In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz by Michela Wrong

Mobutu’s rule, whether a frighteningly efficient kleptocratic system effectively softened up a community for a repeat performance.
    Marchal had brushed it anxiously away, pleading that he was a historian rather than an intellectual, and it was not for him to make such judgements. When put to Professor Stengers, the question had been rejected with a categorical shake of the head. Citing sociological studies conducted in the Great Lakes region, he said what was striking was the lack of memories of the Leopold era amongst the local population. So how could there be any causal link?
    But that, I thought, seemed to be missing the point. Plunging into the dreadful detail of Leopold’s reign, I, too, had been surprised by how few of these horrors—surely the stuff of family legends passed down from patriarch to grandson—had ever been mentioned to me by Zairean friends. But it wasn’t necessary to be an expert on sexual abuse to know it was possible to be traumatised without knowing why; that, indeed, amnesia—whether individual or collective—could sometimes be the only way of dealing with horror, that human behaviour could be altered forever without the cause being openly acknowledged.
    In Belgium I began to sense the logic behind many of the peculiarities that had puzzled me living in Kinshasa, a city where everyone seemed to complain about how awful things were but no one seemedready to try changing the status quo; where grab-it-and-run was the principle of the day and long-term planning alien. Page after page, the picture painted by Marchal had struck a chord.
    Coming after the raids of the hated Force Publique and the slave traders, Mobutu’s looting soldiers were just more of the same. After the crippling production targets set by Leopold’s agents, the informal ‘taxes’ levied by corrupt officials must have seemed benevolent in comparison. Having seen their revolts against the Belgian system crushed by troops wielding such horrors as the Krupp cannon, who still had the courage to rise up against Mobutu’s army, however shambolic it came to seem to Western eyes? And how could the Congolese ever value or build on an infrastructure and administration imposed from above, using their sweat and blood as its raw materials?
    Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo’s population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.

CHAPTER THREE
Birth of the Leopard
    â€˜Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.’
    â€”Charles de Gaulle
    There was a moment in 1960, when, if a white man had stayed his hand and decided not to get involved, the newly independent Congo’s history would have taken a very different course. It was the split second when a young CIA station chief who had crossed a tense capital walked around a corner at one of Leopoldville’s military camps and surprised a man in civilian clothing taking aim at a figure walking away.
    â€˜I guess I was a Boy Scout too long, because without thinking I jumped at the man with the pistol. Then I was sorry, because it turned out he was very strong,’ he recalled. ‘We rolled around in the dirt and I finally remembered something I’d learnt in army training. He had his hand in the trigger guard and I pulled it back until the bone snapped.’ The scuffle attracted the attention of the intended victim’s bodyguards who, misunderstanding the situation, promptly started beating up the Good Samaritan. ‘All I could think about,’ he chuckled, ‘was why the hell did I get involved?’
    A generation of Zaireans might today ask themselves the very same question, but with a greater degree of asperity and