Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (31 page)

His health became a national concern on the street corners in Kinshasa, where people gathered around the newspaper stands and self-made pundits debated the impact of cancer treatment on the sixty-six-year-old. He had been castrated, some said. No, his penis had now swollen to twice its original size, enhancing his notorious sexual prowess.

In reality, the aging autocrat had fallen victim to his own bizarre beliefs. Long an acolyte of traditional healing and magic, he had allowed himself to be treated with natural herbs and tonics until the cancer spread through his body and forced him to seek help abroad.

Finally, on December 17, 1996, his presidential jet arrived at Njili airport. The political uncertainty and fear of a civil war (and probably cash handouts) drove tens of thousands to the airport and the street leading into the city. It was a taste of the good old days: Marching bands played; a phalanx of women danced, their dresses emblazoned with Mobutu’s face; and people waved thousands of tiny Zairian flags. “Father has come! Zaire is saved!” they shouted.

Despite the widespread disdain for Mobutu and his rule, the uncertainty of what the rebels would bring fueled genuine acclamation for the despot’s return. The clergy, the army, and even some opposition figures hailed his return to defend the nation against the “Tutsi conspiracy to create a Hima empire,” as some newspapers put it.
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Mobutu ensconced himself in his residence at the center of the capital’s largest military camp and tried to resuscitate his regime. He fired the head of the army and replaced him with a more competent officer. He arranged for several hundred French mercenaries to come to his aid, along with Serbian and South African soldiers of fortune. His generals met with Rwandan ex-FAR commanders, who were trying to regroup their soldiers who had been dispersed when the refugee camps broke up.

The Old Leopard, however, no longer had the power he used to. Since he had lifted the ban on political parties in 1990, he had slowly been relegated to a more symbolic role in politics. He spent most of his time in his jungle palace in Gbadolite, five hundred miles from the capital, and left the day-to-day running of the country to his prime minister. For years, Mobutu had carefully pitted Zaire’s leading business and political leaders against each other to prevent them from challenging him. In the end, however, Mobutu’s divide-and-rule tactics had left him with a splintered, ineffective shell of a government.

This mess was most apparent in the security forces, where competing militias vied for power and control of economic spoils. A firefight broke out at the Matadi port when a shipment of arms from North Korea came in. Troops loyal to General Nzimbi Ngbale, Mobutu’s presidential guard commander and cousin, and those under General Mahele exchanged gunfire. The former wanted to sell the weapons for profit, while the latter wanted to use them to fight the rebels.

Mobutu’s health began to fail him again. Within a month, he was back in Europe for further treatment. The vicious tongues in the capital began to wag with new rumors of his ill health. When the Central Bank issued yet another new banknote to keep track of rising inflation, it was quickly dubbed “the Prostate.” Just like the president’s gland, it was inflating daily. Just like the illness, these banknotes could seriously damage your health.

When Mobutu returned to Kinshasa the next time, in March 1997, only a fraction of the people turned out to welcome him. They waited in vain at the airport after the airplane arrived and didn’t open its doors. Inside, a sickly Mobutu was struggling to stand up, his muscles having seized up during the ride. Masseuses rubbed his body as his staff shooed away the spectators and press from the airport. Hours later, leaning heavily on the arm of his wife, Mobutu exited the plane and headed home through the deserted streets.

Mobutu liked to watch television. He used to wake early in the morning, around 6 o’clock, to have a massage and watch the news on satellite television. He suffered from insomnia, which had been aggravated by his cancer medication.

The news was not good. Kabila’s conquest of the country had become a media favorite, and dozens of news organizations flocked to the east of the country, streaming live feed of captured towns, with villagers celebrating their “liberation,” around the world. Kabila’s forces had captured Kisangani just days after Mobutu returned to Zaire in March 1997. Television cameras showed people lining the streets as the rebels marched into town, throwing down palm fronds, colorful cloths, and mattresses for them to walk on. In Washington, the White House spokesman announced: “Mobutism is about to become a creature of history.”
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With his back against the wall, Mobutu began thinking about negotiating. He fired his prime minister and handed power over to his long-standing rival, Etienne Tshisekedi, who promptly named a new cabinet, reserving some of the most important ministries for his “brother” Kabila. The Old Leopard sent his national security advisor to South Africa to see whether Kabila was open for negotiations.

Mobutu’s pride, however, still shone through. He said he would meet with the rebel leader—but on his own terms and only if he asked politely. “Politely means, ‘Mr. President of Zaire, my intention is to meet you.’ That’s polite,” Mobutu said in a rare session with the media in April.

Mobutu spent his days in his residence, surrounded by his closest family—his wife, her sister, his son Nzanga, and his grandchildren. He took hot baths in the early morning and evening and drank infusions of lemongrass and ginger. In the evenings, when rainstorms had cleared the thick humidity from the air, he would sit on his balcony, overlooking rapids on the Congo River. Cocker spaniels and a family of peacocks played on the neatly trimmed lawns. Just outside the gates to his property, he could see a sign proclaiming, “Welcome Home, Field Marshall Mobutu.”

The rest of the view was less pleasing. His swimming pool was overflowing and covered with algae, and the military camp was clogged with wrecks of military vehicles, many of which had been cannibalized for spare parts to sell on the black market. In the surrounding military camp, soldiers’ undergarments hung from washing lines; garbage piled up in the ditches.

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.
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Moderation, never his strong suit, was not about to grace him in his old age.

The scenes played out in Kinshasa were both tragic and comic, dramatic and banal. Plump generals in alligator skin shoes held tea parties in their gardens as soldiers set fire to their barracks. Street children in rags and white gloves pretended to guide traffic while army bosses sold tanks for scrap metal on the black market. Kinshasa seemed to have fallen down a rabbit hole.

Then there was Mobutu’s preoccupation with corpses. Two in particular bothered him. One was that of his first wife, Marie-Antoinette, who was buried in a crypt in Gbadolite. He worried endlessly that the rebels, who were within a few weeks’ march of his hometown, would defile her tomb along with those of his sons, buried next to her. On the tenth anniversary of her death, ten years earlier, he had ordered her tomb to be hermetically sealed, but one could never be too sure. He radioed to Gbadolite to ask them to check her tomb, to make sure it could not be opened. His aides traded worried looks. He had long been rumored to be worried about her ghost haunting him. Some suggested that was the reason he had married twins—to protect him from her spirit. With one on each side of him, they would ward her off.

The second corpse had not yet been buried. It was that of Juvénal Habyarimana, the former president of Rwanda, whose body had been recovered after his plane had been shot down on April 6, 1994, over Kigali. The cadaver’s journey is shrouded in mystery, but I have heard people in Bukavu, Gbadolite, and Kinshasa who insist they touched it, saw it, smelled its decomposing mass. Most likely, it was hurried out through Bukavu (my housekeeper there swore that her father, a commander in Mobutu’s army, had kept it in their basement for two nights) and then made its way to Gbadolite, where it was kept embalmed and in cool storage.

Mobutu had been close friends with Habyarimana and was still hosting his widow, Agathe, who spent months in his jungle palace before fleeing to France. Mobutu promised that her husband would receive a hero’s burial in Rwanda, presumably after he chased the RPF from power. When it became clear that this would not be the case, and the RPF was closing on Gbadolite, Mobutu had the body brought to Kinshasa. Fearing that the RPF troops would get their hands on the body, he ordered his friend to be cremated.

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. As Kabila’s rebel army closed in on the capital, the military officer in charge of the body panicked and began calling around for advice. If he abandoned the body, he would be guilty of treason; if the RPF caught him with it, he was surely a dead man. He told a journalist: “If it were up to me, I would have dumped it into the river. But for Mobutu, it is like one of his own children. And even if it is one of his own last acts, he insisted on this being done correctly.”
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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.

At the end of April, Mobutu was visited by a delegation from Washington led by Bill Richardson, President Clinton’s special envoy to the region. The U.S. government was worried about a bloodbath in Kinshasa when the rebels arrived, and wanted to get the autocrat to step down. They discovered a hobbled man who needed help to stand and sit. He seemed divorced from reality; they informed him that his army’s last stand at Kenge, 125 miles to the west of the capital, had failed. Richardson handed him a letter from Clinton asking that he step down with honor and dignity. The ambassador recalled: “He was being told: ‘You’ll be dragged through the streets. These things could happen to you and we are not going to stop them.’”
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Mobutu felt betrayed. The United States had supported him since the 1950s; he had visited the White House numerous times and met Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. He wrote a letter to French president Jacques Chirac: “Today, the US and Great Britain through their proxies South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda and Angola are using the ringleader Laurent Kabila to stab me in the back, taking advantage of my illness.”
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Despite his fury, Mobutu was left with little choice. His ministers were beginning to hire boats to take their furniture and suitcases across the river to the neighboring Republic of Congo. His phone calls were beginning to go unanswered.

He agreed to meet with Kabila on May 4, 1997. The meeting place itself was the subject of long negotiations. Kabila refused to meet in Gabon or the Republic of Congo, fearing a French-backed assassination plot in its former colonies. Mobutu could not travel to South Africa because of his health. Finally, both parties agreed on a meeting on the South African navy ship
Outenika
, anchored just off the coast. South African president Nelson Mandela would mediate. Since Mobutu was unable to walk the thirty-one steps onto the boat, the hosts had to cobble together a plank strong enough for Mobutu’s limousine to be driven on board.