Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (32 page)

For once, Mobutu was outshone in superstition. Laurent Kabila refused to look into his eyes during the meeting and instead stared at the ceiling; according to the prevailing rumor, he was afraid that the Old Leopard still had enough magical power left to curse him with his stare and prevent him from reaching his prize, now so close. It was the only time that the two rivals met; after fighting him for thirty-two years, the rebel leader had little to say to his foe. Hand over power, and step down without any conditions, he told him. Mobutu, insulted by the treatment, limped off the boat, refusing to strike a deal. Mandela, seventyeight himself, had to prop him up as he walked to his car.

During the last days of the rainy season in Kinshasa, thunderous downpours pounded down on the rooftops and inundated whole neighborhoods. It didn’t dampen the youths’ anticipation, however. Graffiti began appearing on walls. One downtown said: “Mobutu = Problème, Kabila = Solution.” Elsewhere, vandals painted over the “Zaire” on administrative buildings, scrawling “Congo,” the name Kabila had adopted for the country, above. An enterprising young man climbed up a sixty-foot-high billboard, painted a mustache on Mobutu’s face, and blackened out a tooth.

It is telling that the closest thing to a hero this period could muster was a traitor. General Donat Mahele was a lanky, tall man from the Equateur region, but not from the same tribe as Mobutu. He had been trained at France’s elite Saint-Cyr military academy, held command positions in the Shaba wars of 1977 and 1978, and led Mobutu’s troops sent to help Habyarimana beat back the RPF in 1990. He was a devout Jehovah’s Witness and enjoyed a good reputation among foreign military advisors; when the army pillaged Kinshasa in 1991, he had the guts to order his soldiers to shoot their looting comrades, which helped bring the chaos under control.

Mahele was named to lead the Zairean army in December 1996. By the following April, after countless standoffs with other army commanders, he realized that it was a lost cause. Kabila controlled two-thirds of the country, including its diamond and copper mines. “At some point he realized that the morally right thing to do was to surrender before more lives were lost,” José Endundo, the general’s friend and a prominent businessman, remembered.

Everyone was worried that the AFDL’s arrival in Kinshasa would prompt a bloodbath, with running gun battles in downtown streets, revenge killings, and indiscriminate shelling of civilian neighborhoods. At the very least, the thousands of demoralized soldiers would thoroughly loot the city before taking to their heels.

It was the Americans who provided General Mahele with the means to get in touch with Laurent Kabila. Ambassador Daniel Simpson, who had met with Kabila on a visit to Lubumbashi, arranged for a phone call to take place on May 14 at his residence. Mahele and Kabila spoke for half an hour and then again a few days later. They arranged for Mahele to read a speech on the radio, telling the troops to stand down when the rebels walked into town. He would also fly to the Zambian capital, Lusaka, to meet with Kabila and officially recognize him.
¹²

First, however, Mobutu had to leave. If he was still in Kinshasa when the rebels arrived, some units loyal to him might try to put up a fight.

On May 15, Mobutu had just come back from another trip to the South African ship
Outenika
—Kabila hadn’t even bothered turning up this time—to be met by his most powerful generals at his residence. General Likulia, who had taken over the prime minister’s office in the final days, was adamant that they could still defend the capital. “I ordered attack helicopters with ample ammunition [in South Africa]. I even paid a sizeable down payment to make sure the equipment arrives.”
¹³

Likulia looked to the others to back him up. Mahele, however, had had enough. “
Voila
,
Maréchal
, I am no longer able to ensure your safety here.”

Mobutu looked at him in amazement. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t aware of this!” According to other, probably more dramatic witnesses, he looked at Mahele and said, “
Et tu, Brute?
”

Bobi Ladawa, the first lady, chimed in, “You betrayed your father! After everything he has done for you!”

Likulia looked to Mobutu’s nephew, General Nzimbi, the commander of the presidential guard. “Nzimbi, you said you have 15,000 troops here in the city. What have you done to prepare our defense?” The general stared back in embarrassed silence.
¹⁴

“I see,” Mobutu said softly. “It is decided then. We shall leave tomorrow.”

The gossip mill began churning as each person involved in the meeting began propagating his own version of what had happened. By the following morning, the news had gone out among the officer corps: Mahele had betrayed the nation.

The next day, Mobutu drove to the airport at dawn, opting for a small, less conspicuous vehicle, accompanied by ten cars stuffed with suitcases. Other objects had preceded them and had been packed onto a 747 jet that was waiting for Mobutu and his entourage. He had so much luggage that he had to leave part of it at the airport in the vehicles. Abandoned expensive vehicles were becoming a common sight in Kinshasa, especially at the various ports where Mobutu officials were fleeing across the river to Brazzaville in canoes, speedboats, and ferries.

Mahele spent the rest of the day preparing for Kabila’s arrival in town. He was particularly worried about the presidential guards, the elite forces who had benefited most from Mobutu’s largesse and who were recruited largely from his home region of Equateur. In the evening, he received a phone call from Prime Minister Likulia, who told him that riots had broken out in Camp Tshatshi, where the presidential guard was based.

Mahele decided to go there himself, accompanied only by a few other officers. “That was typical Mahele,” a former colleague and friend told me. “Even in the 1991 Kinshasa riots, he patrolled town on foot with soldiers. That was too low! That’s not the role of a general!”

At the gates of Camp Tshatshi, they found a gang of presidential guards shooting in the air, high on adrenaline. They stopped the group of officers and made them get out of their jeeps. Mahele entered the camp and tried to reason with them, but they shouted him down: “You have sold us out! You betrayed us, and now you will cross over to Brazzaville! What about us and our families!”

They began talking to each other in Ngbandi, Mobutu’s mother tongue, saying that they should kill the traitor. Mahele was from the Mbuza tribe, but he got the message and began backtracking to the cars they had left outside the gate. His bodyguard Kazembe was waiting for him and forced open the gate, provoking the outrage of the soldiers, who shot him.

A commotion ensued—Mahele jumped in the car, while his other bodyguards jumped into the bushes on the side of the road. The presidential guard opened fire on the jeep, but when they looked inside, Mahele was nowhere to be seen.

“Sorcerer!” they cried out, looking under the seats. Finally, they found the general, hiding underneath the car. “I’m here, you fools. Do with me what you want!”

They took him back into the camp and tore off his general’s stripes and red beret. A fight broke out between the Ngbandi and the Mbuza within the presidential guard about what should be done with him, but the scuffle was cut short when someone—some say Kongolo, Mobutu’s notorious son—drew a pistol and shot Mahele in the back of his head.

Camp Tshatshi collapsed as the soldiers, leaderless and divided, fought over the remaining spoils.
¹⁵

12

THE KING IS DEAD; LONG LIVE THE KING

A cat goes to a monastery, but she still remains a cat.

—CONGOLESE SAYING

KINSHASA, CONGO, MAY 1997

President Laurent Kabila spent his first few weeks in Kinshasa in May 1997 shellshocked. It was understandable; he had not been in the capital since the early 1960s. In his mind, Kinshasa had become a mythical construct, a Babylon of excess and corruption, from where his archenemy had ruled for three decades.

The capital, called Leopoldville when Kabila had left, with its functioning administration and expansive infrastructure, had deteriorated into the riotous commotion of modern-day Kinshasa. In the early sixties, the city had been sculpted around a tidy, wealthy nucleus of white businessmen surrounded by the burgeoning Congolese elite and flanked by neighborhoods of blue-collar workers in relatively neat housing settlements built by the Belgians. By 1997, the population had grown from half a million to over five million. The city had burst at the seams, as villagers streamed into the ever-expanding shantytowns fanning south and eastward, away from downtown.

Kinshasa had become the third largest city in Africa and among the top twenty in the world, but it seemed like an oversized village. There was no functioning postal service or public transit system, and despite an overabundance of rainfall, over two million city dwellers did not have direct access to a water supply. Ninety-five percent of the population worked in the informal sector: lugging bags of cassava, shining shoes, hawking everything from aphrodisiacs to cigarettes and nail polish along the bustling streets. Tens of thousands of civil servants still showed up for work in old suits and ties—but were rarely paid. Garbage accumulated in the open sewers and on impromptu heaps by the side of the road, where it rotted and was eventually burned, filling the air with acrid smoke. Half of the population lived on one meal a day, scrounging together stacks of Nouveau Zaire banknotes to buy cassava flour and leaves for their evening meal; a quarter lived on a meal every two days.
¹
Kin la Belle
had become
Kin la Poubelle
—Kinshasa the Garbage Can.

The architecture of the city had changed accordingly. The statue at the train station of King Leopold, the Belgian monarch who had founded the country and owned it as his private property for twenty-three years, was gone. The various exclusive social clubs, where white privilege was carefully groomed, had also disappeared as the foreign population fled the city, first after the social upheaval around independence and then during the pillage of the early 1990s. Mobutu had tried to reorganize the city, constructing wide boulevards to the Chinesebuilt parliament and a new 80,000-seat stadium, the second largest in Africa. But city planning had failed: The shanties grew organically and anarchically, appropriating empty spaces as sewage and lighting systems broke down. The rich reacted by building higher walls around the few pockets of whitewashed privilege left in the Ngaliema and Gombe communes. The few public parks were taken over by hawkers and evangelists during the day and by the homeless at night.

The presidential gardens, which had housed Mobutu’s zoo, were now overgrown with weeds. The zoo, once a model for others in Africa, was little more than a collection of rusty, dirty cages tended by unpaid keepers who looked after starving animals. Two of the lions had recently starved to death, and a group of expatriates had taken to collecting leftover food from upscale hotels to feed the remaining monkeys, chimpanzees, antelopes, and snakes. The abandoned zoo workers had tried raising chickens and fish on the land, but they had little hope for the animals.

Soon after Kabila arrived in Kinshasa, his advisors briefed him on the country’s economy. It wasn’t a pretty picture. The country’s income had shrunk to a third of what it had been at independence in 1960. Inflation was at 750 percent. Between 1988 and 1996, copper production had plummeted from 506,000 to 38,000 tons, while industrial diamond production dropped from 10 million to 6.5 million carats. Coffee, palm oil, and tea production followed the same trend. Only 5 percent of the population had salaried jobs; many of those worked for the state on salaries as low as five dollars a month. There were 120,000 soldiers and 600,000 civil servants to pay and only 2,000 miles of paved roads in the twelfth largest country in the world.