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The fall of the house of Mobutu
Peter Rosenblum
May 05, 1997

http://www.salon.com/may97/zaire970505.html

They endured 31 years of a stupid, vicious dictatorship while cooking up the best music and tastiest caterpillars on the continent. Now, the people of Zaire are about to get their own names back.

There is one sure thing about the war that is currently raging in the middle of Africa: We are all going to need new world maps pretty soon, because there isn't going to be a country called Zaire for long. Twenty-five years ago, a dictator named Mobutu Sese Seko made up the name, made up his own name and made everyone make up new names. Now people want their old names back.

It makes you wonder whether map makers are involved in fomenting revolution. It took 30 years for the people of Zaire to rise up. They lived through the most venal dictatorship. They invented a word to describe Mobutu's government: "kleptocracy," a government of thieves. You could feel sorry for the Zairians, blame them or blame the others who supported the dictatorship. But you also had to admire their skill in coping, their legendary débrouillardaise -- literally, their ability to make it through the fog. Not only did they survive 31 years of dictatorship, they produced the continent's finest music, the tastiest caterpillars and a crop of youth absurdly committed to building a new, rational society.

This is what I thought about the day journalists started calling to ask me about President Mobutu and the country still known as Zaire. After years of traveling back and forth to the country, I have become an "expert" on human rights and politics in Zaire, one of the cursed talking heads on TV who deprives you of local sports results in order to give you news of faraway disaster. "Try the caterpillars," I wanted to tell the journalists, "they are delicious." Not that they are the best example of Zairian genius, but to get to the caterpillars you have to get to the Zairians first. The press had other things in mind. NBC wanted to know about Mobutu's sex habits, an interesting subject I didn't know enough about. But I responded earnestly to their questions: I kept telling the tale of horrors that is entirely true. The news even ran a segment where I used the word "seduce" (although in reference to politicians, not women). But none of the joy of Zaire was there.

"Eat the caterpillars," he kept saying, "they're full of protein." As if I, among all the stick-thin people in the room, was in particular need of sustenance. I was at the home of a dissident physician in Zaire's capital, Kinshasa. Servicing the clandestine political opposition was not particularly lucrative. His house, like almost all the others I visited, was just a shell of concrete with patches of paint left over from colonial days. The food on the table was certainly more than anyone in the family had seen in a month. And no one else touched it. They were waiting for me. I tasted the caterpillars. They were greasy, crunchy and bitter.

That was in 1989, when I first went to Zaire to document human rights abuses. My job was to investigate rumors of political detention, torture and disappearances. The group I worked with hoped that if my reports were vivid -- and grisly -- enough, we could pressure the Zairian government and persuade its allies to stop sending Mobutu money.

I was well-read, but naive, with a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate sense of outrage about the United States' role in the developing world. Though I'd never been to Africa before, I thought I knew what to expect. The misery, violence and repression came as no surprise, but I wasn't prepared for the hidden gems, the decency and intelligence cloaked in misery. There was a group of men around the table, some in worn suits, others in shirtsleeves. All of them were what we would call shabby. Who would know that here was the country's first great mathematician and former director of the national airlines. And there was the mysterious "Muntuntu" ("grasshopper"), whose regular communications kept a dedicated network up to date on the horrors in the country.

Zaire, a country larger than the United States east of the Mississippi, is a land of fabled mineral wealth. Belgium thrived off its riches for decades and parted with it only under duress. The Belgians left in 1960 and were replaced by the United States. The CIA made Zaire its home, helped dispose of populist leader Patrice Lubumba and replaced him with Mobutu -- who in those days was known as Joseph Desiré. A lot of world-class spies and traffickers made their way to Zaire. One was Bill Close, actress Glenn Close's father, who became Mobutu's personal physician and gatekeeper. It wasn't clear whether he reported to the CIA or the CIA reported to him.

President Mobutu remained one of America's best friends in Africa, though he quickly proved himself a tyrant -- a laughable one in some ways, strutting about in his leopard-skin hat, lavishly dispensing gifts from the central bank. Some of his laws were right out of a Woody Allen film: No ties. No first names. No "Mr." or "Mrs." Everybody would henceforth be known as "citizen." That was when the Congo became Zaire and the president became Citizen Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, which officially means "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest." (Strangely, however, the word "kuku" means "chicken," which no one can explain.) The laws themselves were degrading -- people were forced to wear Mobutu's face on their bodies every Monday or they'd lose their jobs -- and covered an even more pernicious system of repression.

By 1989, congressional Democrats were using human rights as a battle cry to stop aid to Zaire. Mobutu hired a new lobbyist, a flamboyant and mustachioed specialist in pariah nations named Ed Van Kloberg III*. "Unscrupulous" is the word that most people use to describe him. True, but he had more fun than his urbane-seeming peers. (Once, when we got to know each other, he gave me a tour of all the things he'd picked off the shelves of his various clients -- gold cups, crystal glasses ...) With his assistance, Mobutu decided to take on the human rights problems in the simplest possible way: He presented himself before the U.S. Congress and lied. "We have nothing to hide," he said. "You can come look for yourself."

And so we did.

As I think back to that time, I am struck by how naive we were, my colleague, Makau Mutua -- a deeply radical Kenyan who had escaped repression in his own country -- and I. We spent our days and nights smoking, drinking, screaming at each other about the impact of Western imperialism. (He insisted having an au pair was like keeping a slave. I said his obsession with professional sports was a capitalist cop-out.) We would spend the morning wandering into homes that had never seen a white man or a black man with a tie, and play up to ministers and television cameras in the afternoon. (This was an official visit, after all.) In the evening, we would return to white man's land -- the fashionable restaurants in the center of town where suddenly Makau was an oddity: a black man on equal terms. The black service staff didn't know how to treat him. And then, sometime in the middle of the night, there was always a knock on the door from someone who had more information, more abuses to report.

Many stories from Zaire at that time begin and end with a description of arriving in the country. There is nothing simple like passport control, luggage belts or a baggage claim at the airport. Instead, we arrived to face a gauntlet of beggars, thieves and security men reaching into our pockets and grabbing our bags the moment we set foot on the tarmac. Thieves even fought with each over who would get the first bite. We had to give up our passports -- and "buy" them back. That much was unavoidable. But the rest was all a matter of strategic planning and negotiation: If we showed weakness, we'd be eaten alive.

Later, I learned how to make my way through the pack. I would choose one person and throw my fate into his hands, forcing him to swear lifelong loyalty. It often worked. Then, one time, just as I was congratulating myself on conserving most of the $6,000 in cash that I was carrying -- travelers checks and credit cards were worthless -- I was nabbed by a man in a suit, a very bad sign. He took me to a shack at the end of the parking lot, separating me from my protector. It cost $150. But the worst came afterwards, when, looking defeated, I attracted a whole new set of vultures. At that point my protector returned and convinced everyone that I had been sufficiently "devoured," a Zairian term of art.

Zairians outside the country had told us that we would fail in our mission. Nobody would speak to us, they said. And it was mostly true. The weight of repression was palpable in the city of Kinshasa. Even the most inoffensive things were said only in hushed voices. One day a cab driver complimented a minister. We had been cultivating this particular old man for days, paying him by the hour, feeding him and plying him with beer. I was so pleased to get an opinion out of him. Then, suddenly, in a panic, he said, "Don't tell anyone a cab driver" -- we didn't even know his name -- "told you that, we could get in trouble." Even a compliment to the wrong person could be perceived as an insult to the only one who really mattered.

But almost by chance, we stumbled upon the mother lode of resistance. We had met with a million useless Zairian refugees abroad, people who claimed to command armed troops and opposition parties around the country. Then we heard about a man who had just been flown in from Kinshasa. At a hospital outside Brussels, we met him as he recovered from surgery. He had a big hole under his ribs from where they had just removed large portions of his stomach and intestines because of injuries from soldiers kicking him at a demonstration. He gave us his own story and an address in Kinshasa.

When we got to the city, we jumped in a cab and headed down dirt roads that had not seen cars for a long time. We found the address and met a woman who greeted us carefully. We wrote the name of our hotel and left. By the next day, we were at the center of an elaborate web of clandestine political meetings around the city of Kinshasa.

It was a heady time. We were suddenly privy to a secret world of people who had lost everything in their efforts to redeem the state and claim their rights. Our work centered around three activists, the "grasshopper," the "professor" and especially the "old soldier" -- a nearly fleshless man who, at predetermined moments, appeared from nowhere and always refused to accept either food or travel money. His writing was nearly incomprehensible, but he spoke with a stentorian French from another century.

Then one day our little window closed. The old soldier missed a rendezvous. It could have been a mistake, but as life imitates art, we knew something terrible had happened. No one came to inform us right away. But we started receiving dire reports in obscure notes. Others started to disappear. We were terrified. All the more so because we had a pretty good idea, by then, of what was happening to those who disappeared. We knew about beatings with "cordelettes" -- paratrooper's ropes with four-inch metal clasps -- and about people kept in dark rooms without food. It usually took at least a week before a missing friend turned up, sometimes dead, sometimes alive, in prison.

We returned to the States with no news of our friends and began furiously fighting the Van Kloberg propaganda machine. Every step was countered. In response to our protests, the Zairians accused us of soliciting bribes, meeting with anarchists and playing James Bond. Mobutu literally kidnapped one of our Zairian contacts, the professor, and brought him to the United States. We were denounced. Then, at the last minute, a congressman close to Mobutu called to say the whole thing was a mistake.

Our friends were released and we rushed back to Zaire. We met with them -- long enough to meet the old soldier's baby, who had been baptized Peter Makau while the father was still in prison. But before we had a chance to celebrate, the Zairian authorities decided they had had enough of us. In broad daylight, in front of the major business hotel, six well-fed men knocked us to the ground and fought for our briefcases. Bruised and slightly torn, we were whisked off to the office of the security police and then, just as quickly, whisked back to the hotel without any explanation. Inquiries were made by the U.S. Embassy, and we were instructed to leave the country as quickly as possible. The Zairian government claimed the attack was our own fault. We weren't supposed to be in the country, anyhow.

Ironically, getting beaten up and thrown out of the country turned out to be the best thing we ever did. The New York Times picked up the story and, Van Kloberg told me years later, it brought his successful campaign for Mobutu to an end.

One night, several years ago, I dreamed of Goma. Lush green and rolling hills, interrupted by a volcano so perfect it seemed a real-life imitation of an artist's rendering. Later the refugees would arrive and the volcano would glow in the night as if to signal the gods' wrath and impending doom. But at the time of my dream it was a forgotten city, cut off from everywhere, even the rest of Zaire.

I dreamed of a volleyball game. Barbara Bush was there. (In fact, she had just been quoted in the paper, chiding President Mobutu for not eating his vegetables at a state dinner. "I'm positively glued to him," she said.) At one moment the ball escaped and I ran after it. Suddenly, in that way that narratives shift in a dream, I was possessed by the need to make a phone call. I stepped into a phone booth and called a woman who now publishes interactive art in a Web magazine. She wasn't home. I woke up.

All I could think of, all morning, was my dream. Something was wrong. Eventually, I realized what it was. The telephone. There are no phone booths in Goma. There are no phone booths anywhere in Zaire. In fact, until recently, there were hardly any phones, and no access to them. It's no surprise that everyone in Zaire relies on rumor and no one outside the country has any idea what is going on.

When the end of the regime comes -- and with rebel leader Laurent Kabila meeting with Mobutu as his troops close in on Kinshasa, it seems to be imminent -- someone should build a little shrine to the cellular phone. What first looked like a toy for the rich became the means of breaking the spell of government control over people and information. To reach Zaire, we had spent hours -- sometimes all night -- with telephones lined up in a room, calling mysterious numbers with a dozen digits, pleading with operators around the world to find a way through. Sometimes, magically, a phone would ring and a minister would pick up. In moments the phone would die again.

Then, the cellular telephone arrived. At first, it only benefited the rich. Having a phone directory gave us a way to reach the most powerful in the country. Slowly, sporadically, others gained access. At the same time, the Cold War was ending and pressure was building for reform. Suddenly, there were people openly talking about human rights and democracy. Some of our old friends went into the open political opposition; others, especially younger Zairians, helped to create human rights groups. We knew them all and tried in various ways to nurture them.

But the new human rights activists were like my brother's eighth-grade band. They gave themselves exotic and aspirational names, picked up instruments and began to move around the room, picking, strumming and drumming nearly at random. I got phone calls in the middle of the night, costing someone dozens of dollars a minute. "Hi, it's me." "Yes," I said, "What news?" "Nothing." "Nothing?" "Well, some people were arrested." "Who?" "It's not clear." I went back to bed touched by confusion from the other end of the world.

And then, suddenly, they mastered their instruments.

My favorite thing about Zaire -- aside from discovering the truly tasty caterpillars, the palm tree "mpose," as they call them -- was overcoming the great taboo: the tribe. There are many tribes in Zaire. Also in New York.

One of the many strange things about Zaire are the Jews. There had once been hundreds of Jews, living in Zaire, mostly Sephardic Jews from the island of Rhodes. The few who are still there today speak Ladino, a Spanish "Yiddish" carried away from Spain when the Jews were expelled in 1492.

One day my car broke down in Lubumbashi. I stepped out with my camera, excused myself and ran down the block to the old boarded-up synagogue near the center of town. When I returned to the car, the sullen Zairian colleague I traveled with wore a wide grin of discovery. A little embarrassed -- because of the way he asked the question -- I confirmed I'm Jewish. He was transformed. It was as if he had figured me out. But it was even more than that. Suddenly, I too was tribal and he could relax. He immediately began spouting stories about himself and his people.

There are two approaches to tribes: You can either blame them for everything or make believe they aren't there. Political correctness dictates the latter. A hundred thousand Hutus killed up to a million Tutsis, but today in Rwanda the most indiscreet thing you can do is ask someone his "tribe."

Europeans were so fixed on the idea of tribes they invented them left and right. Agreeable Africans, comfortable with a fluid identity, often complied and eventually created the imagined grouping. A few years ago, in the same great tradition, the New York Times invented tribes to describe the violence that was shaking the Zairian region of Shaba. Actually, the violence there was regional, set members of the same tribe against each other and had nothing at all to do with tribes.

In Zaire, one's tribe is just one piece of a rich identity that may lead to love or hatred. One night at a party, I suddenly realized that I was surrounded by macho Lubas -- one of the most impressive ethnic groups in the country. I was strategically placed next to the beautiful daughter of a high dignitary of the tribe, and was struggling to be very politically correct when suddenly she whispered to me, "I would never marry a Luba; they treat women like dirt."

The sad thing about Mobutu's regime is that it has whittled away at the links that bound people outside the tribe: Authoritarian states undermine the power of rationality itself. People turn first to the people of their region, then their tribe, then their village and are eventually left with only the members of their family to rely on. And quite consciously throughout the regime, the tribe and the region were instrumentalized and set against each other. It is all part of the divide-and-rule strategies first used by the colonizers. Even now, invisible to most observers, Mobutu is engaged in the most delicate act of regional and tribal baiting, seeking to create division between the rebels and the non-violent opposition. You almost have to applaud him for his deathbed skill.

I kept returning to Zaire. Foolhardy, perhaps, but I suspect not. Others were thrown out, now and then, but I was left alone. Maybe they thought I was protected; maybe I was. My work had shifted away from the torture reports, toward efforts to bring Zairian opposition members help -- in the form of money and expertise -- from outside the country. We didn't bring about the current unrest, but we helped create groups of people who can and will take the reins when democracy comes to Zaire.

I ate grasshoppers with Muntuntu on one of the several occasions he was released from prison. I saw a new generation of normal people emerge from a country that was entirely abnormal. Military pillaging wiped out most of the remaining modern economy. But somehow, people kept going, defying all predictions of violence and starvation.

A number of years ago, a Zairian sociologist said that if you put all the data that existed about Zaire into a computer, it would declare the country not to exist. Officially, nothing works. No one is paid to do his job. No building has ever been repaired and no schoolhouse built. And yet, mysteriously, life goes on: The teachers teach, the judges judge, the students study, the electricity functions. What makes it work is "corruption," as we would call it with our limited vocabularies. Once a Zairian friend wanted to give me a quick demonstration of how natural and unquestioned it had become. We were in his car near a gridlocked intersection. He summoned the policeman and, without a word, handed him a wad of bills. The policeman saluted and returned to his post, without a word in return. He then stopped traffic for us to proceed through the intersection.

Sometimes, I think my friends are like frogs in a bucket of water. A frog jumps out of a hot bucket of water. But if you heat the water slowly, it boils to death. At one moment, the good guys seemed to be winning the battle. We even went to have lunch in the officers' mess, the mouth of the beast, where we ate from plates emblazoned with the seal of the president. Then, suddenly another crackdown came. The soldiers turned on the people. Nuns were raped; church property was targeted. The frog was definitely boiling.

It was so hard to keep track of the major abuse that it was pointless to mention the minor. A friend was late to a meeting, robbed and beaten by police. An inconvenience. My taxi was commandeered by thugs claiming to be security. I jumped at an intersection and ran. A bother. And then, as one, the people decided to breathe. The city came alive. The bars were hopping. There was nothing to do but dance all night.

I was back in Zaire over Christmas, seeing old friends and learning about the new threat -- or new salvation -- coming from the east. Rebels, shrouded in their own mystery, are sweeping away the last remnants of Mobutu's state. My friends were ambivalent, happy to see the departures but suspicious of what new military might would mean. The daily reports of slaughter confirm their worst fears about a new dictator in the making.

As I sat in a bar watching the money-changers adjust the exchange rate every half hour to account for hyperinflation, I admired again the Zairian capacity for resistance, the ability to survive, to make it through the fog. There is a new age coming in Zaire, together with a new name. Mobutu will be out of power by the end of the month. A new leader will arrive. Zaire may again become the land of international intrigue as the West recalls the mineral wealth left untapped.

When I was back there, I learned a new recipe for caterpillars. It's particularly disgusting to describe, but if properly prepared, it might transform an entire nation.

*Addendum (Ten years on): Van Kloberg eventually died by leaping to his death from a 'castle in Rome'. I think he had a terminal illness and wanted something more dramatic for his end. The age of international intrigue has definitely returned to the Congo.

Peter Rosenblum is a white, Jewish boy who runs the Human Rights program at Harvarad Law School.

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