In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz

Why did this small European nation prove such an appalling colonial power? One gets the impression that Leopold was rushing so desperately to catch up with his foreign allies, self-restraint and principles were simply jettisoned along the way. Maybe a country in its infancy did not possess the self-confidence necessary to show magnanimity when imposing nationhood on others. As tribally divided as the nations hacked arbitrarily from Africa’s land mass by the colonisers, Belgium barely had a sense of itself, let alone itself in the novel role of master.

Marchal, convinced modern Belgium owed the Congolese some kind of reparation in recognition of its errors, even if it only took the form of a more relaxed visa system, seemed to lay the blame on a failure of imagination. A ‘small country with small horizons’, as Leopold himself contemptuously described it, Belgium regarded the Congo as a money-making opportunity, and little else, unlike colonial nations with longer imperial traditions behind them and loftier ideals.

One former ambassador – not a Belgian – put it rather more bluntly: ‘The Belgians were awful in Congo because they had no grandeur themselves. This was the Zaire of Europe, a ratty little country divided amongst itself, and it proved incapable of aspiring to the heights.’

Not long ago, strange notices began appearing over the clothes racks in the slick designer shops and perfumeries lining Boulevard de Waterloo, the broad thoroughfare that carves an ugly swathe through the heart of Brussels.

They were written in Lingala, a language incomprehensible to most Belgians. They warned their readers anyone caught stealing would not only be arrested and charged, but expelled from Belgium and sent back to their country of origin. Their appearance, somewhat at odds with the fur-coated, poodle-carrying sophistication of this most European of cities, was a tribute to the effectiveness of the Congolese women hit-squads who had taken to systematically shop-lifting designer labels in the area.

‘It’s time to repay the colonial debt. On va kobeta’ (‘We’re going on a raid’), the women would say, as, with the rumbustious energy only an African market trader can bring to her task, they set off in search of Versace and Yamamoto jackets, Gianfranco Ferre and Jean-Paul Gaultier slacks, Kenzo accessories and Church shoes – anything decreed cool by the trendsetters of the day.

The designer shops had only themselves to blame. They were, after all, displaying their goods within temptingly easy striking distance of the poor Congolese ghetto that nestles compactly in the covered galleries and cobbled streets of Ixelles, just off the Porte de Namur. Few districts in the Belgian capital can rival ‘Matonge’, focal point for the Congolese community, when it comes to juxtaposing inordinate personal vanity with the chronic inability to meet the cost of a heightened sense of style.

Nicknamed after Kinshasa’s heaving popular quarters, because, like its namesake back home, this is a district where ‘ça bouge’ (things move), Matonge is like a long draught of Congolese essence that has been decanted and boiled down to its purest concentrate. There is something brave, almost foolhardy, about the way this tiny ghetto turns its back on the Belgian present of tramlines, dark streets and narrow houses to recreate a more familiar reality.

In the hairdressers – and every second shop seems to be a hairdresser, its window crammed with wigs and hair extensions – Congolese women have their hair straightened or young blades chat. The greengrocers here sell fat stalks of sugar cane, nobbly sweet potatoes, heaps of the greens used to make pondu, the Congolese alternative to spinach, deadly red chillies and small, pale green aubergines. The front pages of Congolese newspapers, Le Soft, Le Palmarès, Le Phare – with all their tunnel-vision, their obsession with the domestic political scene – are stuck against café windows; ‘waxes’, the bright Dutch prints used to make women’s wraps, lie folded on display in neat rows and even the gold on sale in the jewellers has that pinkish tinge associated with Africa.

Restaurants serve chicken in peanut sauce, fish wrapped in palm leaves and it is even possible to find such delicacies as caterpillar, crocodile – the oysters and caviar of Kinshasa’s culinary scene – or chikwange, the leaf-wrapped blocs of fermenting cassava paste that, to the uninitiated, resemble nothing quite so much as warm carpet glue.

In the old days, a tailor here turned out the awkward abacost jackets made obligatory by Mobutu. The ghetto even has its own radio station. Broadcasting from an abandoned military barracks, Radio Panik feeds its listeners a diet of Koffi Olomide, Zaiko Langa Langa, Papa Wemba, or whoever dominates the Congolese music scene of the day, plus, most crucially for a public hungry for information from home, a weekly resume of Congolese news.

Silting squat in the city centre, Matonge is a psychological world away from the leafy suburbs of Rhode St Genesè, Uccle and Waterloo to the south of Brussels, where Mobutu’s former aides live in marble-floored mansions, over garages where the Mercedes is parked alongside the BMW. Just as the presence of Mobutu’s château in Brussels’s chic suburbs acted as a magnet for the Congolese elite, who set up their court around the big man, Matonge, at the other end of the social scale, owes its existence to the Maison Africaine, a hostel where those shaking the red dust of the continent from their feet could stay for next to nothing, often lingering for years on end.

Cafés sprang up serving the food homesick new arrivals missed, as did music shops and the nightclubs, Le Mambo, La Référence, Hollywood City, which only come alive in the early hours. Matonge became an area the 15,000 Congolese living, studying and working in Belgium recognised as a second home, a place where the Congolese genius for finding creative solutions to the problems of existence surfaced.

Family in dire straits at home? There are agencies here where you can go, deposit 100 dollars, sure in the knowledge that a dependant at the other end in Kinshasa will receive another 100-dollar bill, all without going through a bank. Relatives going hungry or can’t afford the price of an electrical appliance? The same procedure is available for a sack of rice or a fridge. And when disaster really strikes you can even, through these tiny offices, arrange a funeral back in Congo.

The entrepreneurship extends well beyond the law’s reach. A vibrant trade in second-hand cars, drugs and forged cheques, prostitution and fake visas, plus the designer brand shoplifting, has prompted Belgium’s police to establish a unit specialising solely in crime committed by members of the Congolese community, something of a mark of distinction given the far greater numbers of Moroccans and Turks in Brussels.

Despite all the cheering inventiveness, there’s a tragic poignancy about Matonge. The alliterative Lingala slang residents use to refer to life abroad is premised on vaunting ambition, but the aspirations come tinged with a sense of inferiority. For those abandoning Kinshasa, despairingly dubbed ‘Kosovo’, Belgium is ‘lola’, or ‘paradise’. Paris, another favourite destination, is known as ‘Panama’. Europe is ‘mikili’, ‘the promised land’, inhabited, appropriately enough, by ‘mwana Maria’, ‘the children of the Virgin Mary’ – whites.

This is a community determined to outstay its welcome, made up of forty-year-old students with a smattering of children and fistfuls of degrees; of young men playing up their brushes with the law in Kinshasa in the hope of winning the sobriquet of ‘political asylum-seeker’; of youths plotting marriages of convenience with Belgian mates: all and any methods are acceptable in the quest for the ultimate prize – a permit allowing an indefinite stay in Europe.

When it is won, such documentation rarely goes to waste. ‘Whites say that all blacks look alike,’ explained Leon, a philosophy graduate studying accountancy, ‘so someone with papers will lend them to a friend who wants to cross into France or Switzerland, who will then post them back to Brussels.’ Without the paperwork, work outside the informal sector is impossible. So Brussels’s restaurant kitchens, its building sites, its minicab firms, are staffed by Africa’s most well-qualified students.

The sense that only the West offers hope of improvement is enough to make even the uninspiring seem acceptable. ‘I have friends who are vegetating here. They do nothing, they stagnate, but they don’t dare go back,’ said Leon. ‘In the eyes of their families, returning from Europe means they have failed. And the worst thing you can have happen to you, the most humiliating, is to be expelled.’

Other African communities forced into exile organise guerrilla campaigns from abroad, hatch plots, or draw up political programmes for the distant day when they hope to take power. For decades, Eritrean émigrés ran an efficient informal tithing system which funded the rebel movement that eventually pushed Ethiopian occupiers out of their territory. Despite boasting one of the continent’s most formidable dictators as an antagonist to rally against, the Congolese have nothing to match this. If a rebel campaign is being fought in the east of their country, amongst the young men of Matonge there is no talk of donning camouflage and signing up. The biggest opposition party had closed its offices ‘for security reasons’, I was told, but administrative incompetence was more likely to be the cause. The collective sense is missing.

Congolese themselves acknowledge the lack, with a shrug of the shoulders and the rueful honesty that is in itself part of the problem of proscribed ambitions and low expectations. Each man’s aim is to leave Congo, acquire qualifications, and build a life somewhere else. Let someone else draw up a constitution. Let someone else rebuild the country. Experience has taught that politics is a game played by conmen and hypocrites.

What adds a bitter edge to this undignified scramble for the exit is the realisation that while thousands of Congolese immigrants would not be living in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Liège were it not for their country’s historical ties with Belgium, a younger generation of Belgians is virtually unaware of that painful colonial past.

‘There is no African memory left,’ acknowledges Marcelin, who works for a struggling Congolese state company with offices in Brussels. ‘There are very few Belgians left in parliament or the ministries who worked in the colony, so the sentimental attitude of the past has gone. All that is left is a sense of disappointment with our leaders and negative associations of disaster, death and dictatorship. Young Belgians assume Congolese either make music all the time or are petty crooks. There is no sense of responsibility for what their country did in the Congo, let alone guilt.’

Despite the intimate historical relationship, no Belgian newspaper or radio station has a foreign correspondent permanently based in Kinshasa. In a country struggling with its own contradictions, preoccupied with prickly Francophone-Flemish relations, Belgian colonial history is not taught at school. The distorted vision of history the Royal Museum at Tervuren set out to sanctify has been incidentally fostered by the political sensitivities of modern Belgium.

Young Bruxellois live in a city dotted with baroque monuments funded with the proceeds of the Congolese state, scattered with antique shops selling Congolese masks and home to the biggest community of Congolese living abroad. Yet King Leopold’s Ghost, the first book in years to stir a general debate on the topic, was written by an American, not a Belgian.

As Jean Stengers, a retired professor who has written copiously on the Congo Free State, freely admitted, his pet subject remains almost exclusively in the narrow intellectual domain, a closed book to most fellow nationals. Working from a study crammed with leather-bound volumes and papers looking out on the bleak Rue de Couronne, the white-haired academic had criticised Marchal for his interpretation of history, arguing that the former diplomat ignored the fact that national glorification, rather than personal enrichment, was Leopold’s prime motivating factor. But if they differed in their views of the king, the two men shared a rueful awareness the topic they both regarded as of such importance was a matter of general indifference.

What feelings existed, Stengers said, were amongst a disappearing generation and – astonishingly – they were scarcely feelings of shame. ‘In the older generation, many of whom served in the Congo, the strongest feeling is one of injustice done. There’s a deep sense that magnificent things were given to the Congolese and we were rewarded with huge ingratitude. But the public at large has lost interest in the Congo. For the new generation, ignorance of Belgian history is nearly as great as ignorance of Congo’s history.’

Knowing nothing about the past, of course, frees a population from any sense of blame for the present. How convenient was all this forgetting, I wondered as I walked down the steps of Stengers’ house, given the débâcle of modern-day Congo?

The question Belgian researchers into the Congo Free State hate to be asked is whether there is any causal link between Belgium’s exploitative regime and the excesses of Mobutu’s rule, whether a frighteningly efficient kleptocratic system effectively softened up a community for a repeat performance.

Marchal had brushed it anxiously away, pleading that he was a historian rather than an intellectual, and it was not for him to make such judgements. When put to Professor Stengers, the question had been rejected with a categorical shake of the head. Citing sociological studies conducted in the Great Lakes region, he said what was striking was the lack of memories of the Leopold era amongst the local population. So how could there be any causal link?

But that, I thought, seemed to be missing the point. Plunging into the dreadful detail of Leopold’s reign, I, too, had been surprised by how few of these horrors – surely the stuff of family legends passed down from patriarch to grandson – had ever been mentioned to me by Zairean friends. But it wasn’t necessary to be an expert on sexual abuse to know it was possible to be traumatised without knowing why; that, indeed, amnesia – whether individual or collective – could sometimes be the only way of dealing with horror, that human behaviour could be altered forever without the cause being openly acknowledged.

In Belgium I began to sense the logic behind many of the peculiarities that had puzzled me living in Kinshasa, a city where everyone seemed to complain about how awful things were but no one seemed ready to try changing the status quo; where grab-it-and-run was the principle of the day and long-term planning alien. Page after page, the picture painted by Marchal had struck a chord.

Coming after the raids of the hated Force Publique and the slave traders, Mobutu’s looting soldiers were just more of the same. After the crippling production targets set by Leopold’s agents, the informal ‘taxes’ levied by corrupt officials must have seemed benevolent in comparison. Having seen their revolts against the Belgian system crushed by troops wielding such horrors as the Krupp cannon, who still had the courage to rise up against Mobutu’s army, however shambolic it came to seem to Western eyes? And how could the Congolese ever value or build on an infrastructure and administration imposed from above, using their sweat and blood as its raw materials?

Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo’s population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.

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