Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (12 page)

Sensing that he could not hold on much longer, Sassou boldly sought to get out in front of history by volunteering to become a figurehead transitional president, and hence reinventing himself, however improbably, as the father of Congolese democracy.

Next door, giant Zaire was becoming the spectacle of Africa, steadily disintegrating while Mobutu, a recluse in his village palace in Gbadolité, clung to power. Meanwhile, unnoticed amid the attention lavished on an Eastern Europe that was suddenly casting off its communist dictatorships, Congo-Brazzaville was joining a small club of African nations—initially including Mali and Benin—that, without foreign help or fanfare, were “going democratic,” as largely peaceful civic movements brought down longstanding dictatorships.

Congo’s brief democratic experiment and its collapse turned out to be deeply influential, not least in once-mighty Zaire. Looking back now, the obvious lesson to be learned from this—whether or not it has been grasped—is that in Africa, both big advances and huge disasters often begin in small countries. Congo’s democratic honeymoon ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. As would prove the case in country after country in Africa in the 1990s, the experience was derailed by regional, and then, even more narrowly, by ethnic and then, finally, by tribal efforts to monopolize power, accompanied by bloodshed and warlordism. Without sturdy institutions, and with little experience in the rule of law—problems whose roots go back to colonial rule— politics was reduced to a game of ethnic brokerage.

Here and there, fledgling democracies quickly assumed a sectarian hue, as, for example, when predominantly Christian southerners united against northern Muslims in Ivory Coast, or when Muslim majorities in northern Nigeria interpreted majority rule to mean that they were justified in imposing strict Sharia Islamic law in the states they controlled. In Congo-Brazzaville, officers from the sparsely populated north had dominated during the oil boom years, and when the Sovereign National Conference chased Sassou from power, southerners rejoiced, uniting briefly around a simple but potent theme commonly heard all over an ethnically splintered continent: It’s our turn.

“After the disaster of one-party rule we had the tragedy of democracy, and it has lasted so far for three years,” said Emmanuel Dongala, a Congolese novelist I went to see to talk about Sony Labou Tansi and about the state of his country. “We went straight from dictatorship to multiparty politics without any transition. The attitude was, Aghh, the old regime has fallen and the northerners are gone. Now it is our turn to hoard all of the money, to have the most beautiful women and to drive the fanciest cars. The rude awakening that we had here was to learn that in Africa political parties are still composed on the basis of the lowest common denominator, and for the Congolese, that still means the ethnic group.”

With Congo producing an alphabet soup of political parties, each pretty much organized along ethnic lines—and sometimes consisting of nothing more than a clan leader and his extended family—the handwriting of this country’s demise was written on the wall for all to see. Pascal Lissouba, a southerner, a thick-spectacled Marxist with a background in plant genetics, won election as president. Sassou complained that his supporters had not been given enough jobs and refused to participate in any multiparty “unity government.” The former president then made common cause with Kolelas, making Lissouba’s party the minority in government and setting the stage for the first battle for Brazzaville in 1993.

Almost no one outside of Central Africa, except perhaps France, paid any heed to the urban warfare in Brazzaville, which pitted the president’s militiamen against Kolelas’s private army, but the fighting showed as much resourcefulness in its disregard for human life as any war in recent memory. For weeks, rival gangs composed of soldiers and neighborhood toughs pounded one another and residents of the city with anti-aircraft guns and heavy artillery aimed at one another’s neighborhoods.

“It all began when the Aubervillois led a charge into the Bakongo neighborhood, bashing and banging for a day and a half with heavy-caliber field guns that didn’t have any business being used in a city,” a foreign diplomat told me, in a reference to Lissouba’s militia. “Kolelas’s people, the Lari, responded by cutting off the railroad lines that came in from the coast, and then going after Lissouba’s people with equal viciousness in the streets of Brazzaville. The fighting didn’t end until pretty much everybody in Brazzaville had lost an uncle or a brother or a nephew. This had always been a country where people from different groups intermarried, and it was an amazing thing to watch the hatreds boil over. You have to wonder now if it can ever be put back in the bottle.”

Kolelas had a different explanation for why the fighting stopped. And in his reasoning, in retrospect at least, one could also see the seeds for the coming conflagration, which would pit the two southern leaders against Sassou. “By the end of three months of this kind of killing we had cases where people would capture their enemies’ babies and beat them to a pulp with a wooden mortar for revenge,” he said. “Finally, I believed there had been some sort of divine intervention when I started hearing people say, ‘We are all blood brothers, descendants of the same Kongo kingdom. Why should we massacre each other if all we are doing is giving the northerners a chance to take over again?’ ”

No one was predicting it at the time of my visit, but a new and far more destructive war, fought precisely along these battle lines, was to arrive on the heels of Mobutu’s downfall in 1997. It was much more intense than the cakewalk campaign that would topple Mobutu and bring Laurent Kabila to power, and it may have killed more innocent people, but this was the near-invisible little Congo, and its suffering, like its progress, would go unnoticed.

For reasons I could still not fathom, Tansi had inserted himself in the middle of this venomous equation, first running for parliament in the 1993 elections, and then boycotting the institution altogether, along with the rest of Kolelas’s supporters. The stories of his final, declining months were as dispiriting as anything I had heard about this country. Congo’s greatest writer, a man whose brave satirical fiction had subverted dictatorships throughout the region, had taken up the tribalist Bakongo cause of Kolelas’s most hate-filled supporters with a virulence that he married to his gift for the verb. John Updike, writing about Tansi in
The New Yorker,
said that his late works were haunted by a “personal dying.” Updike quoted a passage from Tansi’s last novel, the surrealistic
The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez:
“In this country, night has the appearance of divinity. It smells like infinity. Day here will never be more than a pathetic hole of blue, sickly light.” The words capture beautifully Tansi’s almost fanatical disgust with the Central African condition, but give little hint of his own growing political folly.

Tansi’s concerns were never with the cookie-cutter countries bequeathed by Europe’s arbitrary partition and colonial subjugation of the continent. Subtly underpinning all of his art, but always at the forefront of his increasingly rabid politics, was a deeply felt nationalism. It harkened back to what was for many African intellectuals a myth-infused antediluvian past, before the time, that is, when Europe’s imperial mapmakers and colonizing armies destroyed Africa’s nascent states.

There was tragic irony in Tansi’s rage for redemption. Europe had undoubtedly wreaked untold destruction by shoehorning Africans of different languages and cultures together inside arbitrarily drawn boundaries at the end of the nineteenth century, by halfheartedly imposing its models of governance and economics on the continent for a few short decades in the twentieth century. Then, by washing its hands of Africa and walking away long before the mold had set, it vastly compromised matters even further.

Though born of the indignities of domination by Westerners, Tansi’s passions were nonetheless based on a narrow, ethnically driven sense of identity. Everywhere one looked in Africa, runaway ethnicity in politics had the same impact: blinding carnage and chaos. Surely this was not the germ of African renaissance. An ideology like Tansi’s struck me rather more like a stick of dynamite thrown into a crowded marketplace—a recipe for death and destruction.

While dying of AIDS, a disease he refused to so much as acknowledge, Tansi was experiencing a delirious streak of energy, which he unleashed on foes both old and new. Among them were the other ethnic groups, whose history he felt was nothing but backwardness compared to that of the descendants of the grand old Kongo kingdom. There was France, which had thrown Congo’s disparate peoples together in the same doomed formula for state creation seen all over Africa, and had been despoiling his country ever since. And finally, there was the vanity, nihilism and greed of Africa’s modern leaders, whom he condemned mercilessly, harkening back all the time to a putatively purer Africa, the Africa of his ancestors, who enjoyed order and light before the golden bough of their culture had been defiled by wave after wave of European slavers, explorers, missionaries and colonists.

From the stories I was hearing secondhand, Tansi had worn out his welcome in Paris, where until recently he had been undergoing treatment for AIDS at the expense of both French and African friends. He had been sighted briefly in Brazzaville, together with his wife, and then they had disappeared again. Although Robert and I had heard all kinds of tales about him—that he was already dead, that he was in Zaire— most of the accounts seemed to converge around the idea that he had gone deep into the bush to undergo what French-speaking Africans call
traitement à l’indigénat,
or traditional cures. The village that was named most often in this context, the one that was cited with the most conviction, was a tiny place named Kibossi, located on the banks of a medium-sized tributary of the Congo River.

Because of the infrequent air connections out of Brazzaville, we knew when we set out that Sunday morning that we had only one day to find Tansi. Everyone had told us we would require a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and although I wondered if I was setting myself up for a rip-off, I submitted to the idea and negotiated the least ruinous fee I could with the only rental-car agency that was open for business on that sleepy Brazzaville Sunday.

The driver, André, collected us at our hotel, and we hit the road immediately, leaving Brazzaville’s sandy streets behind us. Within a few minutes, following the banks of the river, we passed the looted and destroyed compound of the World Health Organization, where I had done my stints as a translator, and finally hit the winding, pitted two-lane road that after twenty years of booming oil exports was still the closest thing Congo had to a national highway.

I had been talked into the necessity of a true off-road vehicle, a huge and heavy Toyota Land Cruiser, and not one of the recreational vehicles that serve as oversized cars for suburban adventurers back home. But droopy-eyed André, skinny, almost dainty in his fancy shirt, designer sunglasses and gold chains, looked like anything but the type of guide one would want to have deep in the bush. What is worse, he had brought his sportily dressed girlfriend along for the ride, seating her far in the back. There was a strong hint of pique from both of them over the fact that André’s French boss had made him work on a Sunday because of a couple of Americans with a peculiar request.

The trip started out badly between us. During the first hour I repeatedly had to ask André to turn down the music. And though he grudgingly did so each time, he gradually turned it back up, until the bass pounded so heavily that it masked even the noise that the brutal banging from the steadily deteriorating road was delivering to the car, and to us. The songs were heavily rocking Congolese rumbas, with fantastic, bouncing guitar runs, and lilting vocals by a roly-poly singer whose name I soon learned was Madilu System. In the popular manner of many Congolese singers, Madilu seemed to weave the names of every person he knew into his lyrics, laughing deeply as he pronounced words like “enigma” and “paradox” in his booming tenor.

Like an endless loop the same tape would play over and over throughout the day, producing the same scratchy attempts by André and his girlfriend to match the singer’s trills. But however much it had grated on me at first, I was gradually won over. Indeed, in time, I was playing the guitar parts in my head, tapping my feet and occasionally even puzzling over what the enigma was.

The ride was giving me my second lesson in the geography of this region in as many weeks. Although we never strayed far from the banks of the Congo or one of its many tributaries, climbing the grassy hills and then plunging into incredibly lush bamboo-filled valleys, I realized that I was seeing more of what I had been admiring from the air on the flight to Kikwit. Africa is extraordinarily empty. The Sahara and Kalahari Deserts, each huge, have climates far too dry to support more than a few wandering nomads. The forbidding Sahara alone, which is scarcely smaller than the United States, is a little less than one third of the continent’s total area. At the opposite extreme of the continent’s ecological spectrum, the Central African rain forest, a biosphere of over 500,000 square miles, is a world of water and vegetation so dense that one could fly overhead for hours and never see the ground.

However lush it may appear, though, for humans life in the forest is almost as rude as it is in the desert, which is why only small numbers of pygmies eke out a life there. We drove atop one of those grassy plateaus that had so hypnotized me from the air, and dipped into the well-watered valley that led to Kibossi. Everywhere, I was stunned to remark that apart from the road we had turned off onto—a loamy track that seemed at times as if it would swallow the car like quicksand— there was no sign of man’s hand anywhere.

The Congo River had excavated the soil from the bowels of the continent all along its immense arc through southern, then eastern and finally Central Africa, and then deposited it here like molehills of compost. This was earth of an almost impossible richness, and yet for miles at a time there was not a soul in sight. Tropical pestilences had plagued Africa from the beginning of time, and this primordial curse had meant that much of its best land remained underpopulated, almost uninhabitable. Western science has never given these problems its best shot, far from it, and technology has been failing miserably in the face of menaces as commonplace as the mosquito and the tsetse fly.