In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  The matter would have remained of purely academic interest had it not been for one key point—the building happened to be a nuclear reactor, the first reactor ever built on the African continent. With its one megawatt capacity, it is dwarfed by the likes of Chernobyl’s 1,000 megawatt installation. Nonetheless, if damaged, it could spew radioactivity for kilometres around, leaking contamination into the city’s water supply. No wonder when I visited the site on the university campus, a white-coated technician, leaning over to inspect the punctured wall, was shaking his head: ‘This is more than just worrying, it’s a threat. If it had hit the centre it wouldn’t have been funny at all.’

  Few clues to the building’s purpose are available on the meandering approach to the reactor. To get there, you must cross the district of Limete, stronghold of Etienne Tshisekedi. Once the champion of the opposition movement, he is now a stubborn old man who likes to sleep late and rarely strays beyond his own courtyard. The highway is a blaring ribbon of buses overloaded to the point where they develop a permanent slouch, honking Mercedes driven by army captains and taxi-buses with urchins dangling from the fenders, all maintaining top speed as they swerve around the potholes. At the end of the thoroughfare, you circle around the monument to Patrice Lumumba, erected by Mobutu to beatify the national hero he helped destroy. Kinshasa’s equivalent of the Eiffel Tower, the monument was ultimately meant to hold a restaurant with panoramic views, but the cranes on its airy platform stopped moving long ago. Like Lumumba’s nation-building project itself, it has never been completed; with every passing year, more panels and constituent parts go missing, cannibalised by pragmatic patriots.

  At this point you turn inland, climbing through the district of Lemba and a series of haphazard markets redolent with the sharp stink of chicken droppings, where women sell bread baguettes from large metal basins, lorries load up young labourers, and girls sit patiently plaiting yellow, mauve and orange tresses into each other’s hair. Eventually, the Ministry of Information and other skyscrapers become toy blocks shimmering in the haze of the valley and you reach the cool air and open green hills where the city finally begins to sputter to an end. This is the entrance to the University of Kinshasa and the sudden deluge of neat white shirts and young faces sheltering from the sun under coloured umbrellas is a reminder that this is a very young country.

  Once on campus, there are no carefully monitored perimeter fences, guard dogs or electric warning systems. Only a small sign—one of those electrons-buzzing-around-an-atomic-core logos that once looked so modern and now seem so dated—alerts you to the presence of radioactive material. Behind the reactor’s rusting gates, secured with a simple padlock, the courtyard resembles a wrecker’s yard, littered with the rusting hulks of cars being tinkered with in the hope of eventual revival. The grounds are being put to the usual culinary use, with cassava bushes and papaya trees growing on either side of the main entrance.

  The day I visited, the only formality involved signing a book held out by a man in a dingy sideroom. It was only later, when the head of the reactor mentioned that a crack team of gendarmes had been assigned to guard the building, that I realised I had already made contact with this elite unit. If at the Mama Yemo hospital, staff were all too bitterly aware of the extent to which a state on permanent Low Batt had abandoned them, Professor Felix Malu Wa Kalenga showed a blissful ignorance of that overwhelming reality. ‘I have absolutely no worries about security,’ he assured me, moments before casually mentioning that a fuel rod which had gone missing two decades earlier had recently, to the administration’s astonishment, been unearthed by the Italian police, property of the Sicilian Mafia. ‘I think one of the previous directors was a little careless with his keys,’ he explained. ‘He probably lent them to someone, not realising that the key to the reactor was on the same bunch.’ Well, anyone can make mistakes.

  Professor Malu was a gangly, spider-like man with long arms and legs, even longer fingers and a head of bristly greying hair. He wore a hearing aid, but it didn’t seem to work. I asked questions and he gave long, detailed answers. Sometimes, for brief interludes, the two would coincide. But most of the time he answered questions I had not asked and I put questions he did not answer. His deafness made him seem evasive and unhelpful, but I suspect embarrassment at his affliction left this intelligent man constantly trying to second-guess conversations. The deafness also had its advantages for the veteran physicist. It reinforced a wall of inexplicable serenity he had built around himself in order to allow his pet project to remain in existence.

  The missile impact and theft of the rod were not, after all, the only time the nuclear reactor had triggered a panic spreading well beyond the country’s frontiers. Realising they faced defeat at the hands of Kabila’s advancing forces, Mobutu’s presidential guard had drawn up plans to blow the reactor up in 1997—plans that were luckily never put into action. Periodically, local politicians have warned of the risks of a landfall sweeping away the reactor. The university campus, like much of Kinshasa, is built on sandy soil disastrously prone to erosion, with entire hillsides regularly subsiding overnight. ‘Obviously it’s not a good thing having a land fall near a nuclear centre,’ acknowledged the professor. ‘But the last one was at least 100 metres from here. There was no real danger.’

  Given that Kinshasa had lived through two rounds of looting, one military takeover and a major rebel attack in the last eight years alone, I suggested, wouldn’t it be sensible to ask the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna to send officials to remove all radioactive material and close down the facility for good? ‘Certainly not,’ retorted Professor Malu. ‘We have never had any real problems, although I do get the impression that the IAEA regards us with some suspicion because our country is in ruins.’

  The fact that Kinshasa possesses a nuclear reactor at all, surely that most inappropriate of institutions for a country incapable of providing millions of its citizens with electricity or clean running water, is really a fluke of history. When I first heard of it, I automatically assumed it was a folie de grandeur on the part of Mobutu, one of the more perilous of his white elephants. But I was wrong. Kinshasa’s reactor was a gift from God. It was the brainchild of Monsignor Luc Gillon, a ferociously energetic Belgian priest who had trained as a nuclear physicist, studied at Princeton, and in later life poured his energies into setting up Belgian Congo’s first university. Like a colonial administrator who uses his years in the tropics as a chance to build up his butterfly collection, Mgr Gillon seized the opportunity to indulge in his hobby: nuclear research.

  In the run-up to the Second World War, when the likes of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer were growing interested in nuclear fission, Belgian Congo was the world’s biggest producer of uranium. Found in concentrations almost unheard of anywhere else in the world, the bright yellow substance was dug from the mines of Shinkolobwe, in the southern province of Katanga. But since the colonial authorities themselves had no interest in the metal—they sought the radium excavated alongside, used to treat cancer—the state-owned mining company Union Minière du Haut Katanga allowed a prescient director to ship three years’ worth of uranium stocks to the United States, where it was on hand when work began on the Manhattan Project. The bombs the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were made with Congolese uranium.

  Under the secret supply deal signed with the US, Belgium agreed to sell Congo’s uranium at a nominal price in return for American help funding its peacetime nuclear energy programme. For Mgr Gillon, it seemed only right that the colony that had provided the raw material that effectively ended the Second World War should benefit. The head of Belgium’s atomic energy programme, perhaps understandably, disagreed. ‘He believed an atomic reactor would serve no purpose in Congo and indicated that the American dollars on which I was counting for funding had all been spent,’ Mgr Gillon recalled in his memoirs. But the priest, whose self-confidence comes across as bordering on bumptiousness, steamed forward regardless.
>
  He set about buying a US-made, 50-kilowatt Training and Research Reactor for Isotope Production General Atomic (TRIGA) he had ‘fallen in love with’ at an exhibition in Geneva. Despite the fact that Leopoldville had been swept by violent riots just a few days before the Triga reactor arrived in Congo in early 1959, the question of whether this potentially hazardous invention would be an appropriate inheritance for an unstable government terrified of its own mutinous army does not appear to have troubled the well-intentioned Mgr Gillon. ‘At the time people were talking about independence in 30 years’ time,’ shrugged Professor Malu. ‘It wasn’t envisaged.’ Less than a year and a half later, Congo was on its own.

  And so Congo became the first African member of the IAEA, an achievement that was a source of huge subsequent pride to Mobutu. In 1970, Gillon and Malu, his young sidekick, decided to upgrade the reactor to its present capacity. By this time, Shinkolobwe had closed and Congo could no longer provide the raw material required. It was forced to buy its own uranium back from the Americans. The humiliation still rankles, contributing to a profound feeling of grievance in Congo, where the secrecy surrounding the 1944 supply deal has left locals convinced Belgium made a killing on the uranium sales and that on this issue, as with so many others, their country was ripped off by a cynical West.

  Professor Malu remains inordinately proud of having managed to carry out the upgrade. ‘It was a very, very dangerous operation. One slip, and you could be irradiated. We had no help from anyone, we financed it ourselves and we did it all on our own.’

  Why bother? I was tempted to ask. For the Triga reactor serves no conceivable practical purpose. It was never designed to provide electricity to a nation that in theory already had the hydroelectric capacity to export power to the region. Its raison d’être was purely educational: producing isotopes used in scientific experiments, such as irradiating seeds in the hope of producing disease-free varieties. Now even that abstruse function has fallen by the wayside, as producing the radioactive elements needed for such research costs more than buying them abroad, leaving the institution little more than a tempting, if ultimately unrewarding, target for the nimble-fingered. In one of Kinshasa’s looting sprees—‘après le deuxième pillage’—it was said, animals being used in experiments at the reactor were stolen and eaten, radioactive or not.

  But this was to reckon without national amour propre. Mobutu had taken a huge interest in the nuclear reactor, making a point of attending all its special events and providing funding when emergencies cropped up. Kabila took a similarly benevolent approach, dispatching the thirty-man team of gendarmes to guard the installation. The new president was as unlikely as his predecessor to close down a facility he regarded, however ludicrously, as a symbol of prestige.

  ‘In principle’, said Professor Malu, the reactor was still switched on briefly once a week, to verify it was still functioning properly. But anything more ambitious was ruled out because of lack of funding. The general dearth of financing clearly weighed on his mind. ‘The policemen guarding this facility earn $200–300 a month. That’s ten times more than a university professor. C’est pas normal.’ As the years went by, he acknowledged, the forty-year-old reactor was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. The world of nuclear technology had moved on and Kinshasa’s monitoring equipment had become obsolete, with worn parts impossible to replace. This forced the technicians to go in for a bit of ‘bricolage’ (do-it-yourself), he admitted, a comment that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

  Such tinkering might no longer suffice. Visitors to the reactor have reported that the water used to cool the rods is becoming grubby, a sign that it is impure. Left unchecked, the process could lead to the corrosion of the uranium rods and eventual contamination of the site. ‘Something has to be done there,’ sighed a spokesman for the IAEA. Responsible for the world’s nuclear industry, the organisation was far from reassured by the findings of a safety inspection conducted at the Kabila government’s request. ‘There is a problem with the buildings’ foundations and a general problem of a lack of infrastructural support from the government. They are aware this is not the best of situations and we are trying to help.’

  Not so aware, apparently, as to recognise that Congo and nuclear energy should finally part company. Staff at the reactor approached the US with a bizarre deal in November 1999. In return for granting US experts permission to empty fuel from the area decommissioned during the famous upgrade, they wanted investment in a range of nuclear research projects. True to the unquenchable spirit of Monsignor Gillon, construction of a brand new nuclear reactor topped the list.

  Some industry experts have speculated that if conditions at the Kinshasa reactor deteriorate beyond a certain point, Washington, increasingly nervous about the temptation offered to terrorists by such poorly policed nuclear rods, might feel obliged to stage a repeat of the operation in which nuclear fuel was removed from Vietnam before the country fell to the Vietcong.

  Just how dangerous was the Kinshasa facility? I asked the IAEA. ‘We did some back-of-an-envelope calculations when the rebels were advancing in 1997 and worked out that there could have been contamination if the reactor had been blown up, but that it would have been largely limited to the university,’ an official told me. ‘Certainly, from a safety standpoint, it lies at the lower end of the world league table. But while one can’t be complacent, the scale of potential contamination is roughly 1,000 times less than Chernobyl, because the reactor is 1,000 times smaller.’

  As I drove away from a battered reactor full of murky water, on a hill slowly sliding into the valley, run by physicists who had lost touch with reality, the figures somehow failed to reassure. Before I left, Professor Malu had gestured to a technician, who switched off what sounded like a car alarm, opened a locked room and emerged proudly holding a silvery metallic tube. The uranium rod was gleaming. To my untrained eye it looked pristine, free from any signs of corrosion. But in a nation on Low Batt, I wondered how long that could remain true.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Never naked

  ‘A man from the Congo, living in Brussels, travelled regularly to London on Eurostar to collect housing benefit, an Old Bailey jury heard today.

  ‘Ngolompati Moka, 33, who is a Belgian national, used fake tenancy agreements to persuade the boroughs of Hounslow and Haringey to pay him a total of £4,653.36, said the prosecution. The court was told that Moka, who was born in the Congo, used a series of identities to claim the cash. After he was arrested in a Hounslow JobCentre last August, police found a number of documents that incriminated him. These included bogus tenancy agreements, a Belgian ID card and receipts from Eurostar trains. ‘These show he was making trips from Brussels to claim benefit in this country,” said counsel.’

  Evening Standard, 28 January, 1999

  ‘A mouse that goes hungry in a groundnut store has only itself to blame.’

  Bas-Congo proverb

  During the tumultuous post-independence years, when Congo looked to the outside world like an oversized fruitcake about to crumble into a hundred tempting morsels and an uncertain Mobutu was sizing up army morale, an empire briefly saw the light of day in the province of south Kasai, home of the Luba.

  With the quiet blessing of the Belgian mining companies, more interested in guaranteed access to Congo’s mineral wealth than issues of national sovereignty, the diamond province followed the example set by Katanga further south, and announced its independence. Its new emperor, Albert Kalonji, suddenly found himself swamped by returning Lubas fleeing an army which interpreted its orders to put down the secessionist revolts as a licence to massacre members of the ethnic group. Exasperated by constant requests for shelter, seeds, tools and money, he finally issued a statement telling the refugees to stop bothering the government with their problems, going so far, some say, as to write the principle into the empire’s new constitution. ‘Vous êtes chez vous, débrouillez-vous,’ was the message—‘This is your home, so fend for yourselves.’


  Thus was born the infamous Article 15. ‘Je me débrouille,’ the Kasaians would say, with a knowing nudge and a wink, as they indulged in a bit of light diamond smuggling. ‘Article 15,’ Kalonji’s officials would quip, with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders, citing the constitution to justify their demands for bribes. And later, long after the empire had faded into history, the principle received another top endorsement when Mobutu, addressing a ruling party conference, acknowledged that it was acceptable to ‘steal a little’, as long as the theft remained within limits.

  By the 1990s, Article 15 was the sardonic thread running through the fabric of Zairean society, the raison d’être of a leader, a government, an entire regime. Prime ministers came and went, each of them doling out civil service jobs for the boys. There were official drivers for ministries without cars, switchboard operators for departments without phones, secretaries without typewriters. They were paid an average of $6 a month but hung on nonetheless in the hope that one day the economy would revive and they would get what they were owed. In a world of fantasy wages, knowing how to ‘se débrouiller’—that untranslatable French concept meaning to fend for oneself, to cope against all odds, to manage somehow—had become something approaching an art form.

  For public servants, juggling two jobs—the official one that involved sitting in a dimly lit office reading the newspapers and the real one that started at noon and, hopefully, brought in some real money—became the norm. The skill was finding a Darwinian niche in the ecosystem, the tiny competitive edge that meant one had something to sell, a means of survival in a ruthless world.