Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (61 page)

The ayatollahs of the Congolese government were in for a surprise. The weak, introverted successor turned out to be much smarter and more independent than anybody had suspected. Within a year of his nomination, Joseph would rid himself of almost everybody who had put him in power. He also launched a peace process, setting the gears in motion to bring an end to the war and paving the way for elections.

It would have been difficult to find someone more different from his father than Joseph Kabila. Where his father was authoritarian and confrontational, Joseph was shy and reclusive. In his first speech to the nation on January 26, 2001, he stumbled through his prewritten text in halting, uninspired French. He was not very fluent, as he had grown up mostly in Tanzania and was more comfortable in Swahili and English. Several days later, he asked an advisor to help him through his first meeting with the diplomatic corps. “You do the talking,” he said uneasily.
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For the Congolese public, the contrast was jolting. “He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t like going out to dinner, doesn’t have a large wardrobe, doesn’t have a lot of good friends, and doesn’t speak the languages of the people he’s going to govern,” an American reporter observed.
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In an early television interview in the United States—he avoided the press in his home country until he had a better command of French—his expression was wooden, his hands folded in front of him, barely moving when he answered questions.

So who was Joseph Kabila? From the first day of his presidency, the Congolese rumor mill began churning. As usual, most of the talk was not about government affairs, but about his ethnicity and origins. He wasn’t the real son of his father, some said. He is really Tanzanian, others tattled—he can’t speak French. Or even: He killed his own father to take power!

Joseph Kabila and his twin sister, Janet, were born in Mpiki, South Kivu, on June 4, 1971, in the grass-thatched rebel headquarters of his father. Overlooking the camp was the so-called Mlima ya damu, the Mountain of Blood, named for the battles that had taken place there against Mobutu’s army.

Most agree that Joseph is the son of Laurent Kabila. The deep attachment between the two attests to this: Mzee doted on Joseph while in office and elevated him from a simple soldier to the commander of his army. However, short of DNA testing, the mystery of Joseph and Janet’s biological mother will be more difficult to solve.

The official mother, Sifa Mahanya, married the rebel leader in 1970 and would remain his wife until he died, albeit alongside a gaggle of mistresses. She was responsible for the women’s wing of the rebellion and a member of the revolutionary courts. It was Mama Sifa, as she is known today, whom most of Mzee’s former comrades recognize as the mother of the current president.
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A second, plausible version is provided by members of Joseph Kabila’s entourage. They say that Joseph’s mother was a Rwandan Tutsi called Marcelline Mukambuguje, who was one of the many Rwandans who joined Kabila in his
maquis
in the hope of using Zaire as a rear base to overthrow the Hutu-dominated dictatorship in Rwanda. Mukambuguje was allegedly kept from public sight when Laurent Kabila was president in order to prevent the public from discovering Joseph’s real mother. A Tutsi mother would obviously not do in a country at war with Rwanda.

As soon as he became president, his alleged mother was bundled away to the United States to live. This is not just Internet apocrypha—although the blogosphere does abound with these rumors—but allegations relayed by people close to the president, including a close former advisor, a bodyguard, and members of his family.
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Every once in a while, rumors make the rounds among diplomats and the elite in Kinshasa that a mysterious elderly woman was seen in the presidential chambers or gardens. Of course, this version of his parentage is lapped up by the opposition and many Kinois, who think Kabila never stopped working for the Rwandan government, a sort of Tutsi Manchurian candidate.

Shortly after Joseph’s birth, Kabila’s troops kidnapped a group of American students from a Tanzanian chimpanzee research project, earning them international infamy. While the rebels did manage to obtain a hefty ransom, Mobutu’s army launched a new offensive against Kabila, pushing his soldiers out of their highland redoubt into inhospitable jungles to the west. Given the danger and poor living conditions, Laurent Kabila decided it was best for his family to move to Tanzania, where he had good connections inside the security services.

In Dar es Salaam, Joseph and Janet enrolled in the French school under fake names, pretending to be from a western Tanzanian tribe in order to escape the attention of Zairian intelligence agents active there—Laurent Kabila’s deputy was scooped up by such spies and taken to Kinshasa, after which he wasn’t heard from again.

According to one of Joseph’s classmates, he was intelligent, proficient in English, and an admirer of martial arts and sports cars. Nonetheless, even then he was a silent loner. When he did speak about politics, he liked to discuss the exploits of the heroes of his father’s generation—Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara, and Yoweri Museveni.
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“The small boy already had the personality of a leader, he dreamed of being a soldier, of leading an army,” recalled his mother, Sifa Mahanya, who, according to Tanzanian security sources, was with Joseph during his whole childhood. He used to play with small model cars and trucks in their house, lining them up into military convoys.
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Joseph underwent a brief military training in southern Tanzania but spent most of his youth helping his father with his businesses, which for a while included transporting large shipments of fish along Lake Tanganyika. The young man drove trucks for thousands of miles, from Zambia through Tanzania to Uganda.
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When Laurent Kabila got in touch with the Rwandan army in 1995 to prepare for the invasion of Zaire, Joseph accompanied him to the meetings. Once the war started, the twenty-five-year-old was entrusted to Colonel James Kabarebe, the Rwandan field commander of operations. The two lived under the same roof and traveled together to the front lines to inspect the troops. Officers remember seeing Joseph Kabila, known as Afande Kabange
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by his soldiers, everywhere along the front lines, but he rarely spoke. The image that remains for most from that time is of a young man, his military cap pulled low over his sunken eyes, a silent fixture in the room. The war had a serious impact on his psyche. “The worst thing that I have ever seen is the sight of a village after a massacre; you can never erase that from your memory.”
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After the AFDL’s victory, Joseph kept a low profile in Kinshasa. He lived in the same house as several Rwandan commanders and began to explore the capital. He visited the famous bars and nightclubs of Bandal and Matonge, where
ambianceurs
(lovers of the nightlife) and
sapeurs
(dandies) strutted the latest fashion and ate grilled goat washed down with bottles of Primus or Skol beer. Until today, scurrilous Kinois still claim to have drunk beer with Joseph or have seen him trying out a dance move. (“He used to love the women!” some claim. “No! He was too timid, he couldn’t even dance.” “Alligator skin shoes, that’s what he liked. My little brother sold him his first pair!”)

In early 1998, his father sent him on a military training course to China; his father had himself once visited the Nanjing military academy decades earlier. This training, however, was short-lived, as he was called back home when the second war began. Despite his brief military career—at that point, he had served a grand total of three years in military uniform, including a year of basic training in Tanzania—he was promoted to the rank of general and named acting chief of staff of the army.

It was an abrupt change for him; he had had little experience in military operations.
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Now he commanded tens of thousands of Congolese troops against the very Rwandans who had trained him. As soon as he got off the plane from China, he rushed to defend the capital from his former mentor and friend, James Kabarebe.

Few remember much of Joseph Kabila during the next few years. He rarely met with foreign military advisors, and even in meetings with his own staff he spent most of the time listening. In any case, it is not clear how much power the young general had; his father made many important military decisions, like, for example, the battle for Pweto in 2000, and Zimbabwean and Angolan generals also had strong influence.

The Congolese officer corps was an amalgam of former Mobutu officers, Katangan Tigers trained in Angola, Mai-Mai from the Kivus, and newly recruited child soldiers. Without much experience, the president’s son showed he was adept at navigating the tensions between these different groups, making friends and listening to their advice. He established a small coterie of young army officers, some of whom had also gone for training in China—not the most experienced officers, but fiercely loyal to him.

As much as Joseph admired his father, he also realized that his views were outdated. In his first address to the nation, just days after he had laid his father to rest, Joseph announced a sea change in foreign policy. George W. Bush had just been elected in the United States, and Kabila’s message was directed at him: “Without beating around the bush, I recognize there has been mutual misunderstanding with the former administration. The DRC intends to normalize bilateral relations with the new administration.”
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At the same time, he promised to liberalize the diamond trade and float the currency, promote a new mining code, and—most importantly—immediately try to resuscitate the peace process. Several months later, he allowed political parties to operate again. Where his father had governed by ideology, Joseph was a pragmatist.