In The Footsteps Of Mr. Kurtz: Living On The Brink Of Disaster In Mobutu's Congo (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
The Congo bears a putrid history as a fruitful land constantly being pillaged and destroyed by leaders corrupted by endless greed. The reign of Mobutu Sese Seko, trademarked with the notorious leopard-skinned hat and pink champagne with which the greedy tyrant thrived, sickeningly juxtaposed the poverty, disease and neglect which plagued the nation which he robbed. Michaela Wrong declares, in her book "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz," “In Mobutu’s hands, the [Congo] had become a paradigm of all that was wrong with postcolonial Africa.” After six years of observing the country firsthand, as a news correspondent for London’s Financial Times, Wrong has created an account of Mobutu’s kleptocratic governance, its consequences, and specifically the final days of his crumbling regime, which she witnessed. Furthermore, Wrong divvies-up the blame for the Congo’s demise, which traditional resides solely on Mobutu’s head, amongst the meddling of many global and Western parties, including the IMF and World Bank. With likeness to a giant, 300-paged newspaper article, this informative book combines her own first-hand anecdotes, numerous interviews, and meticulous research to illustrate how Mobutu sucked the Congo dry. Mr. Kurtz, the memorable character from Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness," lay on his death bed, deep within an African jungle, uttering his last words. He muttered “The horror, the horror,” and these words still seem to resonate through present-day Africa, in the form of disease, corruption, war and poverty. Mr. Kurtz may have been implying his transformation from a formidable ivory trader to a cannibalistic “native.” Hence the title of Wrong’s book, Mobutu seems to have followed Mr. Kurtz’s destructive path, caving to the “monstrous passions at the core of the human soul” which lead him to use his power for the sole purpose of stealing everything he could get his hands on. However, Michaela Wrong also infers that Mr. Kurtz’s horrors were directed more so towards “rooten Western values, the white man’s inhumanity to the black man, than, as is almost always assumed today, black savagery.” Since there seems to be plentiful responsibility to go around, Wrong meticulously counts the faults of ‘outside interferences’ which allowed Mobutu, one of history’s most corrupt leaders, to thrive and blatantly thieve for 32 long years. Amongst the guiltiest Western or world components are, of course, King Leopold, but also Belgium, USA, France, the IMF the World Bank. Wrong starts her book with a brief glimpse back at how Kin Leopold’s bloody colonization and exploitation of the Congo set the stage for a future of corruption. Belgium’s abrupt abandonment of the shaky new nation, sporting only 17 university educated Africans, was like unrolling an ominous welcome mat for the absurd regimes to come. Later, Wrong claims that external interference acted as a new, ‘insidious form of colonialism.’ According to interviewee, CIA agent Devlin, the US was involved in attempts to assassinate Lumumba, in order to bring Mobutu to power. Mobutu continued to keep strong ties with the US, which was particularly aware of the Congo’s richness in raw materials, especially during the Cold War. According to Wrong, the IMF continued to feed the Congo loans, pressured by Western countries not to cut off relations, even as Mobutu blatantly pocketed a large majority of the $9.3 billion of financial aid received. The lack of intervention of Mobutu’s outrageous financial actions, and even the temptation of offering more loans, by these organizations offered, have sunk the Congo deeper into financial disaster which will take decades into the future to ever repair. The blameworthiness of associations like the IMF or other nations over Mobutu is a controversial subject up for debate. So naturally, Michaela Wrong receives significant censure about going soft on Mobutu and pinning blame on the IMF and World Bank for doing their job. I feel that there is no debating the fact that Mobutu is the foremost delinquent. However, it is important for the IMF and World Bank to full understand the outcome of their ‘aid’ and be impartial to individual country’s agendas, but work towards holistic global benefit. Moreover, no matter where people fall on this controversial issue, Wrong still has one major shortcoming in her argument; a gaping void in citations. For the amount of numbers, statistics and questionable claims she uses, her bibliography is sparse and footnotes are nonexistent. The credibility of information or sources constantly comes into question when Wrong makes claims such as Mobutu’s ordering of the rape of an IMF official’s spouse when his flow of financial aid was jeopardized by reform. All in all, Michaela Wrong’s "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz", is an informative read. The book has the fault of periodically being one-sided and lacking analysis of points of view other than her own. Also, the loose chronological structure of many of her vignettes may confuse people with no previous background knowledge of the Congo’s plight. To ensure readers will be able to understand the book and form their own opinions, I would recommend the book for an audience already familiar on the topic. This book is especially for those who have read about Congo’s colonial era (i.e. King Leopold’s Ghost), and are interested to learn about its post-colonial history. Overall, I applaud Wrong’s efforts to help disperse ignorance in a field which is too often ignored, and I hope that authors like her will continue to labor to ensure that these accounts of Africa stay on the forefront of people’s minds.
This is a richly detailed account of Zaire (aka Congo) under Mobutu. It's chock full of amusing anecdotes and evdence of the corruption that has permeated every level of Zaire's society. It lucidly explains how Mobutu's kleptocracy and the "fend for yourself" culture has decimated a country that is rich in natural resources. It also outlines the hypocrisy of Western nations that used Zaire as a pawn during the Cold War. I enjoyed reading this book, and yet....there is something missing. The author, Michela Wrong, is, essentially, a muckraking journalist writing an expose on the economic self-destruction of Zaire. She produces a stinging condemnation, but her book lacks the empathy that even the most venal of nations deserves. Wrong clearly regards everyone she interviews with utter contempt. (The one exception is an ex-pat European farmer who seems to be beneath her contempt.)There are other problems here, too. The causal relationship she draws between the brutal excesses of the Belgian colonialists and the complacency of the population under Mobutu seems a bit too neat. Her portrait of Mobutu himself seems incomplete. She never fully explains how the pragmatic young leader became the paranoid, corrupt "dinosaur"--other than the maxim "absolute power corrupts absolutely." I also think her references to Mr. Kurtz and Conrad's Heart of Darkness are too simplistic.Still, this book has value for readers who are interested in 20th century African history.
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As told in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, in 1885 Leopold II, King of the Belgians, seized a Western Europe-sized chunk of land in the Congo river basin in central Africa. He exploited its natural resources and people mercilessly, and in 1908, bowing to international pressure, sold the colony to Belgium. The Belgians continued the exploitation, though it was no longer as harsh, as the population grew, while under Leopold's rule it shrank; they built hospitals, schools, and even a university with a research nuclear reactor. However, the social organization of the colony was similar to South African apartheid; one Congolese politician told the author that before giving his parents a permit to buy wine, a colonial official checked that their toilet was clean enough. By the late 1950s, much of colonial Africa had independence movements, including Congo, which caught the Belgians unawares; unwilling to fight a war, they granted independence to the Congo in 1960. When the country's first prime minister Patrice Lumumba raised the pay of the civil servants but not the soldiers, and the army commander told the soldiers that independence would change nothing, the army mutinied; amid the chaos, two mineral-rich provinces tried to secede with Belgian encouragement. At Lumumba's request, the United Nations intervened, but didn't subdue the secessionists, as he wanted. He then turned to the Soviet Union, which provided weapons and airplanes to transport Congolese troops who put down the rebellions bloodily; a CIA agent the author interviewed said that the Soviets brought along Marxist propaganda booklets and sent propagandists to the army. Lumumba was deposed in a coup, flown to a formerly rebellious province, and assassinated; the extent of American and Belgian involvement in the coup and the murder remains murky to this day. The coup organizer, the head of the army, and after 1965 the president, was one Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a sergeant in the colonial army, the son of a cook and a maid, a member of a small backward tribe. He started a campaign of authenticity, banning European names and dress, renaming the river and the country Zaire (a Portuguese mispronunciation of the native Congolese name of the great river), and himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga (which literally means "The cock who leaves no hen untouched"). He created a political party, to which all Zairian citizens were supposed to belong from birth. He nationalized all foreign-owned enterprises in the country, and gave them to native Zairians, who quickly ran them into the ground. A Belgian mining manager from a minerals-rich province the author interviewed complained that the post-independence authorities had built nothing and bought no new equipment. Most importantly, Mobutu stole. He bought mansions in France and Belgium; he built a palace with Versailles-like opulence in the middle of the jungle in his tribal territory, with a landing strip long enough for the Concorde, which he liked to fly. His children stole too (he had 17 from several women; when his first wife, fittingly named Marie Antoinette, died, he married his mistress, and made her twin sister his new mistress), and so did members of his tribe, and so did the other "big vegetables". All this in a country with an infant mortality rate of about 10%, average life expectancy of about 50 years, endemic infectious disease, broken roads, and bad electrification. Yet the West put up with it for a long time: the United States wanted a base from which to supply the Angolan rebels, acquiescing to the fact that a part of the supplies would be skimmed off; France wanted to do business in the Francophone country; Belgium wanted to retain influence in the former colony; before Robert McNamara, the World Bank considered dictating the loan recipients' economic policy neo-imperialist, and even afterwards the size of the recipient country's head of state's Swiss bank account wasn't considered important.After the Rwanda genocide, a quarter of the country's Hutu population fled to eastern Zaire, afraid of the retribution by Rwanda's new government with large Tutsi representation. In 1996, they threatened to carry out a genocide against the local members of the Tutsi caste. The latter rebelled under Laurent-Désiré Kabila, an opposition politician who had once been an associate of Patrice Lumumba. With the help of Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, the rebel army advanced; the Zairian army was more skilled at racketeering and looting than fighting, and proved no match for it. In 1997 the rebels captured the capital, and renamed the country back to Congo; meanwhile, Mobutu died of cancer in exile in Morocco. Since then, only a few millions stolen by Mobutu have been traced down in foreign banks, and the government practices of the Mobutu era continued under Kabila.
—Ilya
Ms. Wrong is a talented journalist and here she's written a solid obituary to the Mobutu era with some real-time observations on the brief and tumultuous reign of Mzee Laurent Kabila. The entire story of post-colonial DR Congo/Zaire is painted as outlandish and foolhardy with brushes of acerbic irony.The book brought together several pieces of the puzzle for me and several times provoked an 'aha' out loud as I made connections to the life I observe daily in present-day DR Congo.Footsteps is well written from an expatriate journalist perspective. My only major critique is that it seems Ms. Wrong has no time or interest in seeing the beauty of DRC in its land and its people, of at least giving a serious and direct nod to the suffering that is part of Mobutu's legacy. There is plenty to gawk at and rant over to fill this book and probably three more, but the kind of eye that sees the controversy and doesn't strive to also show the society in its humanness and loveliness is short sided. It sounds a little too much like a burned out expat who can't see the beauty amidst the mess.
—Brian
This book left me confused, at first I thought that the book would narrate Mobutu's rise to power or at least talk a little about how the African president rose to the position he held for 32 years , but no, the book jumps from one point to another with no visible connection, the author had all the building blocks for a good book, but I think the execution was lacking a bit. Nonetheless this book serves the purpose of amplifying our knowledge of post colonial Africa ... And in that subject .. It does success .
—Carlos
