I turned on my voice recorder, and he leaned toward it eagerly. “You must go.  Go tell your leaders, who are responsible for the misery of the Congolese  people, we have got no hope—ninety per cent of us. That’s because we are  intelligent. We have learned how to use our intelligence. We have the spiritual  and intellectual capacity to develop this country economically. But your leaders  there, in the West there—they use these idiots to rule us, to impoverish us, to  makes bums of us.” He spoke French: “pour nous clochardizer,” he said.  He made an expression of intense disgust. “That’s why even now we Congolese have  no roads; we have no electricity. What kind of a country is this? It’s  scandalous. And you see this poor population. We don’t deserve this misery.  Frankly.”

“Oh Congo, what a wreck,” I  wrote after my last trip here. “It hurts to look and listen, and hurts to  turn away.” At that time, twelve years ago, the country was cut in half by war.  The feeble army of President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, propped up by Angolan and  Zimbabwean forces and the fugitive army of Rwanda’s former genocidal regime,  controlled the west.  And the east was under the occupation of the Rwandan and  Ugandan armies, fronted by a fractious alliance of fierce Congolese  politico-military factions. The same Rwandan and Ugandan forces had installed  Kabila, in 1997, after chasing out the West’s Cold War client dictator, Mobutu  Sese Seko, who had seized power thirty years earlier after the country’s only  democratically elected leader, Patrick Lumumba, was assassinated (by the  Belgians, who got to him before the Americans, who were also scheming to  eliminate him).

Kabila had proven a complete failure as a head of state.

 

But the Rwandans and  Ugandans made him look almost good to many Congolese when they turned on each  other, and fought for control of the diamond-trading center of Kisangani,  subjecting its people to a bloodbath in the process. When Laurent Kabila was  assassinated the next year, there were many theories as to who’d done it—and  most of them were all too plausible: just about everybody who’d dealt with him  had reason to get rid of him. Yet in the upheaval that followed the murder,  Kabila’s son Joseph emerged as his replacement. His legitimacy as the leader of  a country whose full name is Democratic Republic of Congo was, at best,  debatable: even in seen-it-all Kinshasa, heredity was considered a dubious path  to the presidency.  But there he was, and after the Rwandans and Ugandans cut a  peace deal with him and withdrew their armies from Congo, in 2003, the so-called  international community (big Western powers, in harness with the U.N.) set about  making Joseph Kabila legit, by staging a hugely expensive national election in  2006 and deploying the biggest, most expensive peacekeeping force in the world  to the country’s restive east.

Joseph Kabila’s election resolved none of Congo’s woes. The country remains  one of the most wretched on the earth. When Kabila stood for reëlection last  year, he kept his job—but only after what was pretty universally reported as  gross ballot rigging, and only after the international observers who watched the  fraud happen shrugged it off and validated the vote.

Now, a year later, Congo is again in the news for unhappy reasons, after M23  drove Kabila’s much larger, better equipped Army out of Goma. After some fierce  battles, Kabila’s unpaid, barely fed forces abandoned the city, fleeing west,  pausing only to rape and pillage in outlying villages. Most of the international  press coverage of this latest war in the east, which began in April, has  focussed on allegations in a U.N. report that neighboring Rwanda was behind M23.

Salvador Muhindo, the gaunt little man who button-holed me in the rain  yesterday afternoon, didn’t care about that. He was a supporter of the  opposition politician, Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba, who is believed by his  followers and many less partisan observers to be the true winner of last year’s  election. Like Tshisekedi, a nationalist, Muhindo was no fan of Rwandan  influence in Congo, but he saw it only as a measure of Congo’s weakness, and  that weakness he blamed firmly on the pernicious role that the larger  international community had played in the country for a hundred and fifty years  or so. “It is impossible to be Congolese,” he said at one point, “without being  continuously outraged.” When he threw his hands up, he often seemed to be going  for my throat.

“You,” he said. “You come here to work. So impress this upon your leaders  there, in the West there. What they have done to us! After slavery, there was  colonization. After colonization there was neo-colonialism instead of  independence. We never had independence here—not yet. And now again, you impose  Kabila on us with this democracy of complacency. So it’s neo-slavery. We  continue to suffer. Go inform your leaders there: if they continue to place at  the head of this country these idiots, these imbeciles, these political  homosexuals, we’re going to create Al Qaeda á l’Africaine here. That’s what  we’ll become.”

But Salvador Muhindo’s theme was impotence, and as he thought about what he  just said, he backed away from it. In the next breath he said, “We are no longer  going to coöperate with you.

Photograph by Phil Moore/AFP/Getty.