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CHAPTER ONE
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave
Kinshasa, 17 May 1997
The Management
At 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, a group of guests who had just staggered back to their rooms after a heavy drinking session in L’Atmosphère, the nightclub hidden in the bowels of Kinshasa’s best hotel, heard something of a fracas taking place outside. Peering from their balconies near the top of the Tower, the modern part of the hotel where management liked to put guests paying full whack, they witnessed a scene calculated to sober them up.
Drawing up outside the Hotel Intercontinental, effectively barring all exits, were several military armoured cars, crammed with members of the Special Presidential Division (DSP), the dreaded elite unit dedicated to President Mobutu’s personal protection and held responsible for the infamous Lubumbashi massacre. A black jeep with tinted windows had careered up to the side entrance and its owner – Mobutu’s own son Kongulu, a DSP captain – was now levelling his sub-machine gun at the night receptionist.
Kongulu, who was later to die of AIDS, was a stocky, bearded man with a taste for fast cars, gambling and women. He left unpaid bills wherever he went with creditors too frightened to demand payment of the man who had been nicknamed ‘Saddam Hussein’ by Kinshasa’s inhabitants. Now he was in full combat gear, bristling with grenades, two gleaming cartridge belts crisscrossed Rambo-style across his chest. And he was very, very angry.
Screaming at the receptionist, he demanded the room numbers of an army captain and another high-ranking official staying at the Intercontinental, men he accused of betraying his father, who had fled with his family hours before rather than face humiliation at the hands of the rebel forces advancing on the capital.
Up in Camp Tsha Tshi, the barracks on the hill which housed Mobutu’s deserted villa, Kongulu’s fellow soldiers had already killed the only man diplomats believed was capable of negotiating a peaceful handover. With the rebels believed to be only a couple of hours’ march away, Kongulu and his men were driving from one suspected hideout to another in a mood of grim fury, searching for traitors. Their days in the sun were over, they knew, but they would not go quietly. They could feel the power slipping through their fingers, but there was still time, in the moments before Mobutu’s aura of invincibility finally evaporated in the warm river air, for some score-settling.
The hotel incident swiftly descended into farce, as things had a tendency to do in Zaire.
‘Block the lifts,’ ordered the hotel’s suave Jordanian manager, determined, with a level of bravery verging on the foolhardy, to protect his guests. The night staff obediently flipped the power switch. But by the time the manager’s order had got through, Kongulu and two burly soldiers were already on the sixteenth floor.
Storming from one identical door to another, unable to locate their intended victims – long since fled – and unable to descend, the death squad was reaching near-hysteria. ‘Unblock the lifts, let them out, let them out,’ ordered the manager, beginning to feel rattled. Incandescent with fury, the trio spilled out into the lobby. Cursing and spitting, they mustered their forces, revved their vehicles and roared off into the night, determined to slake their blood lust before dawn.
The waiting was at an end. May 17, 1997 was destined to be showdown time for Zaire. And it looked uncomfortably clear that the months of diplomatic attempts to negotiate a deal that would ease Mobutu out and rebel leader Laurent Kabila in, preventing Kinshasa from descending into a frenzy of destruction behind the departing president, had come to precisely nothing.
In Rwanda, that role is fulfilled by the Mille Collines hotel, where the management stared down the Hutu militiamen bent on slaughtering terrified Tutsi guests during the 1994 genocide. In Zimbabwe, it used to be the Meikles, where armed white farmers rubbed shoulders with sanction-busters during the Smith regime. In Ethiopia it is the Hilton, where during the Mengistu years some staff doubled as government informers; in Uganda, the Nile, whose rooms once rang with the screams of suspects being tortured by Idi Amin’s police.
In Congo the honour most definitely goes to the Hotel Intercontinental. I know, because I once lived there. With one room as my living quarters, another as dilapidated office and a rooftop beer crate as the perch for a satellite telex – my link with the outside world – I soon realised that the hotel, as emblematic of the regime as Mobutu’s leopardskin hat, offered the perfect vantage point from which to observe the dying days of the dinosaur.
The hotel was built on a whim. On a visit to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, President Mobutu saw the Hotel Ivoire, and decided he wanted one too. For once, his impulses were based on canny business instincts. The Intercontinental was the first five-star hotel in Kinshasa. Until the restoration of the Hotel Memling, its rival in the town centre, there was simply nowhere else to go for VIPS seeking the bland efficiency only an international hotel chain can deliver. During the prosperous 1970s, the 50 per cent government stake in the building was a share in a certified cash cow.
Constructed on a spur of land in leafy Gombe, a district of ambassadors’ residences and ministries, it enjoys some of the best views in Kinshasa. To the east, the Congo river traces a lazy sweep as it emerges from Malebo pool, an expanse of water so vast that, venturing out in a small boat, you can lose sight of the opposite banks and end up wondering whether, by some miracle of geography, you have drifted out to sea.
Across the water, which is transformed into a disturbed mirror of silver and gold each sunset, gleams the distinctive concave tower that serves as the city of Brazzaville’s landmark. The river, that concourse Marlow described as ‘an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land’ is the frontier, a fact exploited by the fishermen whose delicate pirogues languidly traverse the waterway for a spot of incidental smuggling.
Nowhere else in the world do two capitals lie so close to each other, within easy shelling distance, in fact, a feature that has been of more than merely abstract interest in the past. The proximity allows each city to act as an impromptu refugee camp when things get too hot at home. From Brazzaville to Kinshasa, from Kinshasa to Brazzaville, residents ping-pong irrepressibly from one to another – sinks, toilets and mattresses on their heads, depending on which capital is judged more dangerous at any given moment.
In peacetime, the river offers release to Kinshasa’s claustrophobic expatriates. Roaring upstream in their motorboats, they picnic in the shimmering heat given off by the latest sandbank deposited by the current or scud across the waves on waterskis, weaving around the drifting islands of water hyacinth. Legend has it a European ambassador was once eaten by a crocodile while swimming and freshwater snakes are said to thrive. Yet far more ominous, for swimmers, is the steady pull of the river, the relentless tug of a vast mass of water powering relentlessly to the sea.
Some of this water has travelled nearly 3,000 miles and descended more than 5,000 feet. It has traced a huge arc curving up from eastern Zambia, heading straight north across the savannah as the Lualaba, veering west into the equatorial forest and taking in the Ubangi tributary before aiming for the Atlantic. The basin it drains rims Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville. The catchment area straddles the equator, ensuring that some part is always in the midst of the rainy season. Hence the river’s steady flow, so strong that in theory it could cover the energy needs of central Africa and beyond. In practice, the hydroelectric dam built at Inga is working at a fraction of capacity – one of Mobutu’s many white elephant projects – and even domestic demand is not being met.
The local word for river is ‘nzadi’: a word misunderstood and mispronounced by Portuguese explorers charting the coastline in the fifteenth century. In rebaptising Belgian Congo ‘Zaire’ in 1971, Mobutu was acknowledging the extent to which that waterway, the most powerful in the world after the Amazon, defines his people’s identity. But what should have opened up the region has instead served to isolate it. On the map, the blue ribbon sweeping across the continent looks a promising access route. But the terrible rapids lying between the upper reaches of the Lualaba and Kisangani, Kinshasa and the sea, make nonsense of the atlas.
Looking west from the hotel, you can just glimpse the brown froth from the first of the series of falls that so appalled explorer Henry Morton Stanley when he glimpsed them in 1877. Determined to settle the dispute then raging in the West over the origins of the Nile, he had trekked across the continent from Zanzibar, losing nearly half his expedition to disease, cannibal attack and exhaustion. The calm of Malebo pool, fringed by sandy islands and a long row of white cliffs, had seemed a blessing to him and his young companion, Frank Pocock. ‘The grassy table-land above the cliffs appeared as green as a lawn, and so much reminded Frank of Kentish Downs that he exclaimed enthusiastically, “I feel we are nearing home”,’ wrote Stanley. In his enthusiasm Pocock, the only other white man to have survived this far into the journey, proposed naming the cliffs Dover, and the stretch of open water after Stanley. The reprieve proved shortlived. Three months later, still struggling to cross the Crystal Mountains separating the pool from the sea, Pocock went over one of the rapids and was drowned.
Leopoldville, the trading station Stanley set up here in honour of Leopold II, the Belgian King who sponsored his return to the area to ‘develop’ the region, was originally separate from Kinshasa, a second station established further upriver and dominated by baobab groves. The baobabs have gone now and the two stations have merged to form one inchoate city, a messy urban settlement of fits and starts that always seems about to peter away into the bush, only to sprawl that little bit further afield.
In the city’s infancy, the Belgian colonisers had laid out a model city of boulevards and avenues, sports grounds and parks. But with the population now nudging five million, all thought of town planning has been abandoned, the rules of drainage and gravity ignored. Nature takes its revenge during the rainy seasons, when mini Grand Canyons open up under roads and water-logged hillsides collapse, burying inhabitants in their shacks.
‘It looks as though it’s survived a war and is being rebuilt,’ a photographer friend, a veteran of Sarajevo, remarked after her first visit to Kinshasa. But the damage has been self-inflicted, in two rounds of looting so terrible they have become historical landmarks in people’s minds, so that events are labelled as being ‘avant le premier pillage’ or ‘après le deuxième pillage’, before and after the lootings. It is Congo’s version of BC and AD.
As for rebuilding, the impression given by the scaffolding and myriad work sites dotted around Kinshasa is misleading. The work has never been completed, the scaffolding will probably never be removed. Like the defunct street lamps lining Nairobi’s roads, the tower blocks of Freetown, the fading boardings across Africa which advertise trips to destinations no travel company today services, it recalls another era, when a continent believed its natural trajectory pointed up instead of down.
Down in the valley lies the Cité, the pullulating popular quarters. Matonge, Makala, Kintambo: districts of green-scummed waterways, street markets and rubbish piled so high the white egrets picking through it bob above the corrugated-iron roofs. In heavy rains the open drains overflow, turning roads into rivers of black mud that exhale the warm stink of sewage. On the heights, enjoying the cooler air, are districts like Mont-Fleuri, Ma Campagne and Binza, where spiked walls conceal the mansions that housed Mobutu’s elite and giant lizards in garish purple and orange do jerky press-ups by limpid blue swimming pools.
When the ‘mouvanciers’, as those belonging to Mobutu’s presidential movement were called, ventured downhill, it was usually to the Hotel Intercontinental that they headed in their Mercedes. It was a home away from home. They liked to sit in its Atrium café in their gold-rimmed sunglasses, doing shady deals with Lebanese diamond buyers, ordering cappuccinos and talking in ostentatiously loud voices over their mobile phones while armed bodyguards loitered in the background.
They were the only ones who could afford to patronise the designer-wear shops in the hotel’s arcade or hire the Junoesque whores – renowned as the most expensive in Kinshasa – who swanned along the corridors. They ran up accounts and left the management to chase payment by the government for years. Kongulu owed the casino a huge amount, but who could force a president’s son to pay?
It was never a place where those who opposed the regime could feel comfortable. Mobutu’s portrait stared out from above the main desk, his personality seemed to invest every echoing corridor. The Popular Movement for the Revolution (MPR), the party every Zairean at one stage was obliged to join, rented a set of rooms here and on at least one embarrassing occasion for management, a handcuffed prisoner was spotted in the lifts, being taken upstairs for interrogation.
Time the placing of your international call right and you could eavesdrop on the telephone conversations of guests down the hall, being monitored by the switchboard operators. The room cleaners showed a disproportionate level of interest in guests’ comings and goings. There was always a sense of being under surveillance. ‘We don’t hire them as such, but what can we do if the staff work as spies?’ a hotel executive once acknowledged, with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders.
By the mid-1990s the Intercontinental had, like the country itself, hit hard times. Zaire had become an international pariah and few VIPs visited Kinshasa any more. With occupancy below 20 per cent, service was stultifyingly slow. The blue dye came off the floor of the swimming pool, leaving bathers with the impression they had caught some horrible foot disease. The aroma of rotting carpet – blight of humid climates – tinged the air, the salade niçoise gave you the runs and the national power company would regularly plunge the hotel into penumbra because of unpaid bills. The first time I used the lift it shuttled repeatedly between ground floor and sixth, refusing to stop. ‘Yes, we heard you ringing the alarm bell,’ ...
