And the tigers are getting hungry.’ —Winston Churchill When the AFDL’s representatives started calling the BBC offices in Nairobi in late 1996, claiming they would march all the way to Kinshasa, journalists dismissed them with a weary shrug as yet another unknown guerrilla movement, the length of its constituent acronyms only rivalled by its obscurity, making wild plans and farcical claims. Africa is full of them: they surface, splinter into factions—yet more acronyms—only to disappear with equal suddenness. Anywhere else in the world, the AFDL story would have probably been one of raids on helpless villages, a few clashes with the army, limited annexations of land. A hotch-potch of credos, experiences and motivations, its membership ranged from communists to US-educated academics and village thugs. They had barely had time to work out either a clear structure or an ideological line when south Kivu’s deputy governor pushed them into the limelight. Laurent Kabila, the spokesman-turned-leader, was a Maoist with keen commercial instincts, who had funded a fiefdom in eastern Zaire by smuggling out gold and ivory, a trade enlivened by an occasional spot of kidnapping of Westerners.
What do You think about In The Footsteps Of Mr. Kurtz?
