Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (39 page)

Late in the afternoon of August 13, the electricity went out across Kinshasa, and an air of panic coursed through the town. Talk turned to worries of another conquest, another pillage, yet more death. The information minister, Didier Mumengi, tried to explain it all away. “What we have is a technical problem,” he said. “The experts are working and will have power restored shortly.” It was a patent lie. The rebels had seized the Inga Dam, Africa’s largest, and turned off the switch.

In the end, though, Kabila proved far more resourceful in diplomacy than he was either in defense or in governance, and for all its tactical brilliance, Rwanda, in overreaching, had provided him the escape route. Angola had been upset to see smaller East African countries like Rwanda and Uganda expanding their influence so deeply into the western reaches of Central Africa, and when Angola’s leaders heard reports of old Mobutu types haunting the hotels of Kigali and Kampala, they had visions of a new safe haven for UNITA rebels on their northern border. Angola poured in troops, and soon so did a half dozen other African countries.

Kabila would survive, but it appeared likely that Congo might not.
¹⁴
It had not been an ordinary colony when it was run by Leopold as his own estate, and it had never truly been a nation in the independence era under Mobutu or under Kabila. At best, it had always been a personal domain, and now Congo, perhaps irreparably fissured, had many masters.

Africa had experienced more than seventy coups d’état since the end of European rule, and the very first—against Lumumba, right here in Kinshasa—was sanctioned by the CIA, but not a single one of them had led to the formation of a new state. For all of their flaws and for all of the booby traps they had produced, Africans had always regarded the borders they inherited as more or less permanent. Then came tiny Rwanda’s two invasions of the gigantic land at the very heart of the continent.

It is said that at least 3.3 million people have perished in the chaos and deprivation caused by the fighting in Congo since I was last there. Even now, hundreds of thousands of people subsist on berries and grubs, cut off from the outside world without so much as an aspirin to treat the fevers that rage in the tropics. The United Nations estimates that 600,000 of those victims are children five years old or younger—as many people as died in twenty-seven years of pretty much constant warfare in Angola. The figures are astounding.

The Congo wars, which have been called Africa’s first world war, were interesting enough the first time around, when Kabila was being installed, if only for their novelty. But it seems that Bantus are not the only people addicted to spectacle, and without the garish figure of Mobutu to captivate the imagination of an outside world that makes an utter abstraction of Africa, the show quickly turned into a bore. Serving up atrocities is a business of diminishing returns, and Washington, having experimented with so-called African solutions to African problems, silently recognized its failure and vowed to stay away altogether. Since then, the forest has taken over. Smeared green and unimaginably thick across the waistline of the continent, defied only by the might of a deceptively lazy river, it muffles all cries.

By the time my successor had taken over, Kinshasa was under threat of attack, and there were no more commercial flights I could take out. Even quick runs across the Congo River to Brazzaville aboard small charter planes were becoming difficult to arrange. The saving grace for me was Rashid, a resourceful Indian businessman whose infinite connections and generosity had often rescued me. Working the collection of cell phones and two-way radios he was never without, he secured me a seat on the last Piper of the day, and promised that its fifteen-minute hop across the river would get me to Brazzaville just in time to catch an Air Afrique flight back home to Abidjan.

At the airport, we were literally held up by Kabila’s security people, who shook down the pilot, the crew and the passengers for one entire sweaty hour before allowing us to take off.

I had crossed the Congo River innumerable times, aboard jet air-liners, speedy, private outboard launches and rusty ferry boats, partying with Koffi Olomidé, Zaire’s most popular musician. I had even crossed by dugout canoe, escaping the new Congo when its borders were still officially closed, just after Kabila had seized power, only to be arrested by the other Congo’s river police, aboard a PT boat.

I had never flown out by small plane, though, and on this, my final departure from the country I had visited more than any other in Africa, I let all of the stress drain away from me as Kinshasa, colossal, shabby and now nerve-wracked, faded into the distance. After banking sharply and heading out over the river’s broad expanse, the plane glided over the orderly, cultivated fields and Cartesian grid of Brazzaville.

We landed and taxied, and as if by some small miracle, the huge green Air Afrique jet, Flight RK 741 was there, just as it should have been, still parked in the middle of the airport’s asphalt apron and boarding its passengers—a bit late, as usual. All I could think was that I would sleep in my own bed this night, one of my last in Africa. The Brazzaville police thought otherwise, though, and together with all of the other passengers who had flown in aboard our little plane, I was whisked away from the waiting jet toward yet another security check.

As I’ve said, few things are executed so energetically in Africa as what the French language so delicately calls
les formalités.
A nation may be broken and bankrupt, civil servants and soldiers may be unpaid, but a traveler can always count on having someone beckon him to check his papers—especially when he is in a hurry.

“I’m not entering this Congo,” I pleaded. “I am merely here in transit. I’ve got to catch that plane.” A sympathetic guard finally listened to me and offered to escort me to the airline’s offices to get a boarding pass. When I found the airline agent, though, she was busily counting the stubs of the passengers who had already entered the Air-bus. Its huge engines could be heard idling. “Le vol est fermé,” she said with finality, the flight is closed, scarcely looking up. I protested that I had a first-class ticket, that I had confirmed my last-minute arrival by radio from Kinshasa, and that I knew the local director of Air Afrique. It had no impact. Determined to board the plane anyway, I ran out onto the tarmac, but the aluminum stairway was being wheeled away, and the ground personnel, their ears covered with protective gear, waved me away furiously.

I finally had to reconcile myself to the fact that I would be spending the night in Brazzaville. But it was only as I searched for a taxi amid the knots of people still milling around the terminal that I remembered that the quiet, orderly city I had once known, a place of well-dressed people and lazy cafés, was no more. It had been utterly destroyed in its own obscure “little” civil war. The Hotel Méridien was the only intact lodging left in town, so the driver I found took me straight there, warning that it was likely to be full. Indeed, the scene in the lobby wasn’t encouraging. The place was swarming with stressed-out foreigners—evacuees from Kinshasa and reporters hoping to make their way there in time for the city’s widely predicted fall. People were bunking up three and four to a room, but I managed to crash alone in the empty room of Robert Weiner, a CNN producer who had not yet arrived. I wanted nothing more than to call my family in Hawaii and then my office in Abidjan to say I had missed the flight. I turned on the TV and found nothing but electric snow. Brazzaville no longer had a functioning station.

I opened the curtains to capture the afternoon’s final fading light, and found that the windows had been shot out so long ago that the metal frames that once held glass were rusted out. Then I picked up the phone to make a call, but got the switchboard. With incongruous cheer, the operator told me there was no longer any telephone service in Brazzaville. “If you wish to make an overseas call, though, you can come to the reception area and use our satellite phone.”

I rose early after that gloomy night. My driver from the day before had come to greet me and take me back to the airport, where the scene resembled a minor riot. Brazzaville had been a major hub for Air Afrique, but very few flights landed here any longer, and officials from Kabila’s Congo were sending scores of family members onward to West Africa. There were Lebanese traders jousting to get their gems to market in Antwerp. There were members of the remaining elite from here, too, people who had finally scored visas to other countries and were desperate for their wives and children to get out.

All of this meant, of course, a great opportunity for theft, and like crocodiles lying in ambush in an African riverbed awaiting the passage of migratory beasts, every uniformed corps from the Congo was heavily represented on the airport’s premises.

I made it through the
formalités
on the strength of a stony expression practiced for just such occasions, and sheer moral fatigue. Three different officers, customs, army and immigration police, were fighting over the rights to the Lebanese trader who stood just before me in the dark and narrow corridor of this airport—a gauntlet, really. Someone inspected my papers and waved me on. Another demanded 2,000 CFA francs, saying it was for the “stamp tax.” Yet another agent tried to order me into a small room for a pat down. “I am in transit. My money is finished,” I mumbled, lying. He let me pass.

All that remained of the Congolese state was naked extortion from the president to the lowliest government agent. But there was worse ahead. At three consecutive “customs” desks in the final, narrow, unlit corridor that led to the departure area, bags were being searched, and money was being confiscated. Those who raised too strong an objection were threatened with being sent back from whence they came. What Sony Labou Tansi had written, “This is the most sordid time there has ever been,” was now manifest. Kafka translated locally meant ever more exposure to the Congolese state.

I sensed my heart racing. I was weary and stressed. There had been too many trials like these. Gentle Japan awaited me if only I could hold on, and I knew instinctively that the best approach was simply to remain cool. I must have looked unruffled, because I was never stopped.

I settled into the unenclosed departure area. There had once been a neat little first-class lounge nearby, but it was long since destroyed. Where I sat had once been the airport’s observation deck. Rubble and litter were strewn all around, and there were bullet marks and blood-stains still visible on the walls, along with tatters of clothing, the remnants of a battle that had raged here for weeks.

I was sitting on a concrete ledge. Others squatted on the ground. Had it rained, I thought, as it often did for days on end in this equatorial river basin, we couldn’t have been less well sheltered. As the Cameroon Airways jet I was to fly out on taxied, those of us gathered for boarding received a powerful blast from its exhaust. A skinny, enterprising waiter dressed in fading whites, a man who had invented his own job in the finest African tradition of survival, circulated among us with a tray suspended on a naked cord that hung from his neck. It contained a selection of cigarettes, soft drinks and alcohol. “I’ll have a cognac, please,” I said, spotting a bottle of Rémy Martin and explaining that I looked forward to a profound sleep. Without irony, he replied, “Monsieur, I do not recommend profound sleep around here.”

The signal finally came, and there was a rush of people down the stairway to the tarmac. It was free seating, which meant a free-for-all. After a couple of hours in the air, we landed in Douala, the commercial capital of Cameroon, for what was billed as a three-hour layover. As in Lagos, the boarding corridors that were once used to board and deplane had long ago frozen in rust.

As delay piled upon delay, our time on the ground dragged on. Three hours became seven. I was being treated to yet one more Central African exercise in decay. My mood was grim, and this brought to mind an earlier trip to Douala. All of the fancy lampposts that lined the grandly traced highway from the center of town to the airport had been stripped of their hardware. A collection of headless stanchions bowed in mockery of us all.

By and by I grew tired of the barren transit lounge and talked my way past immigration to the departure area, where I hoped to find some newspapers and a telephone. Finally, I thought, I would be able to reach my family.

“Is there anywhere I can make a phone call?” I asked an airport worker. “The phones have been out here for days,” came the answer. “Somebody ripped out all the cables. People are poor here. This is what we do to survive.”

1
After Abacha’s sudden death, in June 1998, Obasanjo was released from detention. In February 1999 he was elected president.

2
Mobutu changed the name of the country from Congo to Zaire in 1971. After his overthrow in 1997, the name was changed again, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

3
The Oort Cloud is an immense spherical cloud surrounding the planetary system at the edge of the sun’s orb of gravitational influence.

4
ECOMOG, or the ECOWAS Monitoring Group, was the peculiar name given to the regional peacekeeping group in Liberia.

5
Mobutu’s full name has also sometimes been translated as “the strutting rooster who covers all the hens, going from battle to battle, leaving enemies fleeing in his wake.”

6
Abacost is a clever contraction of
A bas le costume,
or “Down with the suit.”

7
Estimating casualties in conflicts anywhere is a rough and highly unscientific endeavor. This is especially true in Africa. The death toll in the Congo, although indisputably huge, is the subject of an ongoing and unlikely-soon-to-be-resolved debate.

8
Touré was elected president of Mali in May 2002, succeeding Alpha Oumar Konaré.

9
And would be again in 2003, when George W. Bush procrastinated for weeks during fierce fighting in Monrovia, and the attendant humanitarian disaster, over sending U.S. troops to join an international force to secure the peace.

10
Forces Armées Rwandaises, or FAR, the acronym for Rwanda’s formerly Hutudominated army.

11
In August 1997, three months after Kabila’s victory, a U.S. Defense Department chronology revealed this rumor to be true, but said the American troops were trainers for land mine removal, civil affairs and public information instructors.

12
Joseph Kabila became president in February 2001 following his father’s assassination.

13
Democratic Republic of the Congo.

14
That is, Kabila survived until his murder in his presidential palace by a bodyguard on January 16, 2001.