Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

by Jason K. Stearns

They launched their challenge early in the morning. Thousands of young soldiers clambered up the steep slopes toward the fortifications above. There was little brush for cover; this was cattle country, and all the trees had been chopped down for pasture. “It was a massacre,” Colonel Gateretse remembered. Kabila’s army “sat at the top with their heavy machine guns and just mowed the kids down. You would hear the mortars thunder, the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns and screams as our boys fell.” One by one, the walkie-talkies of their officers trying to scale the hill went dead. After two days and hundreds of casualties, the Rwandans and Burundians sat together to rethink. They decided to send a light, mobile battalion around Kabila’s position to attack from the rear, while the bulk of the troops continued their frontal offensive to distract their adversaries. The flanking maneuver, however, was risky, as the terrain was difficult and the Congolese had patrols throughout the surrounding areas. The soldiers would have to cover forty miles by foot in one night to catch them by surprise, a tough feat even by their standards. They forced some unlucky locals at gunpoint to serve as guides for them and set out at nightfall at a light trot with little equipment other than their AK-47s, several clips of ammunition, and a few rocket-propelled grenade launchers. It worked. After a morning of catfights up the mountain, incurring even more casualties, suddenly the machine guns at the to...