| Murderer of a country - king and god to all |
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| Written by Danial Steinmann | ||||
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I was not really paying much attention when watching a documentary on Joseph Desiree Mobutu’s life. It was the same old drab liberated Africa story. One man, one vote, once, and then a tyrant slowly but meticulously robbing his ignorant citizens, draining his country, making himself filthy rich, and eventually destroying an entire country. I have seen this so often and read so many similar stories that I hope I will be forgiven for describing it as boring, despite the human tragedy.
But at some point, my ears picked up the words “founding
father” and “father of the nation.” At that point my attention level
picked up dramatically and I started listening intently to the
programme. Have I not heard those words before and not in the distant
past, recently as a matter of fact? The documentary carried on blah blah blah what Mobutu did to come to power, how he quickly eradicated all opposition after he settled on the throne, and how he systematically created a cult figure around his own personality. First he renamed the country from Congo to Zaire. Mobutu then started renaming all sorts of places and persons, including himself and even the mighty Congo River. Next was an instruction to his information minister to create an aura of a celestial being, removing any images that may create a separation of Mobutu the man, the president and god incarnated. Of course the poor Congolese, being ignorant sods, ate it up by the bucket full, spoon and all. And Mobutu started pillaging his country and any person with some modicum of wealth that could pose a threat in future. This made him fabulously rich and his country and fellow Congolese exceedingly poor. But no one cared enough to stop him. After all, god himself was in charge of the Congo. Not being entirely unfamiliar with the Congo’s history, I did not make too much of it when Laurent Desiree Kabila started his westward march in 1997 from Kivu to Kinshasa. At that time I was in Kenya for a sojourn, and being just on the other side of Lake Victoria, events in the Congo received far more exposure there than here in Namibia. Almost like a front row seat in terms of media exposure. |
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