In a country where the war-weary people say they have no idea what is being fought for on their behalf, the one certainty is that the next dictator will be a popular man – after he has gone out of style, writes John Matshikiza
In recently published letters and diary extracts, Che Guevara, the Argentinean-born hero of the Cuban revolution of 1959, talks about his attempts to export Castro-style revolution to the African continent, among other places, in the early 1960s. He describes his disgust at the corruption and licentiousness of the men he was trying to mould into a force of committed and politicised fighters.
Che finally withdrew from Africa, disillusioned about Africans’ potential to liberate themselves, and ultimately died in the jungles of Bolivia, fighting the good fight to the last.
The African country he had been based in for that short spell in 1965 was Congo.
Laurent Kabila was the most notable of that notoriously unreliable bunch of would-be guerrillas.
In the period following the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first elected prime minister, Kabila’s was one of many groups contending for power in the vast sprawl of Congo. Some of those groups were politically inspired, aiming to overthrow the puppet regime of Moise Tshombe. Others, like those spawned by the self-styled prophet Simon Kimbangui, espoused a revivalist African spirituality based on revised interpretations of the Christian Bible. Yet others had vague regional goals, or simply terrorised small communities, with no discernible agenda. The added presence of mercenary armies promoting various international agendas did little to help the seething mess of Congo.
Kabila operated among these groups for some years, and then disappeared from the war arena. His career thereafter was murky, but he later surfaced in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, where all kinds of African liberation movements, big and small, serious and comical, hovered, conspired, settled personal scores and planned their moves. Most of them were concerned with removing the remaining white regimes in the south of the continent. But there were others, like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who were honing their military and political skills to fight against post- colonial tyrannies in their own countries.
Kabila appeared to drop out of liberation politics and became a petty merchant, occupying one of the hundreds of thousands of cupboard-sized hole-in-the-wall dukas in the seething African market place that is Dar es Salaam – “the Hand of Peace”.
He rapidly earned himself a reputation for bad debt and poor business practice.
It was Museveni, now triumphant in his own long walk to freedom, and established as president of Uganda, who rescued Kabila from obscurity.
It was 1994. The Tutsi-dominated Ugandan and Rwandan alliance that was planning to march on Kinshasa to overthrow the despotic regime of Mobutu Sese Seko needed a Congolese face to give it legitimacy. Somehow Kabila’s squat frame insinuated itself into the picture, taking pride of place among the many eager Congolese faces that were signing up to join this united front against the dictator of Kinshasa.
Kabila entered Congo, then still known as Zaire, from the east, hitting the ground running behind the liberating Tutsi forces that were already cutting a swathe through the southern and eastern part of the country.
The fat shopkeeper had left his bad debts behind him, and was already beginning to refer to himself as president of Congo, even as the combined force continued its inexorable progress on foot across the 3 000km that separated them from Kinshasa in the far north-west. In a land without a discernible infrastructure, a legacy of Mobutu’s rule of stagnation, the long march was the only way of achieving their glorious objective.
That was what is now known as the first war of Congo.
“On the 28th October 1994,” says Dr Safari, “the first war for the liberation of the Congo hit our area. They called it a war of liberation for the Congolese people, but the first soldiers who arrived here were not Congolese. They were tall men, Tutsis from Rwanda. Others were light-skinned, with long hair that fell down to the middle of their backs. We believe they were mercenaries from Eritrea or Somalia, working for the Rwandan forces who were bringing Kabila into power. Whoever they were, they began killing people indiscriminately, mostly women and children. There were no military targets around here. It was war against the civilian population.”
Safari is a trained medical doctor who has abandoned formal medicine to establish a co-operative that encourages self-help farming in his home area of Kaziba, where the invaders first made their appearance.
“I fled for my life and took refuge in Bukavu, the regional capital,” he says. “When I returned some days later, I found devastation, bodies lying everywhere. I ran from one house to the other, trying to see if there were any people I could help. In one house, I found a woman who seemed to be kneeling against a wall, as if she was praying. She had a baby strapped to her back. As I stepped nearer, I realised she was dead. She had been shot in the back of the head at point-blank range, execution style. The baby had been killed in the same way.”
One hundred and twenty villagers perished in that first sweep into Kaziba.
The unwelcome army of liberation occupied Kaziba and surrounding villages for some weeks. When they pulled out, they smashed up the school block where they had been billeted, stole whatever livestock they could lay their hands on and headed on into the interior, and the ultimate goal of Kinshasa.
For a while, with Kabila installed as president, peace reigned in Congo. Things started working properly for the first time in many decades. Teachers and civil servants were paid, roads in the towns started to be repaired. It felt as if things were starting to move again, after the long freeze of the ice queen, Mobutu.
With the start of the second war, in August last year, things went back to square one.
“The Congolese people are just tired of war,” says Safari, echoing a common sentiment. “We are prepared to forgive Kabila’s terrible failures of the past, because we feel he really could do something for the country if he’s given the chance to govern. The ordinary people of the Congo are 100% behind him. The RCD [Congolese Rally for Democracy] is just a front for the Tutsis of Rwanda. We see Kabila as a Congolese nationalist. He simply wants to drive all foreign forces out of Congo and let the country grow in peace.”
“Our biggest problem here in South Kivu,” says Colonel Etienne Kasereka Sindani, military commandant of the region that has its capital at Bukavu, “is the mentality of the people. The big thing is ethnic intolerance. Most of the people here (and we are Bantu people, you will note),” he qualifies, with a wry and tired smile, “are opposed to the presence of the Rwandans, the Tutsis, that is, whom they regard as Nilotics from Ethiopia or somewhere, and have come here to exploit our wealth. So there is this problem of ethnic rivalry, based on the turmoil that has been raging for a long time in the whole of the Great Lakes region – wounds that haven’t healed.
“We soldiers are like pawns, like puppets caught between conflicting demands, trying to serve all the people, who have an equal right to protection, as citizens of the area. To be able to achieve that, you need to have some kind of peace. But you can’t build peace on ethnic conflict. You have to get beyond that so that you can move towards peaceful solutions.”
The commandant is short and clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair, usually topped by a snappy combat beret and matching combat fatigues. It is hard to imagine him in parade uniform or civilian clothes. He is a career soldier who has been at this game of war for ever, cutting his military teeth in Mobutu’s army. If the soldiers are tired of this war, what must the civilians be feeling?
“You have to have a strong president to control Congo. Mobutu was a strong president. But who do we have now? The Lusaka accords have been signed, all well and good. But who is the strong leader who is going to run Congo?”
It seems strange that anyone should talk openly and favourably about the late president Mobutu Sese Seko. But he was part of the psychological landscape of Congo for more than three decades, keeping a stifling grip on everything.
In a way he is still around, his grim image staring out of the thousands of faded orange and brown bank notes that remain in circulation. The notes are torn and sticky from being passed through thousands of hands over the years, each note boasting a face value running into hundreds of thousands of nouveau zaires, in reality signifying nothing.
Mobutu is and he isn’t.
Mobutu is almost two dictators ago already. His successor, Kabila, is himself very much on the way out, and is already only a distant memory in Bukavu and eastern Congo. Time in Congo, these days, is measured in dictators, not in decades.
Kabila is also keeping an eye on things from the new bank notes that he introduced while he was still in control of the whole country. The new notes are smaller and crisper, and have a value that is measured only in single and double digits.
It is incredibly complicated to calculate just how much you are handing over in the market place, trying to make up the total in a mixture of notes that bear among them the incompatible faces of Mobutu, Kabila – and George Washington. The market place, with its thousands of women traders sitting flat on the red earth, their varied wares displayed in front of them, is truly a free trade zone, where the dollar is not foreign currency, but rather part of the local dialect. And, of course, part of the local dialectic. The dollar finances the war and yet it is also what makes the world go round. The dollar is simultaneously the symbol of life and of death – the bread and the bullets, guns and butter. It’s a depressingly tired refrain.
Everywhere the people say they are tired of the war, and have no idea what is being fought for on their behalf. In the villages of eastern Congo, hundreds of thousands of internal refugees put intolerable pressure on already scant resources. They no longer know whether the pillaging forces that have driven them from their homes belong to the shadowy interahamwe, the Rwandan army or the RCD. It’s all the same to them. To a large extent, because there is so little communication from whoever is supposed to be liberating them, they suspect some sort of collusion between all of them. “War is just good for making money for certain people,” they say.
>From the verdant beauty of Bukavu, I flew into the volcanic landscape of Goma to the north, the seat of the RCD. From Goma, I flew with some of the RCD people to Kisangani, the city at the heart of the split between different factions of the movement.
Before dawn, the Kimbanguists are chanting their prayers. I’m already lying awake in the hot room, with a senior official of the RCD snoring quietly on the other side of the mercifully wide double bed.
It’s been a harsh night. The RCD’s local protocol people had not bothered to make any arrangements for us to eat or sleep on this mission to Kisangani. They’d simply dropped us at the Kimbanguist Centre, dark and silent as a grave, without water or electricity. “The electricity usually comes on at about 10pm,” someone comments. “There should be water to wash with in the morning.”
With that, the protocol people pile back into their crock, an electric blue Mazda with a large spider web fracture on the driver’s side of the windscreen, as if someone’s head had connected with it at speed on one of these crazy Kisangani roads. They drive off into the night, promising to come and fetch us as soon as they’ve found us some proper accommodation – maybe the Palm Beach Hotel, they boast. We smell, but cannot see, the blue smoke that trails from their exhaust pipe as they rattle out of the compound. All is blackness.
After 90 minutes, even the staunchest among the senior RCD people is beginning to grumble as we sit, staring at the stars. “Frankly,” says one of them, “things are always pretty lousy here in Kisangani. No communications, no transport, lousy protocol. It’s intolerable.”
The senior man who had taken me under his wing in Goma yawns and gets the old man who’d let us in to see if there isn’t a bed somewhere. We follow him into the house and climb over the outstretched feet of invisible soldiers sleeping on the couches in the reception area.
One of the rooms off the corridor is unlocked, and contains the huge double bed. “We’d better make the best of it,” says my mentor. So we crash on either side of the bed, leaving the others to their own devices.
At dawn, I rise and walk barefoot into the courtyard. The soldiers have gone. An old man comes out of the shaded veranda where he has been listening to tapes of religious music. He asks me who I am. When I tell him I am a South African journalist, he bristles and asks why, then, I am not paying attention to anything that is going on in Congo. Why am I not telling the truth to the outside world?
“What is the truth?” I ask him.
“The truth, my dear friend,” he says angrily, “is that I wish with all my heart that Mobutu was still alive. Have you seen what is going on in this country? Every Congolese wants Kabila. Every one of us. These other people of RCD, they are chancers. It’s like a circus. The fact is,” he continues, contradicting himself in his rising anger, “in this region, the only man we support is Wamba dia Wamba. There’s a man. He started the RCD, but when he saw that the only thing the other RCD people understand is fighting, he came to us and said: `People, I am a man of peace. War is bad.’ All he wants is to sign the peace accord with Kabila and let us get on with living our lives again. But these ones, the people from Goma – it’s just a circus.”
Suddenly, having got it all off his chest, he smiles and asks me if I don’t want to join him for prayers in the chapel. I decline politely.
This is the essence of the politics of Congo. I have heard and seen it too many times now to doubt it. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the next dictator will be a very popular man – after he has gone out of style. Nostalgia is the only reliable political principle.
The coldness of the politics of the present is startling.
This war, like the last one, is supposedly being waged on behalf of the Congolese people, buried under decades of black dictatorship, and 80 years of white colonial oppression before that. And yet, as I walk with this group of the RCD’s intellectuals from the Kimbanguist centre where we slept back to the governor’s residence, I notice that none of these high-minded leaders even glances at the people they pass. Old men on rickety wooden chairs outside their huts, young women and men in curtained doorways, old women trying to squeeze a few reluctant centimes out of the roasted cassava roots they sell by the roadside – the people watch the Goma intellectuals passing in their elegant jackets and expensive shoes.
The intellectuals walk with their heads bowed in deep meditation on the state of Congo, looking neither left nor right.
The impoverished peasants of Kisangani stand aside and note everything about them, particularly the fact that these black intellectuals proceed down the dusty road with the same aloofness that the petty administrators from Belgium used to display in colonial days.
“All they understand is war,” the old Kimbanguist had said to me. “What do they know about the Congolese people? What do they care about Congo?”