John Matshikiza
With the Lid Off
The Lusaka accords, heralding the possibility of an end to the war in Congo, has finally been signed by the last of the several hundred different people who were supposed to sign it. It’s like that folk tale about the gang who stole a pig from someone’s yard and then decided that they should all carry the pig back to the hideout, because none of them trusted any of the others not to steal it all over again for himself.
Does the signing of the accord guarantee an end to the war? I doubt it. What have several peace accords done for Angola? Besides, all those guys insisting on collectively carrying the pig of peace don’t have much time for each other anyway. Signing a piece of paper is just another stage of a long political game. I just hope I’m wrong.
One morning, while I was in the Congolese city of Bukavu, I left my room in the charming hotel I was staying at, overlooking the spectacular expanses of Lake Kivu. The sky was clearer than it had been for the past few days, but there was nevertheless a feeling of unease hovering in the air. As I walked down the path, the little man who cleans the rooms was walking towards me, and we exchanged greetings. I told him I had slept well, and asked if he had done the same.
“Not really,” he had replied. “Like the rest of the country.”
I asked him what he meant.
“We hear on the radio that [Laurent] Kabila bombarded the rebels in Equateur Province yesterday, so [Jean-Pierre] Bemba is threatening to withdraw his signature from the peace accord and continue to march on Kinshasa.” He sighed, desperately pained that the war would be going on.
I got the same information from the head waiter as I took breakfast on the terrace. He was normally an irrepressibly comical guy, but this morning his face was depressed. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, because he was on the point of tears. He told me that 130 rebel soldiers and 300 civilians had been killed in the bombing.
“We’re never going to get out of this war,” he muttered under his breath, more to himself than to me. “Why don’t the Americans just play their hand?”
The Americans, the Congolese feel, could have a decisive influence, intervening on the side of good, just as they intervened with decisive support for the reconstruction of Rwanda after 1994. But the American hand is not yet out in the open in this game of Congolese roulette.
“The Congolese suffer from a certain folie de grandeur. Why is this?” The man asking the question is Marcellin Sebisaho, diplomatic counsellor in the cabinet of the governor of South Kivu, operating out of Bukavu.
He answers his own question: “Because we’re a huge country, the third largest in Africa; we’ve got fantastic quantities of minerals, petroleum oil, everything. They tell me we are the only country on earth that has reserves of a mineral called coltan, which is the coating the Americans use on their stealth bombers to make them undetectable. We have every kind of potential, but what does it mean? What does it mean to me personally that petrol pours out of the oil wells at Boma, way out in the west, if I don’t even know what that petrol looks like? It goes straight out of the country, and meanwhile, here in Bukavu, we struggle to keep our cars going. And yet we continue to think of ourselves as masters of the universe.”
Marcellin is one of the extraordinary people I met in Congo, whose brilliance makes it even more difficult to understand the endemic lack of leadership and direction that bedevils the country. He is tall and fleshy, a man who has always inhabited libraries and seminar rooms rather than the sports field. He is 28 years old, and already has the analytical skills and political subtlety that make him one of the governor’s most trusted lieutenants.
He says that before the conference of Berlin in 1885, there were two major kingdoms in the region. The sprawling Kingdom of Kongo was divided up between three European nations, and became Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, and Congo-Kinshasa.
“There is no such nation as `the Congo’. But there is a `Kongolese’ nationality – the one that was destroyed from long range over a map at Berlin in 1885. Similarly, there was a Kingdom of Rwanda, that covered what is now Rwanda, Burundi, parts of Uganda and Tanzania, and the eastern part of the Congo – the part where all the trouble always starts. So the people have a justifiable desire to reconnect with these lost kingdoms.”
Does this mean that Kabila’s Congo will ultimately disintegrate back into its constituent parts? Marcellin hopes not. The RCD (Congolese Rally for Democracy), he says, the people who have finally been dragged to the peace table, believe in a federal arrangement. “But then again,” he adds, “do we have the kind of political culture that could make federalism work? I don’t think so. I think, rather, that we have a kind of culture of fatalism, of demonising others rather than co-operating, that destroys a large part of our will to survive.”
And so the wars go on.