"After [Patrice Lumumba's] assassination in 1961, Kisangani and the whole of eastern Zaire descended into chaos that climaxed with mass killings in 1965 by pro-Lumumba rebels as well as by Belgian paratroopers and European mercenaries flown in on US transport planes to help Mobutu Sese Seko's army to put down the rebellion..."
—Lynne Duke; Mandela, Mobutu, and Me
"Through sixty-six and seven, they fought the Congo War
With their fingers on their triggers, knee-deep in gore
For days and nights they battled the Bantu to their knees;
They killed to earn their living, and to help out the Congolese..."
—Warren Zevon; 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner'
Lynne Duke, who has unfortunately passed away, wrote an incredible memoir, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, reflecting on her time working for The Washington Post in Africa. Africa is, admittedly, a continent I know far too little about and I have been trying to work on that, albeit I'm not doing as well as I could be. From the birth of civilization to Sundiata to Anansi to Mandela to Lumumba, I know tidbits here and there and certainly know of things I'd like to be less ignorant on, so it's going to continue to be an ongoing process.
Plus, Congo has some thought-provoking references in popular culture, from Zevon in the above lyrics to 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner' (though this fictional Norseman, or his bar-owning tall-story-telling buddy David Lindell, was probably fighting for the villains of history) to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness drawing on Conrad's experiences in Leopold's Congo.
The discussion of Mandela—'the world's last hero' as I believe George Meredith put it in The State of Africa (Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom should be on everyone's reading list, as well)—obviously drew me in, as did Mobutu.
Not only were the two stark contrasts in leadership, Mobutu ties back to another subject of interest for me: awful US geopolitical decisions we're seeing the unpleasant consequences of still today, particularly those that can be traced to the Dulles brothers and Ike Eisenhower.* In the case of Congo, we have the brutal, CIA-aided murder of the first Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba and him being replaced by the brutal right-wing dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
Duke also goes into detail to show the many complications throughout Africa by comparing and contrasting South Africa's independence with that of Congo/Zaire. As much as it is easy, nostalgic, and pleasant to recall Nelson Mandela as a unifying hero, she goes to lengths to discuss those, even Blacks within South Africa, who felt he took too conciliatory an approach, especially as time went on, toward intransigent and belligerent Afrikaners.
Mandela and his government were in an incredibly difficult situation: he didn't want the wealth amassed by the white Afrikaners to leave the country if they departed, so he was conciliatory toward him. This came despite the fact that many of these white remained racist, in positions of power, and plenty of them committing terrorist attacks to undermine the post-apartheid state. Black supporters of Mandela were disappointed when they saw Mandela being conciliatory toward these abominable people while their own conditions didn't improve.
When I say Afrikaners were in power and committing terrorist acts, let me clarify: whites in the government in South Africa were going to such lengths as bombing native African and there were instances of inhuman Afrikaners walking into traffic and firing at random at innocent Black people. With the support of others, including high-ranking others, in the government.
Mandela also had little choice, especially if he wanted to remain able to receive international aid from places like the International Monetary Fund. Fleeing Afrikaners bringing their ill-begotten wealth with them not only would hurt the economy in the short-term, it would make international investors and oversight bodies likely to help. Few companies were willing to invest in South Africa at the ime, after all, with McDonald's and Coca Cola being two exceptions.
It's also infuriating to see Afrikaners try to describe themselves as a disenfranchised minority considering the awful brutality of the abusive regime that was run under apartheid (notably, as Duke points out, pronounced: 'apart-hate,' a very fitting description of the system, especially when you read about powerless shantytowns).
It's all made even worse with the knowledge that the mess created by foreign nationals in South Africa, and the rest of the continent, wasn't ever cleaned up—post-colonialism has basically just allowed us to tell these ruined countries, "We don't care unless you're profitable."
This is a problem. I believe it's Richard McGregor's The Party that first brought this to my attention but it's still going on: China is investing heavily in Africa. And by building an infrastructure, they're building a reliable, up-and-coming market. I point out the fuck ups of the Dulles brothers a lot. One of our many current, and past, mistakes is that we did not choose a more equitable and fair approach to Africa to build up a strong relationship based on goodwill. Kinda screwed the pooch on that one.
Let's take a more brutal look at how in the form of Congo and Mobutu. In Congo, we even see the failure of Mandela's approach when he is incapable of mediating an agreement between Mobutu and Kabila.
Now, this is a whole thorny thing and both South Africa and Congo I'm going to need to return to and delve deeper into. This goes without question.
For now we can go through a brief history of Congo: first, it began as a colony of Belgium, specially looked after by the king. In this case, King Leopold. King Leopold's Ghost is a well-known book on this, a whole Wikipedia page on 'Atrocities in the Congo Free State' exists, and we know that a lot of evidence was destroyed, so there's a lot of crimes against humanity we're not aware of (when a government office is shutting down and the chimney's working overtime, it's generally not because a new Pope has been anointed).
Those we are aware of include the chicotte, a whip of hippo or rhino hide, holding families captives while men were sent out to extract rubber from the rubber plant, and the mutilation of said man if he did not bring back his required amount of rubber. Due to restrictions on bullets and bounties, this often took the form of the man's hand being chopped off. It was awful beyond belief, and as demand for rubber grew, it got worse and more repressive.
Some estimates place the death toll of Leopold's Congo Free State as high as ten million, or nearly half of the population.
I'm not too familiar with the interim until Patrice Lumumba fell on the bad side of the Dulles Brothers, Eisenhower, and the CIA. This brings us back to the opening quotes: aided by the CIA, Mobutu betrays Lumumba, he's murdered, his body is disposed of in a gruesome fashion to make it unrecognizable, and the United States props up this guy Mobutu, who becomes a big ally as he turned the country into a 'kleptocracy.'
Duke describes this as a "vast system of extortion." See, Mobutu would raid state funds and so would his cronies—this means the government employees don't get paid, so why do their job? Well, because other people will pay you. But your job won't. So bribes become commonplace, whether it's for a fake vaccination card or because the guys trained as soldiers or cops didn't get their pay this month, but they've got guns, so they've decided it's not robbery when you have a badge and a gun.
See how this could maybe cause problems?
This is what I call, "Real trickle-down economics." Everyone takes a shit on the person below them and everyone ends up miserable and furious.
It also illustrates a lesson I recall from a very bright college professor: there's a vast difference between a private profit and a public good. Things like healthcare, education, infrastructure, things roughly equivalent to providing the baseline needs for Maslow's Hierarchy, should be operated as a Public Good because running them for-profit is going to kinda thwart the purpose. Mobutu ran the government for a private profit instead of as a public good meant to serve the people, for one easy example, and he led by example, meaning that's what those beneath him chose to do, as well.
These events occur in the wake of ongoing brutality in Africa. There's Rwanda, where there is ongoing genocide, to Somalia, where the US intervened and it went terribly awry. The US and the UN both are hungry for a positive piece of news to shift from the bad headlines that had been coming out, leading to an undeserved credulity in Mobutu's ability to broker peace in Angola. Mobutu, it should be noted, had worked with the US to covertly supply weapons to Angola after a Congressional ban. Within Angola, war is ongoing between the MPLA, the Marxist-leaning de facto government, and UNITA, the anti-Marxist right-wing group.
Peace was hoped to be accomplished by disarming UNITA, in accordance with the Lusaka Protocol—but it was pretty clear that UNITA was only handing over token weapons and holding onto the weapons they would need to continue fighting a long-term war, like, say, heavy artillery.
As Duke points out, even the international response here is wholly inadequate. In fact, the Rwanda situation shows this. As her account tells us, the difference between Hutus and Tutsis was an artificial one implemented by early colonizers, applying racial pseudo-science and assigning taller, thinner people as Tutsis and shorter, broader people as Hutus. Lots of nonsense racism mixed in there, naturally.
End result: these two groups that used to intermarry and coexist, no biggie, began to "Other" one another. Now there's a sort of caste system. By the time the Tutsis, the more upper-class, get a whiff of this whole African Independence thing, they're interested—their Belgian colonizers, on the other hand, are not. So they shift their allegiance to the Hutus and foment anti-Tutsi sentiment, which has already grown due to the racist system they implemented in the first place.
Hutus go on a genocide against Tutsis, then end up fleeing into refugee camps—mostly real refugees, but mixed in with government leaders and a paramilitary group that took refuge in Mobutu's Zaire and continued to launch attacks against Rwanda's new, Tutsi government.
Taking the easy, hands off approach led, understandably, to mixed feelings about the UN and other relief organizations from many average civilians, who want nothing to do with war, or refugees, or blown off limbs, or government coups, or gunfire in the distance, and really just want to live free from pain and fear. And deserve that, too.
Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, when we return to South Africa, gives us a glimpse once more into mixed perspectives: despite hopes that Afrikaners would show remorse for their atrocities, a large number showed up just to recount their crimes and get immunity. This, understandably, left the survivors of victims with the feeling of having been cheated of justice.
A very poignant and powerful point is raised here: South Africa did not have an equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials. There was no, as Tutu calls it, "Victor's Justice," because it would have led to "justice and ashes." We see this, to an extent, with the conciliatory attempts made by Mandela to try and steer his country toward a better future, even if it made him have to accept awful people because they had the capital he needed to try and keep South Africa alive—Chile faced a similar choice with Pinochet.
Even so, one cannot help but understand the scene of a killer cop, meeting the wife and orphan of one of his victims from the apartheid era: the mother speaks of her gratefulness that the two can attempt to reconcile; his orphaned son hurls a vase at him.
Aren't both of them right to feel and act the way they do? Who could judge?
—
*To play devil's advocate for these guys, as I do demonize them quite harshly, we can take a look at the root of their ideology and how it was shaped. During WWII, Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. That kinda speaks for itself. Allen Dulles worked in covert operations during the same war. Both men believed that by strategically eliminating leaders that fell afoul of them, a future Hitler could be avoided without things ever getting to the point of a WWIII.
In theory, you can see this being appealing. In practice, it should be obvious this is a completely untenable approach to geopolitics—after all, who watches the watchman?
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