The Writer and the World (37 page)

The bush grows fast over what were once great events or great disturbances. Bush has buried the towns the Arabs planned, the orchards they planted, as recently, during the post-independence troubles, bush buried
the fashionable eastern suburbs of Stanleyville, near the Tshopo falls. The Belgian villas were abandoned; the Africans came first to squat and then to pillage, picking the villas clean of metal, wire, timber, bathtubs and lavatory bowls (both useful for soaking manioc in), leaving only ground-floor shells of brick and masonry. In 1975 some of the ruins still stand, and they look very old, like a tropical, overgrown Pompeii, cleared of its artifacts, with only the ruins of the Château de Venise night-club giving a clue to the cultural life of the vanished settlement.

And it is surprising how, already, so little of Belgium remains in the minds of people. A man of forty—he had spent some years in the United States—told me that his father, who was born in 1900, remembered the Belgian rubber levy and the cutting off of hands. A woman said that her grandfather had brought white priests to the village to protect the villagers against harsh officials. But, ironically, the people who told these stories both might have been described as
évolués.
Most people under thirty, breaking out of the bush into teaching jobs and administrative jobs in Kinshasa, said they had heard nothing about the Belgians from their parents or grandparents.

One man, a university teacher, said, “The Belgians gave us a state. Before the Belgians came we had no state.” Another man said he had heard from his grandfather only about the origins of the Bantu people: they wandered south from Lake Chad, crossed the river into an “empty” country, inhabited only by pygmies, “a primitive people,” whom they drove away into the deep forest. For most the past is a blank; and history begins with their own memories. Most record a village childhood, a school, and then—the shock of independence. To a man from Bandundu, the son of a “farmer,” and the first of his village to be educated, the new world came suddenly in 1960 with the arrival in his village of soldiers of the disintegrating Congolese army. “I saw soldiers for the first time then, and I was very frightened. They had no officers. They treated the women badly and killed some men. The soldiers were looking for white people.”

In the colonial days, a headmaster told me, the school histories of the Congo began with the late-fifteenth-century Portuguese navigators, and then jumped to the nineteenth century, to the missionaries and the Arabs and the Belgians. African history, as it is now written, restores Africans to Africa, but it is no less opaque: a roll call of tribes, a mention of great kingdoms. So it is in
Introduction à l’Histoire de l’Afrique Noire
, published
in Zaire last year. So it is in the official
Profils du Zaire
, which—ignoring Portuguese, missionaries and Arabs—jumps from the brief mention of mostly undated African kingdoms to the establishment of the Congo Free State. The tone is cool and legalistic. King Leopold II’s absolute powers are spoken of in just the same way as the powers of older African kings. Passion enters the story only with the events of independence.

The past has vanished. Facts in a book cannot by themselves give people a sense of history. Where so little has changed, where bush and river are so overwhelming, another past is accessible, better answering African bewilderment and African religious beliefs: the past as
le bon vieux temps de nos ancêtres.

I
N THE PRESIDENTIAL
park at Mont Ngaliema, formerly Mount Stanley, where the guards wear decorative uniforms, and the gates are decorated with bronze plaques—the bad art of modern Africa: art that no longer serves a religious or magical purpose, attempts an alien repre-sentationalism and becomes mannered and meaningless, suggesting a double mimicry: African art imitating itself, imitating African-inspired Western art—on Mont Ngaliema there are some colonial graves of the 1890s.

They have been gathered together in neat terraces and are screened by cypress and flamboyant. There, above the rapids—the brown river breaking white on the rocks but oddly static in appearance, the white crests never moving: an eternal level sound of water—the pioneers grandly lie. The simple professions recur:
commis, agent commercial, chaudronnier
[boilermaker],
capitaine de steamboat, prêtre, s/officier de la Force Publique.
Only Madame Bernard is
sans profession.
Not all were Belgians; some were Norwegians; one missionary was English.

In one kind of imperialist writing these people are heroic. Joseph Conrad, in his passage through the Congo in 1890, just before those burials began on Mont Ngaliema, saw otherwise. He saw people who were too simple for an outpost of progress, people who were part of the crowd at home, and dependent on that crowd, their strength in Africa, like the strength of the Romans in Britain, “an accident arising from the weakness of others,” their “conquest of the earth” unredeemed by an idea, “not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea.”

“In a hundred years,” Conrad makes one of these simple people say in “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), “there will perhaps be a town here. Quays, and warehouses, and barracks, and—and—billiard-rooms. Civilization, my boy, and virtue—and all.” That civilization, so accurately defined, came; and then, like the villas at Stanleyville and the Château de Venise night-club, vanished. “Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake”: this is from the narrator of
Heart of Darkness
(1902). “No; you want a deliberate belief.”

The people who come now—after the general flight—are like the people who came then. They offer goods, deals, technical skills, the same perishable civilization; they bring nothing else. They are not pioneers; they know they cannot stay. They fill the night-clubs (now with African names); they keep the prostitutes (now in African dress; foreign dress is outlawed for African women) busy around the Memling Hotel. So, encircled by Africa, now dangerous again, with threats of expulsion and confiscation, outpost civilization continues: at dinnertime in the Café de la Paix the two old men parade the young prostitutes they have picked up, girls of fourteen or fifteen. Old men: their last chance to feed on such young blood: Kinshasa may close down tomorrow.

“Everyone is here only for the money.” The cynicism has never been secret; it is now reinforced by anxiety. With this cynicism, in independent Zaire, the African can appear to be in complicity. He, too, wants “acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags”: the Mercedes, the fatter prostitutes, the sharp suit with matching handkerchief and cravat, the gold-rimmed glasses, the gold pen-and-pencil set, the big gold wristwatch on one hand and the gold bracelet on the other, the big belly that in a land of puny men speaks of wealth. But with this complicity and imitation there is something else: a resentment of the people imitated, the people now known as
nostalgiques.

Simon’s company, a big one, has been nationalized, and Simon is now the manager. (Expatriates continue to do the work, but this is only practical, and Simon doesn’t mind.) Why then does Simon, who has a background of bush, who is so young and successful, remember his former manager as a
nostalgique?
Well, one day the manager was looking through the pay sheets and he said, “Simon isn’t paying enough tax.”

People like Simon (he has an official African name) are not easy to know—even Belgians who speak African languages say that. Simon only answers questions; he is incapable of generating anything like a conversation;
because of his dignity, his new sense of the self, the world has closed up for him again; and he appears to be hiding. But his resentment of the former manager must have a deeper cause than the one he has given. And gradually it becomes apparent, from other replies he gives, from his belief in “authenticity,” from his dislike of foreign attitudes to African art (to him a living thing: he considers the Kinshasa museum an absurdity), from the secretive African arrangements of his domestic life (to which he returns in his motorcar), it gradually becomes apparent that Simon is adrift and nervous in this unreal world of imitation.

It is with people like Simon, educated, moneymaking, that the visitor feels himself in the presence of vulnerability, dumbness, danger. Because their resentments, which appear to contradict their ambitions, and which they can never satisfactorily explain, can at any time be converted into a wish to wipe out and undo, an African nihilism, the rage of primitive men coming to themselves and finding that they have been fooled and affronted.

A rebellion like this occurred after independence. It was led by Pierre Mulele, a former minister of education, who, after a long march through the country, camped at Stanleyville and established a reign of terror. Everyone who could read and write had been taken out to the little park and shot; everyone who wore a tie had been shot. These were the stories about Mulele that were circulating in neighbouring Uganda in 1966, nearly two years after the rebellion had been put down (Uganda itself about to crumble, its nihilistic leader already apparent: Amin, the commander of the petty army that had destroyed the Kabaka’s power). Nine thousand people are said to have died in Mulele’s rebellion. What did Mulele want? What was the purpose of the killings? The forty-year-old African who had spent some time in the United States laughed and said, “Nobody knows. He was against
everything.
He wanted to start again from the beginning.” There is only one, noncommittal line in
Profils du Zaire
about the Mulelist rebellion. But (unlike Lumumba) he gets a photograph, and it is a big one. It shows a smiling, gap-toothed African—in jacket and tie.

To Joseph Conrad, Stanleyville—in 1890 the Stanley Falls station—was the heart of darkness. It was there, in Conrad’s story, that Kurtz reigned, the ivory agent degraded from idealism to savagery, taken back to the earliest ages of man, by wilderness, solitude and power, his house surrounded by impaled human heads. Seventy years later, at this bend in
the river, something like Conrad’s fantasy came to pass. But the man with “the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear” was black, and not white; and he had been maddened not by contact with wilderness and primitivism, but with the civilization established by those pioneers who now lie on Mont Ngaliema, above the Kinshasa rapids.

M
OBUTU
embodies these African contradictions and, by the grandeur of his kingship, appears to ennoble them. He is, for all his stylishness, the great African nihilist, though his way is not the way of blood. He is the man “young but palpitating with wisdom and dynamism”—this is from a University of Zaire publication—who, during the dark days of secessions and rebellions, “thought through to the heart of the problem” and arrived at his especial illumination: the need for “authenticity,” “I no longer have a borrowed conscience. I no longer have a borrowed soul. I no longer speak a borrowed language.” He will bring back ancestral ways and reverences; he will re-create that pure, logical world.

“Our religion is based on a belief in God the creator and the worship of our ancestors.” This is what a minister told teachers the other day. “Our dead parents are living; it is they who protect us and intercede for us.” No need now for the Christian saints, or Christianity. Christ was the prophet of the Jews and he is dead. Mobutu is the prophet of the Africans. “This prophet rouses us from our torpor, and has delivered us from our mental alienation. He teaches us to love one another.” In public places the crucifix should be replaced by the image of the messiah, just as in China the portrait of Mao is honoured everywhere. And Mobutu’s glorious mother, Mama Yemo, should also be honoured, as the Holy Virgin was honoured.

So Mobutism becomes the African way out. The dances and songs of Africa, so many of them religious in origin, are now officially known as
séances d’animation
and are made to serve the new cult; the dancers wear cloths stamped with Mobutu’s image. Old rituals, absorbed into the new, their setting now not the village but the television studio, the palace, the conference hall, appear to have been given fresh dignity. Africa awakes! And, in all things, Mobutu offers himself as the African substitute. At the end of January Mobutu told the Afro-American conference at Kinshasa
(sponsored by the Ford and Carnegie foundations): “Karl Marx is a great thinker whom I respect.” But Marx wasn’t always right; he was wrong, for instance, about the beneficial effects of colonialism. “The teachings of Karl Marx were addressed to his society. The teachings of Mobutu are addressed to the people of Zaire.”

In Africa such comparisons, when they are made, have to be unabashed: African needs are great. And Mobutism is so wrapped up in the glory of Mobutu’s kingship—the new palaces (the maharaja-style palace at Kisangani confiscated from Mr. Nasser, an old Indian settler), the presidential park at Mont Ngaliema (where Africans walk with foreigners on Sundays and pretend to be amused by the monkeys), the presidential domain at Nsele (open to faithful members of the party: and passengers on the steamer and the barges rush to look), the state visits abroad, intensively photographed, the miracle of the peace Mobutu has brought to the country, the near-absence of policemen in the towns—so glorious are the manifestations of Mobutu’s kingship, so good are the words of the king, who proclaims himself a friend of the poor and, as a cook’s son, one of the
petit peuple
, that all the contradictions of Africa appear to have been resolved and to have been turned into a kind of power.

But the contradictions remain, and are now sometimes heightened. The newspapers carry articles about science and medicine. But a doctor, who now feels he can say that he cures “when God and the ancestors wish,” tells a newspaper that sterility is either hereditary or caused by a curse; and another newspaper gives publicity to a healer, a man made confident by the revolution, who has an infallible cure for piles, an “exclusive” secret given him by the ancestors. Agriculture must be modernized, the people must be fed better; but, in the name of authenticity, a doctor warns that babies should on no account be fed on imported foods; traditional foods, like caterpillars and green leaves, are best. The industrialized West is decadent and collapsing; Zaire must rid herself of the plagues of the consumer society, the egoism and individualism exported by industrial civilization. But in the year 2000, according to a university writer in
Elima
, Z
aire
might herself be booming, with great cities, a population of “probably” 71,933,851, and a prodigious manufacturing capacity. Western Europe will be in its “post-industrial” decadence; Russia, Eastern Europe and the Indian subcontinent will form one bloc;
Arab oil will be exhausted; and Zaire (and Africa) should have her day, attracting investment from developed countries (obviously those not in decadence), importing factories whole.