In the Heart of Africa, Darkness

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

INSHASA, Congo — So the doctor was in the middle of surgery, in no less a place than this country's largest hospital, when the lights went out.

But Dr. Kabamba Mbwebwe, chief of Kinshasa General Hospital's emergency room, didn't blink; he was used to working in semi-obscurity, relying on the natural light that filtered through the dirty windowpanes. Perhaps the hospital — built by the Belgians, expanded by Mobutu Sese Seko, now an orphan — had not paid its electricity bill?

The patient managed to survive, just as this hospital and country in the heart of Africa, plundered for more than a century, have survived — seemingly defying their own deaths with a resourcefulness born of desperation.

The light was still out a few hours later, when the doctor slumped in an armchair in his tiny office. The air-conditioner was silent, not doing its job of keeping out the smell of the waiting room just outside Dr. Mbwebwe's door, where a half dozen Congolese lay on beds with no sheets.

It was the unmistakable smell of an African hospital in wartime, of death and decay, of bodies and floors scrubbed with water and nothing else. If the hospital lacked even detergent, it obviously did not have medical supplies. One day, the doctor recalled, two children came in for surgery; by the time a supply of blood had been found, the children were dead.

"If there is a hell somewhere, I would choose to go to the hell of the Congo," the doctor said. "In the hell of the Congo, something will always be missing. If there is enough wood, there won't be a match. If there's a match, there won't be enough wood. If there's enough wood and there's a match, the flames will be too weak."

Hell, as imagined by the outsider, has long found a place in the Congo. Congo is the setting of Joseph Conrad's indictment of colonialism, "Heart of Darkness," written a few years after King Leopold II of Belgium claimed the country as his own property and Europeans carved up the rest of the continent for themselves.

Conrad himself took a steamboat up the Congo River, "an immense snake uncoiled," into the African interior, a place forbidden to Europeans who died easily of malaria and countless other diseases. There the author found the material for Kurtz, a European trader who lives in the jungle in a house surrounded by shrunken heads.

But the metaphorical descent into hell was not so far from the truth. From the late 1870's, when King Leopold commissioned the American journalist, Henry Stanley, to explore the Congo, through the next four decades, perhaps as many as 10 million Congolese were killed. Long before rebels in Sierra Leone grabbed headlines in recent years by chopping off civilians' hands, the Belgians had perfected the practice here. Congolese meeting the Belgians' exacting criteria of civilization were eventually handed identity cards classifying them as "evolues" — those who had evolved.

The legacies of colonialism and the Cold War are particularly fresh here. "Americans and Europeans, leave us in peace," reads a sign put up by Kinshasa's city hall in the city center.

This city is a corpse. Skyscrapers erected by Cold War rivals vying for Mobutu's loyalty stand empty. Two cars were parked recently in front of the gigantic Chinese-built People's Congress. The French-built, C.C.I. Zaire — World Trade Center Zaire — is reduced to serving as a TV antenna. On its sign, the "z" is peeling off, soon to join the "a" and "r" which had fallen off by the time Congo's current war began in August 1998.

Someone, though, has opened a nightclub on the 18th floor of the otherwise almost empty 19-story Ministry of Communication, complete with waitresses in cocktail dresses who serve alcohol during the day — a true testament to the Congolese spirit, which, war or peace, hell or heaven, knows how to party.

"The United States was founded on democratic principles, but why does it support dictatorships in other parts of the world?" said Louis Muamba, a professor of psychology at the University of Kinshasa. "The only thing we ask of the United States is to live up to its ideals."

It would be easy to dismiss such comments as hopelessly naive, if it were not America's history in the Congo. It was, after all, the Central Intelligence Agency that took part in assassinating Congo's first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, who was a little too independent-minded, and in installing Mobutu Sese Seko. Even as millions of Congolese suffered under Mobutu's mis-rule, he was received at the White House through the Bush presidency. Surely Conrad was right in pointing out that the Congo often brought out the worst in people.

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much," Conrad wrote about the European colonial powers.

But after Africa's independence four decades ago, Mobutu and other African leaders — who sent their children to be educated in Europe and America, who flew in private jets to be treated in the West's best hospitals — pillaged their own countries. Today, the Congo has again inaugurated a new era in Africa: other African nations, including Rwanda, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe, are busy plundering the Congo, along with the government headed by President Laurent Kabila here.

Kinshasa's General Hospital, built by the Belgians in 1912, was once Central Africa's most prestigious hospital, Dr. Mbwebwe said. With 2,000 beds, it is still the largest. Flush with money from the West, Mobutu kept the hospital working well through the late 1970's until corruption began taking its toll. After the Cold War ended and the foreign money dried up, the hospital fell to its present state, surviving on payments from patients. Doctors and nurses, not paid regularly by the government, have left to take up farming, the doctor said.

"You cannot separate the problems of this hospital with the problems of this country," said Dr. Mbwebwe, who became involved in opposition politics during the Mobutu years. "They are inextricably linked."

Noise could be heard from outside the doctor's door. The stench was getting stronger inside. Then the power returned. The air-conditioner hummed back to life.

"This is a good sign," the doctor said with the faintest of smiles. "Maybe there is hope."