Life And Death In The Congo

In May 1997, as rebel forces approached Kinshasa -- the capital city of the vast African country then known as Zaire -- Mobutu Sese Seko fled the city to his palace in the north. Near the airport, a surface-to-air missile sat mounted on a jeep, waiting to shoot down the plane carrying the brutal dictator of 32 years. Just such a missile had killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in April 1994, touching off a chain of events that eventually included invasion, civil war, genocide, and massive refugee flows into Zaire, all of which helped lead to Mobutu's downfall.

This time the plot failed. The missile was there on the orders of Mobutu's own cousin, a Zairian general named Nzimbi Ngbale. But Mobutu had been tipped off in advance, and his plane circled away from the waiting jeep on takeoff.

The dictator made it to his lavish palace in Gbadolite unharmed. But members of the Mobutu clan quickly realized that even this redoubt was no longer safe, and the aging and cancer-ridden strongman was soon hustled out of the country on a Russian cargo plane borrowed from the Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi. As that plane took off, members of the abandoned presidential guard fired on their fleeing patron, but Mobutu escaped yet again. This time, however, the end was near. After a brief stop in Togo, Zaire's ousted dictator ended up in Rabat, Morocco, where he died of prostate cancer in September of that year.

The story of Mobutu's demise is recounted in In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, written by Michela Wrong, who covered Zaire and Africa for the Financial Times for six years. Having witnessed the last days of this dying regime -- what she calls "a paradigm of all that was wrong with post-colonial Africa" and "a parody of a functioning state" -- Wrong has now produced a gripping, gracefully penned, conscience-wrenching account of Mobutu's tyranny in the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Much of the story has already been told, but rarely with such a combination of powerful anecdote, fine research, mesmerizing reportage, and subtle understanding.

Composed primarily of a series of often chilling vignettes, the book allows readers to feel for themselves the experiences of this haunted country -- the victim of brutal autocrats, including Belgium's King Leopold II, and many years of misguided Western assistance. Wrong may make some mistakes when she doles out individual blame for the Congo's ongoing suffering. But there is plenty of responsibility to go around, and the story she tells remains a compelling one, with lessons for both Africa and the West.

IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Wrong's first vignette is set at Kinshasa's Hotel Intercontinental. During the days after Mobutu's downfall, rebel leaders occupying the building had to go outside to urinate; fleeing members of the old regime had plugged the hotel's toilets by frantically stuffing them with evidence of the perishing autarchy. From there, Wrong moves back in time, presenting the reader with a fine analysis of the actions and obsessions of Leopold II, "the only European king to ever personally own an African colony." This early emphasis on Leopold is deliberate, for Wrong sees Mobutu as the Congo's "second Great Dictator," following in the footsteps of the Belgian king. By this logic, rather than being an aberration or "a monster out of time and place," Mobutu simply represented another step in the Congo's exploitation. Leopold's bloody legacy, reinforced by subsequent Belgian colonial rule, provided fertile ground for the seeds of Mobutu's tyranny.

Wrong fails to appreciate, however, the equally powerful precolonial roots of the Congo's oppression. Long before the Europeans arrived, the country already had a tradition that emphasized personal power and authority, ostentatious displays of wealth, and politics based on patron-client relations maintained through the distribution of resources. The Kingdom of the Kongo, for example, which lasted from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century -- and which Wrong does mention briefly -- ruled using patterns of power similar to Mobutu's, basing its support on tribute collected and distributed by the king, the ManiKongo.

If Wrong pays too little attention to the Congo's precolonial history, however, she does a much better job sketching Mobutu's early life and rise to power, lacing the story with commentary from the American Larry Devlin. The key CIA player in this drama, Devlin cites the British historian Lord Acton's famous maxim about the corrupting influence of absolute power to describe Mobutu in the 1970s. The dictator's kleptocracy came to life through the connivance of the Grosses Legumes (slang for "big shots"), the barons of the political class that Mobutu created, who were the main beneficiaries of what became a brilliantly manipulated patronage system. The essential characteristic of Mobutu's reign was not his much celebrated vulgar ostentation. Rather, it was his adroit use of money as "a method, an instrument, the most effective of techniques" for "maintaining, extending, and preserving his power."

In the early 1990s, however, the Grosses Legumes turned the tables on Mobutu, slowly seizing control of the government from him. Preoccupied solely with extraction and extortion, Zaire's criminal government allowed the rest of the state to simply fade away. As a result, Zaire in the third decade of Mobutu's rule became a country running on depleted power supplies -- or, as its citizens, using an evocative phrase derived from the widespread use of cell phones, call it, a country "on low batt."