In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (6 page)

Pleading near bankruptcy, Leopold managed to win two major loans worth a total of 32 million francs from the Belgian state in 1890 and 1895, paid out in yearly instalments. But while the faithful Van Eetvelde was drawing up fictitious budgets underestimating revenues, thereby ensuring the government maintained subsidies for a colony the public had never wanted in the first place, profitability was sharply on the rise. By 1901 ivory exports stood at 289,900 kilograms and rubber production had gone from 350 to 6,000 tonnes a year. Congo was providing more than a tenth of world production of this key raw material, bringing in somewhere between 40 and 50 million francs a year. The king also made money by issuing more than 100 million francs worth of Congo bonds, effectively printing money with
the same liberality as Kinshasa's central bank was later to show when it came to issuing notes.

When Leopold was finally forced to hand the colony over to Belgium, he did so at a high price, wheedling 50 million francs from the government in recognition of his endeavours. The Belgian government, which had always been assured it would never be sucked into the king's African adventures, found itself agreeing to assume Congo's 110 million francs in debts—much of that sum comprising the bonds Leopold had issued—and contribute nearly half as much again to completing the building projects the king had drawn up in Belgium.

No one will ever know for certain how much profit Leopold himself drew from the Congo Free State. He adopted the methods beloved of many a modern-day African strongman when it came to trying to hide the extent of the wealth he had accumulated. Real estate was bought through aides, money secretly funnelled into a foundation dedicated to building projects, and shadowy holding companies set up in Belgium, France and Germany. Before handing over responsibility for his African colony, Leopold was careful to burn much of the Congo documentation, protecting himself as far as he could from the scrutiny of future scholars. Belgian investigators only succeeded in unravelling the complex network of his investments in 1923.

By then the world's attention had moved elsewhere, satisfied that the human rights abuses in Congo had halted with the Belgian's government takeover. Not so, insisted Marchal, who aimed to challenge this comfortable myth in the book he was currently writing about the system of forced labour imposed by Belgium's Union Minière, the company that continued running the mines in Congo's southern Katanga region well after independence. ‘When I finished writing about Leopold, I thought it would be over for me, because I believed all those professors who said when Belgium took over everything was wonderful. But I've seen that things remained the same, the system was nearly as brutal, it just became more hypocritical. I now have material for another three or four books.'

Marchal's own memories might have suggested as much. The system of forced cultivation in the cotton industry he enforced as a young man lasted until independence in 1960; use of the chicotte, that mainstay of colonial rule, was outlawed only ten months before Belgium pulled out. The officials who had worked under Leopold had a new master but largely remained in situ. Reforms were applied only slowly. It was only after the Second World War, Marchal now believed, that the Belgian Congo became ‘a colony like the others'.

Even then, Belgium hardly distinguished itself. True, it had established an infrastructure whose modernity was marvelled at by European visitors. To take just one example, Congo at independence had more hospital beds than all other black African countries combined. But daily life resembled that adopted in South Africa under apartheid rule.

The capital was divided into the indigenous quarters and the Western zone, where blacks were not allowed after a certain time and would be refused drinks in hotels and restaurants which were reserved for whites only. Referred to as ‘macaques' (monkeys)—a term still contemptuously spat out by heavy-drinking expatriates in Kinshasa—Congolese were set the qualification of ‘évolué' as a target. This was a certificate indicating they were Africans who had ‘evolved' far enough to adopt European attitudes and behaviour. But it was not enough to allow them to accede to positions of responsibility and power.

Certain experiences are calculated to stick in the gullet. Long, long after independence, one of the MPR's leading lights would sometimes recall the time when a Belgian colonial official came round to verify the cleanliness of his parents' toilet before issuing the permit that allowed them to buy wine. In schools, children from such ‘evolved' Congolese families would be taken aside each week to be checked for fleas, an indignity spared their white classmates.

Acting on the principle of ‘pas d'élites, pas d'ennemis',—the theory that an educated African middle class would prove dangerously subversive—the Belgians did virtually nothing to pave the way for independence, expected in 1955 to be decades off. When the
government was forced to hand over in the face of growing protests in 1960, only seventeen Congolese youths had received a university education. The withdrawal was one of the most abrupt in African history.

Why did this small European nation prove such an appalling colonial power? One gets the impression that Leopold was rushing so desperately to catch up with his foreign allies, self-restraint and principles were simply jettisoned along the way. Maybe a country in its infancy did not possess the self-confidence necessary to show magnanimity when imposing nationhood on others. As tribally divided as the nations hacked arbitrarily from Africa's land mass by the colonisers, Belgium barely had a sense of itself, let alone itself in the novel role of master.

Marchal, convinced modern Belgium owed the Congolese some kind of reparation in recognition of its errors, even if it only took the form of a more relaxed visa system, seemed to lay the blame on a failure of imagination. A ‘small country with small horizons', as Leopold himself contemptuously described it, Belgium regarded the Congo as a money-making opportunity, and little else, unlike colonial nations with longer imperial traditions behind them and loftier ideals.

One former ambassador—not a Belgian—put it rather more bluntly: ‘The Belgians were awful in Congo because they had no grandeur themselves. This was the Zaire of Europe, a ratty little country divided amongst itself, and it proved incapable of aspiring to the heights.'

 

Not long ago,
strange notices began appearing over the clothes racks in the slick designer shops and perfumeries lining Boulevard de Waterloo, the broad thoroughfare that carves an ugly swathe through the heart of Brussels.

They were written in Lingala, a language incomprehensible to most Belgians. They warned their readers anyone caught stealing would not only be arrested and charged, but expelled from Belgium and sent back to their country of origin. Their appearance, somewhat
at odds with the fur-coated, poodle-carrying sophistication of this most European of cities, was a tribute to the effectiveness of the Congolese women hit-squads who had taken to systematically shoplifting designer labels in the area.

‘It's time to repay the colonial debt. On va kobeta' (‘We're going on a raid'), the women would say, as, with the rumbustious energy only an African market trader can bring to her task, they set off in search of Versace and Yamamoto jackets, Gianfranco Ferre and Jean-Paul Gaultier slacks, Kenzo accessories and Church shoes—anything decreed cool by the trendsetters of the day.

The designer shops had only themselves to blame. They were, after all, displaying their goods within temptingly easy striking distance of the poor Congolese ghetto that nestles compactly in the covered galleries and cobbled streets of Ixelles, just off the Porte de Namur. Few districts in the Belgian capital can rival ‘Matonge', focal point for the Congolese community, when it comes to juxtaposing inordinate personal vanity with the chronic inability to meet the cost of a heightened sense of style.

Nicknamed after Kinshasa's heaving popular quarters, because, like its namesake back home, this is a district where ‘ça bouge' (things move), Matonge is like a long draught of Congolese essence that has been decanted and boiled down to its purest concentrate. There is something brave, almost foolhardy, about the way this tiny ghetto turns its back on the Belgian present of tramlines, dark streets and narrow houses to recreate a more familiar reality.

In the hairdressers—and every second shop seems to be a hairdresser, its window crammed with wigs and hair extensions—Congolese women have their hair straightened or young blades chat. The greengrocers here sell fat stalks of sugar cane, nobbly sweet potatoes, heaps of the greens used to make pondu, the Congolese alternative to spinach, deadly red chillies and small, pale green aubergines. The front pages of Congolese newspapers,
Le Soft, Le Palmarès, Le Phare
—with all their tunnel-vision, their obsession with the domestic political scene—are stuck against café windows; ‘waxes', the bright Dutch prints used to make women's wraps, lie folded on
display in neat rows and even the gold on sale in the jewellers has that pinkish tinge associated with Africa.

Restaurants serve chicken in peanut sauce, fish wrapped in palm leaves and it is even possible to find such delicacies as caterpillar, crocodile—the oysters and caviar of Kinshasa's culinary scene—or chikwange, the leaf-wrapped blocs of fermenting cassava paste that, to the uninitiated, resemble nothing quite so much as warm carpet glue.

In the old days, a tailor here turned out the awkward abacost jackets made obligatory by Mobutu. The ghetto even has its own radio station. Broadcasting from an abandoned military barracks, Radio Panik feeds its listeners a diet of Koffi Olomide, Zaiko Langa Langa, Papa Wemba, or whoever dominates the Congolese music scene of the day, plus, most crucially for a public hungry for information from home, a weekly résumé of Congolese news.

Sitting squat in the city centre, Matonge is a psychological world away from the leafy suburbs of Rhode St Genesè, Uccle and Waterloo to the south of Brussels, where Mobutu's former aides live in marble-floored mansions, over garages where the Mercedes is parked alongside the BMW. Just as the presence of Mobutu's château in Brussels's chic suburbs acted as a magnet for the Congolese elite, who set up their court around the big man, Matonge, at the other end of the social scale, owes its existence to the Maison Africaine, a hostel where those shaking the red dust of the continent from their feet could stay for next to nothing, often lingering for years on end.

Cafés sprang up serving the food homesick new arrivals missed, as did music shops and the nightclubs, Le Mambo, La Référence, Hollywood City, which only come alive in the early hours. Matonge became an area the 15,000 Congolese living, studying and working in Belgium recognised as a second home, a place where the Congolese genius for finding creative solutions to the problems of existence surfaced.

Family in dire straits at home? There are agencies here where you can go, deposit 100 dollars, sure in the knowledge that a dependant at the other end in Kinshasa will receive another 100-dollar bill,
all without going through a bank. Relatives going hungry or can't afford the price of an electrical appliance? The same procedure is available for a sack of rice or a fridge. And when disaster really strikes you can even, through these tiny offices, arrange a funeral back in Congo.

The entrepreneurship extends well beyond the law's reach. A vibrant trade in second-hand cars, drugs and forged cheques, prostitution and fake visas, plus the designer brand shoplifting, has prompted Belgium's police to establish a unit specialising solely in crime committed by members of the Congolese community, something of a mark of distinction given the far greater numbers of Moroccans and Turks in Brussels.

Despite all the cheering inventiveness, there's a tragic poignancy about Matonge. The alliterative Lingala slang residents use to refer to life abroad is premised on vaunting ambition, but the aspirations come tinged with a sense of inferiority. For those abandoning Kinshasa, despairingly dubbed ‘Kosovo', Belgium is ‘lola', or ‘paradise'. Paris, another favourite destination, is known as ‘Panama'. Europe is ‘mikili', ‘the promised land', inhabited, appropriately enough, by ‘mwana Maria', ‘the children of the Virgin Mary'—whites.

This is a community determined to outstay its welcome, made up of forty-year-old students with a smattering of children and fistfuls of degrees; of young men playing up their brushes with the law in Kinshasa in the hope of winning the sobriquet of ‘political asylum-seeker'; of youths plotting marriages of convenience with Belgian mates: all and any methods are acceptable in the quest for the ultimate prize—a permit allowing an indefinite stay in Europe.

When it is won, such documentation rarely goes to waste. ‘Whites say that all blacks look alike,' explained Leon, a philosophy graduate studying accountancy, ‘so someone with papers will lend them to a friend who wants to cross into France or Switzerland, who will then post them back to Brussels.' Without the paperwork, work outside the informal sector is impossible. So Brussels's restaurant kitchens, its building sites, its minicab firms, are staffed by Africa's most well-qualified students.

The sense that only the West offers hope of improvement is enough to make even the uninspiring seem acceptable. ‘I have friends who are vegetating here. They do nothing, they stagnate, but they don't dare go back,' said Leon. ‘In the eyes of their families, returning from Europe means they have failed. And the worst thing you can have happen to you, the most humiliating, is to be expelled.'

Other African communities forced into exile organise guerrilla campaigns from abroad, hatch plots, or draw up political programmes for the distant day when they hope to take power. For decades, Eritrean émigrés ran an efficient informal tithing system which funded the rebel movement that eventually pushed Ethiopian occupiers out of their territory. Despite boasting one of the continent's most formidable dictators as an antagonist to rally against, the Congolese have nothing to match this. If a rebel campaign is being fought in the east of their country, amongst the young men of Matonge there is no talk of donning camouflage and signing up. The biggest opposition party had closed its offices ‘for security reasons', I was told, but administrative incompetence was more likely to be the cause. The collective sense is missing.