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In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo
Michela Wrong
A story of grim comedy amid the apocalypse and a celebration of the sheer indestructibility of the human spirit in a nation run riot: Michela Wrong’s vision of Congo/Zaire during the Mobutu years is incisive, ironic and revelatory.Mr Kurtz, the colonial white master, brought evil to the remote upper reaches of the Congo River. A century after Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ was first published, Michela Wrong revisits the Congo during the turbulent era of Mobutu Sese Seko.From the heart of Africa comes grotesque confusion: pink-lipsticked rebel soldiers mingle with track-suited secret policemen in hotels where fin de siecle dinner parties are ploughing through vintage wines rather than leave them to the new regime. Congo, the African country richest in natural resources, has institutionalised kleptomania. Everyone is on the take. Someone has even swiped one of the uranium rods from the country’s only nuclear reactor.Having presided over unprecedented looting of the country’s wealth, Mobutu, like Kurtz, retreated deep within the jungle to his palace of marble floors and gold taps. A hundred years on and nothing has changed.
In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz
LIVING ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER
IN THE CONGO
Michela Wrong
DEDICATION (#u282e7507-78fc-5736-811f-cd5fd1ef1e1b)
To Michael Holman, who made sure the book got written
CONTENTS
COVER (#uf8accbe1-ffc6-5f30-8261-1a5a399808b9)
TITLE PAGE (#u87f09d3e-47b0-563f-acd6-6cf68c82fac1)
DEDICATION (#u89be5d4f-2cf2-5e3b-9bcb-a314dffd55d3)
INTRODUCTION (#ue2225ab4-05e2-5855-83cf-df585caed1cb)
CHAPTER ONE You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave (#ue0c14d50-5ee1-52ee-8dee-bc073973948a)
CHAPTER TWO Plaything for a king (#ub310f18d-4e65-55fa-b616-ca66726d0878)
CHAPTER THREE Birth of the Leopard (#ub1aa025b-1bac-5a9d-9c36-d2f01a6845eb)
CHAPTER FOUR Dizzy worms (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE Living above the shop (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX A nation on Low Batt (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN Never naked (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT The importance of being elegant (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE I get by with a little help from my friends (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN A folly in the jungle (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN The night the pink champagne went flat (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE The Inseparable Four (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Nappies on the floor (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Ill-gotten gains (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
GLOSSARY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#u282e7507-78fc-5736-811f-cd5fd1ef1e1b)
‘He won’t be forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honour; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking. No; I can’t forget him.’
Heart of Darkness—JOSEPH CONRAD
The feeling struck home within seconds of disembarking.
When the motor-launch deposited me in the cacophony of the quayside, engine churning mats of water hyacinth as it turned to head back across the brown expanse of oily water that was the River Zaire, I was hit by the sensation that so unnerves first-time visitors to Africa. It is that revelatory moment when white, middle-class Westerners finally understand what the rest of humanity has always known – that there are places in this world where the safety net they have spent so much of their lives erecting is suddenly whipped away, where the right accent, education, health insurance and a foreign passport – all the trappings that spell ‘It Can’t Happen to Me’ – no longer apply, and their well-being depends on the condescension of strangers.
The pulse of apprehension drummed as I stuffed my clothes back into the ageing suitcase that had chosen the river crossing between Brazzaville and Kinshasa as the moment to split at the seams, transforming me into a truly African traveller. It quickened as a sweating young British diplomat signally failed to talk our way through the red tape and a chain of hostile policemen picked through the intimacies of my luggage, deciding which bits to keep. It subsided as we emerged from our three-hour ordeal, a little the lighter, finally crossing the magic line separating the customs area from the city.
But in truth, the quiet thud of fear would be there throughout my time in Zaire, whether I was drinking a cold Primus beer in the bustling Cité or taking tea in the green calm of a notable’s patio. This ominous awareness of a world of infinite, sinister possibilities had become one of the dominant characteristics of the nation led by the man who started life as plain Joseph Désiré Mobutu, cook’s son, but reinvented himself as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, ‘the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’.
By the mid-1990s, Mobutu had become more noticeable by his absence than his presence, a tall, gravel-voiced figure glimpsed occasionally at official ceremonies and airport walkabouts in Kinshasa, or fielding hostile questions at a rare press conference in France with a sardonic politeness that hinted at huge world-weariness. Rattled by the army riots that had twice devastated his cities, belatedly registering the extent to which he was hated, he had withdrawn from a resentful capital to the safety of Gbadolite, his palace in the depths of the equatorial forest, to nurse his paranoia.
His impassive portrait, decked in comic-opera uniform, kept watch on his behalf, glowering from banks, shops and reception halls. ‘Big Man’ rule had been encapsulated in one timeless brand: leopardskin toque, Buddy Holly glasses and the carved cane so imbued with presidential force mere mortals, it was said, could never hope to lift it. He liked to be known as the Leopard, and the face of a roaring big cat was printed on banknotes, ashtrays and official letterheads. But to a population that had once hailed him as ‘Papa’, he was now known as ‘the dinosaur’, a tribute to how sclerotic his regime had become. Certainly, on a continent of dinosaur leaders, of Biya and Bongo, Mugabe and Moi, he rated as a Tyrannosaurus Rex of the breed, setting an example not to be followed. No other African autocrat had proved such a wily survivor. No other president had been presented with a country of such potential, yet achieved so little. No other leader had plundered his economy so effectively or lived the high life to such excess.
Preyed on by young men with Kalashnikovs, its administration corroded by corruption, a nation the size of Western Europe had fallen off the map of acceptable destinations. My battered copy of the Belgian Guide Nagel, picked up in a Paris bookshop, described Kinshasa as a modern capital ‘boasting all the usual attributes of Europe’s great cities’ and encouraged the tourist to explore its museums, monuments and ‘indigenous quarters’. But that had been in 1959, when the world was a white man’s oyster. Kinshasa was now a stop bypassed even by hardened travellers, where airlines avoided leaving their planes overnight for fear of what the darkness would bring. A hardship posting for diplomats, boycotted by the World Bank and IMF, it was a country every resident seemed determined to abandon, if only they could lay their hands on the necessary visa.
I would be there for the end, and for the beginning of the end.
Less than three years after my arrival, the tables were turned and I was the one to experience the curious intimacy the looter shares with his victim, rifling through Mobutu’s wardrobes, touring his bathroom and making rude remarks about his taste in furniture (‘African dictator’ kitsch of the worst kind). Somewhere at the back of one of my drawers, there is a stolen fishknife that was once part of the presidential dining set. My companions in crime were more ambitious – they took monogrammed pillow cases, bottles of fine French wine, even a presidential oil portrait. But looters were being shot on the streets the day we paid our unannounced visit on Marshal Mobutu’s villa in Goma, and I wasn’t going to risk execution for a souvenir.
It was November 1996 and the new rebel movement that had suddenly risen from nowhere in the far east of Zaire had seized control of the area bordering Rwanda. For weeks the frontier crossings leading into this breathtakingly beautiful region of brooding volcanoes and misty green valleys, all rolling down to the blue waters of Lake Kivu, had been closed while the fighting went on. Then suddenly the victorious rebels opened the frontier, and a small flood of journalists who had been kicking their heels on the other side poured across.
When tour agencies were still brave enough to include Rwanda and Zaire in their African itineraries, Goma was a favourite destination for tourists visiting some of the world’s last mountain gorillas. A pretty little town on the black lava foothills, it had now been torn apart by its own inhabitants, who had taken the army’s exodus as the cue for some frenzied self-enrichment. Shops had been eviscerated, the main street was a mess of phone directories, glass and unused condoms, shattered toilet bowls and broken shutters. ‘They’ve attacked me four or five times, but they just won’t believe I don’t have anything left to take,’ gasped a ruined Lebanese trader, waiting at the border post for permission to leave. His eyes were swimming with tears.
The atmosphere was prickly. Starting what was to prove a seven-month looting and raping retreat across the country, Zairean forces had lashed out indiscriminately before pulling out, leaving corpses scattered for kilometres. No one was too sure of the identity of the rebel movement, the new bosses in town. And then there were the roaming Rwandans, whose intervention in Zaire was being denied by the government next door but was too prominent to ignore. Speaking from the corner of his mouth, a resident confirmed the outsiders’ presence: ‘We recognise them by their morphology.’ Then he hurried away as a baby-faced Rwandan soldier – high on something and all the more sinister for the bright pink lipstick he was wearing – swaggered up to silence the blabbermouth.
Somehow, Mobutu’s villa seemed the natural place to go. The road ran along the lake, snaking past walls draped in bougainvillaea, with the odd glimpse of blue water behind. We surprised a lone looter who had decided, enterprisingly, to focus on the isolated villas of the local dignitaries, rather than the overworked town centre. Thinking we were rebels, he stopped pushing a wheelbarrow on which a deep freeze was precariously balanced and ran for cover. As we drove harmlessly by, he was already returning to his task. A stolen photocopier and computer were still waiting to be taken to what, almost certainly, was a shack without electricity.
In the old days, the villa complex had been strictly off limits behind staunch metal gates manned by members of the presidential guard. Now the gates were wide open and the Zairean flag – a black fist clenching a flaming torch – lay crumpled on the ground. There had been no fight for this most symbolic of targets. No one, it was clear from the boxes of unused ammunition, the anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs carelessly stacked in the guards’ quarters, had had the heart for a real showdown.
In the garage were five black Mercedes, in pristine condition, two ambulances, in case the president fell sick and a Land Rover with a podium attachment to allow him, Pope-like, to address the public. A generous allocation for a man whose visits had become increasingly rare. But like a Renaissance monarch who expected a bedroom to be provided in any of his baron’s castles, Mobutu kept a dozen such mansions constantly at the ready across the country, on the off-chance of a visit that usually never came.
It was on venturing inside – could the property possibly be tripwired? – that we really began to feel like naughty children sneaking a look in their parents’ bedroom, only to emerge with their illusions shattered. From outside the villa had looked the height of ostentatious luxury: all chandeliers, Ming vases, antique furniture and marble floors. Close up, almost everything proved to be fake. The vases were modern imitations, they came with price labels still attached. The Romanesque plinths were in moulded plastic, the malachite inlay painted on.
With an ‘aha!’ of excitement, a colleague whipped out a black and white cravat, of the type worn with the collarless ‘abacost’ jacket that constituted Mobutu’s eccentric contribution to the world of fashion. From a distance, the cravats had always appeared complex arrangements of material, folded with meticulous care. Now I saw that they were little more than nylon bibs, held in place with tabs of Velcro. This emperor did have some clothes. But like his regime itself, they were all show and no substance.
Most poignant of all, perhaps, was the pink and burgundy suite prepared for the presidential spouse, although it was impossible to say whether this was the first lady Bobi Ladawa, or the twin sister Mobutu had, bizarrely, also taken to his bed. An outsize bottle of the perfume Je Reviens, which had probably turned rancid years ago in the African heat, stood on the mantelpiece. With their man ravaged by prostate cancer, his shambolic army collapsing like a house of cards, neither woman would ever be returning to Goma. This irreverent plundering was the only proof required of how rapidly the power established over three decades was unravelling.
Rebel uprisings, bodies rotting in the sun, a sickening megalomaniac. In newsrooms across the globe, shaking their heads over yet another unfathomable African crisis, producers and sub-editors dusted off memories of school literature courses and reached for the clichés. Zaire was Joseph Conrad’s original ‘Heart of Darkness’, they reminded the public. How prophetic the famous cry of despair voiced by the dying Mr Kurtz at Africa’s seemingly boundless capacity for bedlam and brutality had proved yet again. ‘The horror, the horror.’ Was nothing more promising ever to emerge from that benighted continent?
Yet when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness and penned some of the most famous last words in literary history, this was very far from his intended message. The title ‘Heart of Darkness’ itself and the phrase ‘the horror, the horror’ uttered by Mr Kurtz as he expires on a steam boat chugging down the giant Congo river, probably constitute one of the great misquotations of all time.
For Conrad, the Polish seaman who was to become one of Britain’s greatest novelists, Heart of Darkness was a book based on some very painful personal experience. In 1890 he had set out for the Congo Free State, the African colony then owned by Belgium’s King Leopold II, to fill in for a steamship captain slain by tribesmen. The posting, which was originally meant to last three years but was curtailed after less than six months, was to be the most traumatic of his life. It took him nine years to digest and turn into print.
Bouts of fever and dysentery nearly killed him; his health never subsequently recovered. Always melancholic, he spent much of the time plunged into deep depression, so disgusted by his fellow whites he avoided almost all human contact. His vision of humanity was to be permanently coloured by what he found in the Congo, where declarations of philanthropy camouflaged a colonial system of unparalleled cruelty. Before the Congo, Conrad once said, ‘I was a perfect animal’; afterwards, ‘I see everything with such despondency – all in black’.
Mr Kurtz, whose personality haunts the book although he says almost nothing, is first presented as the best station manager of the Congo, a man of refinement and education, who can thrill crowds with his idealism and is destined for great things inside the anonymous Company ‘developing’ the region. Stationed 200 miles in the interior, he has now fallen sick, and a band of colleagues sets out to rescue him.
When they find him, they discover that the respected Mr Kurtz has ‘gone native’. In fact, he has gone worse than native. Cut off from the Western world, inventing his own moral code and rendered almost insane by the solitude of the primeval forest, he has indulged in ‘abominable satisfactions’, presided ‘at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites’ says Conrad, hinting that Kurtz has become a cannibal.
His palisade is decorated by rows of severed black heads; he has been adopted as honorary chief by a tribe whose warriors he leads on bloody village raids in search of ivory. The man who once wrote lofty reports calling for the enlightenment of the native now has a simpler recommendation: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ When he expires before the steamer reaches civilisation, corroded by fever and knowledge of his own evil, his colleagues are relieved rather than sorry – a potential embarrassment has been avoided.
Despite its slimness, the novella is one of those multilayered works whose meaning seems to shift with each new reading. By the time Heart of Darkness was published in 1902, the atrocities being committed by Leopold’s agents in the Congo were already familiar to the public, thanks to the campaigns being waged by human rights activists of the day. So while Heart of Darkness is in part a psychological thriller about what makes man human, it had enough topical detail in it to carry another message to its readers. Notwithstanding the jarringly racist observations by the narrator Marlow, the way Heart of Darkness dwells on the sense of utter alienation felt by the white man in the gloom of central Africa, the book was intended primarily as a withering attack on the hypocrisy of contemporary colonial behaviour. ‘The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilising work in Africa is a justifiable idea,’ the writer told his publisher.
So when Kurtz raves against ‘the horror, the horror’, he is, Marlow makes clear, registering in a final lucid moment just how far he has fallen from grace. The ‘darkness’ of the book’s title refers to the monstrous passions at the core of the human soul, lying ready to emerge when man’s better instincts are suspended, rather than a continent’s supposed predisposition to violence. Conrad was more preoccupied with rotten Western values, the white man’s inhumanity to the black man, than, as is almost always assumed today, black savagery.
Why then, nearly a century on, has the phrase, and the title, become so misunderstood, so twisted?
The shift reflects, perhaps, the level of Western unease over Africa, a continent that has never disappointed in its capacity to disappoint: Hutu mothers killing their children by Tutsi fathers in Rwanda; the self-styled Emperor Bokassa ordering his cook to serve up his victims’ bodies in Central African Republic; Liberia’s rebels gleefully videotaping the torture of a former president – the terrible scenes swamp the thin trickle of good news, challenging the very notion of progress.
On a disturbing continent, no country, appropriately enough, remains more unsettling than the very birthplace of Conrad’s masterpiece: the nation that was once called the Congo Free State, later metamorphosed into Zaire and has now been rebaptised the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In Mobutu’s hands, the country had become a paradigm of all that was wrong with post-colonial Africa. A vacuum at the heart of the continent delineated by the national frontiers of nine neighbouring countries, it was a parody of a functioning state. Here, the anarchy and absurdity that simmered in so many other sub-Saharan nations were taken to their logical extremes. For those, like myself, curious to know what transpired when the normal rules of society were suspended, the purity appealed almost as much as it appalled. Why bother with pale imitations, diluted versions, after all, when you could drench yourself in the essence, the original?
The longer I stayed, the more fascinated I became with the man hailed as inventor of the modern kleptocracy, or government by theft. His personal fortune was said to be so immense, he could personally wipe out the country’s foreign debt. He chose not to, preferring to banquet in his palaces and jet off to properties in Europe, while his citizens’ average annual income had fallen below $120, leaving them dependent on their wits to survive. What could be the rationale behind such callous greed?
Zaireans had demonised him, seeing his malevolent hand behind every misfortune. From mass-murder to torture, poisoning to rape – there were few crimes not attributed to him. But if Mobutu had approached near-Satanic proportions in the popular conception, he remained the lodestar towards which every diplomat and foreign expert, opposition politician and prime ministerial candidate, turned for orientation.
Rail as it might, the population, it seemed, simply could not imagine a world without Mobutu. ‘We are a peaceful people,’ Zaireans would say in self-exculpation, when asked why no frenzied assailant had ever burst from the crowd during one of Mobutu’s motorcades, brandishing a pistol. It was to take a foreign-backed uprising, dubbed ‘an invasion’ by Zaireans themselves and co-ordinated by men who did not speak the local Lingala, to rid them of the man they claimed to loathe. The passivity infuriated, eventually blurring into contempt. Every people, expatriates would shrug, deserves the leader it gets.
My attempt to understand the puzzle kept returning me to Heart of Darkness – not to the clichés of the headline writers, with their inverted, modernistic interpretations, but back to Conrad’s original meaning.
No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responsibility for a nation’s collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull political acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire’s free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.
Exploring the Alice-in-Wonderland universe they created I would belatedly learn respect. Stumbling upon the surreal alternative systems invented by ordinary Zaireans to cope with the anarchy, exasperation would be tempered by admiration. Above all, there would be anger at what Conrad’s Marlow, surveying the damage wrought by colonial conquerors who claimed to have Congo’s interests at heart, described as a ‘flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiful folly’.
CHAPTER ONE (#u282e7507-78fc-5736-811f-cd5fd1ef1e1b)
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave (#u282e7507-78fc-5736-811f-cd5fd1ef1e1b)
Kinshasa, 17 May 1997
Dear Guest,
Due to the events that have occurred last night, most of our employees have been unable to reach the hotel. Therefore, we are sorry to inform you that we will provide you only with a minimum service of room cleaning and that the laundry is only available for cleaning of your personal belongings. In advance, we thank you for your understanding and we hope that we will be able soon to assure our usual service quality.
The Management
At 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, a group of guests who had just staggered back to their rooms after a heavy drinking session in L’Atmosphère, the nightclub hidden in the bowels of Kinshasa’s best hotel, heard something of a fracas taking place outside. Peering from their balconies near the top of the Tower, the modern part of the hotel where management liked to put guests paying full whack, they witnessed a scene calculated to sober them up.
Drawing up outside the Hotel Intercontinental, effectively barring all exits, were several military armoured cars, crammed with members of the Special Presidential Division (DSP), the dreaded elite unit dedicated to President Mobutu’s personal protection and held responsible for the infamous Lubumbashi massacre. A black jeep with tinted windows had careered up to the side entrance and its owner – Mobutu’s own son Kongulu, a DSP captain – was now levelling his sub-machine gun at the night receptionist.
Kongulu, who was later to die of AIDS, was a stocky, bearded man with a taste for fast cars, gambling and women. He left unpaid bills wherever he went with creditors too frightened to demand payment of the man who had been nicknamed ‘Saddam Hussein’ by Kinshasa’s inhabitants. Now he was in full combat gear, bristling with grenades, two gleaming cartridge belts crisscrossed Rambo-style across his chest. And he was very, very angry.
Screaming at the receptionist, he demanded the room numbers of an army captain and another high-ranking official staying at the Intercontinental, men he accused of betraying his father, who had fled with his family hours before rather than face humiliation at the hands of the rebel forces advancing on the capital.
Up in Camp Tsha Tshi, the barracks on the hill which housed Mobutu’s deserted villa, Kongulu’s fellow soldiers had already killed the only man diplomats believed was capable of negotiating a peaceful handover. With the rebels believed to be only a couple of hours’ march away, Kongulu and his men were driving from one suspected hideout to another in a mood of grim fury, searching for traitors. Their days in the sun were over, they knew, but they would not go quietly. They could feel the power slipping through their fingers, but there was still time, in the moments before Mobutu’s aura of invincibility finally evaporated in the warm river air, for some score-settling.
The hotel incident swiftly descended into farce, as things had a tendency to do in Zaire.
‘Block the lifts,’ ordered the hotel’s suave Jordanian manager, determined, with a level of bravery verging on the foolhardy, to protect his guests. The night staff obediently flipped the power switch. But by the time the manager’s order had got through, Kongulu and two burly soldiers were already on the sixteenth floor.
Storming from one identical door to another, unable to locate their intended victims – long since fled – and unable to descend, the death squad was reaching near-hysteria. ‘Unblock the lifts, let them out, let them out,’ ordered the manager, beginning to feel rattled. Incandescent with fury, the trio spilled out into the lobby. Cursing and spitting, they mustered their forces, revved their vehicles and roared off into the night, determined to slake their blood lust before dawn.
The waiting was at an end. May 17, 1997 was destined to be showdown time for Zaire. And it looked uncomfortably clear that the months of diplomatic attempts to negotiate a deal that would ease Mobutu out and rebel leader Laurent Kabila in, preventing Kinshasa from descending into a frenzy of destruction behind the departing president, had come to precisely nothing.
The fact that so many of the key episodes in what was to be Zaire’s great unravelling took place in the Hotel Intercontinental was not coincidental. Africa is a continent that seems to specialise in symbolic hotels which, for months or years, are microcosms of their countries’ tumultuous histories. They are buildings where atrocities are committed, coups d’état consecrated, embryonic rebel governments lodged, peace deals signed, and when the troubled days are over, they still miraculously come up with almond croissants, fresh coffee and CNN in most rooms.
In Rwanda, that role is fulfilled by the Mille Collines hotel, where the management stared down the Hutu militiamen bent on slaughtering terrified Tutsi guests during the 1994 genocide. In Zimbabwe, it used to be the Meikles, where armed white farmers rubbed shoulders with sanction-busters during the Smith regime. In Ethiopia it is the Hilton, where during the Mengistu years some staff doubled as government informers; in Uganda, the Nile, whose rooms once rang with the screams of suspects being tortured by Idi Amin’s police.
In Congo the honour most definitely goes to the Hotel Intercontinental. I know, because I once lived there. With one room as my living quarters, another as dilapidated office and a rooftop beer crate as the perch for a satellite telex – my link with the outside world – I soon realised that the hotel, as emblematic of the regime as Mobutu’s leopardskin hat, offered the perfect vantage point from which to observe the dying days of the dinosaur.
The hotel was built on a whim. On a visit to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, President Mobutu saw the Hotel Ivoire, and decided he wanted one too. For once, his impulses were based on canny business instincts. The Intercontinental was the first five-star hotel in Kinshasa. Until the restoration of the Hotel Memling, its rival in the town centre, there was simply nowhere else to go for VIPS seeking the bland efficiency only an international hotel chain can deliver. During the prosperous 1970s, the 50 per cent government stake in the building was a share in a certified cash cow.
Constructed on a spur of land in leafy Gombe, a district of ambassadors’ residences and ministries, it enjoys some of the best views in Kinshasa. To the east, the Congo river traces a lazy sweep as it emerges from Malebo pool, an expanse of water so vast that, venturing out in a small boat, you can lose sight of the opposite banks and end up wondering whether, by some miracle of geography, you have drifted out to sea.
Across the water, which is transformed into a disturbed mirror of silver and gold each sunset, gleams the distinctive concave tower that serves as the city of Brazzaville’s landmark. The river, that concourse Marlow described as ‘an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land’ is the frontier, a fact exploited by the fishermen whose delicate pirogues languidly traverse the waterway for a spot of incidental smuggling.
Nowhere else in the world do two capitals lie so close to each other, within easy shelling distance, in fact, a feature that has been of more than merely abstract interest in the past. The proximity allows each city to act as an impromptu refugee camp when things get too hot at home. From Brazzaville to Kinshasa, from Kinshasa to Brazzaville, residents ping-pong irrepressibly from one to another – sinks, toilets and mattresses on their heads, depending on which capital is judged more dangerous at any given moment.
In peacetime, the river offers release to Kinshasa’s claustrophobic expatriates. Roaring upstream in their motorboats, they picnic in the shimmering heat given off by the latest sandbank deposited by the current or scud across the waves on waterskis, weaving around the drifting islands of water hyacinth. Legend has it a European ambassador was once eaten by a crocodile while swimming and freshwater snakes are said to thrive. Yet far more ominous, for swimmers, is the steady pull of the river, the relentless tug of a vast mass of water powering relentlessly to the sea.
Some of this water has travelled nearly 3,000 miles and descended more than 5,000 feet. It has traced a huge arc curving up from eastern Zambia, heading straight north across the savannah as the Lualaba, veering west into the equatorial forest and taking in the Ubangi tributary before aiming for the Atlantic. The basin it drains rims Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville. The catchment area straddles the equator, ensuring that some part is always in the midst of the rainy season. Hence the river’s steady flow, so strong that in theory it could cover the energy needs of central Africa and beyond. In practice, the hydroelectric dam built at Inga is working at a fraction of capacity – one of Mobutu’s many white elephant projects – and even domestic demand is not being met.
The local word for river is ‘nzadi’: a word misunderstood and mispronounced by Portuguese explorers charting the coastline in the fifteenth century. In rebaptising Belgian Congo ‘Zaire’ in 1971, Mobutu was acknowledging the extent to which that waterway, the most powerful in the world after the Amazon, defines his people’s identity. But what should have opened up the region has instead served to isolate it. On the map, the blue ribbon sweeping across the continent looks a promising access route. But the terrible rapids lying between the upper reaches of the Lualaba and Kisangani, Kinshasa and the sea, make nonsense of the atlas.
