Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French Page A

freighters.
    In this once-booming land, the ships were the equivalent of a rail stock and tractor-trailer fleet wrapped into one. But they were all badly rusted now, immobilized by an economy that with each passing day was growing more informal. Some had turned into floating apartment buildings, and here and there, men could be seen on their decks, squatting naked, taking their morning baths out of plastic buckets.
    Even in this advanced state of ruin, though, Zaire, or more precisely Kinshasa and its skyscrapers, was an impressive sight from the low vantage point of our battered blue-and-white ferry. Mimicking Leopold once again, Mobutu had dreamed big. For a time, during the 1970s and early 1980s, when I had first visited, Mobutu’s hold on the country, no less than that of his European predecessor, was built on a foundation of seductive, but ultimately outlandish, lies: rehabilitating African culture through a series of gimmicks, like banning neckties and Christian names, and through a demagoguery that promised a state whose power would reflect the country’s immensity. At the height of his glory in those years, the tricked-out carapace of Mobutu’s creation glittered with the illusion of promise. By now, though, every one of the country’s forty-five million citizens bitterly understood that the Mobutu system had never been anything more than an empty shell.
    At its core, Mobutu’s program had consisted of little more than manipulation of symbols, fear and greed. But in the end, it was the president’s outsized, Leopoldian appetites and ambitions that had laid his country low. These days, when Mobutu was not savoring champagne breakfasts in one of his European chateaus, he confined himself to his gaudily overbuilt village, Gbadolité, or to his gleaming white luxury riverboat, the
Kamanyola,
a ludicrous, James Bond–style prop, with a helicopter parked on its prow. All the while, a keen personality cult cranked out flattering names for him—the Guide, the Helmsman or, in a more atavistic mode, honorifics derived from the names of animals, like the Eagle, and his favorite, the Leopard, which hinted more candidly at his rapaciousness.
    No one had declared Mobutu’s Zaire dead yet, but something definitely smelled, and the country’s decomposition had become an open secret. In the space of a mere year or two, by virtue of processes foreseen by none of the outside parties that had served for so long as Mobutu’s allies and handmaidens—not by the Belgians or the French, not by the World Bank or the United Nations, and it seems not even by the CIA—this gigantic country would become a geopolitical fiction. There would still be a flag and an anthem, to be sure, along with a mortally sick and isolated ruler determined to cling on to the last. But like nature, politics tolerates no vacuums, and politically speaking, Zaire was already becoming an empty pit in the heart of the continent—a pit waiting for someone, by yet another unforeseen process, to fill it up and make the earth level again.
    On this day, however, with sunshine streaking through the looming skyline of downtown apartment complexes and office buildings, it was still possible to sense the immense dreams this land had inspired, and not just the horrible ruin. Indeed, the best gauge was a glance back across the immense river at Brazzaville, ever modest, but now as shrunken and reduced as a postcard portrait. The only building that stood out on the distant shore, in fact, was the headquarters of the Central Bank of Central African States, a creation of France that circulated the CFA franc, a version of the French franc decked out in colorful African disguise, for use in Paris’s former colonies. The tall copper-colored tower was a play on famous Central African statuary, and it shimmered from afar like a bronze scimitar, jealously warding off Belgium, or Zaire, or whoever else might be tempted to encroach on France’s preserve. But one tower does not a