In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo - Michela Wrong

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But they shared their predecessors’ habit of never paying. The manager’s face grew taut once more. He was not amused when one of the rebels caused a bit of a ruckus at breakfast one day, carelessly dropping a grenade which rolled under the selection of almond croissants and pains au chocolat.

      In theory, the AFDL was now in charge of one of Africa’s richest states, a country blessed with diamonds and gold, copper and uranium, oil and timber. In practice, it had inherited a country reverting to the Iron Age society first encountered by the Portuguese explorers of the fifteenth century. The infrastructure was shattered, the army hopelessly divided. The state boasted more than half a million civil servants, who did little but wanted compensation for months of salary arrears. Foreign debts had accrued to the tune of $14 billion; the country had disastrous relations with all international institutions of importance and, worst of all, a population cynically inured to breaking the law.

      With a simplistic rigour that could only be explained by the decades its cadres had spent outside the country, the AFDL set about the task of moral spring-cleaning. There were to be no Liberia-style executions. Instead, the new government declared the independence of the central bank, the institution Mobutu had treated as his personal cash reserve, and sacked the heads of the state enterprises Mobutu had milked for revenue. They went to join the former ministers and presidential business associates awaiting trial in Kinshasa’s infamous Makala jail, specially repainted for its VIP intake.

      Top of the investigators’ list, of course, was Mobutu himself. The rebels had started legal proceedings well before reaching Kinshasa, firing off requests for the president’s assets to be frozen in a dozen European and African countries while still on the move. Claiming he had evidence that Mobutu had appropriated a staggering $14 billion, with $8 billion of that stored in Switzerland alone, incoming Justice Minister Celestin Lwangi pledged to reverse the flight of capital.

      But as the vestiges of Mobutu’s reign were painted over and the Hotel Intercontinental, symbol of his rule, appropriated, the departed dinosaur did manage to exact his petty revenge. One of the last actions performed by the DSP families before heading out was to rid themselves of their Mobutu mementoes, stuffing MPR T-shirts and cloth printed with the president’s face down the hotel lavatories. For the first week of the new regime, the AFDL leaders had to go outside to relieve themselves. Mobutu was literally clogging up the system.

       CHAPTER TWO

       Plaything for a king

      ‘In every cordial-faced aborigine whom I meet I see a promise of assistance to me in the redemption of himself from the state of unproductiveness in which he at present lives. I look upon him with much of the same regard that an agriculturist views his strong-limbed child; he is a future recruit to the ranks of soldier-labourers. The Congo basin, could I have but enough of his class, would become a vast productive garden.’

      The Congo and the founding of its free state —HENRY MORTON STANLEY

      Kinshasa possesses its own version of Ozymandias. In a field bordering the river, grounds owned by the Ministry of Planning, a grey metal giant lies ignored, his face buried in the grass. The raised arm that once beckoned flagging followers on to conquer new horizons now cradles the ground in a meaningless embrace. Too big to fit inside the warehouses holding smaller statues, this is the figure of Stanley that once towered over Mount Ngaliema, a hill overlooking Kinshasa. Congo’s founder was unceremoniously dumped here in the 1970s, when Mobutu told the crowds it was time the country finally shrugged off the colonial mantle.

      The anger that prompted the toppling of these grandiose monuments by Zaireans who decided they preferred a capital dotted with empty plinths to one tainted by Belgium offers a hint that Mobutu should not be regarded as sui generis, a monster out of time and place. Yet you will find no trace or explanation of that popular fury back in Brussels, in the museum specially constructed to commemorate a truly extraordinary colonial episode.

      Built at the turn of the century on the orders of King Leopold II, the only European monarch to ever personally own an African colony, the Royal Museum for Central Africa boasts one of the largest collections of Congolese artifacts in the world. But the quantity of items stored inside this elegant building in Tervuren – the Belgian equivalent of Versailles – has done nothing to prevent a strikingly simplistic vision of history from emerging.

      On the day I visited, the woman handing out tickets inside the marble-lined entrance hall seemed surprised I wanted to see the permanent collection, rather than a special exhibition of West African masks on temporary display. Strolling under the gilded cupolas and tip-tapping my way through the halls designed by French architect Charles Girault, Leopold’s favourite, I began to see why even its staff might regard the museum as an anachronism and feel a sense of relief that a large number of the exhibits were currently hidden from view, undergoing refurbishment.

      Political correctness, the modern sense that colonialism is something to be regretted rather than gloried in, had made the barest of inroads here. King Leopold’s bust, with its unmistakable spade-shaped beard and beak nose, stared with proprietary ferocity from frozen courtyard and chilly hall. Under his watchful eye, history was still being sieved through the mental filter of the nineteenth-century capitalist and driven missionary – colonialism as economic opportunity and soul-saving expedition, all wrapped up into one convenient package.

      One section, dedicated to Congo’s flora and fauna, displayed scraps, sheets and lumps of natural rubber. But there was no mention of the methods used to extract the raw material or ensure a steady supply back to Europe. Wall paintings showed Congo’s jungle being stripped to make room for copper mines, but the struggle over mineral assets between Belgium and the post-independence government did not feature. Was it a symbolic accident or deliberate, I wondered, that the lights in the rooms displaying the battered suitcase and worn khaki bag used by Stanley were barely working, discouraging any lingering over Congo’s controversial pioneer?

      Sly omission blurred effortlessly into blatant wishful thinking. In the Memorial Hall, where the paint was peeling off the ceiling, labels promised to reveal ‘the King’s intentions towards the Congo’. But the anti-slavery medals struck at Leopold’s behest made the same point as the rusting slave chains in the glass cases and the melodramatic tableaux vivants, all buxom negro wenches and noble savages wincing under the whip of the sneering Arab overseer. Leopold, it seemed, colonised the Congo not for commercial reasons or vainglorious imperialist ambition, but to snuff out the barbaric slave trade that for centuries had robbed central Africa of its strongest and its best.

      I had expected rose-coloured spectacles, but this complacent rewriting of Belgium’s past took me by surprise. No explanation here, then, for why things went so wrong under Mobutu. This was a tale – the wall frieze commemorating the hundreds of young Belgians who found their graves in the Congo Free State made clear – of selfless commitment and higher motives.

      From this self-satisfied tableau, one item nonetheless grabbed my attention. Under the roll-call of dead heroes, an 1884 painting by Edouard Manduau, a painter unknown to me, injected an incongruous note. The artist, who had clearly been somewhat disturbed by his brush with the Congo, had painted a native being held to a post. On his knees, writhing, he is being whipped until the blood flows down his back. Looking on without expression is a white man, scientifically taking notes.

      In the whole museum, it was the only object on display that had the sour ring of truth. Those bright oils, that unexpected depiction of what was clearly an everyday, a banal event, pointed in a very different direction, one that would show how the seeds of Mobutism found fertile ground in which to sprout.

      Jules Marchal knew all about watching coolly as a man was whipped. As a young district commissioner working in the Congo in the 1950s, he used to order labourers who had failed to meet the cotton quotas set by the Belgian state to be punished with the chicotte, a whip made from a strip of hippopotamus hide that had been dried in the sun. Applied sparingly, it flayed the skin and left permanent scars; used

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