Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
“Among my children,” André Lokasola often told the villagers, “it is Albert who will be here
with you. Albert will never leave you.”
His father was well aware not only of his son's acumen but also of his ability to speak to others.
As Albert grew up and went to increasingly distant schools, his father arranged for him to come
back and renew his contact with the village, even when he was far away.
But education and then his career became the driving forces in Albert's life. He excelled in the
village's primary school, said his former classmate and fellow conservationist, Pastor Jean Gaston
Ndombasi, who remembered Albert with these words regarding their schoolwork: “If he had eighty,
we had sixty or seventy. If he had a hundred, we were relieved because we'd at least have eighty.”
Albert attended a secondary boarding school in Mbandaka and university in Lubumbashi, where
he did a degree in chemistry. Afterward, he moved to Kinshasa and took a placement test with Uni-
lever. He was hired for management training and spent six years with them. Unilever wanted to
prepare a class of Congolese who could replace the European expatriate staff, and sent Albert to
work in the Ivory Coast for a year, then to Spalding, a town in Lincolnshire, England, for technic-
al training. When he came back to the Congo, he replaced an expatriate as
formateur technique de
l'usine
, the factory's technical trainer. But a year later, in 1991, the factory was slated to be sold to
an Indian-Lebanese company, and he left it.
Listening to Albert, I could already see that he was not prone to dramatizing a struggle or likely
to tell me how hard life in the country had become. He'd looked for new work, each time trying
to get a foothold, to make a place even as Mobutu's regime was crumbling. But after an attempt
at starting a career in Kisangani, he moved back to Kinshasa in 1994. He began what he called his
passage à vide
, “a passage in emptiness,” a way of saying a period without work or clear direction.
It proved to be difficult and formative, giving him the time to conceive a new vision of his future.
But it was also humiliating for a man who had been so driven and successful to have to struggle
without an income, to have to move with his wife and children to her family's home.
With the Cold War over, Mobutu had little support from the West, and the massacres that his
security forces committed began receiving greater international scrutiny. He paid the military a pit-
tance, forcing them to survive on bribes and extortion. They rented out their barracks for cash and
lived with family, and planted cassava on their training grounds. Bureaucrats took similar measures,
and Mobutu even once said on the air, “Go ahead and steal, as long as you don't take too much.”
His rule fostered a culture of abuse, of theft and skimming, that the Congolese still refer to as
tra-
casserie
—literally, the act of bothering or harassing someone.
But this abuse had deeper effects. The culture of corruption pitted the military and bureaucracy
against the people. It was Mobutu's way of dividing and conquering, of using instability to prevent
opposition to his weakening rule. He let the country's infrastructure fall apart, further isolating
communities. The last foreign investors fled, leaving the Congolese virtually helpless against a
predatory military and security apparatus. Organized crime thrived, stores and warehouses were
plundered, and counterfeiting schemes devalued the national currency even as Mobutu was rap-
idly printing more money. Officials sold everything they could seize, and the Zairian ambassador to
Japan even sold the embassy.
The 1990s were by far the worst years. Mobutu was absent, suffering from prostate cancer. The
country was deeply indebted, the mines that had financed it antiquated and in ruins. The unpaid mil-
itary rioted in 1991, looting Kinshasa. In 1993, when Mobutu printed 500,000-zaire notes, with an
approximate value of one US dollar, no shopkeepers would accept the currency and the population
