In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (13 page)

In latter years, valiant attempts had been made to brake the thieving, said the Belgian manager. ‘Customs men and generals were
moved on and we set up roadblocks to stop lorries loaded with cobalt on their way to the border. But there is top level collusion in Kinshasa which means it continues, even if it's slightly less obvious.'

Less obvious, perhaps, because there was little left to steal. It took over thirty years, but by 1994, when copper production had sunk to 30,600 tonnes a year—less than a fifteenth of what it had been at its height—and cobalt output was 3,000 tonnes, the Horn of Plenty had effectively run dry. Revenue was zero. ‘Gécamines,' in the words of Daniel Simpson, former US ambassador to Kinshasa, ‘was as clean as a whistle. Mobutu had not only killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, he'd eaten the carcass and made fat from the feathers.' Gécamines was placed on what its chief executives described as ‘a survival programme' and relieved of its crippling tax obligations. With the exception of the occasional quick-in, quick-out joint venture that barely scratched the surface of Gécamines' potential or its problems, the concession ground to a virtual standstill, with skeleton crews keeping the facilities ticking over in expectation of some far-off resurrection. In order to restore Gécamines' production to about 300,000 tonnes a year, the World Bank had estimated, any investor would have to assume debt in excess of $2 billion and invest another $1 billion.

Driving from one site to another, that figure seemed almost low. This was a landscape of quiet yards, empty skips, mysteriously dripping ceilings; plant after plant that looked as though its sole purpose was to breed rust in industrial quantities. I won't forget the vision of an overalled worker straddling a grating, pounding slowly with a hammer at a rock too large to go through a giant sieve. It was a job for an industrial crusher, but the crusher was out of order, so with a colleague holding the end of a rope wrapped around his waist to prevent a fall, he was reverting to the oldest mining technique known to man. Watching him sweating, I was reminded of a joke told south across the border. ‘What did Zambia use before candles came along?' it goes. ‘Electricity.'

But it was at the Shituri plant that the extent to which Gécamines had lost the fight against its own staff became clear. Against all odds,
cobalt was still being processed here, electrolysed on large plates suspended in solution and then noisily ground out—dark granular fragments dropping into a large plastic container that looked suspiciously similar to the kind of sacks normally used for wheat flour. A South African security company had been hired to patrol the grounds and 250 armed guards monitored a plant working, in any case, at a mere 25 per cent of capacity. Yet management had still felt the need to store the sacks of cobalt in a padlocked warehouse, stretch fronds of barbed wire across the roof and plug the whole apparatus into the national grid. ‘That way, if anyone tries to be clever by going in by the roof, they get fried,' chuckled a Gécamines worker, drawing my attention to the skull and bones sign on the warehouse door. ‘If there was a world competition for breaking and entering, we Zaireans would always win first prize.'

 

Many Katangans believe
they have been made to pay the price for their autonomous leanings, which simmer on today. ‘They had to make Shaba poor, so that we would be dependent on Kinshasa. The destruction of Gécamines was deliberate,' insisted a member of a local political party. It is a conviction that leaves an abiding sense of resentment. ‘If the Zairean economy lasted as long as it did, it was thanks to us. For thirty years they bled us dry and in exchange, what did we get? We were colonised a second time, first by the Belgians, then by the Kinshasa regime.'

But Mobutu's next stop in the hunt for disposable income was to be made on different terms. When Gécamines, backbone of Zaire's economy, showed its first sign of faltering, he turned his attention north-westwards, to the rebel province of east Kasai, a region with just as many reasons as Katanga to long for autonomy.

East Kasai is home to the Luba people. Dubbed the Jews of Congo, the Luba are regarded with suspicion by their fellow nationals as a little too good in business; aggressive wheeler-dealers overly prone to share the fruits of their worldly success exclusively with their tribesmen while ruthlessly boxing out other ethnic groups. ‘Let
one Luba into your business, and next thing you know, they'll be running it,' Kinshasa residents warn.

Etienne Tshisekedi, Mobutu's most formidable challenger until events in Rwanda rendered him irrelevant, hailed from there and having him as their champion always underlined the Lubas' status as outsiders. Only curmudgeonly Kasai, one feels, could have got away with the step community leaders took in 1993, when they took against a new currency issued by Kinshasa. Deciding, with considerable justification, that this was a monetary scam designed to line the pockets of politicians in the capital and was bound to have an inflationary impact, the local elite simply decided to boycott the new notes and stick with the ‘ancien zaires' of old.

For the diplomats in Kinshasa, it was a move which, if left unchecked, would raise the interesting question of whether Zaire was still a state, or simply an empty space defined by nine countries' frontiers. ‘It was a bit like Yorkshire unilaterally deciding that from now on, it was going to use Monopoly money,' said one. ‘It raised some fundamental questions about what makes a nation a nation, and what it was exactly that Mobutu thought he was presiding over.' Yet Kasai was allowed to do its own thing for five long years.

By this late stage of his regime Mobutu was no longer interested in symbols of sovereignty. He needed cash, and the readiest source, once copper had lost its sheen, was to be found in Mbuji Mayi, the town built where a subsidiary of a subsidiary of the great Congo river meanders lazily across the plain, depositing the tiny stones washed from the green-grey pipes of kimberlite, embedded—in the analogy favoured by mineralogists—like so many giant carrots in the soil.

As early as 1907, a colonial prospector had taken what looked like an interesting pebble from this site for analysis in Europe. It lay ignored until an engineer preparing another trip started sorting through samples, stumbled upon it and confirmed that yes, this really was a diamond. By now no one could remember where the sample had been collected and it was only in 1913 that Kasai's status as a diamond region was confirmed. Since then, diamond fever, as dramatic in its social effects as any Klondike Gold Rush, has held the area in its
grip. So valued are these deposits, you need special permits to visit the region and at regular intervals the government in Kinshasa, convinced too many outsiders are getting their share of the booty, ejects the Lebanese middlemen who home in on the province like sugar-crazed wasps.

Mbuji Mayi is a curiously soulless settlement, with no tangible centre, boasting none of the elegant civic buildings left behind elsewhere in Congo by the Belgians. It is a purely functional conurbation, dedicated to making money, with little left over for less focused activities. Its pulsating artery is the Avenue Inga, the rutted, muddy road on whose white-washed walls have been painted, in garish colours, the names of the buyers within, a promise that only they will offer a fair price and—as an example of what is expected from those crossing the lintel—a sketch of a sparkling, blue-white diamond worthy of a monarch's crown.

Inside the carefully guarded compounds, tough young Brits working for the local branch of the South African giant de Beers, homesick Lebanese middlemen who miss their families, and sometimes—but not often—Congolese themselves, sort delicately through piles of what look like coloured sugar crystals. They are searching, in this region where industrial-quality diamonds are the norm, for that rarity: a fault-free, gem-quality crystal structured to slice cleanly under the cutter's blade and guaranteed to fetch thousands of dollars in Antwerp.

‘Fortunes can be made here,' said Ahmed, a Lebanese buyer. ‘But you really have to know diamonds. And you have to be willing to wait months on end for something special to come along. A lot of people don't have the patience.' He displayed his latest cache lovingly on the back of an envelope. ‘These are mostly white stones, which is unusual for here. I spent $30,000 and they should fetch $40,000 in Antwerp. You have to make at least a 10 per cent margin, as you have a lot of expenses to cover.'

In a perfect world, very few of the sixty-odd diamond comptoirs (counters) in Mbuji Mayi would be operating at all. For the diggers they buy from, ragged men who spend their days waist-high in the
Kanshi river, sifting red gravel through crude sieves, taking cover when they hear the sound of approaching voices, are what the Angolans call ‘garimpeiros', or illegal diggers. These freelancers work land nominally awarded to the Société Minière de Bakwanga (MIBA), the company in which the state owns 80 per cent and a Belgian company has the remaining 20 per cent. It is a 5,000-square-kilometre mining concession the company has neither the facilities nor the energy to police. ‘Ninety-five per cent of the diamonds being bought by the comptoirs come from our concession,' estimated a MIBA official. ‘I don't think there's a single legal counter in Mbuji Mayi. But if you crack down on the comptoirs the diggers will just take the stones into Angola and sell them there instead.' Respecting the regulations, after all, has never been the norm in an industry in which the value of diamonds smuggled out each year far outstrips the $300–400 million going through official, and therefore taxable, channels.

Diamonds were always going to be the perfect product for Mobutu: tiny, easily smuggled across borders in a briefcase, handbag or pocket and needing none of the clumsy apparatus of electrolysers, smelters and refiners or the messy infrastructure of rickety railways, road haulage and quaysides associated with base metals. He could play the same game as the buyers on Avenue Inga, setting up diamond counters which massively underestimated the value of their wares in official declarations and then unloaded the garimpeiros' produce onto the Antwerp market. But Mobutu could also go directly to the biggest diamond digger of them all and demand a presidential share. And in Jonas Mukamba, the long-standing government representative running MIBA, Mobutu had a man he could do business with.

A tall, imposing Luba known for his tendency to speak his mind, Mukamba had been a player on the national scene as long as Mobutu himself. Engraved on the memories of most Congolese is the fact that it was Mukamba who accompanied Lumumba and his two fellow prisoners on their terrible flight down to Elizabethville in 1961,
handing the former prime minister over to the men who would take him to his death. As with Mobutu, the oily stain of fratricide has clung to MIBA's president for more than thirty years, lending him a sinister glamour which has done nothing to blight his progress through the world.

Maybe this shared complicity made cooperation between the two men easier. For when Gécamines' top executives stopped being able to deliver, Mukamba stepped in. ‘Mukamba was probably creaming off between $1.5 and $2 million from MIBA for Mobutu each month,' guessed a former government economist. ‘People often say the advantage of a private company is that it puts a stop to this kind of thing. Well, MIBA's mixed economy status made not the slightest bit of difference.' Mukamba obliged Mobutu in other ways. Foreign dignitaries the president wanted to impress were taken to the MIBA building. The company's security guards would be ordered out, each visitor handed a shovel and sack and invited to help themselves to MIBA's raw diamonds. If today the company officially refuses to comment on its past, Mukamba's role as Mobutu's fund-raiser is quietly acknowledged by staff who took over administration after the president's departure. ‘But quite honestly, what else could he do?' asked a MIBA colleague. ‘It's easy to criticise, but it's not black and white. Towards the end it was impossible to work with Mobutu if you didn't play the game. And in the process Mukamba did a lot of good to the town.'

For, in exchange for the presidential tithe, Mukamba was left to run Mbuji Mayi and its environs largely as he pleased. Filling the space left by the absent government, he turned it into the ultimate company state. MIBA repaired the roads, pumped drinking water, supplied the town with electricity and sold food at subsidised prices. MIBA contributed funds to the nascent university and paid for foreign professors to fly over to teach. A young Kasaian could easily spend his life in MIBA-funded institutions: living in a company house, attending a MIBA school and dying in a hospital supplied with MIBA drugs. ‘I'm a businessman, but I'm also a politician and my job
is to look after the population,' Mukamba told me shortly before his removal. ‘The people are very aware of what MIBA is or isn't doing and if we don't do it we are severely criticised.'

With its own scrip and a company-funded health and education system, bolshy east Kasai enjoyed self-rule of sorts. But it was always autonomy by default, and it never touched great heights. By the late 1990s, despite MIBA's repair work and its electricity plant, many of the main roads still subsided in the rain and much of the town was plunged into darkness at night. The much-vaunted university was little more than a couple of outhouses and a dusty roomful of books. A MIBA-sponsored orphanage was a bleak, furnitureless shack, where runny-nosed children could recite the catechism but went without shoes. Residents had accepted their half-baked secession as the best deal they were likely to win and got on with the task of making money, an approach that infuriated the more idealistic amongst them. Gaston Muyombo, a Catholic priest, blamed the approach on what he called ‘Bantu philosophy': ‘People cling to life and are not yet at the stage where they will fight for the quality of that life. They feel as long as they are surviving, that is enough.'