The Congo - 5 books

A friend of mine recently traveled down the Congo river.  That really impressed me as very few tourists go there, for obvious reasons of safety.   He was on a river boat that dragged a barge and both were crammed with people, animals, cars, lorries.. it looked like a floating market.  His journey took six weeks.  As you could imagine, he had many interesting stories to tell.  Despite being a seriously impoverished nation wracked by years of warfare, people he said, were friendly and got on with their daily hardships in life with humour and dignity.

I was curious to learn more about the country, once called Zaire, so I picked up  several books and started reading.  Two are fiction and three are historical/ political, each related to each other but in different time periods.

The first was King Leopold's Ghost : A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa  by Adam Hochschild.   This is a remarkable and overwhelming account of the horrors that took place in Belgium Congo.   Here is the synopsis on the back cover:  "At the turn of the century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a brutal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River.  Ultimately slashing the area's population by ten million, he still managed to shrewdly cultivate his reputation a great humanitarian.  A tale far richer than any novelist could invent, King Leopold's Ghost is the horrifying account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions.  It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who defied Leopold: African rebel leaders who fought against hopeless odds and a brave handful of missionaries, travelers and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century's first great human rights movement."

The book, when published in the late 90s, shocked most Belgians who were largely ignorant of such large scale atrocities that happened under the rule of their King.  Not surprisingly,  that history was never taught in schools and Leopold, in his later years before handing over his personal colony to the sate of Belgium, made sure to wipe clean any trail of wrong doings. 

Hochschild devotes a chapter to Joseph Conrad, the famous writer who had traveled on a steamer on the Congo River during the early days of the colony.  He notes that despite its unspecific setting,  Conrad depicts a realistic portrait of the Congo Free Sate, as it was called.  His main character, Kurtz was inspired by real state functionaries.  Although Heart of Darkness is one of the most famous and studied short stories of the twentieth century, its psychological and moral truths have overshadowed the literal truths behind the story.

Of course, I had to re-read Heart of Darkness, Conrad's masterpiece. The protagonist, Charles Marlow is an Englishman who is hired by a Belgian trading company to captain a steamer  up the Congo River to pick up ivory but to also bring back a mysterious, rogue ivory trader called Kurtz. The novela explores the 'darkness' on three levels: that of the European encountering the dense jungles of the African wilderness, the darkness of White man's cruelty to African natives and finally the darkness within each human being, capable of  unimaginable acts of evil.

Within its 100 pages, there is a lot of symbolism. The "dark continent," as it was called, receiving the "light" of civilization.  The theme of "darkness" is ambiguous on one hand and deliberate on the other.  The darkness is many things: it is the unknown, it is the subconscious; it is also a moral darkness, it is the evil which swallows up Kurtz and it is the spiritual emptiness he sees at the centre of existence; but above all it is the mystery itself, the mysteriousness of man's spiritual life, and to convey all this a certain amount of ambiguity is essential.  This mysteriousness becomes too big for the bounds of the story and Marlow, in his attempts to describe the indescribable, loses restraint over his words and lapses into virtual meaninglessness as he tries to explain the essence of his experience by a method of suggestion, the result of which is not a meaningful 'haze' but a fog of vague adjectives that gets thicker the closer to the heart and to Kurtz we get.  "Kurtz was just a word for me.  I did not see the man in the name any more than you do.  Do you see him?  Do you see the story?  Do you see anything?... No, it is impossible:  it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence... its subtle and penetrating essence.  It is impossible.  We live, as we dream - alone."

Conrad, who wrote in English, his second language, is a master at descriptive prose with his  vivid descriptions of a perilous journey, up the river to the primordial man, at the dawn of time. "Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.  An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.  The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish.  There was no joy in the brilliance of the sunshine.  The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom or overshadowed distances The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooden islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had once known - somewhere - far away in another existence perhaps...  amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention."

Or this, another impressive passage: "But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, or peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage.  The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.  The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell?  We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse.  We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign - and no memories."

The next book, the novel A Bend in the River, is one of V.S. Naipaul's better known works of fiction and takes place, once again, in an un-named, recently independent African country (the 60's- 70's  Zaire, under the strong man Mobutu Sese Seko).  The story is centered around Salim, a Muslim of Indian ancestry whose family had lived for generations, traders on Africa's East Coast.  Following post-colonial upheavals there,  Salim travels inland, to a town on the bend of the river, there to set up a little shop selling cloth.  Through his eyes we see the reality of the new Africa.  Independence has been won, civil war concluded. "The Big Man," president for life, rules by rhetoric, guile, sorcery and a strong helping of terror. There is a new dispensation: "black men assuming the lies of white men."

Naipaul struggles with the ordeals and absurdities of living in new "third world" countries. He is free of any romantic notions about the moral charms of primitives or the glories of blood-stained dictators. Nor does he show a trace of Western condescension or nostalgia for colonialism. He is a tough-spirited writer, undeluded about the sleaziness of much contemporary history and not especially hopeful about its consequences.

The non-fiction book that parallels this last novel is Michela Wrong's remarkable book In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz a vivid account of the rise and fall of Mobutu Sese Seko.   The New York Time's review by Ian Fisher illustrates it much better than I can.

"It is almost possible, but not quite, to squeeze out a tear for Mobutu Sese Seko in his last days as the diminished dictator of Zaire. Everyone was cheating him, from his own children to the suppliers of the pink champagne he popped open each morning at 9. He had lost control of the military. He could not believe that after 32 years as unquestioned ruler, the ''Helmsman'' of a huge nation ridiculously endowed with natural riches, he could be defied. But in 1997 a group of rebels took Zaire with little fighting, later restoring to the country a name that conjures many images: Congo.

As Mobutu fled to Morocco, his own elite guard pocked his getaway plane with bullets. The relevant symbol at this point was not his trademark leopard-skin hat, but the diapers he left behind in one of his palaces. Dying of prostate cancer, Mobutu was incontinent.  All this makes for a rich morality play, not only about one man corrupted absolutely (even gleefully, it seems) but also about a continent in a very big mess. ''In Mobutu's hands, the country had become a paradigm of all that was wrong with postcolonial Africa,'' Michela Wrong writes in her firsthand, and first-rate, account of the Mobutu era.  ''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.''

This is no stretch: Mobutu, a cook's son and a bright star of Congo in its early days, looted billions while his people were reduced to a meal a day. He played off one ethnic group against another. He presided over an ever-deepening disorder, which he discovered, no doubt to his sublime satisfaction, he could manipulate to his own good use. This remains the state of play, with few exceptions, around Africa. Mobutu was a pioneer.

In the 1890's, when the Congo had barely begun to exist for outsiders, Joseph Conrad went to work there as a steamship captain. He turned his experience into the novella ''Heart of Darkness,'' the story of Mr. Kurtz, whose mission of commerce and general betterment ended with him, a classic convert, going more native than the natives. Among other unspeakables, the book hints, Kurtz became a cannibal. ''The horror, the horror,'' Kurtz said, and he died, his body steaming enigmatically away on the Congo River.

As Wrong notes, the words are often summoned to describe Africa's latest wretchedness: AIDS; Ebola; war-induced famine in Ethiopia or Sudan; limbs hacked off children in Sierra Leone; half a million or more dead in a genocide in Rwanda. But, as she rightly says, 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.'' Kurtz had gone to Congo largely to export ivory, just as the founder of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold II, made his main business supplying rubber to the new pneumatic tire industry, costing the lives of perhaps 10 million Africans who were forced into labor.

Thus, many of the troubles of Africa -- which was mostly sealed off until only a short century ago -- start with outsiders. First came the slave trade, by Arabs and, later, by Europeans. Then Europe carved up the continent, imbuing Africa with a profound identity crisis. Maybe worse, the colonists created illogical boundaries that split the natural divisions of geography and ethnic groups, making democracy and state-building after independence in the 1950's and 60's no easy task.

Enter Joseph Mobutu, who showed how African leaders could profit from the West's sorry legacy. A tall army sergeant who tried his hand at journalism, Mobutu was initially a friend of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first prime minister, then his Brutus. Taking power in 1965, Mobutu worked both sides of the cold war, and in the process ensured that no bad behavior would go unrewarded. He stole everything he could, skimming millions off consignments of copper or diamonds. No one had any doubt what he was up to. He barely even bothered to conceal it, except tauntingly to keep up appearances. Wrong describes him at news conferences, as reporters pricked him with questions about his crimes: ''It was difficult not to feel a certain grudging admiration for the impeccable politeness, the fake innocence, the ironic demeanor that all broadcast one defiant message: I know your game and am far too old and wily a fox to be caught out.''

The fact is that many forces kept him far from accountability: the West was so eager for his friendship, and do-gooders so eager to do good, that Congo received some $9.3 billion in foreign aid between 1975 and 1997, when rebels finally forced him from power. In Zaire the state was the only real path for advancement, and so nearly everyone, from soldiers to functionaries to the revolving door of top officials, had a stake in keeping the chaos alive.

''The momentum behind Zaire's free fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad,'' Wrong writes. The details are what gives her story its juice. She documents the excesses: Mobutu's marriage to identical twins; the lavish palaces and gifts of Mercedeses; the suitcases full of cash for European spendfests. Here too is Western treachery: the C.I.A.'s ludicrous approval of a plot to kill Lumumba with a vial of poison; the clockwork meetings with United States presidents, very much aware of the riches of copper, cobalt, uranium and diamonds that Congo had to offer by the ton. She also shows how poor Mobutu, in his last pathetic days, was consumed by the system he had created.

As in many African countries, loyalty was largely bought. Wrong quotes Mobutu's Belgian son-in-law, white and a playboy (a fascinating side story in itself), on the drawers full of $100 bills Mobutu continually dipped into to keep the system going. ''He paid out, and paid out,'' the son-in-law says. ''He was surrounded by leeches, thirsting for dollars. . . . I looked into his eyes and I felt sorry for him.''

Through it all, Mobutu, who died less than four months after fleeing Zaire, left behind one undeniable gift: Wrong notes that most people in Congo actually feel like Congolese, citizens of a coherent nation in one of the world's least coherent geographic states, as opposed to a collection of dozens of ethnic groups. The paradox, of course, is that with Congo now split into fiefs of warlords, rebel groups and foreign armies, it has never been so close to being dismembered. Mobutu himself was often fond of quoting the French saying ''Après moi, le déluge.''

The last book I read is the last chapter in the story of the tragic land that is Congo.  Jason K. Stearn's  Dancing in the Glory of Monsters -  The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa 

The Congo, since the mid-nineties,  has been in an endless conflict in which millions of people have died.  As the New York Times review by Adam Hochschild on Stearns' amazing book describes;

"The fighting has left tens or even hundreds of thousands of women gang-raped and led to what may be millions of war-­related deaths; at its peak, some 3.4 million Congolese (the only one of these tolls we can be remotely sure of) were forced to flee their homes for months or years. But it draws little attention in the United States. As Jason K. Stearns, who has worked for the United Nations in Congo, points out, a study showed that in 2006 the New York Times gave four times as much coverage to Darfur, although Congolese have died in far greater numbers.

One reason we shy away is the conflict’s stunning complexity. “How,” Stearns asks, “do you cover a war that involves at least 20 different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective?” “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” is the best account so far: A fatal combination long primed this vast country for bloodshed. It is wildly rich in gold, diamonds, coltan, uranium, timber, tin and more. At the same time, after 32 years of being stripped bare by the American-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, it became the largest territory on earth with essentially no functioning ­government.

Then it was as if waves of gasoline were poured onto the tinder. When the Hutu regime that had just carried out the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis was overthrown in 1994, well over a million Hutu fled into eastern Congo, then known as Zaire. These included both the génocidaires and their defeated army (the abandoned armored car in Bunia was theirs) as well as hundreds of thousands of Hutu who had not killed anyone but who feared reprisals at the hands of the Tutsis now running Rwanda. In their militarized refugee camps, the génocidaires rearmed and began staging raids on Rwanda. To try to put a stop to this and install a friendly regime in the huge country next door, Rwanda, along with Congolese rebel allies, invaded its neighbor in 1996 in what is known as the “first war.” Mobutu’s kleptocracy in Kinshasa rapidly crumbled; the dictator fled overseas and died a few months later. Laurent Kabila, a portly veteran of some years as a rebel in the bush and many more as a shady businessman in exile, now found himself leader of a Congo where almost all public services had collapsed. He was not the man to fix them. Stearns gives a vivid anecdotal picture of Kabila as someone far out of his depth, trying to run a government by literally turning his house into the treasury, with thick wads of bills stashed in a toilet ­cubicle.

Kabila soon parted ways with his Rwandan backers. Then came the “second war”: an invasion by Rwanda and its ally Uganda in 1998. They failed to overthrow Kabila, however, because, dangling political favors and lucrative business deals, he enlisted military help from several other countries, principally Angola and Zimbabwe. A few years later he was assassinated and succeeded by his son Joseph. Eventually, a series of shaky peace deals ended much of the fighting. But, as Stearns says, “like layers of an onion, the Congo war contains wars within wars.” For example, Uganda and Rwanda fell out badly with each other and fought on Congo soil. Each country then backed rival sets of brutal Congolese warlords who sprang up in the country’s lawless, mineral-rich east. And when Rwanda’s Hutu-Tutsi conflict spilled over the border, it fatally inflamed complex, longstanding tensions between Congolese Tutsis and other ethnic groups. This is merely the beginning of the list.

The task facing anyone who tries to tell this whole story is formidable, but Stearns by and large rises to it. He has lived in the country, and has done a raft of interviews with people who witnessed what happened before he got there. Occasionally the chain of names of people and places temporarily swamps the reader, but on the whole his picture is clear, made painfully real by a series of close-up portraits.

In one crowded refugee camp there were no menstrual pads; women could use only rags that, repeatedly washed out, left rivulets between the tents streaked with blood, as if a reminder of the carnage they were fleeing. Or here is a Rwandan Army officer from a death squad that took revenge on Hutu refugees, including women and children, telling Stearns: “We could do over a hundred a day. . . . We used ropes. It was the fastest way and we didn’t spill blood. Two of us would place a guy on the ground, wrap a rope around his neck once, then pull hard.”

Congo’s history is interwoven with all of its neighbors, but none more closely than Rwanda, whose government in the 1990s understandably feared that Congo-based génocidaires could continue to rampage over the border and slaughter more Tutsi. But the genocide in no way excuses subsequent Rwandan massacres of tens of thousands of Hutu in Congo. Nor the way Rwanda quickly became the latest in the long string of outsiders — from Atlantic slave traders to Belgian colonizers to mining multinationals — who have so plundered this territory.

Stearns is somewhat easier on Rwanda here than he has been elsewhere, for example, in a United Nations report he contributed to. But he does quote the Rwandan strongman and current president Paul Kagame as calling his military intervention “self-sustaining,” and cites an estimate that the Rwandan Army and allied businesses reaped some $250 million in Congolese minerals profits at the height of the second war. Such figures are backed up in abundant detail in a series of United Nations reports, and ultimately led Sweden and the Netherlands to suspend aid to Rwanda.

Not so the United States. It has supported Kagame for years, contributing indirectly to Congo’s suffering. How this media-savvy autocrat has managed to convince so many American journalists, diplomats and political leaders that he is a great statesman is worth a book in itself.

No account of Congo can yet have a happy ending. Although Stearns dutifully makes some policy proposals — more carefully directed aid with conditions on it; more stringent regulation of “mining cowboys”; a mechanism for holding the worst perpetrators to account — he is wise enough to know how difficult it will be to halt 15 years of violence and pillage. Indeed, the price of recent peace deals has been the incorporation of a number of rapacious warlords and their troops into the ill-­disciplined Congolese national army."