South Africans are flocking to see Thierry Michel’s documentary on General Mobutu Sese Seko, writes John Matshikiza
Since it opened at Johannesburg’s Cinema Nouveau complex in Rosebank on October 29, Thierry Michel’s film Mobutu: King of Zaire has been playing to capacity audiences. The film was moved to a larger projection room, but there are still not enough seats to satisfy demand.
This is the first showing of this basically francophone documentary in an anglophone country. One can understand the passion the film has unleashed in Ouagadougou, Paris and Brussels. After all, General Mobutu Sese Seko, unelected leader of the Congo/Zaire for almost 32 years, was an integral part of the Byzantine political life of the post-colonial francophone world, bound up in the global machinations of Charles de Gaulle, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Francois Mitterrand and the king of the Belgians, among others.
The kind of persona Mobutu created for himself could only have sprung from the volatile mix of African mythology, colonial bitterness and a loose assimilation into the pomp and pageant of French history: from the Sun King to the bloody revolutionaries of 1789 to the populist militarist Napoleon Bonaparte and onwards. Being born within the dull confines of a British colony would have killed off any sense of extravagant drama in the formation of Mobutu’s personality.
So why this fascination in anglophone South Africa? It might be partly due to Mobutu’s ability to cross into the international consciousness during his lifetime – becoming one of George Bush’s “best friends”, crossing the globe to touch flesh with world leaders as diverse as Mao Zedong and Pope John Paul II, and hosting the great and the ghastly at home in Zaire, the private empire he had extended from the legacy of the terrible king Leopold.
But one fears that this fascination with Mobutu might also stem from a darker part of the human mind.
Mobutu unashamedly represented, in his own words, the “Bantu” personality – a personality he described as being unfettered by the niceties of concepts such as “democracy” and “human rights”. He was the European nightmare come true, and the ex- colonial and neo-colonial powers loved him for it. And because they kept him in power, he loved them back. Mobutu was a disastrous affirmation of the innately diabolical nature attributed to the African soul. As such, he received the broadly unquestioning support of the Western world.
Although Michel’s film is a documentary, assembled largely from previously unseen archive footage interspersed with interviews with some of the survivors of Mobutu’s inner circle, it makes great dramatic cinema. Michel describes it as a tragedy played out in comic format. Like Macbeth, the tragedy moves forward with relentless power, showing the central character’s progress from almost innocent beginnings to his inevitable doom, wading through rivers of blood as he goes. The rare moments of light relief are provided by bit-players in bizarre costumes, dancing to Mobutu’s terrible tune.
Like Macbeth, Mobutu justifies his actions with his own isolated logic, and reaches the point where the hatred one feels for him is unavoidably tempered by the pitiful sight of a man of power disintegrating, both physically and mentally: “I am in blood stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er,” as Shakespeare’s Scottish thane put it.
If my instinct is right that Mobutu’s life is compulsive viewing for those who continue to look for evidence to counter the idea of a possible African renaissance, what was the film-maker’s intention in making the film in the first place?
Michel makes no bones about the fact that he is a journalist, not a dramatist. It was while he was covering one of many factional flare-ups in Zaire in 1991 that he fell under the spell of the omnipotent Mobutu – experiencing two days in jail before being thrown out of the country for his pains. It’s hard to get the world of Mobutu out of your system after an experience like that. So he kept his ear close to the story, and after the dictator’s demise, began to hunt for material to tell the tale as it really was. Mobutu, after all, was something of an enigma, and managed to keep his true nature aloof from thorough scrutiny, both by the manipulation of his internal terror apparatus, and through the compliance of his Western protectors.
Thus the true story emerges for the first time in this film. And, even for those of us who think we have closely followed and understood the Mobutu story since the mid- 1960s, the new information that emerges through the film is quite shattering.
Only film (or great acting) can capture the development of such an opportunistic personality in this way, growing rapidly from the shy student in Brussels to the single-minded figure we came to know and loathe.
Mobutu was the son of a cook, a young man with few prospects and such a rebellious streak that his family sent him to the army to get a dose of discipline. He was never officially inducted to the fighting ranks, serving rather as a clerk (although this didn’t stop him from playing a game of soldiers for the rest of his life). With the typing skills he gained, he made the move into journalism, and it was as a journalist, sent on a course to the colonial capital of Brussels, that his first opportunity fell at his feet.
At that time, in the early Sixties, Patrice Lumumba, the undisputed leader of the Congolese independence movement, was in the final stages of negotiating the terms of the transfer of power with the Belgian government. Lumumba’s eye fell on the bright, young journalist and appointed him his private secretary. But Mobutu had been spotted by others, too. The CIA and other Western intelligence operatives made mental notes of this ambitious character, seeing in him a potential alternative to the radical and principled Lumumba. The rest is history.
The trusting Lumumba returned to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in preparation for independence, his young lieutenant in tow. Within months of the Belgian withdrawal and Lumumba’s elevation to prime minister, the signal came from the highest levels of power in Washington DC. Mobutu, now installed as head of Lumumba’s army, effected his erstwhile mentor’s arrest, brutal torture and even more brutal assassination, and took full power. The Congo has never recovered.
Mobutu: King of Zaire works as that rarity, a documentary film that is able to fill the larger-than-life environment of a movie theatre, because its central character is himself larger than life, a true protagonist in a dramatic tragedy. Michel describes his subject as “a consummate actor … a natural Machiavellian manipulator who [like Richard III] was able to arrive at the pinnacle of power through a combination of violence and seduction, a fearless litany of false promises”.
I would like to think that it is the dramatic power of this film as a universal human tragedy, rather than as a purely subjective and voyeuristic window on an African debacle, that makes it as compelling as any feature film that it plays alongside in the cine-ma malls of the world. It’s certainly worth seeing – if you can get a ticket.