In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (10 page)

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 Austere army barracks had been replaced by the comfort of the presidential villa on Mount Ngaliema, the hill overlooking the Livingstone falls, or the burgeoning palace at Gbadolite.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 before, 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.” '

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 recom
mended. 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:

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.

‘He was a speaker of genius,' said a Congolese journalist who was a student at the time. ‘I would go unwillingly, because I didn't really approve of Mobutu. But as soon as he began speaking, we would be swept away. We'd stand in the sun for hours, but the time would slip by without you noticing. If you study those speeches now, in the cold light of day, you can see there was almost nothing in them, they were full of inconsistencies, gossip and tittle-tattle. But he knew just how to speak to the people. He would tell us nonsense and we would believe him.'

It was that demagogic talent Mobutu was to exploit in the early 1970s as he launched the most intellectually ambitious project of his career. Five years after his military
coup
, he was increasingly aware
that he needed to give his one-party regime an ideological lick of paint. The secession attempts of the 1960s had shown how prone to fragmentation the country was. Some binding, unifying philosophy was needed. There was also an element of one-upmanship to what followed. The post-independence era had seen a flourishing of African sensibility. From Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah's vision of black consciousness and pan-Africanism had spread across the continent. In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere had launched his doctrine of socialism and self-reliance. In Senegal Leopold Senghor had preached the proud doctrine of ‘negritude'. As the leader of the third largest African nation, with the awareness of all those incredible mineral riches at the back of his mind, Mobutu felt greatness was rightfully his. His country would play a leading role in the non-aligned movement, become the West's preferred African interlocutor and act as a catalyst for change on the continent and beyond, he decided. His head ringing with the praises of his entourage, the self-taught former army sergeant launched himself into a campaign he was signally ill-equipped to see through. Drawing on concepts of mass mobilisation, strong leadership and revolutionary ‘militancy' picked up during visits staged to a friendly China and South Korea, he set out to take the intellectual lead in Africa.

At its best, ‘authenticity', as the movement born in 1971 was called, was an admirable attempt to recover a sense of African identity and pride crushed by the colonial experience. It was remarkable, in a way, that it had taken so long for a new country to feel the need for a fresh image. The country must modernise, Mobutu told his public rallies, but it would do so in a framework of ancestral spiritual values, not by aping Western materialism. ‘Authenticity is the realisation by the Zairean people that it must return to its origins, seek out the values of its ancestors, to discover those which contribute to its harmonious and natural development,' Mobutu told the United Nations. ‘It is the refusal to blindly embrace imported ideologies. It is, in short, the affirmation of mankind, in its place, as it is, with its mental and social structures.'

Congo was rebaptised Zaire, and the national currency and main
waterway similarly renamed: one trademark embraced three key concepts. The Christian names left by the European missionaries were abandoned and African names revived, with Mobutu setting a personal, grandiose example. Roads and squares named after Belgian notables were rebaptised after key events in the struggle for independence and the national anthem and flag were changed. This was the moment when the statues of Stanley, King Leopold and King Baudoin were toppled.

‘Madame' and ‘Monsieur' were replaced by ‘Citoyen' and ‘Citoyenne', in an echo of the French Revolution. Instead of the European suit, men were to don a high-collared jacket of Mobutu's invention. Dubbed the abacost (from ‘à bas le costume'—‘down with the jacket'), and usually modelled in dark brown or navy blue wool, this was no better adapted to the African climate, but it was different. Returning Zaireans would whip off their ties in the plane for fear of having them snipped in two at customs. As for women, the provocative miniskirts of the 1970s were replaced by more dignified African pagnes, or wraps, and wigs shunned in favour of ‘natural' coiffure.

Such changes hardly amounted to a coherent philosophy. But then, there probably never was one within the Mobutu brain, which stalled over even the basic question of the MPR's political orientation, defined as being ‘neither left nor right, nor even the centre'. ‘If he had focalised and crystallised his thought by writing it down, there were rich ideas there waiting to be developed,' insisted Honoré Ngbanda, who later became one of Mobutu's closest aides. ‘It was a fundamental philosophical notion. But unfortunately, whether it was at the level of the MPR's central committee, the government or his own collaborators, there was no one who could take the idea and give it a conceptual form.'

However quaint its manifestations, authenticity did make its mark. For many Congolese today, it is the one Mobutu gift for which they remain grateful, leaving them with a sense of uniqueness, the awareness that they were not Kasaians, Shabaians or natives of Bas-Congo, but citizens of one vast central African nation with its own, very distinct identity.