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Article: HISTORY AS TRAGEDY : 'Lumumba'.
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- October 12, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In the early 1980s I spent two years in Africa, including several months in the calamity formerly known as Zaire. Mobutu's Congo was a wreck, its roads in disrepair, its phones and electricity spotty, its hospitals lacking medicines. Unpaid soldiers freelanced as thugs; if you had an enemy, you could get him beaten up, or his car burned, for $50. There was a zoo in Kinshasa, but most of its cages were empty. People had eaten the animals. Mobutu, meanwhile, busied himself amassing personal plunder. Ridiculous in leopard-skin cap, silk ascot, and dark sunglasses, he stared down from every shop and office wall, a model for the Big Man of V. S. Naipaul's bleak postcolonial ...