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Indiana Alumni Magazine

Crisis in the Congo

As rebel leaders vie for control of the Congo, an IU professor and her husband struggle to empower its long-suffering people

By Daniel S. Comiskey
Photos by Jim Calli

From the window of a landing 727, Dr. Jim Calli watched Congolese children race the aircraft on foot along a potholed runway. This was Gemana, a city of 200,000 people, with no plumbing or electricity. In what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, these children will have a life expectancy of 43 years and will earn about $25 annually as adults. Welcome to Africa.

Although the trip a year ago was Calli's first, his wife, Ann Marie Thomson, MPA’92, PhD’01, was no stranger to the continent. Born in the Congo in 1954 to missionaries of the Swedish Covenant Church, Thomson lived there until she was 18. While the economic situation was far from desirable, she remembers the years leading up to the meltdown as idyllic. “My first friends were Congolese,” says Thomson, now an adjunct professor of public and environmental affairs at IU. “My feeling is that I’m Congolese. I was devastated to see the country this time.”

“My first friends were Congolese,” says Thomson, now an adjunct professor of public and environmental affairs at IU. “My feeling is that I’m Congolese. I was devastated to see the country this time.”

The mission where Thomson grew up had been shelled. What was once a botanical garden was overgrown with weeds. Several acquaintances of her family had been killed as one militant coup made way for the next — a decade-long affair that has driven entire populations of cities into the jungle from which the people are only now emerging. It’s a situation that has inspired the characterization “bad, even for Africa.”

Dedicated to turning the tide, Thomson and Calli established Giving Back Africa in 2003. One of many American aid organizations working in the Congo, its goal is to identify the most immediate needs and, through education and infrastructure, to allow the Congolese to serve those needs independently. “You have to see some of the schools to believe them,” Calli says. “The kids sit in the dirt. There are no books. And the hospitals can only use electricity intermittently. I saw two cases of rheumatic fever there in a couple weeks. I haven’t seen a case here in the U.S. in 15 years.”

The obstacles to progress, of course, are overwhelming. Four vice presidents, several of whom are known murderers, currently share power under President Joseph Kabila in a tenuous agreement to hold democratic elections later this year. Until then, all national infrastructure projects are on hold. But an ambitious looting project, one that began more than a century ago with King Leopold II of Belgium and was perpetuated by Mobutu Sese Seko in the 1960s, continues.

To say that the Congo is poor would be misleading. It is the people who are poor. The land itself is fantastically rich. Diamonds saturate the rock. Coltan, a mineral necessary for cell phones and only found one other place on earth, is plentiful. The Congo River is the second largest on the planet and has the potential to light up half of Africa with a well-placed hydroelectric dam. But when Belgium’s King Leopold first set his sights on this region in the colonial 1890s, it was ivory he was after. Before he was finished plundering, 8 million Africans would be dead.“It was part of Europe’s scramble for Africa,” says Osita Afoaku, director of outreach at IU’s African Studies program. “But I don’t know of any case where there was so much violence.”

“It was part of Europe’s scramble for Africa,” says Osita Afoaku, director of outreach at IU’s African Studies program. “But I don’t know of any case where there was so much violence.”

With a dustpan-shaped beard and a hollow stare, Leopold certainly looked the part of a vicious 19th-century regent. Belgium, however, was a democracy. Leopold’s role was largely ceremonial. Like many of his European contemporaries, the king lusted for an African colony he could call his own. But as a man of small power from a small country, Leopold would have been laughed out of the room by giants such as England and France if he claimed any portion of the continent — he needed an ally. In 1884, Leopold turned to the United States. Convincing President Chester Arthur that he intended to operate a humanitarian project in the Congo, the king had found his patsy.

“Most Americans don’t know anything about the Congo,” Afoaku says. “The irony is, they’ve been there from the beginning.”

With American endorsement, Leopold’s control of the region was grudgingly accepted by the rest of Europe. At almost a million square miles, it was the largest tract of land ever owned by a single man.

“He called it the Congo Free State,” Afoaku says with a laugh. “That’s a rather interesting name for the most brutal case of colonial exploitation.”

The Belgian king wasted little time in spearheading his “humanitarian” projects, which included slave trading, ivory hunting, and wholesale massacre of the uncooperative. Several of his captains in the Congo had a habit of decorating their gardens with human heads. Novelist Joseph Conrad, whose trip there became the basis for Heart of Darkness, described it as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.” Leopold died a very old, very rich man, having never set foot in Africa.

Some 50 years later, a second despot would plague the region, this time from within. Mobutu Sese Seko must have seemed an unlikely tyrant when he assumed power in 1965. As an optimistic young journalist and army commander, Mobutu’s rise in the Congo had been, in part, orchestrated by the CIA.

“He began as an idealist,” Afoaku explains. “But he rose in the army and became something else. He emerged as a dictator.”

With the country’s spectacular natural wealth under his control, Mobutu — who began calling himself “The Leopard” — turned and bit the hand that had fed him. Renaming the country “Zaire,” Mobutu built a personal fortune of $5 billion by extracting its resources without compensating its people. During his 30-year reign, he built no roads but frequently chartered the Concorde for shopping trips to Europe; he charged children to attend public elementary school but outfitted his many palaces with gaudy chandeliers and cases of pink champagne; he printed currency at such a rate that between 1990 and 1995, inflation totaled 6.3 billion percent. Mobutu’s Congo has rightly been called a kleptocracy.

Some 50 years later, a second despot would plague the region, this time from within. Mobutu Sese Seko must have seemed an unlikely tyrant when he assumed power in 1965. As an optimistic young journalist and army commander, Mobutu’s rise in the Congo had been, in part, orchestrated by the CIA. “He began as an idealist,” Afoaku explains. “But he rose in the army and became something else. He emerged as a dictator.”

With the country’s spectacular natural wealth under his control, Mobutu — who began calling himself “The Leopard” — turned and bit the hand that had fed him. Renaming the country “Zaire,” Mobutu built a personal fortune of $5 billion by extracting its resources without compensating its people. During his 30-year reign, he built no roads but frequently chartered the Concorde for shopping trips to Europe; he charged children to attend public elementary school but outfitted his many palaces with gaudy chandeliers and cases of pink champagne; he printed currency at such a rate that between 1990 and 1995, inflation totaled 6.3 billion percent. Mobutu’s Congo has rightly been called a kleptocracy. “All he did in those 32 years was replicate what happened under Leopold,” Afoaku says. “Mobutu was a product of colonial culture. At heart, he was a Westerner.”

With thieves and autocrats as founding fathers, it can scarcely be surprising that the Congo is now in crisis. Mobutu’s death in 1997 created a power vacuum that criminals are eagerly trying to fill. In some regions, instability has rendered the Congolese franc worthless. People use sacks of peanuts as currency. And although 16,000 U.N. troops are currently stationed in the Congo — more than anywhere on earth — they have been unable to completely put down the fighting along the Rwandan border in the northeast, where the Hutus fled following that country’s genocide. In Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo and home to 10 million, garbage burns in the streets. Diseases both old and new are in full bloom. “I was petrified to go,” Calli remembers. “I’ve been to Cuba, which is very poor, but this was totally different. AIDS is everywhere. It’s where the Ebola Virus is from.”

Even so, Thomson prefers to frame the Congo’s plight as an opportunity. “It’s important for me that the world not see the Congo as a ‘problem,’” she says. “It’s just a country that is facing some challenges.”

Among those challenges, improving roads, funding schools, and modernizing hospitals are among the most pressing. Six-foot-deep canals of mud between major cities are euphemistically called “highways.” Only the elected president will have the power to address those — the most likely candidate being Joseph Kabila, a man whose claim to fame is that he is “not personally blamed for any major atrocities.” But Thomson and Calli hope to address education and medicine when they return to the Congo later this month. “My training as a doctor comes into play all the time there,” Calli says. “IU helps to run a medical school in Kenya that will be a model for one I hope to help with in Kinshasa.”

For her part, Thomson is working with professors such as Mossai Sanguma, of the Protestant University of Congo, on education.

“Right now, only 5 percent of girls go to school at all, which is terrible,” Sanguma says. “But I see great change taking place with the movement of democracy.”

One of the early goals of Giving Back Africa was to eliminate the fee for attending public schools, which has been guaranteed by the Congo’s new constitution. Another goal is to increase the number of college graduates, of which only 14 existed the year of the country’s independence. One of the inspirations for the aid organization was Thomson’s friend, Kagu, in rural Congo, whose preteen son, Mindo, said he wanted to be a doctor. “I was so impressed by that,” Thomson remembers. “That he would aspire to something like that gave me a lot of hope.”

As the educated class rises, the founders of Giving Back Africa hope that staffing the organization will be less of a struggle. When the couple returns to the Congo, their first priority will be to hire a director. As Calli freely points out, Thomson could live there, but he feels far too westernized — a warm American shower is a hard thing to give up. Without a presence on the ground in Africa, however, it’s impossible to identify needs. One of the larger problems with international aid, as Calli points out, has been that we “fund individuals, but not institutional roles.” The director’s job will be to establish roles that are most in demand (teachers or engineers, for example) and fund training for that role. “We’re looking at an annual budget of about $10,000 for the next few years,” Thomson says. “Just $1,000 can go a long way in the Congo.”

Premier universities in the country, such as the Protestant University of Congo, charge $500 per year in tuition. It’s possible to feed and clothe yourself on less than $1 per day. So even Giving Back Africa’s limited funding, gathered mostly from donations, has the potential to have a large impact. But Thomson worries that the coming elections, or lack of them, may throw the country into chaos before any projects can take hold. “In an unstable environment, you do the best you can,” she says. “You know full well that what you put in place may fall apart. If it does, you go back and try again.”

Neither Calli nor Thomson has any illusions about renaissance in the Congo overnight. As Thomson says, “We’re talking generations.”

Daniel S. Comiskey, BGS’98, BA’00, MA’05, is arts and culture editor for the magazine. He can be reached at dcomiske@indiana.edu.

 

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