The regular traveller along the Masaka-Kampala highway in Uganda is accustomed to a dangerous stretch of road that has claimed thousands of lives since it was built by the Europeans.
A road sign carries the grim warning: "WEKUUME LWERA", meaning "BEWARE OF LWERA."
Many have ignored this dire warning, fooled by a false sense of invincibility. They have driven even faster as if the warning was a challenge to prove that they could defy death at will. And many have lost the bet, and in the process taken other innocent travellers along with them.
Whoever made that warning sign along the Masaka Road should get back to work, except that this time he should make signs that read: "WEKUUME CONGO" (BEWARE OF CONGO), to be placed on all entry points into the vast mineral-rich African country, as a warning to those who would nurse the desire to seek power and fortune in Congo.
Nobody has ever survived Congo. Nobody, not even King Leopold II of Belgium, the man who created and owned the Congo Free State between 1885 and 1908. Yes, he amassed a personal fortune that has been estimated at $1.1 billion. But all that remains of King Leopold is the memory of genocide that his agents wrought upon 10 million Congolese, and his ghost which hovers over Congo in an eternal dance of death and destruction.
Leopold's Congo is a cursed place, and most of those who have danced with his ghost have come to grief. The post-Leopold Belgian colonialists and their French successors are long gone - at least on paper. The courageous (some say mad) Patrice Lumumba lasted a mere three months as Prime Minister of Congo, before being dismissed by President Joseph Kasavubu and Colonel Joseph Desire Mobutu in October 1960.
Lumumba would later be gruesomely murdered by fellow Congolese, saving the Americans the need to do the dirty deed which they had already planned in President Dwight Eisenhower's White House. Lumumba's dismembered body has never been found, and all that remains of him is a memory in the minds of romantics and intellectuals who long for the days when Africa produced true revolutionaries.
Kasavubu himself was overthrown by his friend Mobutu in 1965, and he was dead within four years of losing power.
Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General who got deeply involved in the Congo crisis and in the process greatly angered the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev, perished in a mysterious plane crash near Kitwe, Zambia on September 18, 1961 while on a journey to meet with Moise Tshombe of Katanga.
Besides a Nobel Prize for peace and the occasional mention in columns such as this one, the Norwegian diplomat is almost completely forgotten.
One suspects that even the current combatants in the struggle for Congo have not bothered to read Hammarskjöld’s speeches and writings on Congo.
Not even a name change from Congo to Zaire, and a change of his own name to Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu wa Zabanga, could save his doomed reign. Mobutu, the only man who reportedly stole more from Congo than King Leopold II did, was chased out of his empire by the Banyamulenge-led rebels and their "advisers" from Uganda and Rwanda in 1997.
Mobutu died a broken man on September 7, 1997 in Morocco, followed soon after by his son Kongolo, with whom he shares a bed in Hell if such a place exists.
All that the Mobutus left behind were the billions of dollars in cash and investments they stole from the Congolese people, and memories of ruthlessness, greed and vanity that is their epitaph. Oh yes! He left a few palaces in Congo, now ransacked ruins that have been reclaimed by the jungle, serving as monuments to vanity and human folly. But it is the millions of nameless Congolese, who died because of his armies’ bullets or from the ravages of extreme poverty and neglect in Africa’s richest country, that are his invisible monument.
Then, of course, there were the heroes of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD) who chased Mobutu out of Congo, with a little help from their friends in Kampala and Kigali. Laurent Desire Kabila, a fortune hunter who initially walked hand in hand with Uganda's Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda's Paul Kagame, soon fell out with his godfathers. By late 1998, Kabila and his two friends had become mortal enemies. Their armies turned the guns on each other, and Congo's killing fields were in business once again. Great rivers of blood continued to flow, including Kabila’s who was assassinated on January 16, 2001.
It was very hard to keep track of who was doing what to whom. The RCD versus Kabila. The RCD versus the RCD. Uganda and Rwanda versus Kabila and his Southern African allies. Then Rwanda versus Uganda.
Amidst the thundering sounds of gunpowder and bombs, one could hear Leopold's ghost laughing with satisfaction at the sight of Africans engaged in mutual annihilation as they struggled for control of his beloved Congo Free State. The looting of diamonds, gold, timber and other valuables by some army generals from Uganda and Rwanda brought great wealth to them and a smile of contentment to Leopold's ghost.
The long dead Belgian King derived solace from the sight of African soldiers mutilating hapless villagers just the way his European agents had done a century earlier. "My men were not that bad after all," the ghost laughed. "At least we did not kill the animals!"
Like all who had succumbed to the lure of Congo's dangerous riches since Leopold II, the turn-of-the-century adventurers from Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia were stuck in the bloody killing fields of the wretched land.
A temporary reprieve came with the coronation of Joseph Kabange Kabila, the son of the assassinated president. At 29, he had the wits to sue for peace with the latest assortment of “liberators” that were, once again, backed by Uganda and Rwanda. The younger Kabila used Mobutu’s script to rule Congo Free State for the next 18 years. Brute force here, patronage there, manipulation of the Constitution, stolen elections, selling the country’s wealth to foreigners and, above all, pretending that most of the hinterland in the vast country was not part of his realm.
A presidential election of sorts was held on December 30, 2018. The exercise, officially meant to choose a successor to Kabange Kabila, triggered the expected violence across the land. Such was the justifiable distrust for the process that the end of the Kabila Dynasty was not the beginning of Congo’s recovery.
Like most Sub-Saharan African countries, Congo is a non-viable jigsaw puzzle that is almost impossible to hold together. It has too many incompatible pieces whose chances of holding were destroyed long ago by the treasure hunters that have ruled the place over the last 130 years.
The romantic idea that Congo, in its current arrangement, can work is a hope built on sand. Leopold's Ghost hovers over the cursed land that Joseph Conrad called the Heart of Darkness. It must be exorcised by dismembering the place through internationally supervised referenda. Out of the broken pieces might emerge a voluntary and functioning federation, assuming, of course, that the rulers of the component parts abandon their feudalist heritage. Fingers crossed.