first review www.theglobalsite.ac.uk 2001

Nicholas Waddell

Lumumba, Mobutu, Kabila

Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, 2001, Verso, 224pp., £17 ISBN: 1850846181; Michela Wrong, In The Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, 2000, Fourth Estate, 324pp., £7.99 ISBN: 1841154229

This review also appears in the Autumn issue of Soundings; published here with permission from the editors

When asked about their namesake, a blank look was all I got from the man at 'Lumumba Autospares' in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam . The headmaster of 'Lumumba Primary School' told me that Lumumba was the first leader of independent Congo but he thought that it was a plane crash that killed him. Such comments are painfully ironic given that the last letter that Lumumba ever wrote contained the following words: 'History will one day have its say; it will not be the history taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris, or Brussels, however, but the history taught in the countries that have rid themselves of colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and both north and south of the Sahara it will be a history full of glory and dignity'.

The famous scene with which the Belgian writer and sociologist Ludo De Witte opens The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba encapsulates both what Lumumba represented and what he fought against. It is June 1960 in the Congolese capital, Léopoldville (now Kinshasa). Sovereignty is being handed over from Belgium to the newly elected representatives of the Congolese people. 'The independence of Congo', announces King Baudouin of Belgium, 'is the result of the undertaking conceived by the genius of King Léopold II'. 'Don't replace the structures that Belgium hands over to you', the Congolese are instructed, 'until you are sure you can do better'. Despite independence, 'we will remain by your side'. To the total astonishment of the Belgians, Lumumba takes the floor in an unscheduled address that shatters the paternalistic charade in progress. Lumumba speaks of an independence won from below rather than bestowed from above. He speaks over the assembled Belgian notables and addresses 'Congolese men and women, fighters for independence, who are today victorious'. Across the nation hushed crowds are gathered around radios, craning their necks to catch every word of a language that many Congolese thought could not be spoken to Europeans. There is a moment of incredible release. Lumumba has not only issued a slap to the face of colonialism, he has also offended the nascent neo-colonial order.

In his preface to Animal Farm, Orwell described how, in free societies, 'Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for an official ban'.

Thus it has taken 40 years for the definitive account of one of the most important political assassinations of the 20^th century - that of Patrice Lumumba – to appear. Until now, the prevailing story of the murder of the first Prime Minister of independent Congo has been that it was, as one Belgian general put it, a 'Bantu affair': Lumumba was a casualty of the brutal nature of African politics and any Belgian involvement was limited to a handful of junior officials acting under Congolese command. Penetrating the intricate web of falsification that has sustained it, De Witte shoots this tale to pieces. Accusations of Western involvement in Lumumba's death are by no means new, but the rigour with which De Witte makes his case is. In a staggering indictment of the ruthlessness and moral bankruptcy of Western governments and the institutions they control, he amasses a huge body of evidence implicating the USA, the UN and Belgium. The resulting volume, which took seven years to research, prickles with fury and political commitment. In Belgium the uproar provoked by the book was such that the Belgian parliament was pressured into establishing a commission of inquiry into Belgium's part in Lumumba's death.

It is not difficult to see why Sartre described Lumumba as 'a meteor in the African firmament'. Completely unknown to the Congolese people in 1955, by 1958 Lumumba was a nationalist beacon. In 1960 he was elected Prime Minister; it was a position he would hold for only 10 weeks. Rather than risk being swept away by the dramatically swift radicalisation of Congolese politics, in 1960 Belgium abruptly decided to grant its colony independence. Things, however, did not go as smoothly as planned. As De Witte sums up with characteristic force:

Nowhere was 'business' more relevant than in the Congolese province of Katanga. Dripping in mineral wealth, Katanga was effectively owned and run by Belgian mining houses and the Belgian ruling classes intended it to remain that way. When it became clear that Belgian interests stood to be compromised, Belgium engineered Katanga's secession. (One Belgian minister described the Katangan president, Moïse Tshombe, as 'necessary to provide a veneer of legality…a good cover to have'.) As De Witte writes, Belgium's actions effectively 'amputated Katanga from the body of the Congo in the hope that Léopoldville would not survive the operation'.

Survival was no easy task for the newly independent state. In an attempt to quash the secession and restore territorial integrity to Congo, President Kasa Vubu and Prime Minister Lumumba appealed to the UN to intervene. In practice, and as De Witte powerfully conveys, UN intervention served to consolidate secession as the UN colluded with Western intentions to sabotage Lumumba's administration. Feeling betrayed by the UN and facing attempts by Western media to discredit him, Lumumba sought the support of African allies and the USSR. Again, he was blocked by the UN.

Not content with merely manipulating Congolese politics and cultivating international opposition to Lumumba, Belgium and the US considered more drastic action. President Eisenhower was warned by his CIA chief that 'Lumumba… remained a grave danger as long as he was not disposed of'. Hit men were approached, and a plan to poison Lumumba was drawn up. Similarly, the Belgian Minister of African Affairs called for Lumumba's 'élimination définitive'. Telegram traffic was heavy with messages to the same effect. Belgium's defenders have argued that such words imply nothing more than Lumumba's political immobilisation. De Witte leaves the credibility of such a position in tatters.

Lumumba did not have long to wait. Following a power struggle with president Kasa Vubu, American-backed Joseph Mobutu seized power. Lumumba was placed under house arrest for his 'protection'. He escaped but was recaptured by Mobutu’s soldiers, along with two supporters, after the UN withheld its protection. Still, Lumumba remained an intolerable liability for his enemies. The danger that he might yet reap the harvest of his popular support was ever present. It was this risk that sealed his fate.

De Witte comes into his own in chronicling Belgium's role in Lumumba’s bloody end. He establishes beyond doubt that the Prime Minister’s Belgian-backed transfer to Katanga amounted to a death sentence. On the way to the Katangan principal city of Elisabethville, Lumumba was brutally beaten by Mobutu's soldiers and force-fed tufts of hair that had been torn from his head. Earlier, soldiers had tried to humiliate him by stuffing into his mouth the statement in which he had described himself as the head of the country's democratically elected government. Further beatings followed.

Previously, in accounts such as that of Jacques Brassine, such horrors have been blamed on the Congolese. De Witte, however, provides clear evidence of Belgian participation. On January 17 1961 a convoy of cars carrying Belgian soldiers and Katangan ministers drove the three prisoners into a forest and shot them. A few nights later, in an effort to destroy the evidence, a small party headed by two Belgians exhumed the bodies of Lumumba and his allies. With considerable difficulty, hacksaws were used to cut them up. The pieces were then thrown into a barrel of sulphuric acid. What could not be dissolved was ground up and scattered. One of the Belgian police commissioners who carried out the operation would later show journalists two of Patrice Lumumba's teeth that he had kept as souvenirs. Intricate lies about his murder were spun as Belgium proclaimed its total innocence and Lumumba was vilified by Western commentators.

As De Witte makes clear, the significance of Lumumba’s murder goes beyond the particulars of the case. Systemic features of the relationship between the West and the so-called 'less developed' countries are distilled in the details of the actions of Belgium, the USA and the UN. De Witte contends that Soviet overtures to Lumumba were not the prime reason why Lumumba encountered the wrath of the West. He argues that, rather than a matter of Cold War expediency, Lumumba’s death was a result of the Western perception that 'Congolese independence was primarily an expression of the anti-colonial revolution which pitted the colonialist North against the colonised South.' De Witte continues:

It was Lumumba's efforts to slip the economic leash of neo-colonialism that set alarm bells ringing. His internationalist beliefs also raised fears about the position of the West in central Africa overall. The independent Congolese Prime Minister had embarked on a course that was unacceptable to Western interests and the only way to reset that course permanently, Western interests decided, was to have him killed.

Although the Britain and US hardly emerge well from the book, Belgium and the UN earn De Witte's most scathing criticism. 'It was', he writes, 'Belgian advice, Belgian orders and finally Belgian hands that killed Lumumba on the 17 January 1961'. Belgium's sins are not only in the past. As De Witte commented at the book's launch, 'the pillars of the Belgian establishment that are implicated in Lumumba's assassination are still in place today'. As for the UN, De Witte repeats the question of a man whose disillusionment with the organisation was total. 'How', asked Lumumba, 'does a blue armband [of the UN] vaccinate against the racism and paternalism of people whose only vision of Africa is lion hunting, slave markets and colonial conquest; people for whom the history of civilisation is built on the possession of colonies?' Ghana's pan-Africanist leader Kwame Nkrumah described Lumumba's assassination as 'the first time in history that the legal ruler of a country has been done to death with the open connivance of a world organisation in whom that ruler put his trust'.

The book never pretends to be a dispassionate evaluation of Lumumba's strengths and weaknesses, or of the brand of nationalism he espoused. As a largely uncritical portrayal of Lumumba, it leaves little space for consideration of flawed political strategies or personal limitations. De Witte suggests that Lumumba might have achieved great things had he lived, but his belief that this might have included creating the conditions for a revolution by the Congolese masses needs more support than De Witte provides. Detailed and factually dense, The Assassination of Lumumba does not make light reading. De Witte has stated hat he was not concerned to produce a 'faction-thriller'. Instead, 'The Assassination of Lumumba can be read as the public prosecutor's closing address in the courtroom'. As such, it is supremely effective.

De Witte has not only written of the dramatic death of one man. He has also illuminated the wider political and economic forces that are integral to understanding that death and to the subsequent course of Congolese history. Ultimately, the book's achievement lies not so much in the conclusions it reaches; Raoul Peck's award winning film Lumumba (2001) for example, tells a similar tale of the West’s role in Lumumba's death. Rather, it is the scholarly rigour with which De Witte has made his case that makes the book so important and so difficult for his detractors to dismiss.

Though Michela Wrong picks up the story of the man who seized power at Lumumba's expense, In The Footsteps of Mr Kurtz is a very different species of book. Thanks in part to Conrad's masterpiece The Heart of Darkness, few countries in Africa hold the place that Congo does in the Western imagination. Riding on this fact, Wrong explains that her book draws on the side of Conrad's work that is an 'attack on the history of contemporary colonial behaviour' - an attack that often gets buried amidst the clichés the book has spawned about a dark, savage continent. In contrast to De Witte's close focus on specific events and detailed primary research, Michela Wrong is distinguished by her efforts to wring grim humour out of Congo's tragic disintegration. Framed around Wrong's experiences in Congo as a journalist for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times at the time of Mobutu's downfall, In The Footsteps of Mr Kurtz loosely charts the dictator’s rise, reign, and fall. Along the way, Wrong considers what (and, more fittingly, who) enabled his rotten regime to survive for so long.

'Why hire a lawyer when you can buy a judge?' was the joke about Kenya's legal system. For most of the 32 years in which he ruled it, however, Mobutu’s Congo was the HQ of corruption in Africa. 'Big Man rule", writes Wrong, ‘had been encapsulated in one timeless brand: leopardskin toque, Buddy Holly glasses and the carved cane’. The dinosaur that fancied himself as a leopard was widely viewed as representative of all that was wrong with African leadership. His spectacular ousting in 1997 and with him the collapse of the ultimate kleptocracy was heralded in these pages as being, ‘apart from the end of apartheid, the most symbolic and heartening event on the African continent for the three decades since colonial rule cracked and began to dissolve'. (Victoria Brittain and Rakia Omaar, Soundings 7, p. 98)

Yet optimism for Congo's future swiftly dissolved as the region was engulfed in a bewilderingly complex war involving the armies of six African countries as well as numerous non-governmental groups. Congo's history is no exception to the rule that suggests that the mineral wealth of African nations is often directly proportional to the suffering that this wealth causes. As Wrong shows, under Mobutu the Congolese people experienced not so much a 'trickle down' as a bleeding dry. In fact, the fabulous profits from Congo's wealth travelled in every direction but down. As Wrong shows, it was invariably hoovered up and siphoned off into presidential bank accounts held abroad. Such activities were, writes Wrong, "coyly referred to by the World Band and International Monetary Fund as ‘uncompensated sales’ or ‘leakages’."

Mobutu conducted operations in a style all his own. Yet Wrong demonstrates how he also picked up where King Léopold had left off. Taking her cue from Adam Hochschild's masterful King Leopold's Ghost, Wrong shows that the differences between Léopold and the 'leopard' were less dramatic than Belgian history would have us believe. As Wrong writes, ‘the seeds of Mobutuism found fertile ground in which to sprout’.

Wrong is in her element when describing how Mobutu disposed of this wealth. She describes a man whose sense of the common good extended only as far as his entourage. Mobutu accumulated innumerable exclusive properties across Europe. Most obscene of all, however, was the presidential citadel dubbed his 'Versailles in the jungle'. 700 miles from the Congolese capital, this enclave boasted musical fountains, ornamental lakes, private zoos, golden pagodas and a palace covering 15,000 square metres filled with Italian marble, French antiques and Venetian glassware. Among incredible items on the Mobutu shopping list that Wrong reveals is an estimated $65,000 bill for a wedding cake that was flown in from Paris for his daughter. One source is quoted as commenting that the president and his clan 'chartered Boeings like most people use supermarket trolleys’.

If awards were to be given for corruption in the 20^th century, Mobutu would win first prize - in the lifetime achiever category. But, and this is a central point in Wrong’s book, an honest acceptance speech would offer thanks to his creditors, and mention 'all those without whom it would not have been possible'. This list would be a long one. Special mention would have to go to the World Band, the IMF, France, Belgium, Swiss bankers, the CIA and US presidents and advisors. Between them the USA and France alone contributed billions of dollars to propping up their Cold War ally. President George Bush counted Mobutu as 'one of our most valued friends'. Mobutu did not operate in a vacuum. It is convenient for numerous parties to play down the fact that many hands fed and oiled the regime that caused Congolese people and their neighbours so much misery. Wrong remarks how 'Mea culpa' was a sentiment conspicuous by its absence during her interviews with 'the Washington financiers who granted billions to a known thief, whose institutions will one day have to explain who the Congolese should be held responsible for loans made in bad faith.'

‘By the end of the century', writes Wrong, 'the government’s annual operating budget for what is potentially one of Africa’s richest states was dipping below the daily takings of the US superstore Wal-Mart’. What she describes as Congo's 'Alice in Wonderland finances' saw inflation balloon to 9,800 per cent in 1994 (the price of goods changed before people had time to hand over the bags of notes required to pay for them). Wrong shows how for a long time the rich were able to buy themselves into a parallel universe, insulated from the 'inconveniences' of crumbling infrastructure and economic freefall: ‘Road non-existent? Buy a four-wheel drive. National television on the blink? Install a satellite dish in your back garden and tune in to CNN. Phone out of order? Hire a Telecel.' Like a crazy game of building blocks, in which parts of the underlying structure are successively removed to build it higher and higher, Mobutu's regime eventually became so precarious that it required only the lightest push to topple it. This final shove came in the form of the band of Ugandan and Rwandan-backed rebels led by Laurent Kabila. This time there would be no French or any other troops to bail Mobutu out. Not only had the geo-political climate changed. The regional power balance had also shifted, when the Rwandese Patriotic Front wrestled control of Rwanda from the genocidal Hutu extremists. Wrong conveys how the corner into which Mobutu had backed himself was so tight that it was all he could do to escape alive as his army evaporated around him. Having taken refuge in Morocco, Mobutu died in September 1997.

Much of the book is evocative and elegantly told. Striving to avoid a dull moment, however, Wrong’s prose can become overwritten in places and at times offensive. When many racist perceptions of Africa emphasise wildlife over people (often suggesting little distinction between the two), the following description of Congolese street traders is not insignificant. Wrong observes them 'like watching predators on the savannah as they prowled the long grasses and scored the horizon, searching relentlessly for a kill'. Wrong dehumanises a disabled man that she meets, describing him as a 'vision of horror, the kind of logic defying deformity that rises gibbering and scrabbling from the depths of the subconscious at night'.

In The Footsteps of Mr Kurtz takes broad and for the most part well-measured strides across Congolese history. In so doing, Michela Wrong combines historical information with a readily digestible blend of political analysis and travel writing. But books such as this one tread a fine line between spanning different genres - achieved with haunting brilliance in Philip Gourevitch's writings on Rwanda - and falling between them. There are sections when Wrong’s book spreads itself too wide and too thin, the coverage of the Rwandan genocide being a case in point. In The Footsteps of Mr Kurtz provides neither a thorough account of Mobutu's reign from the top, nor of what it really meant for the Congolese people. (The latter would be a less entertaining and more sobering, disconcerting tale than the one Wrong has chosen to tell.) The result is a work that lacks a centre of gravity, whose strands do not form an entirely coherent whole.

Nevertheless, Wrong provides a corrective to those who believe it is time to stop harping on about imperialism, that the track record since decolonisation shows that Africans themselves must bear full responsibility for their continent's dire predicament. Wrong has written a compelling narrative whose primary strength lies in its accessibility and the way that it resists pinning all the evils of the Mobutu regime on Mobutu the individual. Wrong's conclusion that Congo's profound problems are rooted in a barbarous colonial history, succeeded by ruthless Western behaviour ever since, is one that applies across the continent and beyond.

For the sake of simplicity, I have referred to 'Congo' throughout this piece. In 1971, Congo was renamed 'Zaire' by Mobutu. When Kabila took power in 1997 the country became the Democratic Republic of Congo

Nicholas Waddell recently completed a History degree in the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of Sussex. nicholaswaddell@hotmail.com