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But gradually his father caught on, and when André was seventeen, a major first division game was
scheduled and his father finally heard about his son's talents.
Shortly before the game, his father told André to spend the evening ironing clothes. As André
did so, his siblings left and hurried to the city to watch the game. His father lingered, then, at the
last minute, also went to the stadium, curious to see if his son was as good as people claimed. André
stopped ironing and ran to the city along another path to meet his team. That day, the match was
close, no scores made until the very end, when André drove the ball into the net with his head. But
before the celebration could begin, even as his team was trying to hoist him up, he broke away and
sprinted home, bathed quickly and returned to ironing clothes.
“That evening, over dinner, my father asked where I had been. I said, 'I was here—you gave me
chores.' He asked my older brother where he'd been. He said, 'I went to see the game.' He asked
my younger sister, and she said, 'I also went to see the game.' He looked at me and said, 'This time
I'm going to beat you not for playing soccer, but for lying.' And so he beat me with his belt.” André
laughed and slapped the table. “But at least after that, he would tell me not to forget to go to soccer
practice.”
By the time André finished high school, Zaire's economy was in a slump, the country's infra-
structure disintegrating, and his dreams began to seem impossible. His father couldn't pay for the
education of so many children, but his mother, who had never gone to school, told André that if he
didn't have a university degree, he would someday be the servant of his friends. She offered to help
pay with what she earned from planting a field of beans, and he took a year off to work and put
aside money. He did an employment test and was offered two jobs, one as a journalist for Radio Na-
tional Zaïrois, the second managing human resources for an aviation company. He chose the latter,
then went to university, where he was shocked to discover how poorly funded it was, how quickly
everything was falling apart.
By then the Mobutu regime was growing weak. Services in the country were rapidly deteriorat-
ing, corruption everywhere. He hated the injustice, the police and military harassing people, taking
their goods in the name of made-up taxes. For those who dissented, there was only prison, exile, or
death.
He still played soccer, and this would prove to be his salvation; fanaticism for the sport made
him a local celebrity, and even the police and military respected him. When he was attending uni-
versity at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Bukavu, he asked his mother to move in with him
because he couldn't stand how his father treated her. He was doing a degree in history, and as he
read about nations and their wars, he saw the common theme, the rejection of oppression, the fight
to create change and freedom, to rebel against old systems and corrupt regimes. Already in his first
year, he became director of the Jeunesse du Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, the student di-
vision of the MPR, Zaire's only party, in which membership was obligatory for all citizens.
Still, André longed for the fall of Mobutu, and one evening he cut a photograph of Lumumba
from a copy of
Jeune Afrique
and put it on the bulletin board, where students gathered every morn-
ing to chant, “Mobutu, Mobutu, Mobutu.” A crowd formed, and when people started asking who
had put Lumumba's photo there, André called out that he had done it.
When the police arrived and asked him if he knew what doing this could cost him, he answered,
“Do you know that Lumumba is the national hero and that he is the father of our independence?” He
was taken to the Services de Securité Militaire. They wanted to know where he'd found the photo,
