Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (33 page)

To top it off, the government was broke. When Kabila’s forces arrived in Kinshasa, one of their first stops naturally had been the Central Bank. The future vice governor of the bank had the honor of opening the vaults, only to find the huge cement chambers empty. A lonely fifty French franc note was left in one of the drawers, “as an insult.”
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In the ministries, most of the files had been burned or stolen, along with phones, fax machines, air conditioners, paper clips, and door handles.

Kabila, who spoke broken Lingala—the language of the capital—and knew almost no one in town, was daunted by Kinshasa. He slipped into the city under cover of night on May 20, depriving residents of a first glimpse of their new ruler. A silent motorcade rushed him to the
palais du marbre
, a marble palace ensconced in the leafy Ngaliema neighborhood. 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 didn’t change his style or his personal habits. He continued to wear sandals and his drab, monochrome safari suits. His closet was full of identical suits in army green, navy blue, and brown, prompting his friends to joke that his tailor had an easy job. His diet remained inspired by his days in the bush: large quantities of venison,
ugali—
the thick maize meal preferred by Katangans—and simple vegetables stewed in palm oil. Sometimes he ordered Chinese and Indian food, or he would go to the kitchen and ask his cooks to make him whatever they were eating themselves; he had kept a taste for manioc, squash, and potato leaves. Contrary to rumor, he didn’t drink alcohol—he had high blood pressure and was diabetic—but consumed large quantities of strong, milky tea.
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His daily schedule also remained largely unchanged. He had problems sleeping—according to some because of his weight—and would wake before dawn and listen to the BBC Swahili and English broadcasts on shortwave radio on his balcony. He had a habit of waking up his advisors in the middle of the night to continue a discussion they had had the previous day. “I had to sleep with my phone next to the bed,” Didier Mumengi, his information minister and protégé, told me. “He would call us at all hours and continue conversations where we had left off days previously.” During these phone calls and everywhere else he went, Mzee—the respectful Swahili term for elder—carried a small, pocketsized notebook in which he would jot notes incessantly.

In the few hours of leisure time Kabila allowed himself at the end of the day, he read history books. He was intrigued by the Russian and French revolutions, as well as by the New Deal—he thought he could draw on these historical lessons to transform the Congo. Biographies of de Gaulle, Mao, and Napoleon lined his study. On occasion, some ministers would stay on after a meeting and debate philosophy. “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!”
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The image his former advisors paint of the new president is one of a man inflated by his new power but also confused and stifled by loneliness. Several times, he scared his bodyguards by disappearing from his presidential compound at night and driving his car into town, where he would drive around alone, trying to catch the city—which he barely knew—off guard. His soldiers would scramble into pickup trucks and chase after him, only to see their president get out of his car and order them to get back to his palace. A former minister remembered being asked to supervise a dredging project on one of the city’s canals. “A few days after we began work, Mzee showed up at night, all alone in a battered Mercedes, to see how work was progressing. He gave us all a fright. Not that I was there to see him—it was 1 o’clock in the morning!”
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On May 29, twelve days after the rebels seized Kinshasa, the country got its first good look at its leader. Laurent Kabila was sworn into office, the nation’s first new president in thirty-two years. The ceremony took place in front of 40,000 people in the Kamanyola stadium. The mood was festive. The war was over, Mobutu was finally gone, and a new chapter of Congolese history was beginning. In the baking midday sun, the Supreme Court’s twenty-two justices stood up in thick red robes lined with leopard skin to swear in the head of state. Behind them on the podium sat the people who had made this moment possible: the presidents of Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, and Zambia. One by one, they filed passed the podium and embraced Kabila.

The celebration was momentarily interrupted by a group of around five hundred opposition activists in the crowd who chanted: “Where is Tshisekedi?” referring to the indefatigable opposition leader many wanted to have a role in the new government. They were soon drowned out by the marching band and Kabila supporters who answered with “Go to Togo!”—the small western African country where Mobutu had first fled after leaving Kinshasa.

The incident was a reminder that the new government was not a child of the democracy movement, that it had taken power by force. In the week before Kabila’s speech, state television had broadcast several decrees that gave an idea about the orientation of the new leaders. The first, signed on May 17, announced that all activities of political parties would be suspended until further notice. The next, signed a day before the inauguration, declared that the president would rule by decree until a constitutive assembly adopted a new constitution. Kabila was granted plenipotentiary powers: He would legislate as well as name judges and all high-ranking administrative and military officials. To the opposition, it was a page out of Mobutu’s playbook.

Many were willing to cut the new leaders some slack. After all, there were over three hundred political parties in Kinshasa when Kabila arrived, many of them so-called
partis alimentaires
, political guppies whose sole function was to “be fed” by the Mobutist system. There was little culture of democratic debate, and the one-party elections under Mobutu had hinged on cults of personality, ethnic politics, and the corruption of key opinion makers. An immediate opening to multiparty democracy and elections in this context could have led to a rebound by the Mobutists. Even Nelson Mandela, the dean of African democracy, deemed it “suicidal” for Kabila to allow free party activities before he had a firm grip on the government.
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A group of visiting U.S. congresspeople accepted Kabila’s measures, saying that the country needed stability first, even if it meant suppressing political protests in the short term.
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Kabila himself addressed these matters with typical flair during his inauguration speech: “You see, that’s very nice all that. However, these gentlemen [who demand elections] were co-responsible for the misdeeds of the dictatorship in this country. During three decades they never organized elections, nor did they care for human rights. They now want for the AFDL to organize in haste and without delay elections, as if democracy was not something that belongs to our people but only to them.”
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Kabila promised that these measures would be temporary and that after a transitional period of two years, political parties would be able to operate again and elections would be held. In the meantime, he named a constitutional commission—all close allies and members of the AFDL—to draft a new constitution.

Kabila’s honeymoon was brief. When the ban on political activity was challenged by the vibrant local elite, Kabila lashed out.

On November 25, Arthur Zahidi Ngoma, a former UNESCO official who had recently entered Congolese politics, tried to hold a press conference at his residence. A special police unit broke into the house, filled the air with tear gas and bullets, and arrested everyone present, including several journalists. Around twenty people were taken to police headquarters, made to lie down on the cement floor, kicked in the stomach, neck, and head, and then beaten severely with sticks. Zahidi himself was awarded fifty-one lashes, one for each year of his age.
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Dozens of other politicians who defied the ban on party activities were rounded up and given similar treatment. The most illustrious was Etienne Tshisekedi. When Kabila first arrived in Kinshasa, Tshisekedi reached out, saying that he wanted to work with the new leadership. However, Tshisekedi quickly withdrew to a typically hardheaded position, demanding that the government be dissolved and that he be appointed prime minister, a position that had been given to him by the National Sovereign Conference in 1992. Kabila threw Tshisekedi into prison several times, but he proved impossible to shut up. Finally, in February 1997, Kabila lost his patience and had him deported to his remote home village of Kabeya-Kamwanga “with a tractor and some soy seeds so he can put his leadership skills to the service of our agricultural sector.”
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For human rights organizations, which had spent the previous decade taking Mobutu to task for his repressive regime, there was little respite. Within the first few months of Kabila’s regime, at least twelve human rights advocates from across the country were arrested and interrogated for criticizing the government or inquiring into the detention of Mobutists; many were beaten. Nongovernmental organizations had flourished in some parts of the country during the latter years of Mobutu’s dictatorship, offering a much needed counterbalance to the heavy-handed state. When they began to criticize Kabila’s government, some of their leaders were arrested and told they had overstepped their limits. In the eastern gold-mining town of Kamituga, three members of a human rights group were detained after they published reports accusing the local prosecutor of corruption. They were subjected to daily beatings of a hundred to two hundred lashes until they accepted the supreme authority of the government.
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