Michela Wrong - In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz - Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo

The atmosphere was prickly. Starting what was to prove a seven-month looting and raping retreat across the country, Zairean forces had lashed out indiscriminately before pulling out, leaving corpses scattered for kilometres. No one was too sure of the identity of the rebel movement, the new bosses in town. And then there were the roaming Rwandans, whose intervention in Zaire was being denied by the government next door but was too prominent to ignore. Speaking from the corner of his mouth, a resident confirmed the outsiders’ presence: ‘We recognise them by their morphology.’ Then he hurried away as a baby-faced Rwandan soldier – high on something and all the more sinister for the bright pink lipstick he was wearing – swaggered up to silence the blabbermouth.

Somehow, Mobutu’s villa seemed the natural place to go. The road ran along the lake, snaking past walls draped in bougainvillaea, with the odd glimpse of blue water behind. We surprised a lone looter who had decided, enterprisingly, to focus on the isolated villas of the local dignitaries, rather than the overworked town centre. Thinking we were rebels, he stopped pushing a wheelbarrow on which a deep freeze was precariously balanced and ran for cover. As we drove harmlessly by, he was already returning to his task. A stolen photocopier and computer were still waiting to be taken to what, almost certainly, was a shack without electricity.

In the old days, the villa complex had been strictly off limits behind staunch metal gates manned by members of the presidential guard. Now the gates were wide open and the Zairean flag – a black fist clenching a flaming torch – lay crumpled on the ground. There had been no fight for this most symbolic of targets. No one, it was clear from the boxes of unused ammunition, the anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs carelessly stacked in the guards’ quarters, had had the heart for a real showdown.

In the garage were five black Mercedes, in pristine condition, two ambulances, in case the president fell sick and a Land Rover with a podium attachment to allow him, Pope-like, to address the public. A generous allocation for a man whose visits had become increasingly rare. But like a Renaissance monarch who expected a bedroom to be provided in any of his baron’s castles, Mobutu kept a dozen such mansions constantly at the ready across the country, on the off-chance of a visit that usually never came.

It was on venturing inside – could the property possibly be tripwired? – that we really began to feel like naughty children sneaking a look in their parents’ bedroom, only to emerge with their illusions shattered. From outside the villa had looked the height of ostentatious luxury: all chandeliers, Ming vases, antique furniture and marble floors. Close up, almost everything proved to be fake. The vases were modern imitations, they came with price labels still attached. The Romanesque plinths were in moulded plastic, the malachite inlay painted on.

With an ‘aha!’ of excitement, a colleague whipped out a black and white cravat, of the type worn with the collarless ‘abacost’ jacket that constituted Mobutu’s eccentric contribution to the world of fashion. From a distance, the cravats had always appeared complex arrangements of material, folded with meticulous care. Now I saw that they were little more than nylon bibs, held in place with tabs of Velcro. This emperor did have some clothes. But like his regime itself, they were all show and no substance.

Most poignant of all, perhaps, was the pink and burgundy suite prepared for the presidential spouse, although it was impossible to say whether this was the first lady Bobi Ladawa, or the twin sister Mobutu had, bizarrely, also taken to his bed. An outsize bottle of the perfume Je Reviens, which had probably turned rancid years ago in the African heat, stood on the mantelpiece. With their man ravaged by prostate cancer, his shambolic army collapsing like a house of cards, neither woman would ever be returning to Goma. This irreverent plundering was the only proof required of how rapidly the power established over three decades was unravelling.

Rebel uprisings, bodies rotting in the sun, a sickening megalomaniac. In newsrooms across the globe, shaking their heads over yet another unfathomable African crisis, producers and sub-editors dusted off memories of school literature courses and reached for the clichés. Zaire was Joseph Conrad’s original ‘Heart of Darkness’, they reminded the public. How prophetic the famous cry of despair voiced by the dying Mr Kurtz at Africa’s seemingly boundless capacity for bedlam and brutality had proved yet again. ‘The horror, the horror.’ Was nothing more promising ever to emerge from that benighted continent?

Yet when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness and penned some of the most famous last words in literary history, this was very far from his intended message. The title ‘Heart of Darkness’ itself and the phrase ‘the horror, the horror’ uttered by Mr Kurtz as he expires on a steam boat chugging down the giant Congo river, probably constitute one of the great misquotations of all time.

For Conrad, the Polish seaman who was to become one of Britain’s greatest novelists, Heart of Darkness was a book based on some very painful personal experience. In 1890 he had set out for the Congo Free State, the African colony then owned by Belgium’s King Leopold II, to fill in for a steamship captain slain by tribesmen. The posting, which was originally meant to last three years but was curtailed after less than six months, was to be the most traumatic of his life. It took him nine years to digest and turn into print.

Bouts of fever and dysentery nearly killed him; his health never subsequently recovered. Always melancholic, he spent much of the time plunged into deep depression, so disgusted by his fellow whites he avoided almost all human contact. His vision of humanity was to be permanently coloured by what he found in the Congo, where declarations of philanthropy camouflaged a colonial system of unparalleled cruelty. Before the Congo, Conrad once said, ‘I was a perfect animal’; afterwards, ‘I see everything with such despondency – all in black’.

Mr Kurtz, whose personality haunts the book although he says almost nothing, is first presented as the best station manager of the Congo, a man of refinement and education, who can thrill crowds with his idealism and is destined for great things inside the anonymous Company ‘developing’ the region. Stationed 200 miles in the interior, he has now fallen sick, and a band of colleagues sets out to rescue him.

When they find him, they discover that the respected Mr Kurtz has ‘gone native’. In fact, he has gone worse than native. Cut off from the Western world, inventing his own moral code and rendered almost insane by the solitude of the primeval forest, he has indulged in ‘abominable satisfactions’, presided ‘at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites’ says Conrad, hinting that Kurtz has become a cannibal.

His palisade is decorated by rows of severed black heads; he has been adopted as honorary chief by a tribe whose warriors he leads on bloody village raids in search of ivory. The man who once wrote lofty reports calling for the enlightenment of the native now has a simpler recommendation: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ When he expires before the steamer reaches civilisation, corroded by fever and knowledge of his own evil, his colleagues are relieved rather than sorry – a potential embarrassment has been avoided.

Despite its slimness, the novella is one of those multilayered works whose meaning seems to shift with each new reading. By the time Heart of Darkness was published in 1902, the atrocities being committed by Leopold’s agents in the Congo were already familiar to the public, thanks to the campaigns being waged by human rights activists of the day. So while Heart of Darkness is in part a psychological thriller about what makes man human, it had enough topical detail in it to carry another message to its readers. Notwithstanding the jarringly racist observations by the narrator Marlow, the way Heart of Darkness dwells on the sense of utter alienation felt by the white man in the gloom of central Africa, the book was intended primarily as a withering attack on the hypocrisy of contemporary colonial behaviour. ‘The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilising work in Africa is a justifiable idea,’ the writer told his publisher.