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Since the Middle Ages, Europeans had studied Africa through the lens of the Bible, trying to find divine design in nature and human society.
how Noah’s sons peopled the earth after the flood, the text tells the story of when Noah, drunk from wine, falls asleep naked. His sons Shem and Japheth avert their eyes and cover him, but their brother, Ham, stares at his naked body. When he awakes, Noah is furious at Ham and condemns Ham’s son, Canaan, to slavery: “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
When the new Rwandan government demanded that Kinshasa hand over the state assets that Habyarimana’s government had fled with, Mobutu gave them a few containers of rusty ammunition, two unusable helicopters, and heavy artillery in equally irreparable condition.
The U.S. Congress had, in the wake of their botched deployment in Somalia in 1993, enacted legislation that forbid U.S. troops to be placed under UN command.
Black hawk down
Leading members of the French government saw conflict in the Great Lakes20 as pitting their sphere of influence against an Anglo-Saxon one. Hadn’t the RPF, an English-speaking rebel movement, taken power in Kigali from a French ally, Juvénal Habyarimana, and wasn’t it now trying to overthrow another, Mobutu Sese Seko?
On the radio in the west of the country, on the border with Congo, one could hear the government in exile broadcasting from the refugee camps, claiming to be Rwanda’s legitimate government. For
This was in 1961, when anticipation of independence from Belgium had led to pogroms against the Tutsi community, which had been privileged by the colonial government.
Like many RPF leaders, Kagame grew up as a refugee in Uganda, living in a grass-thatched hut while attending school on a scholarship.
Uganda, hence Anglophone
Ugandan waragi—a strong gin made out of millet—was a favorite. Mixed with Coca Cola, it was dubbed “Kigali Libre” by RPF officers.
In a region where international donors supply on average half of government budgets, and where the legacy of French, U.S., and Russian power politics was apparent, blatant violations of sovereignty had to be planned carefully.
In 1993, Museveni had begun providing military support to Sudanese rebels, known as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, as part of a regional strategy (endorsed by the United States) to destabilize the Sudanese government.
As both Museveni and Kagame had learned in their own insurgencies, the international community was inherently hostile to foreign invasions but turned a blind eye to domestic rebellions that called themselves liberation struggles.
No one imagined that Rwanda, a country ninety times smaller, could seriously challenge Zaire—in terms of size, it would be like Switzerland trying to conquer all of western Europe.1
The rebellion exacerbated the tensions between the communities, as Kabila’s rebels began to prey on the Banyamulenge’s cattle. “It was some sort of bizarre Marxist approach,” Serukiza said, “anyone with cattle was rich and therefore bourgeois and close to Kinshasa. But we were peasants!”
Both countries were former Belgian colonies inhabited by a Hutu majority and a Tutsi minority, but in Burundi the Tutsi elite had held power since independence, while in its neighbor to the north a Hutu government had ruled.
Kabila’s forces snuck into Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research camp in western Tanzania and kidnapped four American and Dutch students. They subjected their captives to lectures on Marxism and Leninism while demanding a ransom of $500,000. This was the last straw for Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, who had been tolerating the rebels out of disdain for Mobutu.
He had affairs with his two live-in Congolese maids, Vumilia and Kessia, who “were promoted” to wives, and squabbles between them and his first wife, Sifa, sparked tensions in the household. In total, Kabila would have at least twenty-four children with six women, creating endless family intrigue and drama, especially after he became president.
According to accounts that filtered out from his commanders, Kabila would resort to a Mobutist subterfuge, regularly sleeping with his commanders’ wives as a display of power and humiliation.10
To Karegeya, who, like most of his RPF colleagues, had by then endorsed the maxims of free-market capitalism, the “old man seemed like a relic of the past.” Kabila didn’t convince Karegeya, but then again, “we weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.”
After several months, they gave up. And yet Karegeya persisted with Kabila. Many Congolese, especially those close to veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, now accuse Rwanda of having deliberately chosen a weak and marginal figure in order to manipulate him.
A prime example of this was Anzuluni Bembe, the vice president of Zaire’s national assembly, who had created a youth militia called, modestly, Group to Support Anzuluni Bembe.
In negotiating bribes, the local official’s main leverage is time.
On the one hand, the Zairian Armed Forces (FAZ) received hundreds of millions of dollars of military assistance from western countries in their effort to make Zaire a bulwark against the socialist states—Angola, the Republic of Congo, and Tanzania—that surrounded
The Belgian authorities never thought to create a strong army; up until the late 1950s, they thought that independence was still decades away and that they would continue to control the state and its security forces. They did not allow Congolese to advance beyond the rank of noncommissioned officers, leaving a thousand white Belgians to make up the officer corps.
Mobutu himself was a sergeant, a trained typist and journalist, at the time of independence. Within two months he was chief of staff of the newly independent Congo’s army.
Mobutu’s son Kongolo, who had the rank of captain but was not part of the official armed forces, set up his own private security company “Eagle Service” that he used to extort money from diamond traders and customs officials.
Mobutu famously declared in a speech to the army, “You have guns; you don’t need a salary.”10 It was another manifestation of his famous “Article 15,” a fictitious clause in an obsolete constitution that called for the population to do anything they needed to do to survive.
a reminder of when truckers could travel from Kisangani to Bukavu in two days. Now it takes two weeks if the truck doesn’t break down.
This is one of the paradoxes of the first war. The population was so tired of Mobutu that they were ready to welcome their liberator on whatever terms. The Hutu refugees hadn’t been welcome in the first place; any massacre was their own business.
Rwandan officials challenged the United Nations’ figure of 1.1 million refugees in the camps before the invasion, arguing that aid estimates err on the high side so that no one is deprived of food or medicine.
This kind of logic would crop up again and again throughout the Congo war: War is ugly, and you can’t build a state on diplomacy alone. If we push too hard for justice, we will only undermine the peace process.
He unsuccessfully tried to reassert his power, even in the intimacy of his bedroom. His legendary sexual appetite had led him to marry three times and maintain dozens of mistresses. Even after several operations on his prostate, he reportedly continued sleeping with his wife and her twin sister, prompting profuse bleeding.8 Moderation, never his strong suit, was not about to grace him in his old age.
Mobutu
Cremation is not practiced in central Africa, and no one seemed to know how to go about it. Do you put him in an oven or on a pyre? Wouldn’t the church disapprove? The body was kept embalmed in the hold of a cargo aircraft at the airport for three days as officials tried to figure out how to organize the ceremony.
Finally, an Indian Hindu priest was found to officiate. Even though Habyarimana had been a devout Catholic, Mobutu told them just to get on with it. On May 15, 1997, Habyarimana’s body went up in flames in Kinshasa, over three years after his death. No one seems to know where his ashes are.
Mobutu had had several homes in the capital; Kabila would content himself with just one. His wife, Sifa, his concubines, and some of his eighteen children were staying elsewhere in town; he didn’t want to mix business and pleasure.
“He was a well-read man with some strange ideas,” one of his ministers told me. “I remember in one cabinet meeting, he asked us out of the blue whether we thought Sartre would have agreed with some policy we were discussing!”
Kabila
Albright had called Kabila, threatening serious consequences if he didn’t allow investigators into the country to find out what had happened with the missing Rwandan refugees. Kabila had hung up on Albright mid-sentence, muttering, “Imperialist!”
The people who surrounded him day and night—his personal assistant, the commander of his bodyguard, his secretary and protocol officer—were all Rwandan or Congolese Tutsi.
Kabila
The Congo was one of the first countries in Africa to have a mobile phone network, as a result of the absence of working landlines.
(The first move in a military putsch is usually to seize the radio and television stations in order to control popular sentiment and encourage desertions.)
In 1998, the odds were stacked differently. The region split down the middle, with Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi on one side and Angola, Namibia, Chad, and Zimbabwe on the other.
Commander David, who had been in charge of President Kabila’s bodyguard, was part of the rebel advance. He had kept an address book with telephone numbers of Kabila’s ministers and advisors. As the rebels advanced, David would make taunting phone calls to Kinshasa.
Rwanda’s decision to cut electricity to the capital sticks in the memory of Kinois to this day. That the rebels would jeopardize the lives of sick hospital patients and hamstring water and fuel supply was the last straw for many and only further justified their violent hatred of the Tutsi.
Exhorting people to take up sticks and spears to defend the city, he declared that, “The people must be completely mobilized and armed to crush the aggressors.”28 His cigar-smoking chief of staff was less subtle. “The rebels are vermin, microbes which must be methodically eradicated,” he said on state radio.
The Congo war spun its leaders like a centrifuge; the more ruthless, politically adept ones managed to stay at the center and reinvent themselves through new business deals or political alliances.
A Congolese friend once described the curse of Congolese politics as “the reverse Midas effect.”“Anything touched by politics in the Congo turns to shit,” he told me.
The privatization of telecommunications in the early 1990s provided the opportunity. Like the rest of the state’s infrastructure, the phone grid had collapsed, prompting investors to experiment with new cellular phone technology that was too expensive for widespread use in the developed world.
Then, in 1999 and 2000, the alliance between Rwanda and Uganda fell apart, as the two countries fought three battles in the streets of Kisangani.
When Museveni came to power in 1986, Kagame became the head of military intelligence. Other Rwandans became defense minister, head of military medical services, and chief of military police. The relationships between Ugandans and Rwandans were deeply personal.
As in much of central and western Africa, Lebanese traders had cornered the diamond trade, taking advantage of transnational family networks that reach from Africa to the Middle East and Belgium.
