4th January 1959 – A scooter speeds through the streets of Léopoldville, the capital of the Belgian Congo. At the wheel sat the budding journalist Joseph Désiré Mobutu, followed by one of the most recognisable faces of the young Congolese political scene, Patrice Lumumba. The two friends were on their way to another political rally, where they were to speak about the independence of the colony. The Belgian mayor of the town banned the rally at the last minute. The assembled crowd, mostly young boys, got their blood boiling, and when a white bus driver raised his fist at one of them, they went mad. They were joined by fans of a football match that had just finished, who poured in from a nearby stadium, and a violent riot that lasted for days began.
30 June 1960 – After seventy-five years under Belgian rule and one of the most brutal colonial regimes of all time, the Belgian Congo gains its independence at breakneck speed and the Republic of Congo is born. The ceremony was attended by Belgian royalty and colonial royalty, as well as by the recently emerged Congolese political elite.
In an unseemly speech, King Baudouin of Belgium praised colonial rule and even his infamous ancestor Leopold II, responsible for the deaths of at least ten million Congolese during the years when the colony was his personal property (1885-1908). Lumumba sparked a real political incident when, during an unannounced speech, he immediately returned insults to his former masters. He was watched from the front row by his personal secretary at the time, Joseph Mobutu. Nobody thought that he was on the payroll of the CIA, the US intelligence service.
17th January 1961 – The last shot to Patrick Lumumba’s head is fired by Belgian Captain Gat. Congolese soldiers buried the three bodies under the watchful eyes of Belgian officers and local politicians. To get rid of the evidence, they were dug up again the next day, dismembered and soaked in sulphuric acid. Even before that, the Belgian police inspector in charge of this gruesome act, Lumumba, had two teeth extracted and proudly showed them off to visitors at home in Belgium for years to come.
Lumumba was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Congo, but his hot-bloodedness and ruthlessness so offended everyone that his death warrant was signed by Americans, Belgians and domestic opponents. Mobutu, too, preferred to see his former friend dead rather than alive, thus getting rid of one of the obstacles on the road to a complete seizure of power.
2nd June 1966 – The huge stadium in the middle of the capital was dead silent. The crowd of three hundred thousand gasped as the first of four Congolese politicians sentenced to death fell through the trapdoor of the scaffold from the gallows. For twenty minutes, he was groping and fighting for his life. As the black-hooded executioner tightened the noose one last time, panic gripped the people and they began to run in all directions in mortal fear.
Mobutu had been in power in the then-renamed Democratic Republic of Congo for just six months, but he wanted to show by public executions of his alleged opponents that he would have his way in the country from then on. In the first period of his thirty-two-year rule, he crushed the opposition with terror and intimidation and established one of the most corrupt, depraved, exploitative and sinister regimes of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, he smiled for the cameras and hosted the leaders of the superpowers as a distinguished President. The gulf between East and West caused by the Cold War was his blessing.
30th October 1974 – Rumble in the jungle was a boxing match between two of the world’s most famous heavyweights, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. This sporting event has become one of the most iconic events of the twentieth century. It took place in Zaire, as the Congo was then called. Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of Zaire, was the only one in the world willing to open the state purse and pay, in addition to the organisation of the event, ten million in prize money.
This was just one of the spectacular initiatives taken by the master propagandist Mobutu to ensure his country’s and his own global prestige. He succeeded temporarily, until the golden years of hope and progress turned into a complete nightmare for millions of Congolese. Their leader turned out to be a painfully megalomaniacal, bribed and insane dictator, who oiled his regime so damnably with Western sponsors that it lasted until 1997, by which time he had plundered the Congo’s rich natural resources to such an extent that he had become one of the richest men on earth.
27th December 1989 – Mobutu watched in horror the execution of his friend and dictator soul-mate Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena, who had fallen under Romanian soldiers’ gunfire two days earlier, accused of genocide and theft of state property, after a staged trial lasting just one hour. The two leaders were inspired by each other and Ceauşescu’s black fur hat is said to be an Eastern European version of Mobutu’s leopard.
But the end of the Cold War also meant the end of their regimes, and Mobutu feared for his life so much at the fall of Ceauşescu that he retreated to the seclusion of his luxurious palace for two weeks. To save his own skin, he proclaimed the democratisation of Zaire and the end of the one-party system. But it was another seven years before his degenerate regime truly fell on 16 May 1997. Just four months later, he died of prostate cancer in exile. He never paid for his crimes – except through paranoia.
The Enchanted Land
The Democratic Republic of Congo is the size of the whole of Western Europe and 80 times bigger than the former colonial power Belgium. Two thirds of its territory is covered by dense tropical forest, the second largest in the world after the Amazon. “This magnificent African cake”, as the country was called by the voracious Belgian King Leopold II, is unimaginably rich in natural resources.
In the 19th century, they became its curse. From ivory and rubber to copper, zinc, cobalt, uranium, cadmium, manganese, tungsten, diamonds and gold. The broomsticks and grenades that littered the battlefields of Verdun and the Somme in the First World War were made of Congolese copper, and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made of Congolese uranium.
Leopold (1835-1909), a ruler with an inferiority complex, looked around the world for a colony that would boost his tiny Belgium in the eyes of the world public and endow it with a sense of grandeur and pride. His mantra at first was simply that “Belgium must have a colony” and he quickly set his sights on the then untapped and unknown Central Africa.
One of the greatest explorers of all time, Henry Morton Stanley, came to his aid. Stanley ‘found’ the lost Livingstone, solved the mystery of the Nile and mapped the Congo River basin. Inland Africa was terra incognita for Europeans, who for centuries were confined to trading via coastal outposts.
The King of Belgium, then at the helm of the International Association for Africa, which was supposed to be purely scientific and philanthropic, in fact had very different aims. He wanted a colony to fill his coffers. He hired a researcher to help him set up trading posts along the Congo River. Skilfully concealing his real motives, Leopold received international blessing at the Berlin Conference, also known as the Congo Conference, in 1884 and 1885.
He promised to improve the living conditions of the natives, protect them from Arab slave traders and ensure free trade. The other European powers, too busy fighting their own battles for Africa, saw through his ruse. Stanley persuaded naive local chiefs to sign treaties on his behalf, handing over their territory and monopoly of trade to the Belgian king.
The bloodiest period of Belgian-Congolese history has begun. Leopold II was the only monarch in the world ever to own a colony. His brutal regime became one of the worst international scandals, epitomising the savage colonisation of Africa and leaving an everlasting stain on modern ‘civilisation’. It started with ivory and continued with rubber and various minerals and metals, notably copper and cobalt.
Demand for rubber was at its peak at the time, thanks to the invention of the tyre, but it was extremely labour-intensive to produce. Leopold’s mercenaries set higher and higher quotas of rubber for the locals. Until the men returned with baskets full enough, their wives and children were taken hostage – tied by the neck with chains and thrown into cages.
They became notorious mainly for chopping off limbs. This gruesome method was used to intimidate and punish the locals, while saving precious ammunition. Other torture techniques abounded: the natives had to drink their own urine, were hung by the legs, had worms eat them alive and, above all, were beaten to death with the notorious whip made from the dried skin of the hippopotamus, the chicotte. This remained a popular means of repression until Congo’s independence in 1960.
While decimating the locals, Leopold was carrying out megalomaniacal building projects on home soil. In Brussels, palaces and triumphal arches, boulevards and pavilions, and on the prestigious Belgian coast, arched promenades and golf courses. In 1897, Brussels hosted a colonial exhibition, exhibited 267 Congolese as zoo animals in the so-called Congo Village and added a sign saying “No Feeding!”.
At home, Leopold was hailed as the ‘King Builder’, but eventually rumours of the horrors in the Congo began to circulate around the world. The ‘Congo Slaughterer’ bowed to international pressure and was forced to surrender or even sell the colony to Belgium in 1908. He never set foot on its soil himself, but he caused the deaths of between ten and thirteen million people.
Belgium did introduce a slightly less harsh colonial system, but it was also based on crude economic exploitation. The kingdom still has difficulty dealing with its past – many monuments to Leopold II are adorned with inscriptions about the Liberator King, and school textbooks often avoid details.
Many believe that Leopold’s reign was a prelude to Mobutu’s dictatorship. The Belgians trampled on the Congolese people’s self-confidence and belief in their own worth. Plunder and exploitation became commonplace features of the ruling class. The rulers also shared a boundless love of extravagance and megalomania.
From son of a cook to soldier
As a member of one of the smaller Congolese tribes living in thatched huts in fishing villages along the river in the Congo interior, Mobutu later liked to mythologise his upbringing. Once, while walking with his grandfather, they were attacked by a leopard and little Joseph was supposed to have killed it with an arrow. It was for this reason that the leopard became his personal identifying mark. Who doesn’t know Mobutu’s distinctive, ridiculously absurd leopard headdress?
He didn’t like to talk about his father, a cook who died soon, but he was all the more eulogistic about his mother, supposedly the most beautiful woman in the world. He was especially proud of the fact that he had been taken in by a white Belgian woman without children, the wife of the judge for whom Mobutu’s father cooked. She saw talent in the boy and taught him to write and read French properly, and she walked hand in hand with him around the village as if he were her own son.
At the Belgian missionary school, he distinguished himself for his wit, but also for his irrepressibility and humour. He also stood out because he was handsome, athletic and rather tall. He liked to make fun of the Flemish priests when they made mistakes in French, which was not their mother tongue. He would rush out of his desk and correct them out loud to the loud laughter of his classmates. From a young age, he fought against the sense of inferiority and inferiority that the Belgians had instilled in the locals.
Mobutu was soon kicked out of the mission because he disappeared with a girl for several weeks. As punishment, he ended up in the army, where he soon discovered that he could speak French at least as well as the Belgian officers. In the army he learned discipline, but above all he began to read the foreign newspapers of the Belgian officers and to devour books. He was inspired by Churchill and de Gaulle, but above all – like so many future leaders around the world for centuries – he was captivated by Machiavelli’s The Ruler.
The world was changing at breakneck speed, the United Nations and the United States were supporting the right to self-determination, and more and more colonies were embarking on the road to independence. The first wave started in Asia with the Philippines, Burma, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Indonesia, then the spark was struck in Africa and in 1957 Ghana became the first country to gain independence from Great Britain. National liberation movements were everywhere in full swing. Even in the Congo.
Gifted with language and just as provocative, Mobutu quickly turned to journalism and began writing for young Congolese magazines. He hung up his military career, married Marie-Antoinette at the age of 25 and became a journalist.
In 1958, the door to the world opened wide for him. In Brussels, he covered the Universal Exposition (EXPO), a showcase of the scientific and technological pinnacle of the Western, white world. This time, the Congolese were not herded like animals into a Congolese village, but were invited as visitors. Belgium did not want to be left behind by the other colonial powers, which were in a hurry to show off new lines of progressive treatment for the inhabitants of their colonies.
According to official Belgian rhetoric, the so-called ‘évolués‘ (progressives) were those Congolese who, because of their ‘civilisational’ superiority, were different from the vast majority of the ‘primitive’ population. The ‘advanced’ were given a special certificate by the Belgian administration when they proved they could use cutlery, read and write.
They have gained some minor privileges and a higher social status in their community. They could become junior clerks in the Belgian administration, postal and bank clerks, and so on. A few were also allowed to train as teachers. In Brussels, Mobutu met dozens of ‘progressive’ compatriots and a new social stratum, the Congolese intellectual middle, was beginning to emerge.
Patrice Lumumba, President of the Association of ‘Progressives’, was already familiar with Joseph Mobutu, having read his articles regularly. The two young men became close and Mobutu soon became the personal secretary and confidant of his colleague, who was five years older. But something far more sinister happened in Brussels. Mobutu was approached by Larry Devlin, a member of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Instant independence
The atmosphere between 1955 and 1960 was electrified. The global trend towards decolonisation did, however, make the Belgian authorities crawl, and the locals were able to participate in local political life. But it was generally believed that it would be decades before the Congo would be able to determine its own destiny. In 1955, a Belgian journalist caused a frenzy by proposing a 30-year gradual independence plan.
The text became a bestseller among the locals, as it recommended the urgent education of the Congolese and the cultivation of a political elite to run the country. The Congo needed its own engineers, officers, doctors, politicians and civil servants. Already under the Belgians, Congo had as many as sixty percent of its children educated, making it one of the best educated colonies. But this was only a basic education.
In 1960, only 17 locals in the Congo of 14 million had a university degree! These select few were rewarded by studying in Belgium, but they could only study a few innocuous social sciences, such as psychology and pedagogy. Law, economics, medicine, these were all fields in which whites did not want to see blacks.
Political parties have also grown like mushrooms after the rain. In 1958, there were six parties, and a year and a half later, there were a hundred. The vast majority of political activists were young men under the age of thirty. Lumumba, an intellectual with a distinctive bow tie and leader of the ‘progressives’, was at the head of the newly formed National Movement of Congo. His rhetoric was incendiary, attacking colonial rule and demanding early independence. It was his lack of moderation that later damaged him most.
On 4 January 1959, the ban on a political rally in Kinshasa sparked a fire. The Belgian mayor, in the middle of yet another New Year’s Eve reception, with gallons of champagne flowing and the invitees partying in style, preferred to entertain rather than deal with young malcontents. Mistake. The white bus driver’s raised fist further enraged the crowd. “Let’s attack the whites!” they shouted, dragged him off the bus and beat him.
When they were joined by a crowd of just the right size of fans from the football stadium where Congo had just lost to Belgium, a riot broke out. Some looted, others threw stones at the windows of Belgian houses, schools and churches, and destroyed everything Belgian. But they all shouted: ‘Dipenda! Dipenda!” (op.a. local corruption of independence from the French word indépendance).
Lumumba and Mobutu rushed from scene to scene on their scooters, the former addressing the rebels, the latter frantically taking notes.
A week after the riots, King Baudouin conciliatorily presented a new colonial policy and spoke of independence himself. Although he promised nothing tangible, it was a sensation. The timetable and other details of the transition, which the Belgians still expected to take many years, were to be agreed at negotiations in Brussels, attended by a Belgian delegation of 60 and a Congolese delegation of 90.
The talks took an unexpected turn in the blink of an eye, with the Congolese insisting on a date and brazenly suggesting 1 June 1960. That was just four months later. The Belgians, who were most afraid of renewed unrest, more or less agreed – the Congo should become independent on 30 June 1960.
Euphoria swept the Congo and the Belgians prepared for the second round of negotiations with a fig in their pockets. This one was much more important in their eyes, as the agenda was to discuss economic policy and the role to be retained in the Congo’s governance in general. They did not intend to let the economic benefits slip through their fingers.
With the date in their pockets, most of the Congolese delegation went home triumphant. They were in a hurry to prepare for the elections, and only the ‘greens’ remained in Brussels – people like Mobutu, certainly smart and committed, but uneducated and inexperienced. How are people with, at best, a degree in psychology or short experience as journalists, but mostly junior officials and complete self-made men, supposed to negotiate with the cursed cats of the Belgian financial world and take key macroeconomic decisions? Even the Belgian Prime Minister has described them as second-class.
Thus, the owners of the rich gold, copper, cobalt, zinc, uranium and diamond mines remained foreigners, and all duties, customs duties and profits continued to flow into Belgian coffers. For Joseph Mobutu, this was an important life lesson and he never forgot the humiliations he suffered.
Civic violence
Lumumba, the leader of the multi-ethnic National Movement of Congo, is expected to win the first elections a month before independence. He stood for a united country and against regional separatism. Mobutu was still one of Lumumba’s closest associates at the time, although he was increasingly meeting secretly with Devlin, Cia’s agent. The Americans did not trust Lumumba. He did not have many sympathisers among the Belgians either, and he had recently been imprisoned for inciting civil disobedience. Black clouds were gathering over the Congo.
Lumumba became the first president of a democratically elected government, and the moderate and much more Western-friendly Kasavubu became president. Most of the ministers were not even thirty-five years old. It soon became clear that no one knew what kind of country the Congo was actually supposed to be. Some wanted a unitary system, others a federal system, some for gradual decolonisation, others for an immediate break with Belgium, some for a presidential system, others for a parliamentary system.
There was no consensus and no one had experience of political dialogue, institutionalised political culture and compromise. Members of the US, Soviet and Belgian intelligence services circled like vultures over the young indigenous political scene.
On 30 June, the long-awaited day arrived. The independence ceremonies went according to protocol until a rogue unsurrendered the sword of the King of Belgium. The King’s speech was also inappropriate and patronising. It glorified his ancestor Leopold II, his beneficial influence on the Congo and the whole colonial period in general.
But it was Lumumba who truly crowned the day, when he unexpectedly took to the podium and delivered an unforgettable speech. It is now considered one of the most influential speeches of the 20th century. He reproached his former colonial masters in front of the cameras: “You have mocked and insulted us, beaten us morning, afternoon and evening, just because we are black. /…/ We have seen that the law was never the same for black and white, helpful for the former, cruel and inhuman for the latter.”
The King was so offended that he wanted to leave the Congo immediately, but Lumumba, under duress, apologised in time.
The headaches of several days of independence celebrations have not yet subsided when a new wave of violence has already engulfed Congo. This time, there was an uprising among African soldiers against the authoritarian and arrogant Belgian commander. Like many Belgians, he was convinced that their domination of the local army would simply continue. As if independence was just a paper tiger.
The locals went mad again, and this time the violence was even more brutal – several white men lost their lives, and the rape of white women was a special form of revenge. Lumumba did set up a Congolese command overnight, and made his secretary Mobutu chief of the general staff, but the violence only gradually subsided. Thus began at once the mass exodus of Belgians and Mobutu’s official rise.
At the same time, Katanga has also come to the boil. Katanga is a large southern province of the Congo, and has always been the richest because of its exceptional endowment of natural resources. It is from there that most of the money has flowed into Belgian wallets. And it was Katanga that the Belgians had no intention of letting out of their hands, owning the mining company that exploited its main resources.
Katanga declared its own independence less than two weeks after the Congo’s independence. To protect its financial interests, Belgium stood by with its army, even though secession was illegal under international law.
That is why Lumumba and Kasavubu, the Prime Minister and the President, have appealed to the United Nations for help. They expected them to take immediate and decisive action against the secession of Katanga and the invasion of sovereign Congolese territory by the Belgian army. But their hopes were too high. The United Nations was then a young organisation with only four international missions under its belt.
Disappointed by the lukewarm response, Lumumba was naive enough to turn to the Soviet Union. And since it was in the early 1960s that tensions between East and West reached a boiling point, he was immediately branded a communist.
Nikita Khrushchev, while aware that Lumumba was no communist, was excited by the prospect of expanding Soviet influence in Africa. He immediately promised to help him. Through the Congo, the Soviets would for the first time set foot on African soil. Because of its central geostrategic position – the Congo is bordered by nine countries – the scales of the Cold War would have tipped dangerously in the Soviet direction. Devlin therefore watched in horror as Soviet planes and weapons arrived in the Congo and Lumumba became known as the Congolese Castro.
Congo became the first African country to be caught in the grip of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the USA. The inexperienced Kasavubu and Lumumba were unaware of all this, but it was too late for Lumumba. Although he had no communist sympathies and, as a member of the new Congolese bourgeoisie, openly advocated classical economic liberalism and was not at all familiar with the concept of proletarian revolution, he was too dangerous for the Americans.
Lumumba must die
Congo’s most popular politician, who was such a remarkable and passionate orator that he often sent his audiences into ecstasy, was at once unpredictable and grandstanding. Stubborn, defiant and irrational, with a marked hostility and resentment towards foreigners, he was an impossible negotiator. There were rumours of his assassination as early as the summer of 1960, and in September Kasavubu, under international pressure, deposed him.
In an interesting manoeuvre, Lumumba ousted Kasavubu, and the stalemate was resolved by the United Nations in his favour. Mobutu knew that the CIA and Devlin had Eisenhower’s blessing to remove Lumumba in favour of the pro-Western leader. He had already seen himself in that role. Colonel Mobutu had Lumumba placed under house arrest. The friendship was irrevocably over.
The Americans were prepared to kill to sabotage Soviet plans, and the Belgians to protect their economic interests. In one scenario, Devlin Lumumba was supposed to have got away with poisoned toothpaste. The role he played in the post-independence Congo made Devlin one of the CIA’s most notorious agents.
Lumumba was guarded in detention by members of the UN-backed Ghana Blue Helmets, but when they sided with Mobutu and Kasavubu, he feared for his life. He escaped by hiding in the floor of a car, but because he was addressing loyal crowds as he fled, Mobutu’s soldiers easily caught him.
But what to do with it now? The decision was taken jointly by the Belgians, the Americans and the Congolese, specifically by the Belgian army, the US CIA and Mobutu. By sending him to the secessionist Katanga, they knew they were sending him to certain death. He and two followers were beaten and tortured so savagely during their transport to a military base that the pilot had difficulty concentrating on the flight because of the screams and the noise.
The Cathars, who wanted their own country, hated Lumumba to death. They quickly recruited a firing squad of natives led by a Belgian commander, placed the prisoners in front of a shallow pit and shot them. Lumumba was the last to fall. He had a letter in his pocket to his wife, in which he said goodbye to her and to his country, knowing what was in store for him.
The next day, the murderers dug up the bodies and destroyed them beyond recognition. News of the brutal murder sparked outrage and a wave of demonstrations around the world, including in Slovenia. Lumumba became a national hero and a martyr of decolonisation. The Lumumba cocktail – cognac with chocolate milk – became popular among young people, and a university in Moscow was even named after him.
After his death, the country descended into even greater chaos. The secession of Katanga failed because it was prevented by the United Nations, with the strong support of the new US President Kennedy. However, in circumstances that remain unexplained to this day, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, lost his life during negotiations between the warring parties. It is highly probable that his plane was shot down over a tropical forest by secessionist rebels from Katanga.
Even the famous revolutionary Che Guevara has spiced up the Congo. The followers of the murdered Lumumba took part in a peasant revolt in the east, influenced by Maoist and Marxist ideology, and even declared their own state.
But these soldiers were not revolutionaries as the famous Argentine had imagined them, but hysterical lunatics with painted faces, long-haired, drugged-up men who believed in magic and called themselves Simba (lions). Che Guevara quickly left the Congo in disappointment, prophetically saying that among the rebels, there was only one who counted for anything. This was Kabila, the man who, thirty years later, overthrew Mobutu.
After five years of severe internal unrest and civil war, the people were exhausted. They needed stability, style and confidence in the future. Mobutu, who with the help of the CIA staged a coup in 1965 without firing a shot, dissolved the First Republic, overthrew Kasavubu and proclaimed himself President, offered them all.
Congo is me!
He was considered a much more sensible and moderate politician than Lumumba, and a charismatic personality with an incredible sense of the masses. He was a master of word games and was known for his wry sense of humour, which embarrassed many a world leader during his long years in power.
The moment of general optimism was seized by the outdated Mobutu to take measures that boded well for the future. Under the pretext of the need for stability, he imposed a five-year ban on political parties, transferred legislative powers to the President – himself, allowed military courts to be used for civilian purposes and began to turn the country into a military dictatorship. He set to work so fanatically that he was up at half past six in the morning and soon suffered a mild heart attack.
As befits a true dictator, he has taken control of the media, especially public television. Television antennas were also set up on huts in the middle of forests so that people could watch their leader every day. His image descended from the clouds before the news. Mobutu became God’s envoy.
Initially appearing in military uniform, he soon introduced his own distinctive style, a blend of traditional patterns and fabrics and high French fashion. He wore a leopard headdress, which he deliberately kept on the side, thick black-rimmed Buddy Holly-style glasses and a walking stick with an eagle. Over the years, Mobutu became increasingly vain and obsessed with his image. In his old age, he became a caricature of himself.
He soon took on political opponents. On 2 June 1966, in front of a crowd of three hundred thousand, he had four allegedly scheming prominent politicians publicly executed. Among them was a former Prime Minister. He probably set a trap for them, because he needed a sacrificial lamb to consolidate power and silence the opposition as quickly and as much as possible.
These executions proved to be a very successful prelude to Mobutu’s terror. He needed a loyal army for it, so he made sure it was never short of anything. These were the beginnings of one of the most corrupt and kleptocratic regimes of the 20th century. He realised that killing and torturing opponents was not necessary at all and that it was easier to buy them. The right financial incentive makes the opponents the best of friends.
The first five years were marked not only by terror, but also by the return of peace and, above all, by state-building. For the first time, people got electricity and drinking water, drains and sewers, hospitals, schools, industrial infrastructure were built. Modern supermarkets, sports centres and a media park were built in the capital.
Then came ideology and populism. Mobutu was inspired, among other things, by the Cultural Revolution of the Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung, and the Congolese were given a green book instead of a little red book for compulsory reading. The very name Congo was associated in the collective consciousness with colonisation and subjugation. This is why Mobutu launched the so-called authenticity campaign in 1971, with the aim of restoring a sense of African identity and pride to the people through an idealised image of the nation’s past.
To start with, he simply renamed the country. But this was not the best idea, because the country was called Zaire, a 16th-century Portuguese corruption of the word nzadi, which just meant… river. The Congo therefore became a ‘river’. The Congo River was also renamed Zaire, so ‘river of rivers’. ‘River’ also became the new currency.
He banned Christian names and renamed himself. Joseph Désiré Mobutu became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, or ‘the almighty warrior whose endurance and will lead him from victory to victory’. They rechristened towns – Léopoldville became Kinshasa – squares, streets, toppled monuments to Léopold II and Stanley, got a new anthem and a new flag.
People were no longer allowed to address each other as Mr and Mrs, but, in the spirit of the French Revolution, as citizen and citizeness. The National Ballet had to learn traditional dances, a national theatre was set up, a national literary prize, Western music was banned. Men had to wear a new national uniform called the abacost (from the French ‘à bas le costume‘ or ‘down with the men’s clothes’), which was woollen and unsuitable for the African climate. Ironically, the finest examples of the abacost were made in Belgium.
In 1970, Mobutu was ‘re-elected’ with 99.99%. He won more than ten million votes. 157 people voted against, all from the same polling station in a student district.
So he could afford just about everything. In the mid-1970s, he took up economic policy, even though he was completely clueless. “A political genius, an economic spastic”, is how Devlin described him. He had no interest in public or private finance. He just knew that Congo was rich in raw materials that the whole world needed and that he could do as he pleased with the profits.
But as many mines and companies were still foreign-owned, he decided to seize assets from foreigners and distribute them among his supporters. Thousands of companies worth billions of dollars were distributed among people with no experience. One woman testified how her friend’s father offered her a shop: “Would you like a shop?” “No.” “Come on, take one, I’ll give you the employees next door. If you don’t like it, give it to your mother.”
Mobutu took 14 plantations with 25,000 employees and became the eighth richest man in the world. His personal fortune could have paid off the entire national debt. Both grew year by year.
Ali, boma ye!
In ten years of dictatorship, Mobutu has built one of the most recognisable cults of personality in the world. Of the 79 banknotes pressed during this period, his image appeared on 71.
The country was so rich in natural resources that he used the money he diverted into his own pockets to tame all political opponents and buy off the top brass of the army, the administration and big business. The civil service boomed and 600,000 civil servants were on the payroll – an estimated 50,000 were needed. He favoured giving away ministerial posts and changed his government of forty ministers twice a year. His drawers were stuffed with envelopes of hundred-dollar bills, which he handed out without thought.
He has also been able to afford the price for the loyalty of the Congolese people over the years. He gave them enough bread and games to make them blindly adore him. The height of national pride for the Zaireans came when, during the famous ‘jungle fight’ in October 1974, the eyes of the world were on them. Zaire had six years of uninterrupted growth under its belt and it was time to party. Muhammad Ali and George Foreman on Zairean soil!
Mobutu has pulled off one of the best publicity stunts of the century. He captured the world’s TV audience and headlines and, alongside the fight of the century, he staged a public spectacle. The three-day music festival, an expression of African pride, featured B.B. King, Celia Cruz, Johnny Pacheco, the Pointer Sisters, Sister Sledge, but above all James Brown and, of course, the biggest stars of the Zairean music scene.
It was all crowned with a knockout by the people’s favourite, Ali, seven years older and a former world champion who had been suspended for several years. “Ali, boma ye!” (“Ali, kill him!”). People, who had been given a day’s paid leave and half-price beer by Mobutu, were having a party like they had not had in a long time. Kinshasa’s nightclubs, already famous for their notorious nightlife scene, were bursting at the seams.
Mobutu has hosted many other spectacular events, such as the Miss Universe pageant, where a Finnish woman won the African costume category, hosting the famous Apollo 11 astronauts and launching the African Space Programme.
But most of all, of course, he took care of himself and his family. In the middle of the jungle, in the village of Gbadolite, not far from his birthplace, he built the fairytale Versailles of Africa. It is difficult to put into words the luxury, extravagance and, last but not least, the kitsch of this place. A palace with towering baroque towers, Venetian chandeliers, rainforest frescoes, marble floors in the ballroom, swimming pools, a discotheque, gardens with Italian water towers, Japanese pagodas, a nuclear shelter, a concorde runway.
Next door was a village with a luxury hotel, post office, banks, hospital, cathedral, Chinese village with imported Chinese. Another Mrs Mobutu had a fifty-metre wardrobe with at least a thousand pieces of clothing by French designers. While she was picking out fashion accessories, her husband was regularly ferried young virgins from neighbouring villages.
For years, Mobutu has hosted the world’s elite, including Western politicians. Despite the fact that everyone knew that most of the Congolese money was going into his personal accounts instead of the public coffers, few refused the invitation. Up to 12 000 bottles of Mobutu’s favourite rosé champagne, Laurent Perrier, were drunk in Gbadolito every year.
For lunch, he often had the Belgian speciality of fresh mussels from the North Sea, washed down with a fine wine from the 1930 vintage, the year of his birth. The tables were decorated with fresh flowers from Amsterdam, the barber flew in from New York, the hairdresser from Paris, the tailor from Antwerp. Once, he took two hundred family members to Disneyland in Florida, at the expense of the increasingly poor Congolese. He also owned a number of luxury residences around the world, notably in Belgium, where he met regularly with the King and Prime Ministers.
The high point was the marriage of Mobutu’s daughter to a Belgian man, who later described his father-in-law’s unbelievable giving of money in a book. 2500 people were invited. At that time, Zaire was already a failed state, but the daughter wore a dress with a six-metre train worth $70 000 and her jewels were valued at three million dollars. The four-metre high cake, with fresh cream and a Spanish breeze, had been flown in from France, chilled in parts, and reassembled in the middle of the African heat. Price: 65,000 dollars.
Zaton
Mobutu’s regime was able to survive because the dictator had the irrevocable support of the West. The US in particular, and all Republican presidents from Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr, idolised him. Reagan described him as a reasonable man. Zaire was a bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence in Africa. Everything else was irrelevant. “Mobutu is a scoundrel, but at least he is our scoundrel!” Nor did it bother them that he was ideologically inspired in many ways by China and North Korea, and the Romanian leader Ceauşescu was his good friend anyway.
When the price of copper fell by two-thirds after the end of the Vietnam War, and then the oil shock was followed by a global recession, it was catastrophic for Zaire. The IMF and the World Bank granted Mobutu millions of dollars in loans and wrote off a huge amount. Even though they knew where the money was actually going.
Then, on behalf of the IMF, Blumenthal, a powerful German banker, was tasked with finally putting Zaire’s finances in order. The international community wanted to see reforms, or else it would turn off the tap.
Blumenthal’s findings were shocking. For example, senior officials were in the habit of going to the bank and serving themselves money. It was impossible to distinguish between the President’s and the State’s expenses. Mobutu’s son’s teacher, for example, received $300,000 a month from the state budget. The huge public debt was spread over 92 banks. Blumenthal simply resigned in disgust.
Mobutu continued to enrich himself, including by stealing humanitarian aid from the UN Food for Peace programme. The people of Zaire have never been poorer. They had to work for two days to buy a kilo of rice and soon fifty percent of the population was malnourished. Public services were non-existent, with one working telephone line per thousand inhabitants. Plague and sleeping sickness returned, AIDS was on the rise and literacy and life expectancy were falling. Inflation was 4,130% in 1991 and 9,800% in 1994. All the zeros could no longer be squeezed onto banknotes.
By then, Mobutu also no longer had support in the West. The IMF stripped Zaire of its electoral status, Belgium froze development aid, France suspended relations. The Cold War was long over and his friend Ceauşescu was in his grave with 120 broomsticks.
When Mobutu, nicknamed Sesescu, watched his end, he was chilled and on 24 April 1990 he announced a process of democratisation. But he could not back down, and it was another seven years before he fled into exile from the rebels. The coup d’état was carried out by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had already been spotted by Che Guevara thirty years before.
Kabila promised many things. But his regime was not fundamentally different from Mobutu’s. The tragedy of the country that is once again called the Democratic Republic of Congo continues.
