A Continent for the Taking

The continent is simply too large and too complex to be grasped easily, and only rarely, in fact, have we ever tried. Instead, we categorize and oversimplify, willy-nilly, ignoring that for the continent’s inhabitants the very notion of Africanness is an utterly recent abstraction, born of Western subjugation,

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Most important, as a privileged witness to a quarter century–sized slice of history, my understanding of Africa would gradually transform the way I saw the world. It awakened me as nothing else before to the selfishness and shortsightedness of the rich and the dignity of the poor in their suffering, and to the uses and abuses of power.

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The “action” here, as it were, takes place in my home regions of West and Central Africa—places like Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country; Liberia, the closest thing America has ever had to an African colony; Mali, home to some of the continent’s oldest and most distinctive cultures; and Congo, formerly known as Zaire, whose geographical position astride the equator, in the very center of the continent, and turbulent history give it a strong claim to being Africa’s heart, literary clichés aside.

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Africa is the stage of mankind’s greatest tragedies, and yet we remain largely inured to them, all but blind to the deprivation and suffering of one ninth of humanity. We awaken to the place mostly in fits of coarse self-interest and outright greed. Once upon a time, these brief awakenings involved a need for rubber or cotton, gold or diamonds, not to mention the millions of slaves, branded and ferried like cattle across the Atlantic, whose contributions to the wealth of Europe and its coveted New World are scarcely acknowledged.

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Nor does Washington’s brief but active engagement with the continent after the 1994 genocide, which is explored in detail in these pages, make up for extraordinarily misguided policies, driven more by guilt than by genuine care, that resulted in the largely unheralded deaths of at least 3.3 million Congolese—the largest toll in any conflict since World War II.

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forget how this tragic pattern was set in place, in Congo as elsewhere, by what John le Carré once called, with appropriate scorn, “the global architects, the world order men, the political charm-sellers and geopolitical alchemists who in the cold war years managed, collectively and individually, to persuade themselves—and us, too, now and then—that with a secret tuck here, and a secret pull there, and an assassination somewhere else, and a destabilized economy or two, or three, they could not only save democracy from its defects but create a secret stability among the chaos.”

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indeed, this book is a chronicle of the calamitous continuum in the encounter between Africa and the West. This long-running tragedy began in Congo, where much of my story unfolds, with the destruction by imperial Portugal of well-structured kingdoms in its pursuit of slaves for use as beasts of burden in the Americas.

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No one could say how much it had cost to build the Régie Abidjan-Niger railway, whose tracks were laid from Abidjan to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso (formerly known as Upper Volta), between 1905 and 1954, or how many lives were lost in the process, but these many decades later it was easy to view it as a positive legacy of France’s colonialism in the region. The train’s cars were packed with migrant workers from the Sahel, the parched, impoverished badlands south of the Sahara Desert, carrying home their savings and cheap manufactured goods—black-and-white TVs, bulky radio-cassette decks and electric fans from China and India—bought with the meager salaries they had earned as laborers on cocoa plantations

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bound notebook to write in, and an old Olympus 35mm camera. For reading, I had brought along Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis and a hefty paperback travel book, Susan Blumenthal’s Bright Continent, whose brilliant mixture of learned reflection and backpacker’s-eye view made it the best African travel guide I have seen before or since.

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two-hour lesson in patience awaited us, as well as a very neat illustration of power. We were in a world of peasants and the poor, and they already understood perfectly well what we were just discovering and could never completely accommodate ourselves to: that there is often little more to do in life than sit around and wait until those who are more powerful are ready to budge.

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bread and extra bottles of mineral water. Our destination was Bandiagara, a town that appeared close on the map, but which we were warned could take the better part of a day to reach. Each time someone gave us their estimate of the road time that lay ahead, it ended with a sigh of “Insh’Allah” (God willing). Out here, everything depended on one’s vehicle and beyond that God’s favor, or simply one’s

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“For Africans, enslavement was a threat that compounded the uncertainties of existence—a fear at the back of the mind, dulled by familiarity perhaps, an ache that induced a lingering fatalism in society as it passed from generation to generation,” writes John Reader in his illuminating survey, Africa: A Biography of the Continent. “Kidnapping, capture, enslavement threatened villagers in various parts of West Africa for up to 400 years: 20 generations lost some kinsmen to the slavers, or saw their neighbors routed… . The pre-existing political economies in which chiefs and elites commanded the respect and occasional material tribute of their subjects were transformed into systems controlled by warlords and powerful merchants who obliged indebted chiefs and elites to collect slaves as payment against forced loans.” In the kingdom

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Among the most pathetic diplomatic exchanges ever between a sub-Saharan African and a European happen to be the oldest surviving documents written by an African in a European language. In a series of letters written in his own hand in 1526, Affonso appealed to the Christian virtue of his Portuguese counterpart, King João III: “Each day the traders are kidnapping our people—children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family… . Corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated… . We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass… . It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.” Later that year, Affonso wrote João III again to deplore the destabilizing influence of the accelerating Portuguese barter trade of European merchandise for human beings. “These goods exert such a great attraction over simple and ignorant people that they believe in them and forget their belief in God… . My Lord, a monstrous greed pushes our subjects, even Christians, to seize members of their own families, and of ours, to do business by selling them as captives.” The king of Portugal’s reply was brutal in its simplicity and resounded like a death knell for Affonso’s kingdom. Kongo, he said, had nothing else to

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In the months before my arrival, Nigerians were discovering to their horror that Abacha was more interested in killing people than in dazzling them. He gladly ruled from the shadows, from behind dark glasses, where he seemed to relish his image as the person his country-men feared most. Abacha rarely appeared in public, working by night and sleeping well into the day. He reportedly kept long lists of enemies, real and imagined, whom he methodically tracked, executed or jailed. Gradually he came to take on the aura of a motion picture monster, and in a society notable for bold individualism, for a people who were not intimidated easily, Abacha lurked menacingly in the popular imagination, like Jaws, a hidden leviathan that gave people the chills.

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In the insidious language of Nigerian military rule this sort of thing is called “settling people,” a term with an oddly colonial ring about it that means “to buy someone’s silence or cooperation.” With all the money the Abacha regime could offer Jesse Jackson, Kingibe wondered aloud, why did Jackson remain so ill informed about Nigeria, and so obstinate in his criticism of the government? What would it take to get Colin Powell to give Nigeria a fresh look, instead of dismissing the country as “a nation of scammers,” as he once had? Nigeria was the world’s largest black state, Kingibe said. America depended on Nigeria for its oil supply. Surely there must be a basis there for a good working relationship.

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Nigeria under the generals, I thought, was like a decadent Rome, a place that had unraveled to such an extent that the only hard-and-fast rule that held any longer was the oldest rule of all—might makes right. The country’s only greatness was its unrealized potential. To paraphrase Charles de Gaulle’s famous, irony-dripping put-down of Brazil, Nigeria was a land whose future would always remain bright. With Abacha at the helm, I wondered whether even this might not be too generous.

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endlessly long bridges in Lagos that choked and froze twice a day with traffic jams, or go-slows, to the scale of thievery and injustice on display every day. Life had hardened people so thoroughly that when a pedestrian is hit by a car along one of the city’s major highways, no one even stops to help. I had always thought this was Nigerian urban legend, hyperbole, until I saw for myself the remains of a man run over so many times he had been reduced to the thickness and consistency of wallpaper paste.

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Air Afrique jet for Abidjan, and the pilot waited for permission to pull back from the gate, Nigeria reserved one final unpleasant surprise for me. A soldier climbed aboard with rifle in hand to demand a few bottles of champagne from a French-speaking crew member. With this kind of example being set by the military, I thought, how could this sort of lawlessness ever be stopped? The soldier got his champagne.

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constitutional conference created by Abacha. Yar’Adua’s principal offense was introducing a motion at the conference demanding a quick return to democratic rule. He, too, was charged with treason and sentenced to death. Yar’Adua was murdered in jail not long afterward through lethal injection—some said it was battery acid—by Abacha’s security agents.

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Most shocking of all, though, was the arrest and execution of Kenule Beeson “Ken” Saro-Wiwa, a playwright and environmental activist who had given prominence to his Ogoni ethnic group’s demands for a cleaner environment and a share of the wealth from their region’s rich oil production. His arrest had shone the harshest spotlight on Nigeria.

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Harcourt and went to see Claude Ake, a respected Nigerian intellectual and an expert on the local political and environmental situation, to hear what he had to say about Shell’s public relations effort. “When the soldiers were running rampage through Ogoni-land shooting people, and we were asking for aid for the wounded, where was Shell? They didn’t contribute anything. Their callousness is breathtaking. The building of those classrooms is just a trivial matter. They have polluted the entire water table underground; they have left oil scum everywhere. There are flares burning, polluting the air everywhere you look, and they talk to you about classrooms. How much money do they spend on advertising by comparison? Let them keep their classrooms. They are rubbish.” In November

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time when many Africans were soaking up Western influences as fast as they could. With time, his songs became even more trenchant and political, with titles like “Zombie,” “Army Arrangement” (about the country’s rigged politics), “ITT” (“International Thief, Thief,” about Abiola), “Colonial Mentality” and “Coffin for Head of State” (about the murder of his mother) that denounced the soldiers and dictators laying Africa

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People were smoking dope everywhere on the second floor, either sitting or lying on the ground with vacant stares. I asked someone where Fela was, and was directed to the end of the hall, where we found the musician asleep in a room, sprawled on a bed with several women. The man who had directed us asked us to sit down in another room while someone announced us, and after a few minutes, he came back to tell us that Fela had invited us to be his guests at the concert that night. Fela did not feel like talking now, but if we liked, the man said, we could interview him after the show. Purnell, warming to the idea of doing a radio piece on the concert, asked if he could use a tape recorder at the Shrine, to which Fela’s aide said, No problem. “If anyone gives you any trouble, just ask for Morgan, and I will straighten things out.” David had

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When Fela finally came out, the area boys behind us were content to flow with the music for a while, as were we. He seemed in particularly fine form, strutting and hopping bare-chested in his red tights, like a barnyard rooster. The music was angry and joyous by turns as Fela prowled the stage, shouting and preaching the ills of military rule and materialism. Every song was drenched in politics, but there was another constant theme as well—love; not love as in peace and love, but physical love as in bump and grind.

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of Congolese soukous, arguably the most enthusiastic celebration of the female rear end anywhere in Africa, but the show Fela and his dancer-wives put on that night reached a whole new level. It was burlesque meets gymnastics, all set to a driving, unrelenting rhythm, and it was as raw and powerful a display of sensuality as I had ever seen.

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Sweating profusely, Fela stripped down to his red underpants and began working his saxophone furiously, clearly influenced by both James Brown and Pharaoh Sanders. He was fifty-seven, but appeared to have the stamina of a man in his twenties as he blew his way through the chord changes, riffing against the insistent beat. Many minutes later, when he finally paused, Fela introduced the dancers one by one, and as he did so, each of these tall, powerful women performed a solo of her own, writhing under the spotlight like dancing yogis.

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Fela. The sun would be coming up soon,

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Kudirat Abiola was murdered the following year, on June 4, 1996, in what New York or Chicago police would call a gangland-style slaying, when her car came under heavy gunfire in Lagos traffic. The government denied any responsibility, but after the dictator’s death, two years later, Sani Abacha’s son, Mohammed, was charged with ordering the hit. Fela died of AIDS in 1997. He was only fifty-eight years old.

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“I am a man of peace, of ideas,” Saro-Wiwa wrote. “Appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginalization and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and every ethnic group and gives us all a valid claim to human civilization, I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated. I have no doubt at all about the ultimate success of my cause, no matter the trials and tribulations which I and those who believe with me may encounter on our journey. Neither imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory.

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“I repeat that we all stand before history. I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial and it is as well that it is represented by counsel said to be holding a watching brief [or friend-of-the-court status]. The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come and the lessons learnt here may prove useful to it for there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the company has waged in the Delta will be called to question sooner than later and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the company’s dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished.”

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By now, living in Africa was not only required for my job but had also come to involve an intensely personal quest. The continent I had known in the early 1980s, poor and politically backward to be sure, had now settled into a spiral of bloody traumas and chronic disorder. I needed to understand why, and over and over again this question drew me back to Central Africa, a region that, together with a small cluster of West African states, with Liberia at its epicenter, rested atop the continental hit parade of mayhem and decay.

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allies. These were the waning days of the biggest despot of them all, Mobutu, and by now there was no longer any Cold War order, only disease and rot.

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for Africa, cynically claiming his motives were humanitarian. “Had Leopold been a different kind of man,” writes Pagan Kennedy, “he might have been content to languish in his greenhouses and pleasure gardens, and to cavort with his parade of prostitutes, some of them as young as ten years old. But he considered such treats to be only appetizers. He wanted to become one of the most powerful men in the world. In order to do that, he had to get his hands on a colony.”

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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.

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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

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Outsiders might call it corruption, or perhaps even anarchy, but for Zairians the games officials played with “formalities” was an unremarkable part of what was called “Système D,” for débrouiller, the French verb meaning “to make do.” Stealing was not just all right in Zaire; it had become an absolute imperative—a matter of survival, especially for unpaid officials assigned to distant provinces.

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troops and his private merchandise—diamonds, gold, pineapples, cassava— around this huge country. Mobutu had largely given up on territorial control by this stage of his rule, having concluded that it was as tedious as it was costly. The one thing that counted, he had concluded belatedly, was control over markets, and from this point of view, the president’s fleet of planes, though barely airworthy, was his most vital asset.

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Every few months one of these loose-riveted aircraft would crash somewhere, typically in a remote forest. It was the kind of thing that people around here shrugged off as happenstance. This casual fatalism changed forever a few months after our trip, though, when the inner-city airport itself was the scene of a dramatic crash: A Russian Antonov running guns and diamonds back and forth to Angola did a belly dive, plowing through the adjacent, zinc-roofed shantytown and killing scores of residents in its huge fireball.

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recognition when he said matter-of-factly that Kikwit’s small medical community had been sounding alarms for weeks about the strange and sudden apparition of people struck down by violent bouts of bloody diarrhea. He spoke with a depressingly familiar African weariness that comes from fighting against long odds, waging an extraordinary struggle with few means at your disposal—least of all the attention of outsiders. It would be easy to mistake his tone for fatalism. It was the sound of being completely alone in the world, a supposedly interconnected world, and it is a feeling that many Africans, particularly well-educated people like Dr. Kasongo, experience every

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In matters of knowledge, science and medicine in particular, the outside world has never grown accustomed to listening to Africans, or respecting their knowledge of “serious” matters. Listening to Dr. Kasongo, I recalled a story I had often heard when I was in Haiti. During a debate about that country in the United States Senate early last century, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan had expressed surprise to learn that black people could speak the language of Molière. “Imagine that,” he said. “Niggers speaking French!”

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driver that I wanted him to take us through Kikwit’s poorest neighborhoods, where we could inquire if there had been any reports of unusual deaths. The mention of poor neighborhoods in this city of half a million—a place without lights, telephones or even running water for most people—appeared to create some confusion. Poverty was everywhere, and in such circumstances its very definition begins to change. But within fifteen minutes, after winding and crossing back through a dusty quarter called Mkwati, where mud-walled houses were separated by bramble hedges, we had found what we were looking

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She was the only one of the three who could manage a bit of French, which made it easier for me. She continued in her defensive vein, “The disease you are looking for is not around here. It is in the hospital. You must go back there.” As she spoke, a man arrived on a bicycle and interjected himself casually into the conversation of total strangers, as had happened so often to me in Africa. As Westerners, the privacy we are accustomed to is one of large homes and separate living quarters, of a life with telephones and automobiles. This, I was reminded, was the world of villages, where secrets were much harder to keep.

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“Their father died of Ebola,” he shouted, once he had confirmed our interest in the outbreak. “Don’t believe what they are telling you.”

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slender twenty-nine-year-old man wearing pink rubber gloves, washing himself painstakingly with a bucket filled with soapy water. “My mother died this morning at ten a.m.,” he said, confirming my suspicion that there had been a death in his house. “She got sick with a fever last week, and it just kept getting worse and worse. Yesterday she began vomiting and having diarrhea. This morning, she just lay there trembling, and then she was dead.”

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The washing of cadavers is a solemn family duty in the Central African hinterland, and in a world of short lives and infrequent joys, sending one’s loved ones off properly into the hereafter becomes all the more important. By tragic coincidence, this ceremonial preparation of the dead had become one of the prime means of transmission, and yet even after it was known that the virus was spread this way, it was difficult to persuade people to forgo their last rites.

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I had been rereading one of my favorite novelists, the Congolese author Sony Labou Tansi, and having heard that he was secluded in a village somewhere, together with his wife, Pierrette, both of them dying of AIDS, I was thinking of trying to find him. If an African god had set out to make a country, a land resembling the Congo would not be an unlikely result. Zaire next door had always been spoken of as Africa’s “geological scandal,” because of its disproportionate share of the continent’s mineral wealth, but the real scandal was here, and it merely began with minerals. This little country seemed rich in just about every way that nature allowed—large oil deposits, huge expanses of virgin tropical forests, untouched minerals of just about every kind, great rivers, the sea. Congo-Brazzaville was as big as Montana and almost as empty, with barely two million souls to share all of this wealth. But in the end, the folly of the country’s leaders, propelled by the boundless greed of outsiders, proved too much to overcome in spite of the innate wealth. Governance

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Moscow was about to learn that among the political forces at work in Central Africa, entropy has few rivals, least of all an imported ideology from the cold lands of the north called Marxism.

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For all of the Soviet Union’s advisors, for all the MiGs that took off and landed at the airports in Brazzaville and Pointe Noire, lending the leadership a macho blush of power, for all of the model farms created and for all of the monuments to Marx and the streets named for Lenin, the French had an answer. It was a softer, more seductive form of power, something called joie de vivre—bespoke suits, les meilleurs crus, haute cuisine, hôtels particuliers on Paris’s most prestigious boulevards for the richest—and the Congolese elites, like their peers just about everywhere else in Central Africa, lapped it up.

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In Congo, the beginning of the end was ushered in by Denis Sassou-Nguesso, a strikingly handsome army officer with a keen taste for the good life. It has long been said that even tinier, oil-rich Gabon next door was the world’s leader in per capita champagne consumption. But surely under Sassou, Congo’s Pierre Cardin Marxists were not far behind.

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“Your situation is rich with rewards. But you’ll have to be resourceful,” a minister of national education instructed a newly appointed minister of health in a telling passage in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel of the wretched excesses of sudden wealth and absolute power, La Vie et Demie. “A minister is made from his 20 percent share in the expenditures of his ministry. If you are clever, you can even tease that figure up to 30 percent, even 40 percent… . You must build things. We build all the time, because building pays the minister. In short, be daring and you will see how little streams turn into big rivers.” A hallucinatory

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In a brief foreword to La Vie et Demie, which was published in 1979, Tansi calls his work an attempt to see “tomorrow with the eyes of today.” In a reference to the repression on both sides of the Congo River that prevented artists like himself from describing their countries’ situations more openly, he writes, “when the occasion comes to speak of the present day, I won’t take such a roundabout path; nothing, in any event, so torturous as a fable.”

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Looking back now, the obvious lesson to be learned from this—whether or not it has been grasped—is that in Africa, both big advances and huge disasters often begin in small countries. Congo’s democratic honeymoon ended almost as suddenly as it had begun.

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The rude awakening that we had here was to learn that in Africa political parties are still composed on the basis of the lowest common denominator, and for the Congolese, that still means the ethnic group.” With Congo producing an alphabet soup of political parties, each pretty much organized along ethnic lines—and sometimes consisting of nothing more than a clan leader and his extended family—the handwriting of this country’s demise was written on the wall for all to see. Pascal Lissouba, a southerner, a thick-spectacled Marxist with a background in plant genetics, won election as president. Sassou complained that his supporters had not been given enough jobs and refused to participate in any multiparty “unity government.” The former president then made common cause with Kolelas, making Lissouba’s party the minority in government and setting the stage for the first battle for Brazzaville in 1993.

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nephew. This had always been a country where people from different groups intermarried, and it was an amazing thing to watch the hatreds boil over. You have to wonder now if it can ever be put back in the bottle.”

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conflagration, which would pit the two southern leaders against Sassou. “By the end of three months of this kind of killing we had cases where people would capture their enemies’ babies and beat them to a pulp with a wooden mortar for revenge,” he said. “Finally, I believed there had been some sort of divine intervention when I started hearing people say, ‘We are all blood brothers, descendants of the same Kongo kingdom. Why should we massacre each other if all we are doing is giving the northerners a chance to take over again?’ ”

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most hate-filled supporters with a virulence that he married to his gift for the verb. John Updike, writing about Tansi in The New Yorker, said that his late works were haunted by a “personal dying.” Updike quoted a passage from Tansi’s last novel, the surrealistic The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez: “In this country, night has the appearance of divinity. It smells like infinity. Day here will never be more than a pathetic hole of blue, sickly light.” The words capture beautifully Tansi’s almost fanatical disgust with the Central African condition, but give little hint of his own growing political folly.

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Subtly underpinning all of his art, but always at the forefront of his increasingly rabid politics, was a deeply felt nationalism. It harkened back to what was for many African intellectuals a myth-infused antediluvian past, before the time, that is, when Europe’s imperial mapmakers and colonizing armies destroyed Africa’s nascent states.

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There was tragic irony in Tansi’s rage for redemption. Europe had undoubtedly wreaked untold destruction by shoehorning Africans of different languages and cultures together inside arbitrarily drawn boundaries at the end of the nineteenth century, by halfheartedly imposing its models of governance and economics on the continent for a few short decades in the twentieth century. Then, by washing its hands of Africa and walking away long before the mold had set, it vastly compromised matters even further.

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Though born of the indignities of domination by Westerners, Tansi’s passions were nonetheless based on a narrow, ethnically driven sense of identity. Everywhere one looked in Africa, runaway ethnicity in politics had the same impact: blinding carnage and chaos. Surely this was not the germ of African renaissance. An ideology like Tansi’s struck me rather more like a stick of dynamite thrown into a crowded marketplace—a recipe for death and destruction.

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To my chagrin, it took only a few minutes on the far bank to confirm that Tansi was not living in, nor had he ever lived in, this village. He had never even been heard of there. Going with the flow, however, even when it is hard to discern much of any direction, is a necessity in Africa. It is not my style, but I had learned to enjoy it, making a virtue of momentarily surrendering control. I had seen too many foreign correspondents tearing their hair out in frustration over Africa’s chaos or cursing the venality or supposed incompetence they claimed to see everywhere, even as they offered to bribe their way through situations unbidden.

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“I’ve been writing a lot. Some of my best work,” Tansi said. “But the French people don’t want to publish it. They said I am too hard on France, but in their egotism, they’ve missed the point. Asia has come into its own. Latin America has come into its own. Africa alone has failed, and I will not mince my words about the reasons why: We are still sick from a sort of contamination that began under colonization.

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Briefly, Tansi discussed his latest passion, Solzhenitsyn, and said he had read Cancer Ward over and over in his Paris hospital room. “We are all doomed, fated to die,” he said, emitting an enthusiastic deep-voiced cackle that triggered a rattling cough. “But in the meantime there is nothing to stop us from living.” At this instant, we

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“You must understand why I am feeling better now,” Tansi said to me in an embrace as we parted. “I am home at last. Finally I am in my own land. I should have come here a long time ago. It has revived me, and if I had not taken so long to come, Pierrette might have been saved, too.”

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We usually think of wars as having identifiable adversaries. In Liberia, search as one might, it had become impossible to discern any clear lines. The sheer number of deaths seemed to warrant a label like “genocide,” which might have drawn more attention from CNN and perhaps roused the diplomats of the world. But the Liberian civil war’s victims came from every class and description, and perversely, because there was no longer any sharp ethnic focus to the killings, the country’s atrocities eluded easy categorization, and thereby escaped attention in a world already eager to ignore Africa’s nightmares.

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Still, it was hard for me to observe the airport’s choreographed confusion without concluding that this tragic little country’s chaos also had its comical side. Almost everything in Liberia did. But it was vital never to forget that the easy joking and breezy nonchalance masked a raw struggle for survival, and that after five years of brutal civil war, nearly everything here, including airport begging and bribe-taking, had become deadly serious. It took a mere instant to lose your wallet, your passport or your laptop here at Spriggs Payne, and anywhere else in Liberia you might just as quickly lose your life.

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“Big Man” is a term that has been heavily overworked by Western journalists. It is tossed about to describe African leaders in the same cavalier and disdainful fashion that the press displays with the coded language it sometimes uses for black American politicians, like “flamboyant” or “street smart.” Quite recently, Latin America had been full of Big Men, as had Eastern Europe, and much of Asia for that matter, but only in Africa did the term—actually borrowed from anthropologists’ descriptions of Pacific island societies—become a fixed moniker employed by writers too bored or lazy to get beyond such labels.

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an interview with the president usually sufficed to get one of them to drag it lazily out of the way, letting us through. “Wha [white] man say he gone interview da Pappy,” I overheard one of the boy soldiers say, using their customary paternal moniker to refer to Taylor in their heavy Liberian pidgin.

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neatly manicured lawns. From the sight of things, we quickly gathered that this was where Greater Liberia’s Boss Man, as many here called him, the “Pappy” to a horde of orphaned boy soldiers, lived and worked.

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information. After much prodding, he slipped away to make inquiries on our behalf, and while he was gone, a lower-ranked flunky who had also been watching us drew near to me and said, “Man, we want this war to end so badly. We have no food. We’re not paid. There is no school for our children. I can’t even find clothes to put on my back.”

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There, on the ground, the local women traded in produce and cheap goods. Then and there I understood the future that awaited Liberia should Charles Taylor ever succeed in his obsession to become president: unlimited comfort and glory for the chief and unmitigated misery for his people. We had

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Johnson’s murder of Doe on September 10, 1990, gruesome, drawn out and filmed in a herky-jerky cinema verité style, would become one of the signal events of West Africa’s post-independence history. As men sliced off Doe’s ears, kicked him and stabbed him, Johnson repeatedly demanded that Doe provide the numbers of the Swiss bank accounts to which Doe, in the long tradition of African dictators, had been sending off the money he stole from the treasury. Doe would reveal no secrets, and took his time dying; at Johnson’s insistence, the president’s captors kept the camera running throughout his agony. It was more than a gruesomely innovative twist on hunters’ stuffed and mounted cadavers. It was irrefutable proof of the victim’s demise in a land where superstitions about magic and invincibility still have a lock on the popular imagination.

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A barely literate master sergeant, Doe had disemboweled his predecessor, William Tolbert, in a 1980 coup and summarily executed twelve senior government officials on a Monrovia beach. Thus, as enthusiastic street kids cheered the firing squad, 111 years of Americo-Liberian rule came to an ignominious end.

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The slayings took place just one year after the Ghanaian military leader, Jerry Rawlings, a young junior air force officer who had recently seized power, publicly executed three of his predecessors. An awful, matching bookend for the end of the decade, the videotaped dismemberment of Doe confirmed for shocked West Africans that their politics were undergoing a hideous transformation, from the gentle venality they were long accustomed to…

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In his Harper’s interview, Taylor insisted that he had held his men back in order to mollify Washington during the 1990 offensive against Monrovia, showing restraint even while Prince Johnson pursued his Genghis Khan–style campaign against the city, skewering children, slaughtering people in churches, targeting anyone who might be from Doe’s ethnic group, the Krahn, and even killing people for sport. “Your American ambassador came to the Ivory Coast to see me in the middle of the night with a bunch from the CIA,” Taylor said. “Oh yes. They just appeared at our perimeter suddenly from the darkness, out of thin air. What your ambassador told me was that if I waited, if I didn’t plunge the capital into a bloody battle, the U.S. would back me one…

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The belief in mysterious powers operating in the fast of darkness, in the stealth and omniscience of the CIA, and in his own victimhood and constant betrayal by others, was classic Taylor, whose melodramatic airs and paranoia were emphasized by his practiced use of the tremolo tenor voicings of a Mississippi…

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warlord, had been an official in Doe’s disastrous government but fled the country after reportedly embezzling a large sum of money. In Massachusetts, where he briefly studied at Bentley College, Taylor was arrested and sent to prison, to await extradition to Liberia. Somehow he managed to escape, but the story of how he was able to flee has never been convincingly explained. “I wouldn’t even be in this country today if not for the CIA,” Taylor told Harper’s. “My escape from the American jail in Boston—I think they must have arranged that. One night I was told that…

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broken with Taylor and fled the country related the details of Taylor’s life after returning to Africa, following his escape from the American prison. “Taylor received training in Libya to overthrow Doe, and was sent later to Burkina Faso to continue his training and make preparations, recruiting fighters from around the region,” he said. “I was with him there, so I know what I am speaking of. Thomas Sankara [the late president of Burkina Faso] was supporting him, but when he [Taylor] began pressing Burkina for the green light to invade Liberia, Sankara grew impatient with him. Taylor left for Sierra Leone to seek permission to invade Liberia from there, but he was kicked out after he seduced the defense minister’s wife. Then he went to Guinea, and he was kicked out there, too, and to Ghana, where I heard he was arrested twice.

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The story of Taylor’s rebel beginnings in Burkina Faso is a convoluted one, but its twisting contours reveal much about the way Africa has worked in the four decades since independence, with personal rivalries and grudges between leaders, and sordid under-the-table maneuvers by outside powers and their commercial interests, often driving change.

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Doe, who had proclaimed himself a general and had accumulated fictitious degrees from Liberian universities to compensate for his near illiteracy, was well on his way to becoming a West African Idi Amin. Sankara detested him as an offense to the dignity of Africans. Ivory Coast’s archconservative president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, was also offended by Doe, but for very different reasons. Doe had executed William Tolbert, the Ivorian leader’s neighbor, close friend and deeply conservative ally, along with Tolbert’s son, who was Houphouët-Boigny’s son-in-law. Taken together with the executions in Ghana, Ivory Coast’s neighbor to the east, the killings represented a terrifying precedent for Ivory Coast’s president-for-life: succession by murder.

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his rule became wildly murderous and flagrantly corrupt.

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To be sure, Shultz’s endorsement did not stem from any great enthusiasm for Doe, whose presidential priorities after several years of misrule had finally boiled down to one essential—clinging to power. In fact, the secretary of state expressed his distaste for the man after meeting him, telling the American ambassador acidly, “Perhaps I made a wrong career choice, if it was people like that I was going to meet. Doe was unintelligible.” With the Cold War on, though, America’s objectives in a region that forever seemed to dangle from the margins of the world stage were as rudimentary as Doe’s: clinging to strategic assets, sewing up UN votes and containing enemies, from Moscow to Tripoli.

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For American policymakers of the time, interests like these easily trumped notions of democracy in a land where diplomats had always taken a patronizingly long view of Africa’s potential for political and economic development. Thus, instead of denouncing Doe’s election and exerting strong pressure on the former master sergeant for human rights improvements, Shultz’s visit was rewarding him with an extraordinary pat on the back.

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For a man like Doe the satisfaction must have been great upon hearing word of the December 1985 Senate testimony of the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester A. Crocker. Straight-faced, Crocker called Doe’s fraudulent elections “the beginning, however imperfect, of a democratic experience that Liberia and its friends can use as a benchmark for future elections.” Over the next few years, Washington routinely opened its checkbook to the tune of $50 to $60 million in annual aid for the Doe regime, making Liberia sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest recipient of American largesse.

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With Liberians left to groan under Doe’s rule, Taylor was able to amass the support of a large, if incidental, coalition of local and regional powers: France and Libya were both eager to knock the United States down a rung in what each considered its own backyard; Ivory Coast wanted to show that regicide would not go unpunished; and Blaise Compaoré wanted to turn Burkina Faso, his dusty, impoverished backwater, into a force to be reckoned with in the region, and was obsessed with blotting out the lingering popular memories of Thomas Sankara.

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center of town. Sure enough, there were all of the Mercedes and four-wheel-drive escorts filled with gun-toting NPFL thugs that we had been told to expect, and for his own transportation Taylor had chosen an armored, gold-trimmed Land Rover, an all-terrain vehicle the likes of which Liberia had never seen before. I tried to suspend judgment, but watched in dismay as the people of the city waved and cheered the man most responsible for the country’s miserable fortunes. Then I rushed with my colleagues through the packed streets to get downtown for Taylor’s arrival news conference, the first he had ever held in the city.

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As a child, Taylor had been given the nickname “Bossy” by his schoolmates, because of an already pronounced obsession with authority. By now, no one who had watched him as a warlord could believe in his transformation into a democratic leader. Indeed, his every symbol and gesture—from the gaudy motorcade, followed by praise-singing supporters who ran for miles behind his vehicle, to the Mobutu Sese Seko outfit—presented him as a throwback to the dinosaurs of an earlier era in Africa, the worst of the first-generation leaders of the continent who had built powerful personality cults and clung to power for decades. Liberians were still in rags, but here was a man impeccably coiffed, manicured and groomed, and dressed in a finely tailored two-piece African-style suit with the same kind of Mao-cut jacket popularized by the illustrious Zairian despot.

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Exuding haughty self-contentment, Taylor seated himself in a high-backed rattan chair reminiscent of the one in the famous picture of Black Panther leader Huey Newton. In his hand he held an elaborately carved wooden scepter. When he began to speak it was, as usual, pure bombast. “We must take a moment to thank God,” he said, “for this popular, people’s uprising was, in reality, God’s war.” This was the man who had revolutionized warfare in Africa by making generalized use of child soldiers, binding them to him through terror and drug addiction. This was the man who had pursued a war in his own little country that had killed as many people as all the wars in Yugoslavia.

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would be a trite understatement. For all of the inequality under its Americo-Liberian apartheid, a half generation ago Liberia had been one of Africa’s most advanced countries. Now people were living in abject poverty and degradation, without a formal economy or even a government. For all of this, the only thing Taylor saw fit to say about the destruction he had wrought was that it had been God’s plan.

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“Isn’t it outrageous for someone who has drugged small boys, given them guns and trained them to kill to call this God’s war?” I asked. Unaccustomed to being in the company of anyone but sycophants or people terrified of him, Taylor averted his gaze. Meanwhile, Refell and the other aides glowered at me. “How dare you call the destruction of your country in this manner and the killing of two hundred thousand people God’s war?”

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In truth it wasn’t really a question, but Taylor knew that he couldn’t allow this to be the last word. “I just believe in the destiny of man being controlled by God, and wars, whether man-made or what, are directed by a force,” he sputtered, momentarily confused. “And so when I say it is God’s war, God has his own way of restoring the land, and he will restore it after this war.”

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The press conference was over, and Charles Taylor, despite a rare moment’s embarrassment, had achieved his objective. The snake was finally inside the capital.

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Within the fraternity of Africa’s longest-serving dictators, it had become a point of pride, a competition almost, to see who could spend the most time outside his country without inviting a serious threat to his power. Since the death of the founding father of Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, in 1993, Mobutu, who liked to while away his summers on the Riviera, had been the continental champion, hands down.

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capital’s politics still ultimately remained Mobutu’s game, and he knew well that for most of his critics, the dissenter’s soapbox was viewed merely as a stepping-stone to some kind of lucrative appointment. If you could shout loud enough and draw big enough crowds, there was hope that Mobutu might name you prime minister. The lucky few stole as much as they could, first for themselves, then for their villages and finally for their clans, before the president’s revolving door would spin once more. The result was a political class that was thoroughly co-opted. The only standout was Etienne Tshisekedi, whose short-lived stints as prime minister had made him a popular hero because, though powerless, he clung stubbornly to democratic principles. Mobutu ridiculed his critics with his Louis XV–type warnings that after him would come the deluge, and if the prostate scare proved anything, it was that no one had ever seriously contemplated a future without the Marshal at the helm. Like orphaned children, a galaxy of people who had made their careers as professional opponents now trembled at the prospect of Mobutu’s disappearance.

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“The way Mobutu ran this country, I pray God that he’ll have a bit more time; enough anyway for him to organize elections, so that he can be beaten and replaced,” he said. “If he were to die now, we have no structures in place to govern this country. The army would try to take over, and it would be a catastrophe for us

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Kinshasa’s politicians might have been sweating, but remarkably, for the man who was supposedly dying, life’s routines continued much as before. Mobutu owned a twenty-eight-room mansion in Lausanne, but for his cancer treatment he opted for some spiffy new digs nearby, renting a whole floor at the Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel, on the shore of Lake Geneva, for a cool $16,000 a night. Throughout his treatment, Swiss investigators sought to question Mobutu over the tens of thousands of dollars worth of telephone bills and other accounts left unpaid by the huge presidential entourage in Lausanne. But the Leopard would not be disturbed. During the final nights before his surgery, he was often spotted by reporters in a Beau-Rivage bar, fondling the high-priced prostitutes who paraded before him in casting-call fashion while he downed $350 bottles of Dom Pérignon with hangers-on.

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Here again were unmistakable echoes of Leopold II, who was named in a British courtroom in 1885 as a client of a “high-class” house of prostitution, to which he allegedly paid £800 a month for a steady supply of young women.

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For the Leopard, the biggest selling point of all, however, may have been the idea of using an extravagant power project to lash Shaba to the capital. Secessionists would have to think twice about making a break with Kinshasa knowing that Mobutu had his hand on the power switch. What good, after all, would the world’s richest copper deposits and 65 percent of the earth’s cobalt be if there was no electricity to drive the heavy machinery needed to extract and refine it?

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The skyscraper that housed the Ministry of Information was part of another grandiose scheme, this one largely promoted by France under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. A vast array of state-of-the-art microwave transmitters was intended to give Zaire the continent’s most advanced communications infrastructure. The truth was much sadder. It was nearly impossible to make an ordinary telephone call anywhere in Zaire. “The Domain, with its shoddy grandeur, was a hoax,” V. S. Naipaul writes of a ruler very much in the mold of Mobutu in his African masterpiece, A Bend in the River. “Neither the president who had called it into being nor the foreigners who had made a fortune building it had faith in what they were creating. But had there been greater faith before?”

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The rest of the way would be more difficult, judging from the darkness inside the skyscraper. We had to reach the sixteenth floor of the building, but not even a distant hum could be heard from the elevator shaft. Even on the best of days, only one of the building’s elevators worked, and since there were no functioning buttons to push, the only way to summon an elevator was by tapping on the metal doors, as Pierre began doing with his keys—to no avail. So we walked up the sixteen flights, passing breathless stragglers on our way up the pitch-black staircase, and receiving news from people on their way down, happily confirming that the people we needed to see were in their offices.

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When the zaire was introduced as the national currency in 1977, it was worth $2. On the day we left for Mbuji-Mayi, $1 was worth 59,000 zaires, and the currency’s value was falling at such a clip that at least two new rates were introduced each day on “Wall Street,” the congested warren of streets in central Kinshasa where foreign exchange was traded by plump, busty matrons who sat on stools.

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Mbuji-Mayi’s monetary solution was an example of Africa’s genius for improvisation. If it could only be invested in institution-building, I thought, the country would be transformed. In the meantime, though, unable to print their own money, the people of Mbuji-Mayi were trading with carefully tied up stacks and bundles of the frayed, rust-colored banknotes, handling them gingerly to slow their disintegration.

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Mobutu’s success that few of today’s young in Mbuji-Mayi had ever even been there. By the 1990s, Mobutu’s divide-and-conquer approach had so atomized the country that only true locals trusted one another. And we were quickly confronted with the fact that here in Mbuji-Mayi, Kamanga was nearly

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that lined the road through town, the heavy battering that our car took from the rock-embedded road gave us a different appreciation of the name’s meaning. For all of the wealth this city had produced for Mobutu, it had received nothing so much in return as one well-paved street. In fact, the rape had been going on for at least a century, since Leopold’s agents combed the Congo region for elephant tusks, and later for rubber, killing millions of unremembered Africans in the process. Today, the West’s latest obsession is columbite-tantalite, or coltan, the $400-a-kilogram ore that drives a civil war in the post-Mobutu Congo (Zaire) that is still festering after two and a half million deaths. But that is getting ahead of the story. Then, as now, what had mattered most in this part of the world was not human lives—particularly not the lives of Africans—but the extraction of something deemed valuable

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Recalcitrant men and those who failed to come up with their quota were lashed with the chicote, a whip usually made of hippopotamus hide. Alternatively, they had their right hands chopped off, frequently resulting in death. But when it was not a matter of survival for the laborers themselves, the collection of rubber to feed Belgian industry was literally a life-or-death issue for their families. Heavily armed Belgian agents, often traveling by river, would surprise a village, capturing as many women and children as

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have friends who have found twelve-thousand-dollar diamonds, and in three weeks they have nothing left,” he said. “They simply went crazy, treating hundred-dollar bills as if they were tens, and running around with three or four women at a time.” The lore built up around rags-to-riches stories like these worked as an irresistible lure, bringing moths to the flame. It was free publicity for an industry that in these parts demands only dispensable young lives to keep it going.

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But just as East Kasai tired of Mobutu’s currency manipulation, Mbuji-Mayi was growing sick of being a company town built around MIBA. Indeed, the city’s educated elite, men and women who had been engineers, doctors and teachers in Lubumbashi, the far southern city that is the capital of Shaba Province, seemed sick of diamonds altogether. Most of them returned here in 1992 when Mobutu orchestrated a murderous pogrom in the copper belt against migrants from this region. Overnight, well over 100,000 people from neighboring Kasai Province were chased out of Zaire’s copper belt, and untold thousands were killed in a bout of officially sanctioned ethnic cleansing that presaged the purge of the Banyamulenge, people of Tutsi origin from North Kivu Province, in 1996.

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Mobutu had thrived by the very same divide-and-rule strategy that Belgium had used to dominate the country, his tactics growing steadily more violent over time. But the events at Kivu would prove to be one ethnic cleansing too many, because they persuaded post-genocide Rwanda, which was Tutsi-led, to invade Zaire in order to save its Tutsi kinsmen, and ultimately to bring Mobutu down.

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For as long as one could remember, Zaire had been the oversized bully: the schoolkid who meddles willfully in the disputes of others, or steals their candy or lunch money on the least whim. Then came the attack, a brutal jolt awakening the country from its prolonged and self-indulgent dream. And in the sudden wakefulness, a nightmare was unfolding.

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The Rwandan genocide was not halted by any international intervention. Rather, after some 800,000 people had been slaughtered in a slow motion, low-tech, hundred-day bloodbath, an exiled Tutsi army that invaded from its bases in Uganda managed to take over. Since the end of the civil war, Rwanda’s new Tutsi leaders had been demanding the arrest of the Hutu authors of the genocide, but the world had shown no stomach for a task that would have required a major international security operation to seal the region’s porous borders and disarm the Hutu living in the camps. This was Central Africa, after all, a region where life had always been regarded as cheap, not Bosnia or Kosovo, places where European lives and interests were at stake.

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Washington pointedly avoided use of the term “genocide” even as press accounts and intelligence reports detailing the extent of the slaughter—on average, eight thousand murders a day—flooded over the transom. For three months, throughout one of the greatest slaughters of the twentieth century, the Clinton administration never once held a meeting of its top foreign policy advisors to discuss Rwanda.

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At one interagency meeting in Washington that April, Susan Rice, a rising young black star on Clinton’s National Security Council, argued another justification for the semantic evasion—politics. “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”…

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Clinton’s policy aides attempted to justify their hands-off approach as a reflection of their wish to promote “African solutions to African problems.” But even a catchphrase this cynical doesn’t begin to hint at the sludge of putrid crimes and misdemeanors that the United States was, in effect,…

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With the camps in Zaire now under attack, hundreds of thousands of refugees were suddenly on the move. As they gathered their meager belongings and pressed forward together, footfall after terrified footfall back into Rwanda, the televised images of the pitiful fleeing hordes strangely mimicked the seasonal migrations of wildlife on the East African plains. Many other Rwandans, including thousands of ex-militiamen with guns, disappeared into the Zairian forest. Mass slaughter was anything but a new feature in Rwandan history,…

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workers from the main centers of the fighting, and where they had not been evacuated, they were in hiding. Scrambling for someone to unravel the mystery of the Banyamulenge, many of us fell back on the ever handy, ever available “Western diplomats” to explain what was going on. In principle, this has almost always meant American diplomats. But the problem with our heavy reliance on them this time was not just their usual ignorance about what was really happening in the thick of an African crisis. Rather, as would only slowly become clear…

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In time, we began piecing together the complicated picture of the mysterious Banyamulenge. They were pastoral migrants from present-day Rwanda who began settling in the Ruzizi plains, an area of Zaire’s mountainous South Kivu Province, in the early nineteenth century. Their name meant, simply, “people of Mulenge,” and was adopted from the name of a local mountain. Complicating things greatly, however, was that in time much more recent Tutsi…

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much of Europe’s colonial involvement with the continent, and though I had more experience here than most of my peers, I was in no way exempt. Only midway through Kabila’s campaign against Mobutu did I finally get around to reading The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, Crawford Young and Thomas Turner’s seminal 1985 study of Zairian politics and history, which should have been a prerequisite for any reporter. Scales fell from my eyes in the face of such detailed knowledge, and I felt a deep, physical sense of embarrassment at my own ignorance.

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emptied, the original pretense of a “tribal war” between the Banyamulenge and hostile local ethnic groups who had been persecuting them gave way to a newer, somewhat more plausible explanation: This was a Rwandan-led campaign to empty the refugee camps and thereby prevent a repeat of the 1994 genocide.

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even bigger than a mere preemptive strike. The other shoe did not take long to fall, though, and the dramatis personae was rounded out by the sudden stage entrance of Laurent Désiré Kabila, a shadowy, retro-chic rebel who had been living on the murkiest fringes of East African life for two decades and was proclaiming the start of a Zairian revolution.

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From the very start it was a ludicrous boast from a man whose known past included illegally trafficking in gold, diamonds and elephant tusks for years, hiding out in the mountains, dabbling in Maoism, and even kidnapping Western tourists and holding them for ransom. But at least now Kinshasa had some fix on its foe, an army of boys supplied by Rwanda—and kitted out in Wellington boots and shiny AK-47s—which Kabila called his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the

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trying to hold Zaire’s pieces together was left to the prime minister, Kengo wa Dondo, himself half Tutsi, raised under the name Léon Lubitsch. Under the circumstances, this glaring ethnic liability only spurred the already frenetic jockeying for position of Mobutu’s elite, a motley collection of bemedaled generals and sticky-fingered grabbers dominated by relatives and fellow northerners who had been rendered fat and plodding by years of unbridled greed.

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Kengo had every right to point an accusing finger at Rwanda, but that did not excuse the ugly reprisals against Tutsis in Kinshasa’s streets. Moreover, Mobutu had provided the perfect excuse for the invasion by allowing the governor of South Kivu to order the expulsion of 300,000 Banyamulenge from the province in early October, just days before the fighting erupted in the east. Even at this early stage of the game, Washington and its key East African allies, Uganda and Rwanda, were alone in pretending that Kabila, a frontier bandit and small-time terrorist whose efforts to overthrow Mobutu had flopped disastrously years ago, was the real moving force behind the rebellion.

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Everyone else in the region, indeed in Europe and within the relevant agencies of the United Nations, spoke openly of Kabila as the cat’s paw for a Rwandan military operation. What no one could imagine yet, perhaps least of all the two principals most directly concerned, Mobutu and Kabila, was how quickly this African puppet would grow legs and take off on his own. Life was breathed into him by the jubilation his rebels met in Mobutu’s long-neglected countryside, and by Kabila’s own treachery in eliminating potential rivals in what was originally conceived as a collective leadership. The most important of them was André Kissasse Ngandu, a man from eastern Zaire’s Nandi ethnic group, who, like Kabila, had spent years struggling, with little effect, against Mobutu. Kissasse became the alliance’s first military commander and nominal vice president, but was assassinated under mysterious circumstances on January 6, 1997, in what was widely believed to be a hit arranged by Kabila.

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Filthy Kinshasa was being painted and scrubbed. Soldiers dressed in snappy green uniforms were suddenly putting order to the city’s chaotic traffic. Rusted and stripped wrecks that had littered the roadside for months were hauled away, and huge red-and-white banners bearing slogans like “Mobutu = Solution” were being hung everywhere. The sycophants were busy and no amount of hype was being spared. If the Marshal was coming back, it was not merely to join the battle, but to win the war convincingly.

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On December 17, 1996, six weeks after the Banyamulenge uprising began, Mobutu returned home. There is a venerable tradition throughout the continent of people lending their shouts and tears to celebrations and mourning in exchange for a fee. Mobutu’s handlers had resorted to the trick countless times, proving just how effective the prospect of a few rounds of free beer or palm wine, or a bolt of printed cloth or some pocket change, could be in generating the appearance of enthusiasm.

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The same formula of borrowing from abroad and making something imported one’s own lay behind the mass mobilization and hero worship on display this day. Mobutu had carefully studied the personality cults of dictators like Ceauşescu of Romania and Kim Il Sung of North Korea as he set about crafting a cult of his own. By now, although one could still discern some of the inherited features—the use of uniform dress for civilians and mass chants of praise to the great leader—the product was as different from its communist forebears as the soukous heard in nightclubs all over Africa today

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famous trademarks, the carved cane and leopard-skin cap, and strode onto the long red carpet laid out for the welcome. Walking at the same stately pace, but a deferential half step behind him, like a Japanese empress, was Bobi Ladawa, his richly overfed and bleached-skin wife, who, by dint of a queerly incestuous superstition, also happened to be the identical twin of another of the president’s wives. One could not even call the relationship an open secret. Like the long name the dictator, baptized Joseph Désiré Mobutu, gave himself, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga—“the all-conquering warrior who triumphs over all obstacles”—it was a chest-beating howl declaring the great man’s prowess.5 Mobutu’s conjugal arrangements were the ultimate expression of keeping it in the family, but they also served niftily to keep friends and foes alike off guard. The sister often stood in for the first lady at official functions, just as surely as she did in the boudoir, and their resemblance was so great that only Mobutu could reliably tell them apart.

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This dictatorship being a family affair, there was a suitable sampling of the rest of the presidential brood on hand as well. There were pampered daughters, women in their twenties, attractive to be sure, but in the preferred Central African way, meaning pleasantly plump. Although far less garish than their mothers, the young women seemed to aspire to the same sort of force-fed and overly dressed look. It was a style that gaudily married the de rigueur local costume of brightly colored African cloth with Parisian gri fe— handbags, big gold jewelry and large-framed, face-concealing sunglasses, all conspicuously signed Vuitton, Chanel or

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Then there was his son, the inevitable Kongulu, the twenty-seven-year-old army captain with the sparkplug build and scruffy beard whose nickname, Saddam Hussein, perfectly fit a man whose nocturnal death squad attacks on his father’s enemies made him the terror of Kinshasa. With his perpetual scowl, Kongulu appeared to live on the edge of an outburst. On this day he was running the security for his father’s arrival, and as Mobutu shuffled along the red carpet he exhorted his soldiers from the feared Division Spéciale Présidentielle to thrash anyone in the pressing crowd whose enthusiasm, or perhaps a push from behind, caused him to stray too close to the Guide.

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Only a few days earlier, Zairian friends had told me it would be impossible to find a hundred people in Matongé to cheer for Mobutu. Now people were chanting his name wildly, and screaming things like “Papa’s back, the price of beer will fall,” while others, in a more direct reference to the war, shouted, “Kabila souki,” or “Kabila’s finished,” in Lingala.

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“Recently, we have watched as the enemies of our people have chosen the moment when I was floored with disease to stab me in the back. They did this because they know that I represent the territorial integrity of our great Zaire, for which I have consecrated my entire life to the defense of its sacred values.” At that moment, Mobutu burst into tears, but after collecting himself and asking people to pray for his health, he delivered what amounted to a call to arms. “I have never retreated, and once again, this time there can be no question of retreat,” Mobutu said dramatically. “Zaire has become a victim of its African hospitality, and has been wronged… . But together we will restore the tarnished image of our beloved country.”

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“Our greatest misfortune was to be colonized by a country with such a small spirit. You will say that’s all old history now, but the effects are with us still today. When I asked an official Belgian delegation that was here the other day if they were seeking investments in the country, they replied that Belgium would only invest once there had been elections. In the meantime, they said we are here to prevent anyone else from taking our place.” Kamitatu’s quick history lesson was fine as far as it went. What he left out, though, was no prettier. Like almost everyone else in the political elite, in his own small way the weary old former diplomat, who somehow still managed to live quite well amid the country’s ruin, had had his hand in Zaire’s mess, too. It was said that he had sold the country’s embassy in Tokyo while in residence there, and had simply pocketed the money. Mobutu’s generals were even worse than the civilian elite. During the first Shaba war, in 1977, when rebels from Angola occupied the country’s southern copper belt, the chief of staff, General Eluki Monga Aundu, pulled off a train heist worthy of Butch Cassidy, robbing the entire payroll for the troops he was about to lead into battle. That he was quickly defeated was hardly a surprise. More surprising is that he was never punished, whether because of his kinship with Mobutu or because the Guide may have admired his audacity.

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funeral or shouting hurrahs at a wedding for a few coins never made anyone a member of the festival, and the people rocking on the tarmac to the sensuous soukous or swaying in the streets cheering on the president’s motorcade were no different. Theirs was little more than a dance of death for a country that was already on its way out of this world.

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turned out for both events. “This is the Zaire we have become. The same youth that cheers Mobutu today will cheer Tshisekedi with the same fervor tomorrow, and eventually, why not Kabila, too,” said Jean-Baptiste Sondji, a political activist doctor at Mama Yemo, Kinshasa’s biggest hospital, which was named for Mobutu’s mother. “That is the real legacy of Mobutu: the compromising of an entire generation of young people who have grown up

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approaching for Mobutu. Though quiet still, Kisangani was about to assume the role that it had played so often in the short and tragic history of Zaire. Battles for the city had served as hinges slamming the doors on entire eras, helping close the book on every regime the country had known, from colonial rule to the indépendantiste struggle after Lumumba’s assassination, and it would soon lower the boom on the famous survivor himself, Mobutu.

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The scene at Kisangani’s airport reminded me of the way split personalities were depicted in old Hollywood films. With an invisible line the only thing dividing them, fierce-looking Serbian and Romanian mercenaries leading Mobutu’s war effort shared the tarmac with international relief workers who were running a major humanitarian operation. The foreign staffers from UNHCR and the World Food Programme winced as they acknowledged, just outside Ogata’s earshot, that crated weapons and ammunition, along with uniforms and other supplies, were making their way into the bellies of the shiny old DC-3s, the aluminum-skinned workhorses that were ferrying sacks of food and medicines to the desperate Hutu. They insisted this was the price of cooperation from the local authorities.

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visions, although ultimately the governor’s take would prove far closer to reality. East of Kisangani, the government was employing a few dozen Serbian mercenaries and a few thousand Hutu fighters to hold off the rebels, and just as they had done since the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Hutu fighters were hiding among tens of thousands of Hutu refugees to shield themselves from attack.

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more than a rebellion; it was the pursuit of Rwanda’s civil war into the heart of Zaire, and in this struggle, moral complications presented no more obstacle to the invaders than the feeble military resistance they faced. Ethnic cleansing had always lain at the heart of Rwanda’s civil wars, and if Kabila’s AFDL had to exterminate 100,000

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“African solutions to African problems,” Washington’s code name for the war, was an exercise in moral bankruptcy arguably more crass and even more complete than the failure to stop the Rwandan genocide. As it did in 1994, Washington pretended not to know the extent of the murder that was taking place in central Zaire lest it become a hot issue back home, drawing TV cameras and forcing action of some kind. By the time most of the dust had settled, six years after Zaire was first plunged into war, 3.3 million people had died in the eastern half of the country alone, more than four times as many people as had died in the Rwandan genocide.7 Moreover, by some neat trick of misdirection, once Mobutu was gone, the worst of the slaughter and starvation went almost entirely unnoticed abroad.

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advance through the Zairian countryside. On a visit to Kinshasa, David J. Scheffer, Washington’s ambassador at large for war crimes issues, once angrily dismissed my concerns about the murder of Hutu refugees by Kabila’s Rwandan Tutsi troops. Scheffer was far from alone in this attitude. Almost across the board, American officials had written off the Hutu as a pariah population, and no one had time for questions about their fate.

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attitude would persist long after the war, as Washington ran political interference within the United Nations on behalf of Kabila as his new regime stymied all efforts to investigate mass killings that occurred during the AFDL’s triumphant march from one end of the country to the other.

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American government had stopped propping him up. By contrast, Kabila had emerged as a jovial, canny foil. He had quickly learned how to keep the press happy with his blunt, boastful statements and colorful appearances before the cameras. He gave us the illusion that we were covering the war by allowing reporters to fly in briefly when a town had been freshly captured—that is, after any sign of atrocities had been carefully cleaned up. As we turned the war into a black-and-white affair, with Mobutu and his Hutu allies playing the irredeemable bad guys, our most important failure was in suspending disbelief over the flimsy cover story of an uprising in the east by an obscure ethnic group. From start to finish

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The most powerful factor at work behind our self-deception was an entirely natural sympathy for the Tutsi following the horrors of the Rwandan genocide. From that simple starting point, emotionally overpowering but deeply flawed analogies with Israel and with European Jewry and the Holocaust began to drive Washington’s policies in Central Africa. Philip Gourevitch, whose compelling writing on the Rwandan genocide strongly influenced Clinton administration policy toward the region, wrote in The New Yorker:

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Despite Rwanda’s size, General Kagame, who became the country’s President in April, has built its Army into the most formidable fighting force in central Africa, and he has done so without recourse to sophisticated weaponry. Rather, what distinguishes his commanders and soldiers is their ferocious motivation. Having single-handedly brought the genocide to a halt, in 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army has continued to treat its almost ceaseless battlefield engagements as one long struggle for national survival. (The analogy that’s sometimes made between Rwanda’s aggressive defense policy and that of…

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Americans are overly fond of good guy/bad guy dichotomies, especially in Africa, which for many already seems so unknowable and forbidding. But analogies like these paralyze debate over Central Africa rather than clarify it. Nothing could ever pardon the organizers of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, yet it is no less true a fact that the wild adventurousness of the Tutsi leader Paul Kagame, who mounted a Rwandan insurgency from bases in Uganda in…

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The Tutsi, unlike Europe’s Jews, were a small minority that had enjoyed feudal tyrannies in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi for centuries. In Burundi they had perpetrated genocide against the Hutu three times in a generation, and in both countries…

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There were no good guys in Rwanda’s catastrophic modern history, and the same was true for Zaire’s civil war. We in the press were far too slow in seizing upon the recklessness of Rwanda’s invasion, and by the time the true dimensions of the…

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Throughout the flight my mind searched for images of what to expect at Tingi-Tingi, but in the end, nothing could have prepared me for what awaited us. When the fading drone from the plane’s engines announced our imminent landing, I looked out the window as we banked for the descent and discovered a scene worthy of The Ten Commandments. On either side of this road, pressed to its very edges and sometimes spilling onto the highway itself, was a sea of refugees— 150,000 people or more, dressed in tatters and jumpy with excitement over the arrival of a special visitor bearing desperately needed relief supplies. Ours was the second of two identical planes to land. The first was loaded with aid, and, I suspected, with crates of guns as well. As we touched down, the sea of people parted in a feat of just-in-time reactions. I saw mothers reaching out to yank the shirts of overexcited children, and others sucking in their guts or feinting and skipping backward like skilled boxers slipping a punch.

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Later we learned that someone had been killed during the landings, his head lopped off by the first airplane’s wing. If true, the incident had done nothing to dampen the mood of joy for these people who had walked for seven weeks through some of the world’s most inhospitable territory with killers in their midst and more killers on their trail. As we taxied, I was impressed by the way the crowd’s eyes were fixed on the airplanes’ glinting skins; from the looks of beatitude they doubtlessly imagined their salvation was at hand.

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I followed up my quick explanation of the visit with a question: How do you feel about going home? “We will never go back to Rwanda. The Tutsi will kill us,” little Sophie said, her eyes widening and her voice suddenly aquiver. “If they try to put us in an airplane we will run away. We must remain here in Zaire, even if it means dying.”

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What does one say to a thirty-five-year-old Hutu man who, whatever his denials, might have had a hand in one of the century’s great murder sprees? I thanked him for his help, and, sensing the humanity in both his person and his predicament, I wished him good luck. It was all I could do.

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“In strict military terms, the rebels would be foolish to try to take Kisangani from this direction,” he said. “Normally you just don’t rush down the path of greatest resistance. But that is exactly what they are doing, and the reason they are pushing in this direction is the refugees. They were unable to make them return to Rwanda. Now it looks like they just want to kill them.” Events later proved Deppner right. Most of these refugees were indeed slaughtered. The killings occurred just days after my visit, and the bodies were buried so hastily that later they seemed to call out from the grave. Months later, after Kabila had been installed in power, he blocked UN human rights investigators from visiting the mass graves in Tingi-Tingi, and in many other parts of his country. The United States provided political cover, blocking condemnation of the regime in the Security Council and lobbying for the slimmest possible accounting of the massacres.

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them, Naipaul had gotten nothing so right in his acerbic book as his portraits of Mobutu and Kisangani. His words about the city hung in my thoughts as we bounded along toward the low, concrete villa of the World Food Programme representative, where I would sleep on the ground, on the front terrace, covered with mosquito netting and sweating and tossing through the night from the fierce, sawing attacks of the swarming insects that bred on the river nearby. “Valuable real estate for a while, and now bush again,” Naipaul said of the city. “You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition

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The proof, he said, would come when Konaré’s second term expired, when the law would bar him from seeking reelection. “One way or another, Konaré will change the constitution,” Michel told me with a patronizing chuckle. “You Americans are always looking for a horse to back, someone who reflects your own self-image; what you don’t understand is that power works differently in Africa than it does in the West. Once you’ve got it, you can’t just give it up.” So I took note of Michel’s skepticism, thanked him for the contact and headed off for Bamako. Coventional wisdom

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Like General Touré before him, Konaré had quickly shown that he was made of something special. Running what Americans would call a retail-style campaign in a country of parched badlands and tumbleweed as large as Texas and California combined, he avoided the temptation to pose as a rainmaker or to promise miracles. Instead, Konaré told crowds that his party did not have money to distribute right and left. Even more remarkable, once it appeared that he was the strong favorite, Konaré warned against the perils of a landslide, saying that a healthy democracy required a strong opposition. “We’re here to identify the problems,” he told an American reporter as they strode together down a dirt alleyway during the thick of the campaign. “What we guarantee is good management.”

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population can read, they should be possible anywhere in Africa, I thought. I was reminded of a Creole saying favored by Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide: “Analphabète pas bête,” or illiterate does not mean stupid. As Robert

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were no mere abstraction. Africans saw them as a clear expression of the United States’ deepest feelings toward the continent. Like the French president, Jacques Chirac, who had once proclaimed that Africans “weren’t ready for democracy,” Washington was still placing its biggest bets on “strongmen” who gave the appearance of maintaining order, while in reality sowing the seeds of future destabilization at home and in their surrounding regions.

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long string of charismatic strongmen with whom the West had disastrously waltzed. The political bloodline ran through Mobutu, the infamous Idi Amin Dada, Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, Liberia’s semi-literate Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe and the Angolan terrorist cum anti-communist guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, whom Ronald Reagan once toasted as Africa’s Abraham Lincoln. Each of them was disowned only after the situation in his country had gotten frighteningly messy, or when America’s interests had otherwise shifted.

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resemblance to horse racing, with Washington and its Iffys both playing and controlling the bank. In the 1990s three generations of horses were still on the track. Venerable old stars like Mobutu were being put out to pasture, and bets on recent “winners” like Ghana were shifting to Uganda, the shiny new horse, ridden by a not quite new but suddenly hot jockey named Museveni.

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Konaré complained bitterly, too, about the opposition that he had once promoted. In his eyes, they were trying to manipulate the soldiers in the hopes of fomenting a coup. “I am practically in the position of the driver who must keep swerving to avoid running people over,” he said. “I am trying to move the country forward, but the more I try to avoid colliding with the opposition, the more they throw themselves in my path. They pretend to act out of principle. They resemble crazy people,

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No matter how difficult they had made life for him, though, Konaré distinguished himself by resisting the temptation to crush his antagonists, in the manner of so many other African leaders. “I have no illusions about the difficulties implicit in governing democratically, but there are no exemptions from the effort required to build pluralism,” he said, speaking from the heart, but in the slightly wooden tongue he had developed as a student in the Eastern Bloc.

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Whatever Konaré’s criticisms of African authoritarianism, though, his greatest disappointments involved the West. “They once spoke of providing a premium to assist young democracies, but we haven’t seen anything remotely like that,” he said, slumping low in his leather armchair. “Based on the patterns we have seen, it is not so difficult to predict the behavior of the aid givers. Rather than help us now, they will wait until the crickets have finished off our crops, and then they will send us food. They have promised to help finance a new power plant to replace the one that we have now, which is broken half the time. But they say the money won’t be available for three more years. “Three years might not seem like a very long time to people dressed in expensive suits who sit around conference tables and discuss the fortunes of countries like ours, but for Malians, three years makes all the difference in the world. The price of just one of the expensive airplanes that your country is always buying for its military could make a huge difference to Mali. “Half of my population is unemployed. Democracy must be able to deliver some material progress in their lives, and to give them hope for a better future.”

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living connection that Malians felt with their past was just as critical. “Our people have produced great empires,” Konaré told me in parting. “Djenné and Timbuktu are there for all to see. People who know their own history, as we Malians do, develop a strong personality. That, more than anything else, is why I am confident in our struggle for democracy.”

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assigned to West Africa. “Has Africa ever produced anything memorable?” he asked. “Most cultures distinguish themselves through architecture. Have Africans ever produced anything more than mud huts?” As the only African-American in the crowd, the comments came not just as an affront to the land of my ancestors and of my wife and children, but as a direct personal assault as well. But as feelings of resentment welled up inside, I was momentarily at a loss for a reply, and I let the conversation drift in another direction, after only a mild rebuke about his ignorance.

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As I stood before the giant mosque, the shame I had felt at not answering this challenge more forcefully was replaced by a feeling of pity and anger at the arrogance of a Western world that has always denigrated Africa, ignoring its accomplishments and constantly emphasizing its ills. The building before me could comfortably stand comparison with virtually any of the world’s great cultural monuments. It was an esthetic jewel, and at the same time, a functional masterpiece, made entirely from locally available materials, which were easily and perpetually renewable. The towering spires cleverly concealed ventilation ducts that carried away hot air. Its walls, sixteen to eighteen inches thick, depending on their height, absorbed the sun’s blistering heat only gradually, keeping the interior cool by day and comfortably warm even on the chilliest of nights during the harmattan, or cool season.

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Roderick McIntosh had telephoned me in Abidjan with something close to panic in his voice to alert me to the ongoing plundering of long-buried artifacts from the ancient city. “What is happening is a looting of history on a scale not seen in Africa since Napoleon’s armies looted Egypt,” he said. He then gave me the names of several Malian archaeologists with whom he had worked for years, to act as my guides at

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squarely atop any list of places where the West in general, and the United States in particular, had failed the continent most spectacularly in the 1990s. Washington’s client and ally Jonas Savimbi had kept the Angolan civil war going for sixteen years, using $250 million of American taxpayers’ money and American-supplied weapons ferried via Liberia and Mobutu’s Zaire, right next door, to thoroughly gut the country and leave a half million dead.

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Boy soldiers loyal to Charles Taylor were advancing on the city from one direction. What was worse, Taylor’s insurrection, although it was not yet six months old, had already splintered, producing an even more fearsome force, a rival band of fighters from the National Patriotic Front led by an erratic, self-proclaimed field marshal named Prince Yormie Johnson, who were rushing toward the capital from another direction.

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President Doe’s peculiar means of fiddling while Rome burned had been to smoke marijuana and play checkers all day while barricaded in the executive mansion with several hundred loyalists from his Krahn ethnic group. When Johnson’s irregulars reached the city, though, he roused himself from his stupor to order a merciless bout of ethnic cleansing against the Mano and Gio peoples, who he deemed were the rebels’ main supporters. Doe, of course, was to be assassinated by Johnson’s fighters in September 1990.

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Rwanda, and America’s instincts were identical in both cases. While churches full of huddling people were becoming scenes of unimaginable slaughter, 2,500 United States Marines who were part of a task force along with six navy vessels steaming off the capital’s shore swooped into Monrovia to selectively evacuate the city’s American residents, along with other Westerners and Lebanese traders. Liberians were left to their own devices, just as Rwandans would be four years later.

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“We deployed a large marine amphibious force near Liberia to evacuate U.S. citizens, an operation accomplished with great efficiency,” Herman Cohen, an assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, told the journalist Bill Berkeley, speaking with deep regret, albeit years later. “A modest intervention … could have avoided the prolonged conflict.” Cohen confessed, however, that throughout 1990 he had never once managed to speak to the president about the Liberian crisis.

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State Department spokesperson, announced matter-of-factly in a statement read to reporters that “the U.S. military has no role to play in this conflict.” “Somewhere along the way,” an official told the Washington Post reporter in Liberia, “we just decided we weren’t going to get involved. Period. My impression is that Washington and Congress are absolutely fed up with Liberia.”

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a stingy bureaucratic solution that would satisfy no one. The idea was to hire American private contractors to perform essential tasks for ECOMOG, rather than to allow army-to-army cooperation with Nigeria’s military regime. Soon, Americans were flooding the streets of Monrovia, driving huge trucks laden with food aid and other supplies, and building the odd concrete pillboxes that bored-looking ECOMOG soldiers would man at every major intersection.

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None of this dampened Albright’s blustery oratory, though, as she gamely shouted to be heard over the droning engines of Nigeria’s huge, camouflage-painted transport planes. “I can confirm to you that the president and his advisors are deeply committed to the future of this country and its people,” she said. “The United States should take a risk for peace when we have the means to make a difference. The civil war is your war. The peace of Abuja is your peace. Either you take the courageous steps needed to secure it now or Liberia will again experience tragedy. The future

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undisputed kingpin of Liberia’s warlords clearly thought he was applying overwhelming force, but Johnson, a stubby, fast-talking man endowed with sleepy eyes and a preternatural cockiness, was blessed with another attribute that Taylor had not reckoned with: the kind of eel-like slipperiness in tight spots that feeds myths throughout this region about supernatural powers.

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Johnson was just about the only person left in Liberia who dared to match Taylor boast for boast and threat for threat. Although there was nothing in his background to recommend him for the title, Johnson had won a seat as minister for reconstruction in the country’s volatile unity government.

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over not having been named one of Taylor’s co-presidents on the Council of State. Still, Johnson compensated for his limited book knowledge with rare energy and cunning, and ever since his men attacked an ECOMOG position near Tubmanville earlier in the year, taking over the nearby diamond mines, his star had been rising among the idle and disgruntled boy soldiers for whom the war had long ceased being a matter of identifiable causes.

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the president’s Krahn kinsmen were hunted down in the street and shot or dismembered, were still fresh. Indeed, Taylor’s periodic sacks of the capital had only fed fears of renewed horrors. His two previous sieges had each been called “battles for Monrovia,” which gave them more honor than they deserved. They had been horrific affairs, unencumbered by any rules of warfare, with civilians slaughtered, heavy weapons fired at close quarter, and rape and looting on a grand scale. No one could have known that battle number three was beginning in earnest, and that it would be the worst of all, but from the panic that coursed through the streets on this day, it was clear that no one was taking any chances.

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It is said that forest fires start because of an abundance of dry brush lying around beneath the canopy. When the conditions are right, all it takes is a spark. Monrovia, too, was a blaze waiting to happen, and the fuel that ignited with a boom that day and burned fiercely for days had been blowing in from the countryside like tumbleweed for weeks— boys as young as eight or ten years addicted to drugs and armed with machine guns and rocket launchers. Years of rampaging by child soldiers had picked the countryside bare of everything it had to offer, and they were itching to use the blood feud between Taylor and Johnson as cover to relieve Monrovia’s residents of whatever fancy, store-bought goods—or values, as they called stolen merchandise—they could snatch up. Ever since the Abuja truce

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warlord bosses together in uneasy coalition, the boy soldiers, gaunt and hungry-eyed, their skin scabbed and scarred by every manner of wound and parasite, had been steadily filtering into the city to claim some kind of material reward. On my last trip to Liberia, I had spent several days interviewing the raggedy, atrocity-hardened country boys who had begun gathering on street corners, occasionally brandishing their rifles in broad daylight. To a Westerner, Monrovia may not have looked like much of a city, but to these hungry veterans of countless bush skirmishes and village looting raids, it must have looked like a huge, open-air shopping mall.

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morning. Lawrence’s dream, now that he had reached Monrovia, was to work in Charles Taylor’s personal entourage. Only those “lucky” few, he explained, could be sure of receiving any kind of payment at all, and it was usually in rice, not cash.

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wasn’t too sure—he ran off to join the infamous Small Boys Unit (SBU) of

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allowed to recover fully before being sent back into action. For most boys, though, other balms were required, and they were kept loyal and inoculated against fear through the copious supplies of drugs. “They were always feeding us opium, ganja and crack,” Lawrence told me. “At first, I didn’t want to smoke, but there was no way that you could refuse. We were forced to smoke those things, and after a while there was no way you could stop.”

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Soon enough, devotion to Pappy and the craving and fury induced by drugs had become life’s two remaining motivations. “While we were fighting, there was plenty of food for all of us, there was opium and there was medicine if we got sick,” Lawrence said. “When we weren’t fighting, we had to fend for ourselves. So all we wanted to do was fight.”

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company was ordered to overrun his own village, and only much later did he bother to return to see whether his mother was alive and help move her to a safer place. “Our job was killing, and I’ve killed a lot of people … plenty,” he added, stretching the word out for emphasis, like an exclamation point, as Liberians often did. “I’ve had lots of friends die right in front of my eyes, but I never felt bad. I said to myself, this is what war is, so I never stopped.”

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sky-high on drugs convinced they were shielded by amulets against enemy bullets, and getting ripped to shreds all the while. Fronts were ill defined and ground was rarely held for long, unless, that is, diamonds or iron ore or another rich source of a fungible commodity was at hand. For the boy soldiers, it was not readily apparent, but for their commanders, and for the warlords whose groups had splintered into a score of factions, this was a war of spoils, and spoils alone.

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up. The Ukrainians had been hired by the Sierra Leone government to do battle against that country’s own Taylor-style insurgency. With its thousands of loose rivets, their helicopter gunship sizzled frighteningly throughout our short ride across the bay, and the marines at Lungi watched with bemusement as the Soviet-vintage clunker landed. Later, as we prepared for takeoff in an American Huey, a marine expressed surprise that we would have risked flying in the Ukrainians’ metal. “When you get in one of our birds, at least you know that the only thing that can bring you down by surprise is a direct hit,” he said.

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There were doughy American missionaries dressed in clothing that looked almost as if it had been selected for its blandness; the families of the Lebanese traders who had been in this country for generations, running everything from the diamond business to petty commerce; a sprinkling of Greeks and Indians; and a handful of West Africans from Ghana and other nearby countries. Here and there, I could spot a Liberian family who had been allowed onto the field in preparation for evacuation. The diplomats said they were people who had lived in the United States or had some special claim to entry into the country, such as the birth of a child in America, which confers automatic citizenship to the infant. Even amid the crush and chaos, the Liberian families stood out. They had all somehow managed to put on their Sunday best, as if they had mistaken the marines’ choppers for the church altar. To my eyes, the presence of a few families like these only brought into sharper relief the ambiguous morality of the evacuation. The marines were doing their job with typical efficiency and even dignity, but there was no escaping the ugly fact that America was swooping into this country once again to conduct a triage, neglecting precisely those who were least able to fend for themselves. Ordinary Liberians were being relegated to a category of subhuman existence whose intimate workings I had first learned about as a young reporter covering police headquarters in New York. There, I quickly deduced how certain murders were automatically classified as nickel-and-dime cases— “jobs” that required little follow-up by detectives, and by inference, by the press as well. It was another insidious form of triage, and it took only a few days on the assignment to understand that the “garbage” cases almost invariably involved people of color.

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country, if need be. Nonetheless, we had to land at the embassy under cover of darkness, flying in low and observing a total blackout, because Mamba Point had been overrun with militiamen and sobels—the clever neologism for the men who had first ripped Sierra Leone apart, and were now bringing the practice to downtown Monrovia. The soldiers by day, rebels by night in this particular frenzy of gunfire and theft were none other than the Nigerian and Guinean troops of ECOMOG, the dispirited “peacekeepers” whose job it was to preserve Liberia from just this sort of anarchy.

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On the second floor, a marine manning a tripod-mounted .50mm machine gun, aimed in the general direction of the Mamba Point Hotel, where I had always stayed, told me that he had already received incoming fire several times during his shift. “It doesn’t really worry me too much,” he said laconically. “I have faith in my training, and in my equipment. People who shoot at me tend to regret it pretty quickly.”

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Ambassador Milam seemed worried and wanted to talk. Taylor and a rival, Alhaji Kromah, leader of the second-largest militia, had seemingly reached an understanding. They would overrun Roosevelt Johnson and his Krahn holdouts at the Barclay Training Center, and then dissolve the Council of State and simply take over the country. Taylor would be president, and Kromah vice president.

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The Nigerian army had first arrived here during Doe’s final days, and the West Africa superpower had created ECOMOG to prevent Taylor from shooting his way to power. In many years of trying, Taylor had never managed to beat the Nigerians on the ground, but little by little he had managed to cleverly undermine them. Most of the time this was simply a matter of cutting in ECOMOG’s Nigerian commanders on whatever business the multimillionaire warlord was running, whether diamonds, logging, bauxite and iron ore, or cocaine.

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example. ECOMOG’s discipline and esprit de corps had been steadily chipped away. Nigeria had received modest donations from the international community to help defray the costs of its operations in Liberia, but Abacha and his top commanders pocketed most of the funds and paid their soldiers a mere fistful of dollars each month. The Nigerians lacked transportation and walkie-talkies. Their rifles…

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When hell broke loose in Monrovia on Easter weekend, the Nigerian peacekeepers made no pretense of carrying out their mandate. Instead, as I saw from the roof of the embassy, with their vehicles piled high with stolen goods coursing through Mamba Point, many Nigerians had wholeheartedly joined the rebels in the looting. When I asked Milam if the marines might have to be called upon to provide order, he shot me a look of pained resignation and answered, “Things would have to get pretty bad before we got involved.” Then, a bit cryptically, he added, “There are…

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Liberia had been left to stew in its own juices plenty of times before.9 It was the failure to do more to prevent things from reaching this point in the first place. “My view is that if we could have mounted some kind of economic program in time, we could have drawn a lot of these boys out of the militias and created some jobs, or started some schools,” he said. “Now we are in just an impossible spot, having to…

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was holed up. In between the looting binges and torrential, blinding rains, which seemed to send everyone into hibernation, fighters loyal to Taylor and Kromah had been mounting sporadic but intense assaults with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. These spells of violence were as spectacular in their recklessness as anything ever filmed by Sam Peckinpah, and like a film they obeyed a certain choreography. By late morning, after the fog and hangover from the previous night’s drugs and drink had worn off, a dozen or so gunmen, half naked or sometimes completely so, would rush the crumbling, bullet-pocked gates of the BTC, firing their guns wildly as they dashed forward. Roosevelt’s…

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Each round of this madness left half a city block littered with bodies, but those who survived more than a couple of them quickly became legends and were celebrated with names like General Housebreaker, General No-Mother, No-Father, General Fuck-Me-Quick and, most notorious of all, General Butt Naked, the commanding officer of Roosevelt Johnson’s Butt Naked Brigade, who doused himself in a potion made from cane juice that he swore protected…

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skirmish. They were the remains of unlucky citizens, often men in their forties or fifties who had been caught in the crossfire, or executed during stickups. Despite the heat, none of them had yet reached an advanced state of decay. Their spilled blood was the best gauge of the freshness of their death. Small puddles glistened near the wounds of some, their faces fixed in agony. For others, the blood had long since dried up, leaving little more than dulled stains on the pavement.

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“What kind of food have you had to eat these last couple of days?” I asked. “No food,” Lattey said. “Nothing. All we’ve had is a little water.” He held up a five-quart motor oil jug and a small sack of corn-meal, and added, “This cost me five dollars, and there are nine in our family.” Lattey had brought his family to Mamba Point thinking the Americans would rescue them. “We walked here from Sinkor [a distance of two or three miles] overnight. Running, really, the whole way.”

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Only gradually did it dawn on Ambassador Simpson that the argument in Washington was over, if there had ever been an argument. In an odd replay of the country’s civil war in the 1960s, Mobutu had hired a couple of hundred Serbian killers, led by an international war crimes suspect named Yugo Dominic, from Krajina, to mount a last stand.

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John couldn’t get over the rebels’ tactical proficiency. He knew Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, or AFDL, was no hodgepodge group of tribal fighters and child soldiers hastily thrown together and dressed in Wellington boots, as the official story would have it. “They’ve got an Eisenhower- or a Montgomery-type putting together a very impressive, very methodical campaign.” The tactics, he said, even included sophisticated psy-ops, or psychological operations. One recent trick involved calling the confidential satellite phone numbers or radio frequencies of Mobutu’s top generals and telling them the time to make a deal was running out.

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