Biology Reference
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spent the last three decades in Tanzania, smuggling gold and timber while running a bar and brothel.
He'd received international attention only when his rebel forces kidnapped four Western researchers
from Jane Goodall's chimpanzee research camp in Tanzania, then ransomed them after subjecting
them to deprivation and communist reeducation.
Kabila brought little more than his name to the invasion, which, backed by Rwanda and Uganda,
swept across the country. Many Congolese were eager to join, and numerous soldiers defected to
the new cause. The primary casualties were Hutu refugees, many of them women and children, their
numbers unknown though thought to be in the tens of thousands. Kabila's forces were backed not
only by Rwanda and Uganda but, to a much lesser degree, by Burundi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Erit-
rea, Ethiopia, Angola, and the South Sudanese rebel army. Only the National Union for the Total
Independence of Angola (UNITA), an Angolan rebel group, and Sudan offered Mobutu some aid.
His army was in shambles, the soldiers and officers preferring to sell the very weapons with which
they would soon be defeated.
Within little more than six months, the largely Rwandan-led rebel forces had captured Kinshasa.
At the airport, Zaire's elite tried to pack luxury items into jets, leaving Mercedes and BMWs, as
well as heaps of designer clothes and stereo systems, just off the runway. Others fled in boats across
the river to Brazzaville.
As for Albert Lokasola, what little work he'd found was gone within months. Many of the min-
isters left. Kongolo Mobutu's import-export company was short-lived, and his last days in the coun-
try were spent racing through Kinshasa with a military unit. Having drawn up a list of five hundred
of his father's opponents, Kongolo tried to hunt them down and kill them before he fled. Having
escaped to Morocco, his father died a few months later, on the same day Kabila claimed the presid-
ency. Kongolo died two years afterward in Monaco, possibly of AIDS.
Albert was not extravagant in his description of this time. He spoke of it quickly, and I had to
repeat my questions often. Whereas he recounted with ease the stories of his childhood, of the ele-
phant shrew and his excursion into the forest, he spoke fleetingly of Zaire's last days. Given few
words and left mostly to silence, his
passage à vide
became all the more poignant, the empty pages
of his life written with his nation's history.
Only when Kabila took power did the Congolese have a sense of hope, that the country might
again resemble the productive state of Mobutu's early days. Like all the others searching for a stable
livelihood, Albert applied for every job, contacted every NGO arriving in Kinshasa until his search
for employment bore fruit, and he was hired as the secretary-general of the Red Cross in the DRC.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kabila proved to be much like his predecessor, and soon he began to
alienate the countries that had brought him to power. It didn't take long for the newly renamed Con-
golese people to realize that their country would soon be torn apart again, this time by a war funded
by the mineral wealth that had been both the Congo's blessing and its curse.
The vast exploitation that ensued made the projects that Albert would undertake with Sally
Jewell Coxe all the more urgent. The civil war would displace entire populations, so that villages
that had honored certain hunting taboos
depuis la creation
—“since creation,” as the Congolese like
to say—would suddenly see their new neighbors skinning and cooking bonobos after a hunt. The
economy and infrastructure declined exponentially, and the forests were unable to sustain the great
numbers of people taking refuge there, many of whom hunted
nyama
—“animals” and “meat” be-
ing the same word in Lingala—without regard for their impact. This set the stage for the difficult
