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

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СКАЧАТЬ helping out in the fields, alternated with stints at mission schools. He later claimed that religious exposure left him a devout Catholic, but as with many Congolese, his Christianity never ruled out a belief in the African spirit world which left him profoundly dependent on the advice of marabouts (witch-doctors).

      Mobutu finally settled with an uncle in the town of Coquilhatville (modern-day Mbandaka), an expanding colonial administrative centre. The placing by rural families of their excess offspring with urban relatives who are then expected to shoulder their upkeep and education for years, often decades, is extraordinarily prevalent in Africa. Puzzling to Westerners, such generosity is a manifestation of the extended family which ensures that one individual’s success is shared as widely as possible. But the burden is often almost too heavy to bear, and such children never have it easy. For Mobutu, life was tough. Perhaps the austerity of those days, when he depended on a relative for food and clothing, explains his love of excess, the unrestrained appetites he showed in later life.

      In Coquilhatville he attended a school run by white priests, and the child whose precocity had already been encouraged by a white woman began to acquire a high profile. Physically, he was always big for his age, a natural athlete who excelled at sports. But he wanted to dominate in other ways as well. ‘He was very good at school, he was always in the top three,’ remembers a fellow pupil who used to play football with Mobutu in the school yard. ‘But he was also one of the troublemakers. He was the noisiest of all the pupils. The walls between classrooms were of glass, so we could see what was going on next door. He was always stirring things up. It wasn’t done out of malice, it was done to make people laugh.’

      One favourite trick was making fun of the clumsy French spoken by the Belgian priests, most of whom were Flemish. ‘When they made a mistake he would leap up and point it out and the whole room would explode into uproar,’ said a contemporary. Another jape involved flicking ink darts at the priest’s back while he worked at the blackboard, a trick calculated to get the class giggling.

      In later life, like any anxious middle-class parent, Mobutu would drum into his children the importance of a formal education. One such lecture occurred when the presidential family was aboard the presidential yacht, moored not far from Mbandaka. On a whim, Mobutu sent for the priests from his old school and ordered them to bring his school reports. Miraculously, they still had them and Nzanga, one of Mobutu’s sons, remembered his father proudly showing his sceptical offspring that, academically at least, he had been no slouch.

      Given that he did well academically, Mobutu, known as ‘Jeff’ to his friends, was forgiven a certain amount of unruliness. But the last straw came in 1949 when the school rebel stowed aboard a boat heading for Leopoldville, the capital of music, bars and women regarded by the priests as ‘sin city’. Mobutu met a girl and, swept away by his first significant sexual experience, extended his stay. After several weeks had passed, the priests asked a fellow pupil, Eketebi Mondjolomba, where Mobutu had gone.

      ‘Since we lived on the same street, I was supposed to know where he was and I said, in all innocence, he’d gone to Kinshasa,’ remembered Eketebi, who was still grateful that Mobutu later laughingly forgave – while definitely not forgetting – this youthful indiscretion. ‘At the end of the year, that was one of the reasons why he was sent to the Force Publique. It was the punishment the priests and local chiefs always reserved for the troublesome, stubborn boys.’

      The sudden expulsion was a shock. It meant a seven-year obligatory apprenticeship in an armed force still tainted by a reputation for brutality acquired during the worst excesses of the Leopold era. But for Mobutu the Force Publique was to prove a godsend. Here the natural rebel found discipline and a surrogate father figure in the shape of Sergeant Joseph Bobozo, a stern but affectionate mentor. In later life, bloated by good living and corroded by distrust for those around him, he would wax nostalgic about the austere routines of army life and the simple camaraderie of the barracks. Looking back, he recognised this as the happiest period of his life.

      In truth, Mobutu was never quite as much of a military man as he liked to make out. Of more importance in furnishing his mental landscape was the fact that he managed to keep his education going in the Force Publique, corresponding regularly with the mission pupils he had left behind, who kept him closely informed of how their studies were progressing. On sentinel duty, carrying out his chores, he read voraciously, working through the European newspapers received by the Belgian officers, university publications from Brussels and whatever books he could lay hands on. It was a habit he retained all his life. He knew tracts of the Bible off by heart. Later, his regular favourites were to give a clear indication of the sense of personal destiny that had developed: President Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill and Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince, that autocrat’s handbook.

      He took and passed an accountancy course and began to dabble in journalism, something he had already practised at school, where he ran the class journal. And he got married. Marie Antoinette, an appropriate name for the wife of a future African monarch, was only fourteen at the time, but in traditional Congolese society this was not considered precocious. Still smarting from his schoolroom clashes with the priests, Mobutu chose not to wed in church. His contribution to the festivities – a crate of beer – betrayed the modesty of his income at the time.

      Photos taken during those years show a gawky Mobutu, all legs, ears and glasses, wearing the colonial shorts more reminiscent of a scout outfit than a serious army uniform. Marie Antoinette, looking the teenager she still was, smiles shyly by his side. Utterly loyal, she was nonetheless a feisty woman, who never let her husband’s growing importance cow her into silence. ‘You’d be talking to him and she would come in and chew him up one side and down the other,’ said Devlin. ‘She was not impressed by His Eminence, and he would immediately switch into Ngbandi with her because he knew I could understand Lingala or French.’

      A Belgian colonial had started up a new Congolese magazine, Actualités Africaines, and was looking for contributors. Because Mobutu, as a member of the armed forces, was not allowed to express political opinions, he wrote his pieces on contemporary politics under a pseudonym. Given the choice between extending his army contract and getting more seriously involved in journalism, he chose the latter. Although initial duties involved talent-spotting Congolese beauties to fill space for an editor nervous of polemics, Mobutu was soon writing about more topical events, scouring town on his motor scooter to collect information. The world was opening up. A 1958 visit to Brussels to cover the Universal Exhibition was a revelation and he arranged a longer stay for journalistic training. By that time he had got to know the young Congolese intellectuals who were challenging Belgium’s complacent vision of the future, staging demonstrations, making speeches and being thrown into jail.

      One man in particular, Lumumba, became a personal friend. The two men shared many of the same instincts: a belief in a united, strong Congo and resentment of foreign interference. Thanks to his influence Mobutu, who had always protested his political neutrality, was to become a card-carrying member of the National Congolese Movement, the party Lumumba hoped would rise above ethnic loyalties to become a truly national movement.

      But even in those early days there are question marks over Mobutu’s motives. Congolese youths studying in Brussels were systematically approached by the Belgian secret services with an eye to future cooperation. Several contemporaries say that by the time Mobutu had made his next career step – moving from journalism to act as Lumumba’s trusted personal aide, deciding who he saw, scheduling his activities, sitting in for him at economic negotiations in Brussels – he was an informer for Belgian intelligence.

      What were the qualities that made so many players in the Congolese game single him out? Some remarked on his quiet good sense, the pragmatism that helped him rein in the excitable Lumumba when he was carried away by his own rhetoric. It accompanied an appetite for hard work: Mobutu was regularly getting up at 5 in the morning and working till 10 p.m. during the crisis years. But the characteristic that, more than any other, eventually decreed that he won control СКАЧАТЬ