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  'There is one more thing, monsieur. The chef, you have to see the chef' Leading me through a side-door at a canter into a maze of back-corridors, my guide explained we were bound for the head of the airport police. Enervated by my long wait and mindful of the many horror stories that criss-cross Africa about the hazards of alienating Zairean officials, I opted for a policy of beaming acquiescence. It was, in hindsight, a mistake.

  A life-size portrait of President Mobutu Sese Seko hung on the chef's back wall. It was the only object in the room that was not close to collapse. The wooden desk, like the walls, was visibly rotting in the tropical heat. A sidekick lounged in the far corner. His shirt was frayed at the cuffs and collar, and badly needed a wash. The chef, however, did not have a hair out of place. Greeting me in immaculate English, he shook my hand and ushered me to the only chair. He was a senior agent of SNIP (National Police Intelligence Service), Mobutu's ubiquitous and feared secret police. He tutted when he saw my laptop computer. 'Do you have a permit? Customs duties on these are very expensive,' he said with an intake of breath. 'But fortunately I like journalists. So there is no charge.' It was a masterly act hut it was all too obvious what was coming. 'I think this calls for a petitcadeau.'

  In the dying days of Mobutu's regime N'djili Airport had the dubious accolade of Africa's most unpopular destination. That was quite an achievement in a continent where at any one time it can be guaranteed there are half a dozen small wars, but as I sat and sweated before the chef it was easy to appreciate why. While I never ascertained what right he had to his title, what he may have lacked in validity he made up in menace. I emerged from my ten-minute audience minus another hundred dollars. My temper was not improved when my taxi stopped on Kinshasa's outskirts and the driver said he would take me back to the airport unless I paid twice the agreed fare. A Nigerian colleague met me in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel with a wry smile. On his way out of the airport a soldier had put a gun to his head, juggled a grenade, and demanded $500. 'Nigerians are children compared to this,' he said. 'Yau wait. Press accreditation is $700 not counting the unofficial bribes. And if you want to go to the front..’

  More than a thousand miles to the east, Laurent Kabila, the leader of a little-known rebel group, the Alliance of Democratic Forces, had just announced he would overthrow Mobutu. Over the next six months, as the rebellion gathered momentum, I learned the old hands' tricks to soften the shock of arrival at N'djili. The Intercontinental's resident spook would for a fee pay off the enforcers and meet me at the gate. I stashed notes of different denominations in different pockets to 'satisfy' the various officials I might confront. I learned the body language of the protocols and so knew when to grovel and when to bluff.

  Inevitably the tales of the Zairean frontier became a stock motif for correspondents on the long evenings before May 1997 when the rebels reached the gates of Kinshasa and Mobutu fled into exile. They pandered to the West's caricature vision of an African banana republic and fitted the Heart of Darkness clichés about the Congo. The absurdity seemed complete at another border crossing, when, to my surprise, a Zairean colonel handed back to me a bribe which a subordinate had just extracted and gave him a loud public lecture about the need for honesty. Assuming I had chanced on the one upright officer in the army, I headed on my way, thanking him profusely, only to be over taken by the very lackey he had just abused.

  'The colonel says you did not give enough,' he whispered.

  'You must give us double.'

  For the forty million Zaireans, however, there was nothing comic about this daily routine. Over time, I came to appreciate that the most important lesson of the airport was that, far from revelling in their power, many of the officials - although not, I suspect, the chef- were mortified by the state to which they had been reduced. I struck up a friendship with a young SNIP agent at the airport who went by the nom de guerre of Mr King. He explained that none of his colleagues had been paid for months. If they were to feed and clothe their families, let alone pay for schooling and medicines, their only option was to follow the lead of their president and sully themselves.

  Zaireans called the system 'co-operation'. You had to give co-operation to get anything from a driving licence to a good school report. Expatriates called it daylight robbery. In the same week as my first harum scarum arrival at N'djili, South Africa sent a consignment of medical aid supplies. The ambassador, Jan van Deventer, a giant of an Afrikaner who understood the realities of Zaire far better than most of his more urbane European peers, had to intervene when officials started demanding 'samples' of each package. 'I drew the line at the micro scope,' he recalled. 'I said you can't have a sample of that. It is all or nothing. And they backed down saying "Of course Monsieur ... We are just doing our job."'

  The result was just as Mobutu had hoped. Everyone was compromised. Over the years Africa has bred more brutal and bloodthirsty tyrants, but no one has so comprehensively pillaged a state. He was, in the words of one advisor, the 'King of Kleptocracy'. By the end of his rule Zaire had become a parody of a state where everyone and everything could be bought for the right cadeau.

  *

  For a chilling insight into how the scientific developments of the early twentieth century can be run in reverse there can be few better laboratories than Kisangani. Zaire's third largest town is 800 miles of dense rain-forest east of Kinshasa. Since the Victorian explorer and journalist Henry Stanley hacked his way there in the 1870s, losing more than half his 250-strong party to disease, starvation and war, it has had a ghoulish reputation for cruelty and despair. Joseph Conrad's Kurtz was to be found there at the end of Marlow's journey to the 'Inner Station'. A Kinshasan friend had warned me that there were only three diversions in Kisangani- drinking Primus, the local beer, swat ting mosquitoes and watching the soupy waters of the river Congo, or Zaire as it was renamed by Mobutu. I soon under stood why. Given the cloying heat, the constant threats and intimidation from drunken soldiers, and the collapse of the infrastructure, even to move from my hotel was an almost impossible task. I learned my lesson the hard way. I had been told the British Honorary Consul, a Belgian businessman named Francois Seneque, had one of the shrewdest heads in town. His residence was three miles from the centre of town and yet it took the best part of an hour to get there. The roads - if you could call them roads - had crevasses that could swallow a car, so my taxi driver had to spend much of the time ploughing through the under growth, which was busily reclaiming the streets. A street lamp, which amazingly was still lit, peered out of one particularly dense bush, like a monument to a bygone age. I appreciated at last an old Zairean joke. A Zairean is giving a foreigner a few driving tips. 'Which do you prefer, a pothole with water or one without?' Answer: 'The full one' because at least you know it has a bottom.'

  Since independence from Belgium in 1960 the state had in all but name ceased to exist. More than four-fifths of the estimated 80,000 miles of roads had been reclaimed by the bush, as had most of the railway. Or so at least it was presumed; years had passed since anyone had travelled the roads to check. The telephone cables had long since been uprooted. The only ways to Kisangani were by air - an impossible expense for all but the elite - or a pestilential cruise up-river from Kinshasa. Locals relied on pirogues (dug-out canoes) just as they had in Stanley's day. Rule by chaos was one of Mobutu's cardinal tenets. Legend has it that when a fellow dictator telephoned him in despair to say a rebel army was at his gates, he replied, 'I told you not to build any roads.' But the collapse of the infrastructure owed as much to greed as to tactics. It was estimated in the late Seventies that more than two-thirds of the government's budget never reached its destination. By the Nine ties, central funding had effectively ceased. Despatched to the extremities of the vast country, which was the size of Western Europe, provincial governors had a free hand to pillage and extort as if they were running independent states, although if Mobutu deemed one of his proconsuls had become too powerful, he swiftly summoned him back to Kinshasa and cut him
down to size.

  With his florid face and clipped moustache, Monsieur Seneque lent himself to a caricature of a Belgian colon. Kisangani was a far cry from British Leyland, where he had once worked. Two rusting sports cars in his drive testified to his long tenure in the former Stanleyville. They lacked wheels, parts of the chassis and key components of their engines and yet there they were, like their owner, waiting against the odds for better times. I half-expected to settle into a pink gin and a long tirade against Zaire. From the moment he answered his intercom service and ushered me into an air-conditioned salon I realized I could not have been more wrong.

  To survive, let alone thrive, as a white businessman in Zaire has always required a touch of the diplomat, a touch of the trader and a heavy dose of the gambler. But the game had become even more complicated in the early Seventies when Mobutu introduced authenticite, his far-reaching Africanization programme. Officially the aim was to purge the colonial past by Zaireanizing the state. In good revolutionary style, Monsieur and Madame gave way to Citoyen and Citoyenne, the necktie to the loose African shirt, and the river Congo, like the country, was renamed Zaire. In practice it became clear to all but the most star-struck or self-interested Mobutuists that authenticite, like everything else Mobutu did, was about making money and entrenching his position and cult. Foreigners were among the first to understand. Overnight, party cadres took over their businesses 'in the interests of Zaire'.

  When I arrived at Seneque's door, Kisangani was on the brink of another of its periodic convulsions. Flushed with victory, Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader, was pushing out from the eastern Kivu region where his revolt had started, and was naming Kisangani, 700 miles to the west, as his next target. M. Seneque rolled his eyes at the idea. He was adamant that the rebellion would dissipate in the jungle, as had its many predecessors. Local politics may have coloured his opinions. The over-riding concern of men like Seneque was to remain on good terms with Kisangani's governor, who ran the city like a feudal fief and was wont to unleash his soldiers to remind the citizens who was in charge. But it was a credible line shared by most Zaire-watchers, as over the years Mobutu had survived many a rebellion. After a brisk lime and soda I was on my way out of his oasis into the tropical heat, convinced he was probably right and that Mobutu's misrule - or rather chaos, since even the word misrule implied an element of order- was set to continue.

  My driver took me back via a tumbledown Catholic church on the edge of town where a fledgling human rights group was taking a grim record of the latest abuses by Mobutu's rabble of an army. During the previous week the soldiers had been their usual freebooting selves. Many had retreated from the battle front and were taking out their frustrations on their own com munities as they fled. Incident by incident, Les Amis de Nelson Mandela went through the reports, which detailed anything from soldiers entering a church during a wedding service and opening fire, to the looting of mattresses for makeshift beds. After corroboration by several witnesses the reports were entered longhand in a battered old ledger. It was a humbling sight. None of the members had been out of Kisangani, let alone Zaire, yet there they were trying to lead their society down a new moral path inspired by Mandela's example. For an hour they quizzed me on life outside Zaire, the world's reaction to their country's crisis, and, most of all, insights into their hero, the South African president. They gave me a report to be sent on to human rights groups in the free world. I handed over a copy of Gulliver's Travels, whose satirical comments on man seemed all too apt. Robert Numbi, their boyish president, looked at me with a wan smile. 'Little by little our people are beginning to understand what is really happening...’

  By then we were relying on candlelight. With the sun the dimmest of blurs it was time to return to my hotel. As a parting shot I asked for their explanation as to why Zaire had gone so terribly wrong, how an entire state could be up for sale. Numbi looked at me in surprise and - was it my imagination? - with a twinkle in his eyes.

  'The chief learned his lessons well from you [whites].'

  *

  A century after the 'Scramble for Africa' the argument about the motives and intentions of the colonists and their political masters has lost the partisanship of the independence days. Old imperialists are prepared to concede that there was a shabby side to the Livingstonian ethos of 'civilization, Christianity and commerce', which could be rephrased 'capitalism, conquest and continental rivalry'. In Africa itself the larceny and anarchy of the independence years have put the colonists in context. Indigenous historians accept there were many of the colonial administrators who genuinely believed, however arrogant it now seems, that they had a role and duty to uplift the native from a state of primitive backwardness and who earnestly and honestly did their best in pursuit of this goal.

  There are, however, some absolutes in this debate. One of these is that nowhere was the depredation more brazen and brutal than the Belgian Congo, the predecessor of Mobutu's Zaire. His administrators had to look back just fifty years for a case study in exploitation. Indeed it could even be argued that King Leopold II of Belgium, the founder of the Congo and the driving force behind the 'Scramble', was a role model for Mobutu.

  Just as the reports of the massacres that accompanied the rebellion against Mobutu were to trickle out of the jungle in a blur of rumour and unconfirmed reports, so too the excesses of the Belgian rubber planters at the turn of the century took a long time to emerge. From his palace at Laeken King Leopold ran a masterful public relations exercise which painted his venture in the Congo as a noble humanitarian enterprise. His propaganda suggested the central African region was to become a model state. In reality the territory, which was eighty times the size of Belgium, was a giant sweat-shop which he ran as a private estate.

  In the last days of Mobutu, the best sources of information for the course of the fighting in the interior were the Catholic missionaries, whose network extended across the country. Only at the end of the rebellion did I appreciate the value of their information and I made a daily trek down Kinshasa's potholed central boulevard to glean the latest. I should have read my history books more closely: missionaries had provided the bulk of the evidence against the Belgian rubber planters. For several years their horrific accounts were dismissed as hearsay until the Foreign Office finally despatched its consul, Roger Casement, to investigate. Brimming with the same ardour that was to lead him to a firing squad after his part in the Dublin uprising of 1916, his findings shocked the world.

  Revelling in the soaring price of rubber, Leopold's planters treated the workers like wild animals. For most there was no pay. If they failed to deliver their quotas, they risked execution or torture. Soldiers collected baskets of severed hands, apparently to prove they had not wasted ammunition. Ears too were frequently forfeit. The abuses were ended only in 1908 when the embarrassed Belgian government formally took over responsibility for the Congo from King Leopold.

  To their shock the Belgian authorities also discovered a massive discrepancy in the books. Millions of pounds of revenue had not been accounted for - a phenomenon which was to prove all too familiar to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund officials who attempted to unravel Mobutu's accounts during his long rule. Disgraced and disgruntled, King Leopold spent many of his last months in his estate at Cap Ferrat, in the south of France, just down from the villa where Mobutu was to spend much of his last year trying to keep his prostate cancer at bay. Shamed by outrage in America and Britain and indeed among their own subjects, the Belgian government remedied some of Leopold's worst abuses, but the Congo remained nothing more than a cash cow which they milked at will. With the discovery of copper and cobalt deposits and diamonds and gold, it proved even richer than Leopold had hoped when he first sponsored Stanley to chart the region. While the Belgians built roads and railways and spacious colonial towns, which stocked French cheese and vintage champagne, the Africans received a minimal wage. There is even a story of a Congolese seaman jumping ship in Europe and being forbidden by the
Belgians to return lest he fired up his country men with reports of what freedom really meant. (1)

  When the wind of change blew through Africa in the 1950s there were only a handful of Congolese with an education. After riots in 1959 in Leopoldville, the colonial capital that was to be renamed Kinshasa, the Belgians panicked. They set a date for elections and independence and, just eighteen months after the disturbances, scuttled out with all they could carry. Such was their legacy to Zaire.

  Mobutu proved a star pupil. He once told a party congress, 'If you steal, do not steal too much at a time. You may be arrested. Steal cleverly, little by little,' but this was advice he clearly felt no need to follow. Eschewing the more underhand techniques of the elites in Nigeria and Kenya, by a narrow margin Zaire's understudies in corruption, he shamelessly flaunted the proceeds he had stolen from the state. In 1984 he went so far as to boast to American television on 60 Minutes that he was the second richest man in the world. In his heyday his fortune was estimated at between two and five billion pounds.

  His property constellation included a vineyard in Portugal, a thirty-two-room mansion in Switzerland, a castle in Spain and a magnificent first-floor apartment in Paris close to the Arc de Triomphe and within easy walking distance of the furrier who made his leopard-skin hats. The piece de resistance was his pink marble palace in his home village, Gbadolite. In time-honoured Big Man style, on taking power in 1965 he set about transforming his birthplace, then a tiny jungle settlement, to be on a par with Western capitals. Four-lane highways linked his palace to the airport. The runway was specially lengthened to accommodate the Concorde, which he chartered from Air France to take him to his dentist in France. In the late Eighties he sent a government-owned DC8 to Venezuela thirty-two times to pick up 5,000 sheep of a rare long-haired breed for a private ranch.