The Writer and the World (35 page)

These—the cap and the stick—are the emblems of his African chieftaincy. Only the chief can kill the leopard. The stick is carved with symbolic figures: two birds, what looks like a snake, a human figure with a distended belly. No Zairois I met could explain the symbolism. One teacher pretended not to know what was carved, and said, “We would all like to have sticks like that.” In some local carving, though, the belly of the human figure is distended because it contains the fetish. The stick is accepted by Zairois as the stick of the chief. While the chief holds the stick off the ground the people around him can speak; when the chief sets his stick on the ground the people fall silent and the chief gives his decision.

Explaining the constitution and the president’s almost unlimited powers,
Profils du Zaire
, the new official handbook (of variable price: four zaires, eight dollars, the pavement seller’s “first” price, two zaires his “last” price),
Profils du Zaire
quotes Montesquieu on the functions of the state.
Elima
, the official daily, has another, African view of government. “In Zaire we have inherited from our ancestors a profound respect for the liberties of others. This is why our ancestors were so given to conciliation, people accustomed to the palaver
[la palabre]
, accustomed, that is, to discussions that established each man in his rights.”

So Montesquieu and the ancestors are made to meet. And ancestral ways turn out to be advanced. It is only a matter of finding the right words. The palaver is, after all, a “dialogue”; chief’s rule is government by dialogue. But when the chief speaks, when the chief sets his carved stick on the ground, the modern dialogue stops; and Africa of the ancestors takes over. The chief’s words, as
Elima
(having it all ways) has sometimes to remind “anti-revolutionary” elements, cannot be questioned.

It is said that the last five words of Mobutu’s African name are a reference to the sexual virility which the African chief must possess: he is the cock that leaves no hen alone. But the words may only be symbolic. Because, as chief, Mobutu is “married” to his people—“The Marriage of Sese [Mobutu]” is a “revolutionary” song—and, as in the good old days of the ancestors,
comme au bon vieux temps de nos ancêtres
, the chief always holds fast to his people. This marriage of the chief can be explained in another, more legalistic way: the chief has a “contract” with
his people. He fulfils his contract through the apparatus of a modern state, but the ministers and commissioners are only the chief’s “collaborators,” “the umbilical cord between the power and the people.”

The chief, the lord wedded to his people,
le pouvoir:
the attributes begin to multiply. Mobutu is also the Guide of the Authentic Zairois Revolution, the Father of the Nation, the President-Founder of the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, the country’s only political party. So that, in nomenclature as in the stylish national dress he has devised, he combines old Africa with what is progressive and new. Just as a Guy Dormeuil suit (160 zaires in the Kinshasa shops, 320 dollars) can, with cravat and matching handkerchief, become an authentic Zairois national costume, so a number of imported glamorous ideas bolster Mobutu’s African chieftaincy.

He is citizen, chief, king, revolutionary; he is an African freedom fighter; he is supported by the spirits of the ancestors; like Mao, he has published a book of thoughts (Mobutu’s book is green). He has occupied every ideological position and the basis of his kingship cannot be questioned. He rules; he is grand; and, like a medieval king, he is at once loved and feared. He controls the armed forces; they are his creation; in Kinshasa he still sleeps in an army camp. Like Leopold II of the Belgians, in the time of the Congo Free State—much of whose despotic legislation (ownership of the mines in 1888, all vacant lands in 1890, the fruits of the earth in 1891) has passed down through the Belgian colonial administration to the present regime, and is now presented as a kind of ancestral African socialism—like Leopold II, Mobutu owns Zaire.

MUHAMMAD ALI
fought George Foreman in Kinshasa last November. Ali won; but the victor, in Zaire, was Mobutu. A big hoarding outside the stadium still says, in English below the French: “A fight between two Blacks
[deux noirs]
, in a Black Nation
[un pays de Nègres]
organized by blacks and seen by the whole [world] that is a victory of Mobutism.” And whatever pleasure people had taken in that event, and the publicity, had been dissipated by mid-January, when I arrived. I had chosen a bad time. Mobutu, chieflike, had sprung another of his surprises. A fortnight before, after a two-day palaver with his collaborators, Mobutu had decided on a “radicalization of the revolution.” And everybody was nervous.

In November 1973 Mobutu had nationalized all businesses and plantations belonging to foreigners—mainly Greeks, Portuguese and Indians—and had given them to Zairois. Now, a year later, he had decided to take back these enterprises, many of them pillaged and bankrupt, and entrust them to the state. What, or who, was the state? No one quite knew. New people, more loyal people? Mobutu, speaking the pure language of revolution, seemed to threaten everybody. The three hundred Belgian families who had ruled the Congo, he said, had been replaced by three hundred Zairois families; the country had imported more Mercedes-Benz motorcars than tractors; one third of the country’s foreign earnings went to import food that could be produced at home.

Against this new Zairois bourgeoisie—which he had himself created—the chief now declared war. “I offer them a clear choice: those among them who love the people should give everything to the state and follow me.” In his new mood the chief threatened other measures. He threatened to close down the cinemas and the night-clubs; he threatened to ban drinking in public places before six.

Through the Belgian-designed
cité indigène
of Kinshasa, in the wide, unpaved streets, full of pits and corrugations between mounds of rubbish sometimes as high as the little houses in Mediterranean colours, in the green shade of flamboyant, mango and frangipani, schoolchildren marched in support of their chief. Every day
Elima
carried reports of
marches de soutien
in other places. And the alarm was great, among the foreigners who had been plundered of their businesses and had remained behind, hoping for some compensation or waiting for Canadian visas, and among the gold-decked Zairois in national costume. Stern men, these Zairois, nervous of the visitor, easily affronted, anxious only to make it known that they were loyal, and outdone by no one in their “authenticity,” their authentic Africanness.

But it is in the nature of a powerful chief that he should be unpredictable. The chief threatens; the people are cowed; the chief relents; the people praise his magnanimity. The days passed; daytime and even morning drinking didn’t stop; many Africans continued to spend their days in that red-eyed vacancy that at first so mystifies the visitor. The night-clubs and cinemas didn’t close; the prostitutes continued to be busy around the Memling Hotel. So that it seemed that in this matter of public morals, at least, the chief had relented. The ordinary people had been spared.

But the nervousness higher up was justified. Within days the axe fell on many of the chief’s “collaborators.” There was a shake-up; the circle of power around the chief was made smaller; and Zairois who had ruled in Kinshasa were abruptly dismissed, packed off to unfamiliar parts of the bush to spread the word of the revolution.
Elima
sped them on their way.

Words of terror. Because this was the great fear of so many of the men who had come by riches so easily, by simple official plunder, the new men of the new state who, in the name of Africanization and the dignity of Africa, were so often doing jobs for which they were not qualified and often were drawing salaries for jobs they were not doing at all. This, for all their talk of authenticity and the ways of the ancestors, was their fear: to be returned from the sweet corruptions of Kinshasa to the older corruption of the bush, to be returned to Africa.

And the bush is close. It begins just outside the city and goes on forever. The aeroplane that goes from Kinshasa to Kisangani flies over eight hundred miles of what still looks like virgin forest.

CONSIDER
the recent journey of the subregional commissioner of the Equator Region to the settlement of Bomongo. Bomongo lies on the Giri River and is just about one hundred miles north of the big town of Mbandaka, formerly Coquilhatville, the old “Equator station,” set down more or less on the line of the Equator, halfway on the Congo or Zaire River between Kinshasa and the Stanley Falls. From Mbandaka a steamer took the commissioner’s party up the main river to Lubengo; and there they
transferred to a dugout for the twenty-mile passage through the Lubengo “canal” to the Giri River. But the canal for much of its length was only six feet wide, full of snags, and sometimes only twelve inches deep. The outboard motor had to be taken up; paddles had to be used. And there were the mosquitoes.

Ignoring his fatigue,
bravant sa fatigue
, the commissioner set to work. He spoke to various groups about the integration of the party and the administration, the need for punctuality, professional thoroughness and revolutionary fervour. The next morning he visited an oil factory in Ebeka district that had been abandoned in 1971 and was now being set going again with the help of a foreign adviser. In the afternoon he spoke out against alcoholism and urged people to produce more. The next day he visited a coffee plantation that had been nationalized in 1973 (the plantations in Zaire were run mainly by Greeks) and given to a Zairois. This particular
attribution
hadn’t worked well: the labourers hadn’t been paid for the last five months. The labourers complained and the commissioner listened; but what the commissioner did or said wasn’t recorded. Everywhere the commissioner went he urged the people, for the sake of their own liberty and well-being, to follow the principles of Mobutism to the letter; everywhere he urged vigilance. Then, leaving Lubengo, Bomongo and Ebeka to the mosquitoes, the commissioner returned to his head-quarters.
And
Elima
considered the fifteen-day journey heroic enough to give it half a page.

YET BOMONGO
, so cut off, is only twenty miles away from the main Congo or Zaire. The roads of the country have decayed; the domestic services of Air Zaire are unreliable; the river remains, in 1975, the great highway of the country. And for nearly a hundred years the river has known steamer traffic. Joseph Conrad, not yet a novelist, going up the river in the wood-burning
Roi des Belges
in 1890, doing eight miles in three hours, halting every night for the cannibal woodcutters to sleep on the riverbank, might have thought he was penetrating to the untouched heart of darkness. But Norman Sherry, the Conrad scholar, has gone among the records and in
Conrad’s Western World
has shown that even at the time of Conrad’s journey there would have been eleven steamers on the upper river.

The steamers have continued, the Belgian
Otraco
being succeeded by the Zairois
Onatra.
The waterway has been charted: white marker signs are nailed to trees on the banks, the river is regularly cleared of snags. The upstream journey that took one month in Conrad’s time now takes seven days; the downstream journey that took a fortnight is now done in five days. The stations have become towns, but they remain what they were: trading outposts. And, in 1975, the journey—one thousand miles between green, flat, almost unchanging country—is still like a journey through nothingness. So little has the vast country been touched: so complete, simple and repetitive still appears the African life through which the traveller swiftly passes.

When the steamer was Belgian, Africans needed a
carte de mérite civique
to travel first class, and third-class African passengers were towed on barges some way behind the steamer. Now the two-tiered third-class barges, rusting, battered, needing paint, full of a busy backyard life, tethered goats and crated chickens packed tight among the passengers, are lashed to the bow of the steamer; and first-class passengers sleep and eat outside their cabin doors in a high, warm smell of smoked fish and smoked monkey.

The
cabine de luxe
, twice as expensive as first class, is used by the sweating
garçon
as a storeroom for his brooms and buckets and rags and
as a hiding place for the food,
foo-foo
, he is always on the lookout for: securing half a pound of sugar, for instance, by pouring it into a pot of river-brewed tea, and secreting the tea in the wardrobe until nightfall, when he scratches and bangs and scratches at the door until he is admitted.