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

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СКАЧАТЬ Fidel Castro, Devlin himself, ironically enough, never believed in the sincerity of Lumumba’s conversion to the Soviet cause. ‘Poor Lumumba. He was no communist. He was just a poor jerk who thought “I can use these people”. I’d seen that happen in Eastern Europe. It didn’t work very well for them, and it didn’t work for him.’

      The wave of Soviet arrivals triggered the collapse of Lumumba’s strained relations with Kasavubu, Congo’s lethargic president. At times, too many times, politics in Congo resembled one of those hysterical farces in which policemen with floppy truncheons and red noses bounce from one outraged prima donna to another. ‘I’m the head of state. Arrest that man!’ ‘No, I’M the head of state. That man is an impostor. Arrest him!’ Only the reality was more dangerous than amusing. In a surreal sequence the prime minister and president announced over the radio that they had sacked each other. Mobutu was put in an impossible position, with both men ordering him to take their rival into custody.

      The army chief of staff was already unhappy with the turn events were taking. ‘The Russians were brutally stupid. It was so obvious what they were doing,’ marvelled Devlin. ‘They sent these people to lecture the army. It was the crudest of propaganda, 1920s Marxism, printed in Ghana in English, which the Congolese didn’t understand. Mobutu went to Lumumba and said “let’s keep these people out of the army”. Lumumba said “sure, sure I’ll take care of that”, but he didn’t. It kept happening and finally Mobutu said: “I didn’t fight the Belgians to then have my country colonised a second time.”’

      Exactly what role Devlin played in determining subsequent events was not clear. Cable traffic between Leopoldville and Washington shows he received authorisation for an operation aimed at ‘replacing Lumumba with a pro-Western group’ in mid-August 1960. Despite his friendliness, Devlin remained bound by the promises of confidentiality made to the CIA, contemptuous of those in the intelligence services who leaked government secrets. All he would say was that it was during those dramatic days that he really got to know Mobutu. The army chief was already being leaned on by the Western embassies – whose advice was given added weight by the fact that they were helping him pay his fractious troops – President Kasavubu, the student body and his own men. No doubt the CIA station chief brought his own persuasive skills, that talent acquired during years of ‘turning’ Soviet personnel, into play as Mobutu edged towards one of the hardest decisions of his life.

      The eventual outcome, Devlin acknowledged, came as no surprise. On 14 September 1960, Mobutu neutralised both Kasavubu and Lumumba in what he described as a ‘peaceful revolution’ aimed at giving the civilian politicians a chance to calm down and settle their differences. Soviet bloc diplomatic personnel were given forty-eight hours to leave. The huge African domino had not fallen: Congo had been kept safely out of Soviet hands.

      It was exactly what Washington wanted. But Devlin nonetheless rejected any notion of Mobutu being an American tool. ‘He was never a puppet. When he felt it was against the interests of the Congo, he wouldn’t do it, when it didn’t go against his country’s interests, he would go along with our views. He was always independent, it just happened that at a certain point we were going in the same direction.’ And like many commentators of the day, he still believed that Mobutu, an earnest twenty-nine-year-old pushed to prominence by a failure of leadership and a jumble of cascading events rather than personal ambition, was genuinely reluctant to take over in 1960. Such modesty would not last very long.

      Who was the man who so impressed Devlin and the diplomats as they circulated, glasses in hand and mental notebooks at the ready, at the reception in Brussels?

      Joseph Désiré Mobutu was born on 14 October 1930 in the central town of Lisala, where the Congo river runs deep and wide after its grandiose circular sweep across half a continent. That early proximity to the river, he always claimed, left him with a visceral love of the water. ‘I can say that I was born on the river … Whenever I can, I live on the river, which for me represents the majesty of my country.’

      He was a member of the Ngbandi tribe, one of the smaller of the country’s 200-plus ethnic groupings. Anthropologists believe the Ngbandi trace their lineage back to the central Sudanese regions of Darfur and Kordofan, an area that was repeatedly targeted by Moslem Arab conquerors from the sixteenth century onwards. Fleeing the slave raids and Islamicisation, his animist ancestors fled south, heading for the very equatorial heart of the continent, where they in turn subjugated the local Bantus. Safe in the glowering forests that later so terrified Western explorers, they intermarried and the Ngbandi – who took their name from a legendary fighter – gradually acquired an identity. They emerged as a loose affiliation of war-like tribes speaking the same language and straddling the Ubangi, a subsidiary of the great Congo river, with one foot in what is today Central African Republic and another in Congo.

      Like all autocrats, Mobutu was later to mythologise his own upbringing. In one story, almost certainly apocryphal, he described walking in the woods with his grandfather. When a leopard leaped from the undergrowth, the boy shrank away. The grandfather remonstrated with him and, ashamed and piqued, the young Mobutu seized a spear and slew the leopard. ‘From that day on,’ said Mobutu, ‘I am afraid of nothing.’ He was to use the animal at the centre of this coming-of-age fable as his personal insignia, a symbol of pride, strength and courage. It was also the origin of his trademark leopard-skin hats which, in a curious juxtaposition of machismo and decadence, he had made by a Paris couturier, keeping a collection of at least seven on hand.

      The truth of those early years is somewhat less romantic. Some of Mobutu’s contemporaries recall that in the pre-independence era, there was a tendency amongst city dwellers to sneer at the Ngbandi, marooned in one of the least accessible zones of Africa, as coarse rustics who had barely shed their loin-cloths in favour of Western-style clothing; good hunters, yes, but in need of some urban refinement.

      Mobutu would later ensure that changed. But when he was growing up, he belonged to a tribe regarded as ‘sous-evolué’ – under-evolved. He shared with many prominent men a keen awareness of his humble origins, a source of resentment pushing him ceaselessly, fruitlessly, to try and prove his superiority. And if Mobutu’s ethnic origins were not enough of a burden, there was another issue calculated to niggle at the confidence of an impressionable youngster – his parentage.

      His mother Marie Madeleine Yemo, whom he adored, was a woman who had notched up her fair share of experiences. She had already had two children by one relationship when her aunt, whose marriage to a village chief was childless, arranged for her niece to join her husband’s harem. It was a kind of brood-mare, stand-in arrangement that, while strictly in accordance with local custom, must have contained its share of bitterness and humiliation for both of the women concerned.

      Mama Yemo, as she was eventually to be known to the nation, bore the chief two children, then twins who died. Suspecting her aunt of witchcraft, she fled on foot to Lisala. It was there that she met Albéric Gbemani, a cook working for a Belgian judge. The two staged a church wedding just in time, two months before Joseph Désiré Mobutu’s birth. The boy’s name, with its warrior connotations, came from an uncle.

      Recalling his youth, Mobutu later had more to say about the kindness shown by the judge’s wife, who took a shine to him and taught him to read, write and speak fluent French, than his own father, who barely features. ‘She adopted me, in a way. You should see it in its historical context: a white woman, a Belgian woman, holding the hand of a little black boy, the son of her cook, in the road, in the shops, in company. It was exceptional.’

      Given that Albéric died when Mobutu was barely eight years old, the dearth of detail about his father is perhaps not surprising. But that lacuna was later seized upon by Mobutu’s critics, who would caricature their leader as the bastard offspring of a woman only a few steps up from a professional prostitute.

      With his mother relying on the generosity of relatives to support her four children, Mobutu’s existence became СКАЧАТЬ