In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  No hint of his doubts, it must be said, appeared in his cables, raising the question of whether Devlin really was as reluctant as he makes out or just sanitised his account with the passage of time. Although he had access to Lumumba’s entourage, Devlin stalled. The months passed, with the CIA considering first one assassination scenario and then another. Devlin eventually disposed of the poison by pouring it into the Congo river. ‘I had the damn stuff in my drawer and I wanted to get rid of it.’

  During that time, Lumumba was demonstrating just what a threat he remained by dramatically escaping from detention. Recaptured, he was transferred to a military base, only to be briefly freed when the soldiers mutinied. Finally, both the Americans and Belgians were provided with the let-out they had been hoping and pushing for all along. Exasperated by Lumumba’s Houdini-like qualities, Kasavubu and the commissioners dispatched the prime minister to his arch-enemies in the south. On 17 January 1961, Lumumba and two collaborators were flown to Katanga. During the flight down, Luba soldiers avenged themselves for the massacre of their tribesmen by Leopoldville’s army the year before, beating their prisoners so brutally the horrified Belgian air crew closed themselves in the cockpit to drown out the noise. Approaching Elizabethville, the pilot radioed the control tower to announce ‘I have three precious packages aboard’. On arrival, they were taken away to be killed, almost certainly shot dead in front of Katanga’s top officials and their Belgian collaborators.

  The Congolese secessionists had done the CIA’s dirty work for them. Devlin insisted he was not aware of Lumumba’s departure until it was too late. As for Mobutu, no one has ever been able to prove his involvement in the murders. The adoring account written by the Belgian Francis Monheim claims, unconvincingly, that Mobutu was never even told of the decision to move the prisoner. But it is almost impossible to believe that the head of the army, the man who held the real power in the country, could have been kept unawares of such a key development. ‘I can’t believe he wasn’t involved,’ confessed Devlin. ‘But it was just one of those questions you didn’t ask at the time.’

  Whoever actually pulled the trigger, in the eyes of Lumumbists and many other Zaireans, Mobutu always bore moral responsibility for Lumumba’s murderer, with the Western powers playing the part of Iago, whispering their instructions from behind the scenes. Mobutu’s decision later to erect a monument to the country’s first prime minister was regarded as an act of extraordinary cynicism, Orwellian in its apparent intention of rewriting history. Certainly, the story of Lumumba and Mobutu follows the pattern of one of the great parables of mankind: the loving brothers, the best friends who end up trying to destroy each other, their former intimacy ironically rendering them more ruthless, more implacable in their hatred than any two strangers could ever be. It is the story of Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel, Macbeth and Banquo. There was even a moment during those years when a dishevelled Lumumba, thwarted by Mobutu in a bid to address the army, turned on his former friend and in a quiet, sad voice said: ‘Is it you, Joseph, saying that?’ And Mobutu replied: ‘Yes, it is me. I have had enough.’ It was the 1960s equivalent of ‘Et tu, Brute?’ from the dying lips of the betrayed Julius Caesar.

  Lumumba had certainly started off being the dominant member of the partnership, more famous, more charismatic, more politically sophisticated and far more idealistic. But he had lacked pragmatism, and that was Mobutu’s forte.

  The whereabouts of Lumumba’s body have never been identified. It was probably hacked into pieces, the head dissolved in a vat of sulphuric acid by a Belgian clean-up team sent to remove all traces of the assassinations. But another, even more fanciful story has done the rounds: that Mobutu’s collaborators, terrified that Lumumba’s spirit would live on after his death, asked a witch-doctor how to destroy his supernatural powers. On his instructions they divided up the body, hired a low-flying C130, and flew along the borders of their huge country, scattering the pieces. This was the only way, the marabout had said, to prevent Lumumba’s spirit reassembling and returning to challenge his former friend.

  Lumumba’s death removed a man who, while alive, would always represent a challenge to those in power. But it did not end Congo’s political turmoil. Sucked into the government’s attempts to re-establish territorial integrity, the UN was to find itself embroiled in pitched battles with a mercenary force recruited by the Katangans and to lose its secretary-general when Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash flying to yet another round of negotiations.

  Once the Katanga and Kasai secessions had been brought to heel, the government was confronted by a new set of anti-Western, Marxist uprisings in the east. In one of these a young rebel called Laurent Kabila, whose womanising ways and heavy drinking exasperated Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who had set off to help his African brothers, played a role before fading from view. Western audiences were more preoccupied by the horrors that occurred in Stanleyville, where a white mercenary force and Belgian paratroopers were unable to prevent the slaughter of 200 Europeans held hostage by the rebels. Never again would Western leaders and the public at large look at Africa with the same cheerful optimism of the postwar days.

  During all this time Mobutu, as head of the armed forces, was watching and waiting, a quiet presence behind the succession of weak and divided civilian governments. By October 1965, another political impasse had developed, with Kasavubu sacking Tshombe, the rebel-turned-prime minister, and elections looming. By this stage, Mobutu had become a regular visitor at the Devlin household. The two men had got to know each other’s families, with Mobutu taking a particular shine to the CIA station chief’s young daughter, who liked to steal his cap and swagger stick and march up and down with them. However, what happened in November, Devlin maintained, was not the result of any advice on his part. ‘The US position and British position was that they did not want a coup, they wanted Kasavubu as president and Tshombe as prime minister. I told Mobutu that, and he smiled and said: “A Johnson–Goldwater ticket you mean?” (a Democrat–Republican combination that would have united the US’s two main parties) I said “Yes”, and he said “Fine”. The next thing I knew, I was woken at five in the morning with the word he had just pulled a coup.’

  This time, despite promises to hand power back to the civilians in five years’ time, Mobutu was not going to modestly bow out. He was there to stay—for thirty-two years. With hindsight and the knowledge of what was to come, it is too easy today to forget that the second Mobutu takeover was welcomed, not only by foreign allies desperate to see a safe, pro-Western hand on the tiller. Disillusioned by five long years of wrangling and war, the Congolese had lost all faith in the efficacy of armed struggle. They ached for a stability the civilian politicians seemed incapable of achieving. Mobutu’s delivery of just that quality was to render him massively popular for years to come.

  Devlin left Congo in 1967 for Laos, where he was to win the Distinguished Intelligence Medal he wore with quiet pride for a particularly risky battlefield operation. He was not to rebase in Kinshasa until 1974, by which time he had left the CIA, although he deemed it hardly worth his while, given the high public profile he had inadvertently acquired in Congo, to even attempt to cover his tracks. ‘You can retire from the agency under cover if you want to. But I told them that in my case it would be a bit like a whore who’d worked the same block for twenty years coming back as a nun.’ He was taken on by Maurice Templesman, the secretive diamond dealer. But although he brandished a letter from the CIA’s director stating he was no longer with the agency, Mobutu still invited him around. ‘I wanted it to be clear I was no longer in the business. But he liked to use me as a sounding board and perhaps, sometimes, to carry a message back to Washington.’

  Devlin found a changed man. Austere army barracks had been replaced by the comfort of the presidential villa on Mount Ngaliema, the hill overlooking the Livingstone falls, or the burgeoning palace at Gbadolite. The 5 a.m. starts were still being observed. But Mobutu, exposed to only beer be
fore, had learned to enjoy his drink. And in a sign of the luxury he had come to regard as his due, his choice was pink champagne, the Hollywood movie star’s tipple. ‘He was already round the bend, more paranoid, more convinced of his own infallibility. He was surrounded by yes-men who were constantly telling him how wonderful, how brilliant, how marvellous he was, what an extraordinary mind he had. All I could think of were the stories I’d read about the court of Henry VIII or Louis XIV.’

  Like many men of his era, Devlin felt he had no apologies to make for past policy decisions. It was too easy, he insisted, for a new generation to forget the very real imperatives of the day. ‘You’re too young to remember much about the Cold War. But it was a real war and Mobutu played a rather key role in blocking Khrushchev. He was right for Congo at that time.’

  Yet that did not blind him to what the ‘doux colonel’ had become by the 1970s: ‘Lord Acton had it exactly. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” ’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dizzy worms

  ‘If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.’

  Bas-Congo proverb

  ‘There are no opponents in Zaire, because the notion of opposition has no place in our mental universe. In fact, there are no political problems in Zaire.’

  —Mobutu Sese Seko

  For more than a decade, a fanatical rebel movement called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been operating in Uganda’s impoverished north. Led by Joseph Kony, a crazed former choirboy who says he wants to rule the country according to the Bible’s Ten Commandments, it is feared and hated by local villagers for the atrocities it commits.

  Despite its unpopularity, the LRA has successfully challenged the Ugandan government, running rings around army units sent to quell it, and halting development in the region. Its success can partly be attributed to the peculiarly unpleasant technique used to recruit new members. An LRA unit will target a school and force the pupils to march off with its fighters. The girls are then raped and taken as wives by LRA commanders. The boys are given bayonets and ordered to kill a fellow pupil, a playground friend, who may have shown signs of straggling. Once the crime has been committed, the children have blood on their hands. The disgust they feel for themselves, their terror of the vengeance the village elders would mete out if they knew the truth, prevent them from returning to civilian life. It is guilt by association, and it is a terribly effective method for extracting loyalty from even the most reluctant.

  There was something of the LRA technique, the methodology of the vampire initiating his latest victim to the secret world of the undead, about the way Mobutu set about the task of consolidating his position once the mutinous army had been brought under control. In the years that followed he was to adopt a variety of techniques to shore up his rule, ranging from terror, to divide and rule, to sheer demagoguery. But his appeal to one of the most powerful of all human instincts—greed—was to prove by far the most effective means of co-opting a generation.

  As a member of one of the smaller of Zaire’s 250 or so tribes, he knew he could not count on the automatic support of any sizeable ethnic community. His country was intimidatingly large. If the secessions had been brought under control, local governors remained unruly, neighbouring powers itching for a chunk of the land he could barely police. The likelihood of a coup leader managing to stay at the helm beyond the year seemed slim indeed.

  Early on in his regime there were public hangings of suspected coup plotters, with the public encouraged to attend the gruesome open-air spectacle. Pierre Mulele, the rebel leader who had challenged central rule in the east, was lured back from exile with an amnesty promise, then tortured to death by soldiers. His eyes were pulled from their sockets, his genitals ripped off, his limbs amputated one by one as he slowly expired. What remained was dumped in the river.

  But these were the crude, traditional methods a new leader used to show who was boss. By the mid-1970s, Mobutu had grown more subtle. Why kill your enemies, after all, when, with a bit of financial encouragement, they would willingly sell their souls? It was an approach that elided smoothly into his own conception of his role as a tribal chief who, like a gangster boss, must be able to prove his value to the community in concrete terms. ‘If you go to see the head of the village you never come back empty-handed,’ Mobutu would say, handing over funds for a school here, a hospital there. ‘Those who come to see me must always go away with something.’

  He had attended the round-table talks staged to settle outstanding economic disputes between Congo and Belgium before independence. Looking back, he became convinced the naive Congolese delegation had been diddled by the wily white negotiators. But the experience had left him with a keen appreciation of the extent of his country’s assets he could put to good use. The pie waiting to be divided up was enormous. And it could be made yet bigger if a sensitive issue was addressed: ten years after nominal autonomy, 75 per cent of the country’s economy was still in foreign hands. Psychologically, culturally and economically, Congo was still under colonial sway. It was time for a redistribution of wealth that would right past wrongs and simultaneously create an elite who would owe Mobutu everything and be suitably grateful.

  Unfortunately it was here that one of his great personal failings was to be exposed. A self-made man, Mobutu was bright, quick to learn. Like many an African president he had risen to the top by dint of sheer toughness and a cunning understanding of human behaviour. His was the wiliness of the street operator, not the analytical intelligence of the academic. He had never completed his formal education or gone to university. His mental landscape was a jumble of half-learned lessons, gut convictions and practical wisdom, lacking structure and discipline. Though he was ready to fill certain gaps by reading up on political strategy and military tactics, the same did not apply to another, equally important field—economics.

  Official after official attests to the fact that when the subject of economics came up, Mobutu’s attention would wander, his eyes glaze over. He knew how much his country was worth, but he had no idea of the processes required to realise that value. As Oscar Wilde might have said, he knew the price of everything while understanding the value of nothing. ‘He had absolutely no interest in economics,’ acknowledged Jose Endundu, who was one of the country’s leading businessmen during the Mobutu years. ‘He didn’t understand that without a sound economy there is no politics. He couldn’t see the link. If you tried talking economics he’d immediately change the subject. If you brought him an economic document he’d give it to an aide and say “put it on my pillow, I’ll read it later”, but you could be sure he would never look at it.’

  Mobutu was out of his depth, but was not prepared to admit it. ‘If you know nothing, you let others manage,’ said a former prime minister, drawing an analogy with France’s great Sun King. ‘Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the economic adviser to Louis XIV, would say: “Sire, you handle the politics, and I will manage the economy.” But Mobutu would not do that.’

  This weakness was compounded by the changing nature of his coterie. By the 1970s, those who visited him noted that advisers willing to offer cogent criticisms had disappeared, replaced by sycophants ready to say whatever they thought the great man wanted to hear. When it came to politics or the army, Mobutu at this stage of his life was too astute to be misled by such yes-men. But in the field of economics, where his boredom threshold was low, he would grasp at the miracle cures being offered by members of his entourage. Long-term consequences went unexamined, knock-on effects ignored in the rush to tie things up. ‘He liked easy options. If someone came to him and offered him what looked like a nice, easy solution he’d seize it. And like many people with limited education, he wouldn’t know when to let go,’ said Devlin. ‘He was a political genius, but an economic spastic.’

  In the leader of a military putsch, such a failing was trivial. In a president who was to spend three decades in power, it proved devastating.


  As with most autocrats, Mobutu’s personal charisma went hand-in-hand with an instinctive feel for the masses. It was an understanding he carefully nurtured in the first fifteen years of his rule, travelling the country constantly in his determination to fuse the fractious provinces into one nation. ‘His party piece was to call some regional governor and announce he would be flying into his district at noon. It was his way of keeping them on their toes,’ recalled former US ambassador Daniel Simpson, who did a total of three tours of the country.

  There were frequent rallies in sports stadia and halls, at which ‘Papa’ would talk to his children. As every member of Congolese society automatically belonged to the Popular Revolutionary Movement (MPR), the party he had founded, attendance was recommended. The public came expecting entertainment, and Mobutu would oblige. Like a pantomime performer drawing the crowd into his oh-no-you’re-not, oh-yes-you-are routine, he would warm his audience up with a question-and-answer session they came to anticipate:

  Mobutu shouts: Nye, nye? (Can you be silent?).

  Crowd roars: Nye (We are silent).

  Mobutu: Na Loba? (Can I speak?).

  Crowd: Loba (Speak).

  Mobutu: Na Sopa? (Can I speak frankly?).

  Crowd: Sopa (Speak frankly).

  Mobutu: Na Panza? (Can I speak openly?).

  Crowd: Panza (Speak openly).

  Then would follow a speech in Lingala, the language which, unlike the French mastered by only an educated elite, was accessible to the common man. It would be full of puns, wordplay and wisecracks. Mobutu would get the crowd giggling, cheering and laughing. As often as not, there would be a public putdown for an unpopular aide or minister, sometimes a sacking. It was Mobutu’s way of assessing the national mood and lancing the boil of public discontent before it turned septic.