‘peaceful revolution’. Such was the danger that Mobutu sent his family to Belgium. Marie-Antoinette deposited her offspring and returned in twenty-four hours, refusing to leave her husband’s side. ‘If they kill him they have to kill me,’ she told friends.

  What constitutes charm? A presence, a capacity to command attention, an innate conviction of one’s own uniqueness, combined, as often as not, with the more manipulative ability of making the interlocutor believe he has one’s undivided attention and has gained a certain indefinable something from the encounter. Whatever its components, the quality was innate with Mobutu, but definitely blossomed as growing power swelled his sense of self-worth. In the early 1960s European observers referred to him as the ‘doux colonel’ (mild-mannered colonel), suggesting a certain diffidence. Nonetheless he was a remarkable enough figure to prompt Francis Monheim, a Belgian journalist covering events, to feel he merited an early hagiography. By the end of his life, whether they loathed or loved him, those who had brushed against Mobutu rarely forgot the experience. All remarked on an extraordinary personal charisma.

  ‘I’ve never seen a photograph of Mobutu that did him justice, that makes him look at all impressive,’ claimed Kim Jaycox, the World Bank’s former vice-president for Africa, who met Mobutu many times. ‘It’s like taking a photograph of a jacaranda tree, you can’t capture the actual impact of that colour, of that tree. In photos he looked kind of unintelligent and without lustre. But when you were in his presence discussing anything that was important to him, you suddenly saw this quite extraordinary personality, a kind of glowing personality. No matter what you thought of his behaviour or what he was doing to the country, you could see why he was in charge.’

  He had a gift for the grand gesture, a stylish bravado that captured the imagination. Setting off for Shaba to cover the invasions of the 1970s, foreign journalists would occasionally disembark to discover, to their astonishment, that their military plane had been flown by a camouflage-clad president, showing off his pilot’s licence.

  There were some of the personal quirks that can count for much when it comes to political networking and pressing the flesh, whether in a democracy or a one-party state. He had a superb memory and on the basis of the briefest of meetings would be able, re-encountering his interlocutor many years later, to recall name, profession and tribal affiliation. ‘It was phenomenal,’ remembers Honoré Ngbanda, who as presidential aide for many years was responsible for briefing Mobutu for his meetings. ‘Whether it was a visual memory or a memory for dates, he could remember things that had happened 10 years ago: the date, the day and time. His memory was elephantine.’

  Mobutu had another of the characteristics of the manipulative charmer: he could be all things to all men, holding up a mirror to his interlocutors that reflected back their wishes, convincing each that he perfectly understood their predicament and was on their side. ‘He could treat people with kid gloves or he could treat them with a steel fist,’ remembered a former prime minister who saw more of the fist than the glove. ‘It was different for everyone. He was very clever at tailoring the response to the individual.’

  Not for him the rigid stances that had doomed Lumumba. He would dither for days, leaving his collaborators in a state of nervous ambiguity, often uncertain over what instructions had actually been issued. This was the negative side of his adaptability. But while colleagues tried to second-guess his wishes, he would be assessing the mood of the day, ready to change direction with all the panache of a born actor. ‘He was very good at putting on a show,’ acknowledged a contemporary. ‘He could be absolutely furious and two minutes later, when he saw it wasn’t the right thing to do, he’d change completely.’

  And finally, there was the humour: sardonic, worldly wise, it deepened as the years turned against him until, listening to Mobutu fielding questions about human rights and corruption at a hostile press conference in Biarritz, it was difficult not to feel a certain grudging admiration for the impeccable politeness, the fake innocence, the ironic demeanour that all broadcast one defiant message: I know your game and I am far too old and wily a fox to be caught out.

  This was the man who seized control of Congo in September 1960. He was to prove as good as his word, swiftly handing power to a group of ‘general commissioners’—a collection of the country’s few university graduates—who were supposed to run the country while the politicians took stock of the problems confronting Congo. With four separate governments in existence—one in the eastern city of Stanleyville, loyal to the ousted Lumumba; one in Katanga under Moise Tshombe, supported by the Belgians; one in Kasai under Albert Kalonji; and one in Leopoldville under President Kasavubu—national partition was now a reality rather than a threat. But the disappearance of probably the key player in this game was about to alter the situation.

  In the space of a couple of months, Lumumba had managed to outrage the Belgians by insulting their king, appal the West with his flirtation with Moscow and alienate the United Nations. He had also frightened former colleagues by hatching a series of cack-handed assassination plots against his Congolese rivals. With Mo
butu in charge, Lumumba was now in detention, but his Napoleon-like ability to whip up the crowds and convert waverers to his cause—even at times his own jailers—meant he remained a dangerous loose cannon.

  In August of that year, the CIA director himself had told Devlin that Lumumba’s removal was an ‘urgent and prime objective’, an instruction that presumably could have covered anything from encouraging Lumumba’s rivals to topple him by legal means to funding a coup. Now Washington moved to direct action. Shortly after Mobutu’s takeover, Devlin was advised by headquarters that ‘Joe from Paris’ would be coming to Leopoldville on an urgent mission. ‘I was told I’d recognise him, and I did. He was waiting at a café across from the embassy and he walked me to my car and we went to a quiet place where we could talk.’ The man was a top CIA scientist and he had come to Kinshasa with a poison for Lumumba. Devlin, he said, was to arrange for it to be slipped into the prime minister’s food, or his toothpaste. The poison was cleverly designed to produce one of the diseases endemic to central Africa so that Lumumba’s death would look like an unfortunate accident. ‘Jesus Christ, isn’t this unusual?’ was Devlin’s astonished reply. Joe from Paris acknowledged that it was, but said authorisation came from President Eisenhower himself.

  It was a job the usually conscientious Devlin somehow never got around to performing. He insisted, and has testified before a US Senate committee hearing, that while he held no moral objections to the principle of political assassination when demanded by circumstances, the killing of Lumumba was never a step he personally considered necessary or intended to carry out. ‘If I had had Hitler in my sights in 1941 and I’d pulled the trigger, maybe 20 or 30 million people would be alive today. But I just never felt it was justified with Lumumba. I was hoping the Congolese would settle it amongst themselves, one way or another.’