John Matshikiza
with the lid off
One of the early successes scored by the Belgian cartoonist Herg was a book-length adventure called Tintin in the Congo. Written in the 1930s, it has Tintin, the morally impeccable, orange-quiffed wonder boy from hell, storming around the then Belgian colony with his smart-alecky talking dog, bashing up scheming witchdoctors and naughty white men with crusading vigour, and generally bringing stability and progress to the dim-witted, fun-loving, but generally irresponsible natives of that jungle country.
Is Tintin in the Congo metaphor, fantasy or reality? If Herg was around today, how would he characterise the place that has become the independent Democratic Republic of Congo? Would it not be much the same as it was then, with the difference being that there are so many more naughty white men around, as well as an ever-growing horde of greedy black men and women, many of whom have turned from witchdoctors into spin-doctors?
The Congo is indeed like a hair-raising cartoon nightmare, one in which they keep on moving the goal posts. Surely even the unflappable Tintin would be stumped by this stage, tearing out that quiff of hair in utter bafflement. Or maybe not.
The DRC now rejoices in a boy-president who is not much older than Tintin. This boy-president came to power by a route that still mystifies anyone who cares to think too deeply about it. But he is nevertheless being regarded, by the leaders of the Free World, key presidents in the Southern African region, and the ever-intriguing politicians of Kinshasa, as the answer to everyone’s dreams of peace, stability and prosperity.
The only ones not dancing in the streets are the Congolese people themselves described by one Congolese psychoanalyst as being “so drowned in misery, on the one hand, and so filled with an insatiable desire for women, beer and music on the other, that they look on with indifference at the charade being played out by those who are busily devouring the Congo”.
The people who understand the workings of power, on the other hand, are taking Joseph Kabila very seriously. He has been welcomed at the Elyse Palace and the White House, has been given the honour, unprecedented for a foreign head of state, of addressing the Zimbabwean Parliament, and has had intimate discussions with the South African president, among others all within three months of “coming to power”.
None of them seems to want to delve too deeply into who he is, what he knows about anything, or who is behind him. And none of them appears to be bothered to ask themselves the key question: “Who are we to do business with a man who has no popular mandate?” It seems that there is too much at stake to bother with details of democratic process in this case unlike in Panama, Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba and a host of other places.
Kabila II came to power after the apparent assassination of his father, Kabila I, who in turn had come to power after finding himself at the head of the parade of invading armies that had rid the Congo of the awesome dictator, Mobutu the 0.
There was no indication that Kabila I had even thought of bequeathing the throne to his son. On the contrary, he was conducting himself in such a way as to give the impression that he was not only invincible but immortal. He had no compunction in dispensing with the Ugandan and Rwandan mentors who had put him in power, plunging the country into a renewed war from which it has still to emerge. He conducted a campaign of private vendetta, revenge and tribal consolidation at home that would have done credit to a Macbeth. And he cocked a snook at any foreign leader who tried to reason with him.
All in all, at the time of his death, there were few left who were much inclined to lament his passing which is why there were so few likely candidates for the brains behind the assassination.
But then, when the shadowy men who had surrounded Kabila I announced the uncontested elevation of Kabila II to the presidency, suspicion started to veer in his direction. Who else, after all, had so blatantly benefited from the elimination of the old man?
There were other murmurs. No one had ever heard of a Mrs Kabila, although it was known that in his years of exile Laurent Desiree had lived it up all over East Africa, leaving a trail of children wherever he laid down his head. Joseph was said to be the son of one of his conquests, a Tutsi woman from Rwanda.
For many Congolese, this was not good news. In spite of the fact that Tutsi armies had liberated the country from the yoke of Mobutu, Kabila I himself had whipped up a new anti-Tutsi frenzy among his people. Some were even muttering that Joseph was not half-Tutsi, he was whole-Tutsi, being the son of Kabila I’s Tutsi girlfriend by an earlier lover.
But these were rumours doing the rounds in the streets. In the corridors of power they held no weight not for the moment, anyway.
I sometimes feel sorry for young Joseph, who might well find himself unceremoniously dumped as soon as his usefulness as a front for whatever is really unfolding in the Congo has expired.
But for the moment the show goes on. Just as we had Eddie Murphy doing a remake of Jerry Lewis’s 1950s hit The Nutty Professor in the 1990s, it seems like here we have a remake of Tintin in the Congo with a black boy-hero, this time, who can do no wrong as he goes around bashing up baddies and fixing the unfixable Congo.