Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (17 page)

It is amazing to what extent the ethnic stereotypes and conflicts that were born in Rwanda have contaminated the rest of the region. No other image plagues the Congolese imagination as much as that of the Tutsi aggressor. No other sentiment has justified as much violence in the Congo as anti-Tutsi ideology. Again and again, in the various waves of conflict in the Congo, the Tutsi community has taken center stage, as victims and killers. This antagonism is fueled by struggles over land tenure, citizenship, and access to resources, but also and most directly by popular prejudice and a vicious circle of revenge.

The wars that began in the eastern Congo in 1993 acted as a vector to these prejudices, as Tutsi soldiers and politicians took lead roles in every Rwandan-backed insurgency since then. Whereas previously anti-Tutsi resentment was a phenomenon limited to small areas of North and South Kivu, it has now spread across the region. Its expressions crop up everywhere, from pillow talk to bar banter to televised debates. When I first lived in Bukavu, in 2001, I spent a lot of time with a local family. The mother of the family, a soft-spoken twenty-seven-year-old who was studying development at a local university, was, like most of the town, bitterly opposed to what she called the “Tutsi occupation of the eastern Congo.” It was in the middle of the war, and Bukavu and the surrounding areas were heavily militarized. It was difficult to avoid some sort of harassment—taxation, verbal abuse, torture, or worse—by Rwandan troops or their local allies. One day, when I was arguing that you had to understand Tutsi paranoia, as it had its roots in the massacre of up to 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda during the genocide, she replied, “Eight hundred thousand? Obviously it wasn’t enough. There are still some left.”

In the meantime, the towns were bombarded by anonymous tracts, political one-pagers photocopied on cheap machines intended to rally the population against the Tutsi occupiers. They would be handed around in universities, at the markets, at the crowded port. One from October 2000 reads in part:

ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!

Population of South Kivu,

Following the barbarous crimes committed in KAVUMU, MAKOBOLA, BURHINYI, MWENGA and BUNYAKIRI, massacres against our peaceful population of Bukavu are already being prepared by KAGAME, MUSEVENI and BUYOYA. ...

History does not contradict us. The terrible atrocities committed shortly before the beginning of the 20th century by the Tutsi kings prove sufficiently to what extent you are descended from CAIN. Just imagine: A Tutsi king, every time he wanted to stand up, had to lean on a spear that was plunged into the leg of a Hutu subject. The point was very sharp and covered with poison. What cruelty!

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES AND
THE VICTORY IS CERTAIN!
OUR CAUSE IS NOBLE:
PATRIOTISM AND SELF-DEFENSE!
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These tracts tried to outdo each other in their extremism. The Congolese imagination, flailing around for clarity and trying to understand the violent upheaval the country has experienced, has latched onto the most basic building block of society: ethnicity. Instead of disabusing it of these stereotypes, successive leaders on both sides of the ethnic divide have only cynically fanned these flames.

6

MZEE

KIGALI, RWANDA, EARLY 1996; LUBUMBASHI, CONGO, 1960; FIZI, CONGO, 1965–1980

Laurent Kabila’s presence is hard to miss in Kinshasa. In the middle of town, he towers as a forty-foot statue (thanks to North Korean sculptors, experts in state-sponsored hagiography), his finger pointing to the sky, admonishing the Congolese for straying from the path he had envisioned for the country. His head is mounted on countless billboards around the city, dressed in his characteristic collarless brown safari suit. His eyes are turned upwards, “to the dazzling future,” according to supporters. In the center of the government neighborhood, ensconced in a marble mausoleum, his shiny grey coffin is on display, lined with garish fake flowers and ribbons. On many afternoons, schoolchildren in blue and white uniforms parade by, chattering irreverently, impervious to the irritable presidential guards with machine guns.

Despite his omnipresence, however, it is difficult to penetrate Kabila’s myth. His real character has been shrouded by both vilification and idolatry. For some of his former comrades—those responsible for the statue, posters, and mausoleum—it was his perseverance that helped liberate the country first from Mobutu’s dictatorship and then from Rwanda’s control. For many others, Kabila’s image morphed into a stereotype of African leaders: the thuggish, authoritarian “big man,” willing to do anything to preserve his power, a mold cast by Jean-Bedel Bokassa and Idi Amin, the military strongmen of neighboring Central African Republic and Uganda, respectively.

Kabila had been a rebel since his youth in rural, pre-independence Congo. The son of a disciplinarian civil servant, Kabila distinguished himself as a precocious but difficult student. His father insisted on speaking French with his children at home, which left his son with the smooth, urbane accent of an
évolué
, an African accepted into the exclusive colonial clique. His schooling was often interrupted, probably as a result of the turbulence in the country as well as in his household, where his father’s polygamy caused tensions with his mother. Before the age of ten, his parents separated, and he divided the rest of his youth between his mother’s and father’s houses. It is not clear whether he even finished high school, but according to childhood friends, he could often be found in public libraries in Lubumbashi, the capital of the southern, mineral-rich Katanga Province, his nose buried in books. French Enlightenment philosophers such as Descartes and Rousseau appear to have been favorites.
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According to the few accounts from that period, his blinkered ambition appeared at an early age. Despite a slight limp that he developed when he was a child, he earned himself the nickname Chuma (made of iron) for his strength. A friend’s description of his behavior on the soccer pitch reminds the reader of future traits: “Laurent Kabila was very authoritarian. When he said you weren’t playing, he wouldn’t change his opinion. In soccer, we respected him because he didn’t fool around. Kabila didn’t accept defeat, he was resolute and determined, he was above us. We feared him.”
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Kabila began his political career during the upheaval that rocked his home province of Katanga in 1960. The province harbored some of the richest mineral deposits in Africa, prompting Belgian businessmen to back a bid for secession of the province when the Congo became independent. The province, however, split in two when the north, dominated by Kabila’s Lubakat tribe, rejected secession. It was one of the many uprisings that broke out across the country following independence, sparked by both Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and local ethnic power blocs, now free from the shackles of a strong central state, that were trying to stake out their own interests. Kabila quickly immersed himself in this wave of violence, becoming a commander in a youth militia at the age of twenty.

Politics provided a feeling of purpose and belonging that he couldn’t find in his sprawling family of nineteen siblings and half-siblings and at least five parents-in-law. The rebellion also pitted him against his father, the diligent colonial administrator. In late 1960, as Lubakat youths across the north of the province rebelled, they captured dozens of former colonial officers, including Kabila’s father. The sixty-year-old was kidnapped, beaten, and finally lynched by the same militia that his son belonged to. When word of his father’s death reached him, Kabila is said to have reacted calmly.

The young revolutionary spent the next years on the move, after South African and Belgian mercenaries put down the rebellion. He traveled as part of a socialist delegation to Moscow and then Belgrade, where, according to some, he briefly enrolled at the university. Finally, in January 1964, the leaders of the rebellion sent Kabila to Burundi to make contact with the Chinese government and to launch a rebellion in the highlands of the Kivus, close to the homeland of the Banyamulenge. There, commanders from the local community had been fighting against the government for several years, using bows and arrows, colonial-era Mausers, and a few AK-47s.

The rebels purported to be nationalists fighting against colonialism and the exploitation of their country’s natural resources. Marxist ideology, however, was having a hard time grafting itself onto the Congolese insurgencies that proliferated across the country after independence. With over 80 percent of the population living off subsistence agriculture, and with a tiny, unpoliticized, and largely uneducated industrial labor force, the Congolese rebellions had little truck with Marxist arguments of surplus labor and the exploited proletariat. Most importantly, the kinds of urban and rural social networks that communism was able to mobilize elsewhere through labor unions and peasants’ associations were largely nonexistent in the Congo. After conquering half of the country by early 1964, the rebel groups quickly fractured and succumbed to corruption and ill-discipline.

The Chinese were not the only ones to misjudge the strength of socialism. Che Guevara led an expedition to support Kabila’s insurrection in the eastern Congo in 1965. Fidel Castro’s government, newly in power, had immediately embarked on exporting their revolutionary and anti-imperialist ideology elsewhere. The Congo was an obvious target in many ways. Not only had the CIA helped in Lumumba’s assassination, but the United States and South Africa had helped assemble a contingent of white mercenaries to put down the various rebellions that had seized almost half the country in 1964.

The mercenaries’ racism and brutality, as described by an Italian journalist, further stoked Guevara’s determination: “Occupying the town meant blowing out the doors with rounds of bazooka fire, going into the shops and taking anything they wanted that was movable.... After the looting came the killing. The shooting lasted for three days. Three days of executions, of lynching, of tortures, of screams, and of terror.”
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Pictures of white mercenaries smoking cigarettes and laughing, as behind them rebels’ bodies dangled loosely from trees, filtered out, although only an African American newspaper would print them.
⁴
An added affront to Castro was the CIA’s hiring of Cuban exile pilots to provide air support to the mercenaries.

Che took on the Congo campaign as a personal challenge. For him, it was not just a matter of freeing the country from imperialists. “Our view was that the Congo problem was a world problem,” he wrote in his diary.
⁵
During a three-month tour of Africa in early 1965, Che was pressed by other rebel movements for support, but he kept on coming back to the Congo. “Victory [in the Congo] would have repercussions throughout the continent, as would defeat,” he wrote. As he described an exchange he had with rebels from other countries, “I tried to make them understand that the real issue was not the liberation of any given state, but a common war against a common master.”
⁶

Nevertheless, Che’s experience, as well as the insurrection, ended in disaster. The beginning words of his Congo journal were: “This is the history of a failure.” Suffering from internal divisions, lack of organization, and little military experience, the rebel offensives against the national army fell apart amid numerous Cuban and Congolese casualties. After seven months, Che was forced to withdraw, sick and dejected, his feet swollen from malnutrition.

Throughout this period, Kabila proved himself a wily and sometimes ruthless politician, deftly riding the political currents around him. In the conclusion of his diaries from that time, Guevara had mixed feelings about the Congolese leader:

The only man who has genuine qualities of a mass leader is, in my view, Kabila. The purest of revolutionaries cannot lead a revolution unless he has certain qualities of a leader, but a man who has qualities of a leader cannot, simply for that reason, carry a revolution forward. It is essential to have revolutionary seriousness, an ideology that can guide action, a spirit of sacrifice that accompanies one’s actions. Up to now, Kabila has not shown that he possesses any of these qualities.... I have very great doubts about his ability to overcome his defects in the environment in which he operates.
⁷