In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  Lambert Mende, Transport Minister in Mobutu’s last administration, logged how seven companies owned by the generals and members of Mobutu’s entourage were still flouting a government ban on arms flights into UNITA-held territory as the AFDL rebellion gathered ground. ‘The Angolans said “if this continues we will join the war”. But they continued, and the Angolans joined the war.’

  So it was that first Rwanda, then Uganda and finally Angola were eventually to join forces with the AFDL in a momentary coalition of regional interests never before witnessed in Africa. Zaire became the terrain on which alien forces worked out ancient grudges, with the locals swept along for the ride. Tutsi troops from Rwanda hunted down the interahamwe in the equatorial forests, killing untold numbers of Hutu refugees in the process. Angolan soldiers seized an opportunity to track down the UNITA fighters who used Zaire as a rear base. Zambia co-operated by letting the AFDL cross its land to win access to the south; Zimbabwe and Eritrea supplied arms and Tanzania turned a blind eye to the rebel training camps on its territory.

  When the rebel campaign first began, Zaireans waited for Mobutu to send the elite forces they had heard so much about to the east. No one, after all, could expect the FAZ to stand up to protagonists fuelled by the loathing Rwanda’s ethnic divide seemed to breed. As a waiter in Kivu once confessed to me, in one of those endearing Zairean moments of self-insight: ‘We Zaireans may be thieves. But those guys over there,’ he said, jerking his head towards the border, ‘those guys are killers.’

  They waited and waited. Was Mobutu playing some kind of clever tactical game? Was he saving the DSP for later? The answer was much simpler, according to the Terminator: despite repeated orders from Mobutu, not one of the Inseparable Four ever agreed to follow the example set by the youthful Mobutu and go to the eastern battlefront. They had no intention of risking either their own lives or the forces they regarded as priceless tools of financial extortion.

  In desperation, Mobutu applied the methods that had saved him in the past. He appealed to his Western friends. France, always the most loyal, pushed for the UN to send an international force to east Zaire to ‘save’ the Rwandan refugees. But the project was cancelled when most of the refugees flooded home and in the wake of the outcry over Paris’s support for Rwanda’s toppled genocidal regime, a solo operation was out of the question. Both Belgium and the US publicly washed their hands of him.

  Cut off in Gbadolite, Mobutu had failed to appreciate how dramatically realpolitik had altered in a post-Cold War world in which leaders recited the mantra of human rights and democracy. ‘This error in judgement was one of Mobutu’s most fatal. God knows how often we had discussed the issue with him,’ said the exasperated Ngbanda. ‘But all attempts to explain the objective basis for the change in US politics towards him were violently rejected.’

  Belatedly registering that the Inseparable Four were more hindrance than help, Mobutu sacked Baramoto as chief of staff in December and replaced him with Donat Lieko Mahele, an Equateur general, like them, but one with a level of professional competence absent in his colleagues. But even Mahele could not undo in a few months the sabotage of decades. Although given full powers by Mobutu, Mahele soon found that Nzimbi and Baramoto were telling their special units to disobey his orders. At gunpoint, they refused to hand over vital weapon supplies. The regular army was still not being paid. As ever under the Mobutu system, it was impossible to say what came from the president and what was the work of subordinates, particularly as Mobutu was abstracted and hesitant, going back on key decisions, responding achingly slowly to events. ‘I know the president,’ a frantic Mahele railed at the Terminator, only days after his appointment. ‘He is beginning to play the game of turning one man against another. I want no more of it. If he doesn’t give me the weapons I need, I will resign.’

  In a resort to tradition, the white mercenaries were summoned, in an operation coordinated by the French secret service. But as Machiavelli could have told Mobutu, mercenaries—unlikely to take enormous risks, their loyalty always open to question—are a far from ideal solution. ‘The thing to bear in mind about mercenaries is that so many live to write their memoirs,’ was one military analyst’s sardonic comment.

  Its ranks swelled by Serb psychopaths fresh from Bosnia’s killing fields—men who were to be arrested in Belgrade nearly two years later, accused of plotting the assassination of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milo'sevic—the mercenary force had trouble liaising with the FAZ. There were language problems and several ‘friendly fire’ incidents. It was never clear who the mercenaries answered to: Mobutu, the prime minister, Mahele or the French ambassador. While succeeding in terrifying the local population with their atrocities, the mercenaries signally failed to pump new life into the FAZ campaign by the time they fled.

  In a last gasp, Mobutu begged his African allies for support. Nigerian military leader Sani Abacha, mindful of the role Mobutu’s troops had played fighting the Biafran secession, was amongst the few to respond positively. Yet nothing ever came of the plan. When it was far, far too late, Ngbanda discovered Abacha had been told to stand down by a Francophone African leader purporting to speak on Mobutu’s behalf. The region itself had decided the era of the dinosaur was over.

  A number of myths were exploded during the seven brief months that separated the birth of the AFDL from the storming of Kinshasa. Already battered, the image of the invincible white mercenary in Africa finally collapsed. The notion that France would always send in forces to shore up its African friends, however corrupt, was overturned. Above all, the belief that Mobutu held the key to the armed forces, a key that would keep him in power no matter how unpopular he became, evaporated.

  By March 1997 the AFDL had taken Kisangani, a military turning point. The following month came Mbuji Mayi, then Lubumbashi, where Kabila received a warm welcome from his fellow Katangese. As FAZ pulled back, leaving the interahamwe and UNITA rebels to do the real fighting, Kinshasa was being cut off from the country’s mineral resources, a capital with no hinterland.

  Maybe it was as the first boats laden with army deserters began landing in the capital that the generals stopped believing their own lies. As checkpoints were set up on the highways into the capital—manned by soldiers far more suspicious of the army unit down the road than any rebel infiltrator—the men Mobutu hoped would never betray him because of friendship, ethnic loyalty and family ties began to plot against their former champion.

  Had this succession of reversals and betrayals occurred a year earlier, when he was still in good health, Mobutu might have been able to call upon his vast reserves of cunning and pull off one last diplomatic coup. His political demise had been announced time and time again, only for him to emerge phoenix-like from each crisis. But Mobutu was a sick man. Scenting the sweet odour of decay, his enemies crowded around like hyenas snapping at a wounded leopard.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nappies on the floor

  ‘The first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is by observing the men he has around him, and when they are capable and faithful he may always be considered wise, because he has known how to recognise the capable and to keep them faithful. But when they are otherwise one cannot form a good opinion of him, for the prime error which he made was in choosing them.’

  The Prince

  —Niccolò Machiavelli

  By 1996, the young athlete who could outsprint his contemporaries and revelled in such physical feats as parachuting had undergone something of a transformation. Mobutu was sixty-six and three decades in office had taken their toll. His hair was still dark, but the colour now came from a bottle, applied by a Lebanese hairdresser flown to Gbadolite for the task. His face seemed to have registered every sleazy deal, every moral compromise along the way. The eyes were hooded and his features had coarsened, the pouting lips settling naturally into a downward droop that hinted at scepticism and disappointment.

  Mobutu did not look well and the CIA, in one of its class
ic pieces of misinformation, confidently informed Washington that the president was suffering from AIDS. Given his reputation for exercising a presidential droit de seigneur, the diagnosis must have seemed plausible. He was indeed ill, but he was suffering from something far more prosaic but just as deadly in the long term: prostate cancer, one of the most common causes of death in elderly men.

  If the cancer is caught early and properly treated, as it was with French president François Mitterrand and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the patient can last for years. But diagnosis is not easy. The physical examination, which involves inserting a finger in the rectum, is not of a kind doctors lightly press on a grouchy African autocrat. By the time it is clear the patient has cancer, the disease may have already infiltrated surrounding tissues, triggering secondaries in the spine and lungs.

  The first family and aides knew of the problem was when Mobutu was whipped into surgery in a Swiss clinic in Lausanne in August 1996 after a routine medical check-up revealed an abnormality. Unless Mobutu had managed to keep such a momentous secret entirely to himself for several years, which seems unlikely, we must assume, therefore, that he learned of his illness almost at the same time as the outside world: in other words, just when he was confronting the biggest threat of his career. The immediate decision to operate and the rapid course the disease then followed make it clear this was no Mitterrand-style slow-moving cancer. It was spreading across his body as quickly as the AFDL were gobbling up his territory.

  The medical treatment he underwent must have been a reminder that the great Guide, the all-seeing Helmsman, was a mere mortal, after all. Because it involves surgically removing the prostate or hormone treatment to reduce the level of testosterone in the blood—effectively chemical castration—impotence is the norm. Patients can also experience ‘feminisation’, losing facial hair and developing breasts. For an African symbol of virility such as Mobutu, the man who could ‘cover all the chickens’, this would have been hard to bear. Even worse humiliations loomed: because of the prostate’s position, it is hard to remove it without damaging the bladder or urethra, so surgery can cause incontinence.

  It was not surprising, given the draining fatigue produced by radiotherapy, that Mobutu dithered and dallied more than ever before, unable—to the bafflement of those around him—to make the split-second decisions on which his survival now depended. No wonder, given the battering his self-image had sustained and the sudden prospect of an early death, that he seemed at times paralysed by depression. Ngbanda, the special adviser, increasingly had the sense he was dealing with two different individuals: one who showed all the alertness and dynamism of the old Mobutu, another morose, sunk into lethargy.

  Yet the president made a superhuman effort to put his own physical problems to one side. In late December he staged a symbolic return to Kinshasa, the capital he had shunned for so many years. Those who watched the motorcade said it was like the 1970s all over again, as thousands of Kinshasa residents, frightened of what this ‘foreign invasion’ in the east spelled and curious to see how sick ‘Papa’ really was, gathered to cheer the leader who had come to share their ordeal. Invigorated by the unexpected adulation, Mobutu stood upright in his open-roofed limousine for the length of the 35-kilometre trip from the airport to Camp Tsha Tshi, holding his presidential cane aloft and basking in the cheers: quite a feat, in the African heat, for a healthy mortal, let alone a cancer-stricken sixty-six-year-old. He was left so hoarse from hailing the crowd, he could barely read his speech later that evening, in which, in a voice cracked with emotion, he promised to meet the population’s expectations.

  It was to be his last such moment of glory. Public support waned, as Mobutu failed to produce a miracle solution, and so did the president’s energy. When he returned to Kinshasa from Nice in late March 1997, dragging himself away from the doctors and nurses, there were no applauding hordes. Instead the event was overshadowed by a strange incident at the airport. The presidential plane had landed, the red carpet had been rolled out and members of the government were lined up on the tarmac. They waited and waited, but Mobutu did not emerge. Eventually, the press was shooed away and the cabinet told to disperse, prompting immediate rumours that Mobutu had either died on the flight or was petulantly refusing to meet Kengo Wa Dondo, the prime minister he was known to detest.

  In fact, Mobutu’s limbs had seized up during the long flight and he was physically incapable of standing upright until massaged by his carers. When he finally descended from the aircraft, away from the media’s unforgiving eye, he was leaning heavily on his wife and the car had to be brought to the foot of the stairs. His brief respite was over, the cancer was beginning to bite.

  This was a turning point in the career of a man who had lived in the public spotlight since his thirties, dividing his time between army generals, cabinet ministers and foreign VIPs—presenting an image of iron invincibility. Few African presidents had been so thoroughly filmed and photographed. ‘With Mobutu, there were always cameras around,’ a World Bank man once told me. But as we approach death, we all shed the inessentials and decide who and what really matters. For Mobutu that meant completing the personal voyage he had started in Gbadolite: he turned inwards, searching for the warmth and support only blood ties could provide. As the bleak realities of life crowded in, he wrapped himself in the soft cocoon of his family, becoming once again a very private man.

  For one young man, yearning for intimacy with the legendary figure who was his father, this was the moment he had been waiting for. Struggling to come to terms with a sinister patronym, Nzanga Mobutu knew this was the last chance for connection with Mobutu Sese Seko.

  I couldn’t control a slight tremor of excitement when voicing the name. It was, it seemed to me, a bit like asking whether Mr Genghis Khan had called or Mrs Caligula had left any messages. But the clerk at reception, a man with the suave air of one who had witnessed comings and goings normal mortals could only dream of, never blinked. He scanned his huge bookings diary with the casual confidence of a pilot assessing his control panel.

  ‘Mr Mobutu? He’s not staying with us, is he?’

  No, I said, but he was expected. In fact, I understood he had hired a special room so we could chat in peace.

  ‘Ah yes, he hasn’t arrived yet. But if you wait over there, I’ll let him know where you are when he arrives.’

  He entered the lobby of the discreet four-star hotel off Paris’s Place Concorde, a place he said was a favourite because of the ‘English feel’ lent by the leather-bound volumes on the shelves, dressed in a slate-blue suit whose elegance was so understated it had clearly cost a great deal of money. He was sniffing delicately, nursing a cold and blinking back sleep. Insomnia, he explained slightly sheepishly, was something he shared with his late father. Like Mobutu, he tended to suffer from restlessness in the night, then waves of drowsiness in the day. ‘I should really take siestas. But it’s not convenient.’

  Insomnia wasn’t the only thing Nzanga Mobutu, Mobutu’s son by his second wife Bobi Ladawa, had inherited from the late head of state. At twenty-nine, Nzanga had the fleshy good looks, the pouting lips of his father, with his mother to thank for his light skin and doe eyes. ‘My brother and I and my son, we all look exactly like my father. He must have had strong blood.’ It is an inheritance, he said, he had no intention of turning his back on, whatever awkwardness it may bring. ‘I’m very proud of the name that I bear,’ he insisted. Indeed, Nzanga had treasured every moment spent alongside his father at the end of his life, however dangerous it had proved. Like a dry sponge plunged into water, he soaked up the trust and affection of the man he venerated, revelling in this father-and-son communion before death snatched the opportunity away for ever. ‘Those last two years were so important to me. Every word he said, every thing he did, it was like a lifetime packed into a moment. Being by his side was the best university a man could ask for. Because before that we had only seen him on vacations. And he wasn’t a man for vacations.’

  Being
a president’s son can never be easy, but in the case of a man possessed of huge wealth and no shortage of enemies, it was doubly difficult. Mobutu always revelled in the company of children, and he would have loved to have lived surrounded by a sprawling extended family. He also wanted his offspring to retain links with home, a feel for African village life, rather than joining the rootless club of glitterati washing around Switzerland’s ski chalets and Riviera resorts.

  But against all this had to be weighed the constant threat of kidnapping and the embarrassing fact that Zaire could provide neither the education nor the health treatment he wanted for his children. The solution Mobutu picked was to farm his offspring out to former colonials, Belgian couples trusted for their complete discretion. Under assumed names, Mobutu’s children attended school and university in Europe and the US, returning to Zaire when term time allowed.

  Nzanga left Zaire at the age of six and spent ten years living with a Belgian colonel who was a stickler for punctuality. ‘He was very tough. He’d say “before time is too early and after time is too late”. At the time I didn’t appreciate it, but now I realise it was good for my education.’ At Easter Nzanga went on school exchanges to Britain, visits that gave him a smattering of the English he now speaks fluently. Other holidays were spent in Gbadolite, but even then his father, travelling incessantly during the era when he ranked as an important non-aligned statesman, friend of both the capitalist United States and communist Romania, was often away. ‘We relied on my mother. She played the role of father and mother at the same time,’ said Nzanga. ‘We missed him terribly. We really lacked a paternal presence. For my father it was work, work, work, all the time. Even when we were at the table he would be receiving visitors and holding meetings. He had no personal life. Which is why I want to be around my own two children a lot while they are growing up.’