IN THE KIND OF COINCIDENCE on which Africa thrives, but which went unnoticed in most Western media, Congo-Kinshasa dictator Laurent Kabila was shot to death only a few hours before the 40th anniversary of the demise of his presumed revolutionary role model, Patrice Lumumba. Of course, given how power now works in Africa, it was surprising to nobody that during his three-and-a-half year rulership Kabila resembled his immediate predecessor, the corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko, more than the ascetic and idealistic Lumumba.
But Kabila’s kleptocratic habits were widely noted in the world press. What escaped comment was the extraordinary enthusiasm with which the Clinton administration, as well as European chancelleries, embraced Kabila as a putative factor for stability in Congo and preferable to Mobutu. It was as if the man’s entire previous career had never existed.
Kabila was in fact a kind of evil twin to South African leader Nelson Mandela. Both men benefited from the political and financial support of the former Soviet empire and its Cuban client, but Kabila was an unregenerate revolutionary thug who gloried in his long-ago involvement with the granddaddy of all radical gangsters, Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Unlike Mandela, who gained deserved respect after demonstrating his capacity for dignified statesmanship, Kabila proved an outstanding graduate of the Castro-Guevara school of politics, promoting violence within his domain. He enjoyed indispensable military support from the Cuban-sponsored regimes of Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. And he seemed bent, in a sense, on proving Jeane Kirkpatrick right in her distinction between authoritarianism, exemplified by Mobutu, and the totalitarianism Kabila represented. Mobutu was an amateur tyrant; Kabila was a professional. But as noted above, he might not have lasted even a week without the astonishingly beneficent gaze of the Western capitals.
Laurent-Desire Kabila first gained attention four decades ago as a member of the Baluba nationalist militia. Two years after Lumumba’s death, Kabila joined the martyred leader’s followers in the National Liberation Committee. In 1965, he met Che. The Argentine insurrectionary had left Cuba for an African tour, traveling first to Algeria and then to Mali, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea, Ghana, and Dahomey (now Benin), all then Moscow-friendly one-party states. Che was greeted in Tanzania by dictator Julius Nyerere and introduced to Kabila and another Congolese revolutionary leader.
Guevara then repaired to Congo where, with 100 Cuban colleagues, he dedicated several months to “the revolutionary war.” Team Guevara trained combatants for the so-called “Simba” uprising against then-president Moise Tshombe.
“Simba” means “lion,” yet Kabila was anything but. In a personal narrative, Guevara described Kabila as a coward who preferred partying in Cairo and Paris, “issuing communiques and drinking Scotch in the company of beautiful women.” Nearer to the front line, Kabila commuted between saloons and whorehouses, according to the puritanical Argentine.
But Kabila knew things Che did not. He prevented Guevara and his cohort from assuming direct command over the Congolese soldiery, very sensibly realizing that black rebels were unlikely to take orders from a white man. One might even entertain the thought that each at least subconsciously saw in the other, beneath the Marxist costume, a racial cliche. Guevara viewed Kabila as a loose, lecherous African, and Kabila may have considered Guevara a white adventurer, an updated Dr. Livingstone, since Guevara was also a physician by training. They deserved each other, even if they didn’t like each other.
Che’s Africa campaign did not last long. His asthmatic constitution was undermined, and he found nobody among the Congolese in whom he could feel confidence. he soon went back to Cuba. Mobutu took over from Tshombe in Congo. By the end of 1967, Guevara was dead in Bolivia.
Kabila continued his depredations with patronage from Nyerere, although he eventually took time out to traffic in precious commodities, always a lucrative sideline in the region. The Simbas waved their banner into the 1980s, from a Khmer Rouge-style “liberated zone” in Congo, and Kabila showed off his uniform. He became a champion revolutionary tourist, stopping in to see Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat. Along with Tanzania, Kabila gained the on-and-off patronage of Libya, Sudan, faithful Cuba, and North Korea.
But from the time his Alliance of Democratic Liberation Forces emerged as a leading contender to pick up the pieces of Mobutu’s regime, Kabila made it clear he remembered very well the particular Guevarist principles that have turned out to be his lasting legacy in Africa: Where guerrilla revolution fails, dictatorship can succeed. On his victorious march to Kinshasa, Kabila announced that his government would not tolerate multiple parties or a competitive press.
This tale would be of little global significance were it not for the fact that the Clinton administration, its European partners, and the international cadres of humanitarian imperialism rushed so obscenely to congratulate Kabila as the savior of Congo.
In an outrageous comparison that was all too typical, Roger Winter, the director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, who “met Kabila a couple of times,” was quoted by ABC News declaring that Kabila was no longer a Marxist. “That was 30 years ago,” Winter said. “Yeltsin was a Marxist 30 years ago too.”
Well, yes, and so was the author of this article. But a lot of us, Boris Yeltsin included, came to our senses. Kabila never did. His demise closes the books on a chapter in Clinton-era foreign policy. Let’s hope the Bush administration looks more closely when it comes to congratulating new political heavies in the hotspots of the world.
Stephen Schwartz’s latest book is Intellectuals and Assassins, a collection of essays on Stalinism.
