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

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СКАЧАТЬ in Kinshasa. In a country struggling with its own contradictions, preoccupied with prickly Francophone-Flemish relations, Belgian colonial history is not taught at school. The distorted vision of history the Royal Museum at Tervuren set out to sanctify has been incidentally fostered by the political sensitivities of modern Belgium.

      Young Bruxellois live in a city dotted with baroque monuments funded with the proceeds of the Congolese state, scattered with antique shops selling Congolese masks and home to the biggest community of Congolese living abroad. Yet King Leopold’s Ghost, the first book in years to stir a general debate on the topic, was written by an American, not a Belgian.

      As Jean Stengers, a retired professor who has written copiously on the Congo Free State, freely admitted, his pet subject remains almost exclusively in the narrow intellectual domain, a closed book to most fellow nationals. Working from a study crammed with leather-bound volumes and papers looking out on the bleak Rue de Couronne, the white-haired academic had criticised Marchal for his interpretation of history, arguing that the former diplomat ignored the fact that national glorification, rather than personal enrichment, was Leopold’s prime motivating factor. But if they differed in their views of the king, the two men shared a rueful awareness the topic they both regarded as of such importance was a matter of general indifference.

      What feelings existed, Stengers said, were amongst a disappearing generation and – astonishingly – they were scarcely feelings of shame. ‘In the older generation, many of whom served in the Congo, the strongest feeling is one of injustice done. There’s a deep sense that magnificent things were given to the Congolese and we were rewarded with huge ingratitude. But the public at large has lost interest in the Congo. For the new generation, ignorance of Belgian history is nearly as great as ignorance of Congo’s history.’

      Knowing nothing about the past, of course, frees a population from any sense of blame for the present. How convenient was all this forgetting, I wondered as I walked down the steps of Stengers’ house, given the débâcle of modern-day Congo?

      The question Belgian researchers into the Congo Free State hate to be asked is whether there is any causal link between Belgium’s exploitative regime and the excesses of Mobutu’s rule, whether a frighteningly efficient kleptocratic system effectively softened up a community for a repeat performance.

      Marchal had brushed it anxiously away, pleading that he was a historian rather than an intellectual, and it was not for him to make such judgements. When put to Professor Stengers, the question had been rejected with a categorical shake of the head. Citing sociological studies conducted in the Great Lakes region, he said what was striking was the lack of memories of the Leopold era amongst the local population. So how could there be any causal link?

      But that, I thought, seemed to be missing the point. Plunging into the dreadful detail of Leopold’s reign, I, too, had been surprised by how few of these horrors – surely the stuff of family legends passed down from patriarch to grandson – had ever been mentioned to me by Zairean friends. But it wasn’t necessary to be an expert on sexual abuse to know it was possible to be traumatised without knowing why; that, indeed, amnesia – whether individual or collective – could sometimes be the only way of dealing with horror, that human behaviour could be altered forever without the cause being openly acknowledged.

      In Belgium I began to sense the logic behind many of the peculiarities that had puzzled me living in Kinshasa, a city where everyone seemed to complain about how awful things were but no one seemed ready to try changing the status quo; where grab-it-and-run was the principle of the day and long-term planning alien. Page after page, the picture painted by Marchal had struck a chord.

      Coming after the raids of the hated Force Publique and the slave traders, Mobutu’s looting soldiers were just more of the same. After the crippling production targets set by Leopold’s agents, the informal ‘taxes’ levied by corrupt officials must have seemed benevolent in comparison. Having seen their revolts against the Belgian system crushed by troops wielding such horrors as the Krupp cannon, who still had the courage to rise up against Mobutu’s army, however shambolic it came to seem to Western eyes? And how could the Congolese ever value or build on an infrastructure and administration imposed from above, using their sweat and blood as its raw materials?

      Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo’s population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.

       CHAPTER THREE

       Birth of the Leopard

      ‘Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.’

      CHARLES DE GAULLE

      There was a moment in 1960, when, if a white man had stayed his hand and decided not to get involved, the newly independent Congo’s history would have taken a very different course. It was the split second when a young CIA station chief who had crossed a tense capital walked around a corner at one of Leopoldville’s military camps and surprised a man in civilian clothing taking aim at a figure walking away.

      ‘I guess I was a Boy Scout too long, because without thinking I jumped at the man with the pistol. Then I was sorry, because it turned out he was very strong,’ he recalled. ‘We rolled around in the dirt and I finally remembered something I’d learnt in army training. He had his hand in the trigger guard and I pulled it back until the bone snapped.’ The scuffle attracted the attention of the intended victim’s bodyguards who, misunderstanding the situation, promptly started beating up the Good Samaritan. ‘All I could think about,’ he chuckled, ‘was why the hell did I get involved?’

      A generation of Zaireans might today ask themselves the very same question, but with a greater degree of asperity and rather less humour. For the target of the botched assassination attempt, staged at the orders of an aspiring Congolese politician with Soviet contacts, was Colonel Joseph Désiré Mobutu, who had just taken over the running of the country. If the white man in question – Larry Devlin – had not intervened, who knows what route the country would have followed?

      But then, interference, whether muscular or subtle, was always something of a forte of Mr Devlin’s. His role in the traumatic events of Congo’s post-independence period was to leave him one of the most notorious CIA men in history, an example of just how far the United States was willing to go in that epoch to sabotage the Soviet Union’s plans for global communist expansion.

      Mr Devlin’s life had been one of commotion: a bête noire for a generation of Africans still fuming over the way superpower intervention dictated events on the continent during the Cold War, he had been accused by conspiracy theorists of engineering the murder of Patrice Lumumba – Congo’s first, inspirational prime minister. Grown fragile and snowy-haired in his seventies, he had survived wars (two), uprisings (two), crash landings (four), heart attacks (several), beatings and assassination attempts (many) and a medical death sentence (two months to live, delivered, mistakenly, in 1984 when doctors spotted what they thought was an inoperable brain tumour).

      It had not all been pain and suffering. He learned to dance in Leopoldville’s sweaty nightclubs, argued politics into the small hours with the young men who were to become Congo’s movers and shakers and got tipsy on the sun-baked sandbanks of the Congo river.

      But it had all taken its toll, leaving him unsteady on his feet, floating above the СКАЧАТЬ