The elements of power, p.36
The Elements of Power, page 36
Kazadi and I were reunited, and we spent a listless day planning what we would do when we were released, which an agent named Thierry assured us would be that afternoon. Through Thierry and some of the other agents, I also started to get a picture of the ANR and its attitude toward freedom of the press. “You may have been authorized by the Ministry of Communication,” one said to me, “but you should have told us of all your activities. Ministers come and go, but we are the government.”
Morning turned to afternoon, and Joseph suddenly burst into the room. “And now you are leaving!” he shouted. “Now you are going to Kin.” He pronounced that last syllable, the abbreviated name of the capital, with a flourish, a dramatic exhalation that caused his colleagues to begin whooping with excitement.
* * *
Before we knew it, we were being hustled into cars with our suitcases and shuttled toward Lubumbashi’s airport, most famous as the place where, in early 1961, President Lumumba was deposited before he was killed.
All of us were bundled onto the evening flight to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. The stewardesses, clearly not apprised that we would be on the flight, shouted at our escorts. “Are those political prisoners?” one asked. “Prisoners cannot be transported on commercial flights!” The agents ignored her.
When I had been taken by the secret police, anything I could have used to record my detention—pens, pencils, electronics—had been confiscated. On the plane, I fished around in my pockets, and among a jumble of tissues and paper, I felt a pen.
I had something to write on: the back pages of the paperback edition of Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Emperor, which I had managed to retrieve from my luggage. I made two trips to the bathroom and scribbled down notes that I slipped to two strangers on the plane. One was Congolese and wore a cowboy hat; the other spoke French with a heavy Belgian accent. Later, I learned that both had dropped the notes off at the U.S. embassy the next morning.
At the bottom of the stairs, a bunch of shouting men with Kalashnikovs herded us across the tarmac. On the plane, one of the ANR agents—referred to by his colleagues as simply “Monsieur Joe”—had given me an assurance that I was still trying to process as we got off: “Don’t worry, they won’t torture you. The ANR doesn’t torture journalists.” (I later learned that the ANR has been accused of all kinds of aggression against members of the media. Only two months before, three local journalists were tortured by the security service at Boende.)
In the hot night outside was Kinshasa’s N’djili Airport. It had been newly built by the Chinese. I wondered if something else had percolated into the loam of Congolese society with China’s famously no-strings-attached, no-questions-asked investments. Was the entire notion of personal freedom—admittedly never particularly strong in a place that had endured seventy-five years of colonialism, almost four decades of dictatorship, and three rigged elections—being forgotten altogether?
* * *
I was taken to the ANR’s headquarters in Kinshasa, a hulking brutalist structure in the center of town. I was searched and made to declare all my effects in a floodlit courtyard in front of more shouting men with guns. This was a theme that would play out over the next couple of days. These declarations showed the agents’ bosses that they had not stolen anything from me, even as they pocketed objects and cash I had been instructed to leave off the lists.
After the courtyard, I was forced to make a second declaration in a shabby second-floor office. My last pen was discovered and confiscated. In the background, an old documentary about Mobutu was airing. When he came on-screen, the guards cheered: “Papa Mobutu!”
Inside the headquarters, I was confined to a room with barred windows on the seventh floor. I was told that my cell had been prepared for François Beya Kasonga, a former Congolese security chief who was detained in 2022 under shadowy circumstances. In August of that year, after seven months of incarceration in Kinshasa, the previously healthy Beya had to be sent to France for emergency medical treatment.
The room was grimy and filled with mosquitoes, and it smelled of smog from traffic down below. Outside, a nightclub thudded out music late into the night. But at least I had my books, running water for some of the day, a view of Kinshasa, and a bed with sheets. I fashioned writing instruments from burned matches and wrote a diary of sorts, which I hid in my clothes whenever I heard the guards enter. Kazadi and the other men were confined inside a grimy cell in another building and had to defecate in plastic bags.
* * *
On my first day in the Kinshasa cell, I was allowed to purchase a baguette, some water, some spoons, and some smokes from a guard for another fifty bucks. I had to rewrite my declaration. More cash was siphoned off. I would mostly survive on these supplies, three tins of sardines, a packet of muesli, and a packet of cookies that I kept stowed in my bag for the rest of my imprisonment. (When I had traveled to Manono a few months beforehand, I had often ended up in villages that had no shops and no food, so I was at least a little prepared.) I was constantly asked if I had enough food by officials who said I was not eating enough. I quickly realized that their purported concern was something of a sick joke—the mentioned food almost never came.
That night, a Friday, I began to panic. I sat up for hours, unable to sleep. One of the guards told me, cryptically: “At home, they know you are here.” When I pressed him, he clarified: “Your people, the embassy.” I wasn’t sure whether I trusted him or believed him when he said: “I will try and explain that it is not good that you have been taken. You were doing your job.”
* * *
At six thirty the next morning, one of the guards entered my room, joked with me a bit, and smoked one of my cigarettes. He then shuttled me out to another interrogation, a long one this time, with Kazadi, Nkuwimba, and one of the Bakata Katanga emissaries. It was led by a sturdy agent in a red plaid shirt who took notes in longhand on printer paper. We were forced to rehash the entire story again.
At one point, the agent began harrying Kazadi, condemning him as a traitor. Kazadi turned to me and started pleading: “Nick, if you’re hiding anything, please tell them. I’m here in prison with you.”
I replied that I was telling the truth, that I wasn’t a spy. “We’ve known each other for three years,” I told him.
When the interrogator finished, he handed the notes to another man, bald, with snakelike features, who typed up the notes on a laptop using two fingers. Every so often he would flick out his tongue and wet his lips. Occasionally, he would erupt in fury and scream, “You’re a spy!” By midafternoon, the interrogation had been over for a good while, but he was still typing.
Everyone in the room lapsed into slumber. Sometime later, I woke to general confusion as the agents huddled for hours around the computer, furiously whispering. “The boss wants it as a PDF file!” I heard one say. At another point, the officer in the checkered shirt went through my passport and asked me why I had been in each and every country stamped there. He was especially interested in a Rwandan stamp from a trip I took transiting the country in 2019. Were we Rwandan spies?
A few hours later, Jean-Hervé Mbelu Biosha, the head of the security service, called me into his office on the third floor of the headquarters building. In a waiting room with red wall-to-wall carpeting, an assistant and several figures in military uniform watched a thriller on television. Everyone occasionally glanced over at a padded door with a fingerprint scanner through which people entered and exited reverently.
Mbelu was, as Radio France Internationale put it, “a man of the [president’s] household.” He had roots in Kasai, and under Mbelu, the ANR had become a tool for Tshisekedi and the people around him to go after perceived enemies of the president. During his time as head of the ANR (he was dismissed in early 2023), Mbelu presided over an intelligence state that was taking more and more of a sinister turn: The ANR carried out audits of various Congolese adversaries to the president and delayed the departures of opposition figures who tried to leave the country by private jet. Mbelu even implicated himself in the detention of Beya, the former intelligence chief, according to Jeune Afrique.
* * *
I did not understand why we were being held. We were told that we had been trying to interview a warlord and that somehow, improbably, the service thought we might be attempting to smuggle him out of the country.
But there was another possibility. One of the accusations that kept getting lobbed at us was that we were prying into the presidential family’s business in Kolwezi and had no reason to. I had heard several people complain about the presidential family being linked to artisanal mine cooperatives, but they had always been a bit vague. Antoine Mutumba, the fixer in Lubumbashi, had tried to tell us a story about how the president’s family was involved in mining with Vice-Governor Fifi Masuka Saini, but he became annoyed when I told him I could not pay him for information. “You’ll see,” he had said. Had he mentioned my reporting to the ANR?
Mbelu’s office was stacked full of pictures of him and Tshisekedi: Mbelu bowing to the president, Mbelu closely following Tshisekedi at a crowded event, Mbelu in various other supplicant poses with the head of state. Sitting with Mbelu on gilded chairs were two officials from the U.S. consulate. One of the officials, the vice-consul, gave me a list of lawyers in Kinshasa, some granola bars, and some peanut butter. Mbelu insisted on having an ANR translator explain everything we said. I was told by one of the consular officials that I couldn’t transfer personal messages, and that they couldn’t say what would happen to me.
I returned to my cell even more convinced that it would be my home for a very long stretch of time. I wrote in my improvised diary (“It seems I will be here longer than I thought”) and grimly consulted the list of lawyers provided by the consular staff. The latter came with a reference roster on the last page titled “Types of Cases Handled by Attorney,” which ran from “1. Adoptions” to what I assumed would be my category: “25. Criminal.” I envisaged a lengthy trial. Also in my diary: “No dinner.”
The next day, my fifth day of detention, I recorded as “a day without anything.” I was locked in my room, and I didn’t leave. The only remarkable thing was that I was fed: A scrawny chicken leg and gelatinous rice in a blue plastic bowl were passed through my door that afternoon.
* * *
On Monday, I was woken early. On the third floor, U.S. consular officials were there with two medical orderlies. “You’re being COVID tested,” one said. I felt a pang of hope: COVID testing was required to leave the country. (Congo’s deputy health minister had at the beginning of the pandemic accused a “mafia network” of political figures of embezzling government funds for COVID services.)
I was taken back to the interrogation room and asked to unlock my phones. I sat there and watched the agents delete my photos and files: my early drafts of this book, months of research and interviews on mining, history, sustainable agriculture, and so on—all gone. “It’s all not allowed, everything you have here,” one said.
Several more hours of waiting followed, and I chatted to Papy, a genial ANR agent who wore chinos and a blazer. “I am happy to report that I have never seen people tortured here,” he told me. We talked about his work, about how he made around $300 a month (which mainly went to schooling fees for his girls and to rent), about his fear that his neighbors would find out he was an agent of the ANR, and about the relentless swarms of mosquitoes that plagued the headquarters. “When we moved into this building,” he said, “the mosquitoes were so bad that we wore socks on our hands and hats on our heads to stop being bitten.”
Later, I was made to sign a declaration stating that I would never return to Congo, that I would not write about Congo, and that I would forget everything that had happened there. An agent scolded me, saying that I was poorly raised, and then proceeded to steal one of my rechargeable power banks.
I was informed that Mbelu wanted to see me in the late afternoon. He was once again there with the consular officials, who looked hopeful this time. Mbelu reprimanded me again, telling me that I had been detained for my own safety, and then instructed me to re-sign the declaration. He ordered my equipment, my camera footage, and so on to be impounded. My equipment would stay, but I would be released. (I would never get my laptop, footage, and cell phones back.)
An embassy car sped me to the airport, and one of my jailers accompanied me—to get me through customs. I relished the textures, the people, the unfamiliar faces of the crowded Kinshasa streets. The agent rushed me through security onto the Air France flight to Paris. Before I climbed the steps, he embraced me and wished me good luck. “We are together,” he said, flashing a sad smile. I thought of the threat of violence that hung over his life.
Kazadi was still in jail, and it would be two more weeks before he was released. (He later told me he had not been tortured.) Nkuwimba and Mutomb would be freed in several months. They told me they had been tortured, and Mutomb sent me a picture of Nkuwimba in the hospital. Later, I found out that Mutomb had helped the ANR set up the sting. But the reason why they wanted to arrest me in the first place was never made clear.
I never learned what happened to the other people I was interviewing: Some suggested they were freed in an amnesty. I have heard since, from various Congolese figures associated with the intelligence services and the Katangese opposition, that Gédéon is not believed to have any direct involvement in mining. But separatism continues to be an important topic in Katanga. In the days after my arrest, several Southern Katangese political figures, people like Patrick Masengo Kalasa, president of the Alliance de Forces Populaires de Katanga, or AFPK, a separatist-federalist group that urged peaceful disobedience, urged me to write “the reality, how we have no freedom in Katanga, how even to speak of separatism is to be arrested by the authorities in Kinshasa.”
Masengo himself would be disappeared by Congo’s secret state on September 20, 2024.
Chapter 49
An African Electric Car
The Kiira EV factory, near Jinja, Uganda
I could not go back to Congo, but in 2023, I heard that the neighboring country of Uganda had built an electric-car factory. Uganda’s chameleonic president, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, has been in power since 1986 and has pushed a revolutionary “doctrine of self-sufficiency” for all Africans and for Ugandans in particular. To this end, the president’s wizened countenance, invariably sheltered by a wide-brimmed hat, can be seen at a seemingly endless procession of ribbon cuttings and openings for industrial parks, factories, farms, data centers, oil fields, and—a personal favorite of the president, who has said that he comes from a seven-thousand-year lineage of cattle herders—centers for animal husbandry.
Uganda is trying to become that rarest of African states—one where finished products are actually made, rather than imported from China. At a 2023 conference in Kampala, the country’s capital, Monica Musenero, the country’s science minister, said that the government was “propelling technological innovations aimed at optimizing transport and mobility” for Uganda’s overwhelmingly young population.
These are lofty aims for a country that is, by most metrics, almost as poor as Congo. The World Bank has argued that Uganda should focus on building human capital and reducing inequality. But such humble goals are not what Museveni has in mind for his country.
In a green field just next to the headwaters of the Nile, near the city of Jinja, sits Kiira Motors’ headquarters, a factory that was designed to look like a bus but in fact looks like a spaceship. Kiira is one of Museveni’s favorite projects: In 2011, Kiira’s founders created one of Africa’s first electric vehicles. When I visited Kiira, Ugandan engineers were striving toward an even more lofty goal. They wanted to refocus the battery supply chain in Africa.
* * *
The story of the Ugandan electric car began at Makerere University, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most venerable institutions of higher learning. The Kiira project was the brainchild of Paul Isaac Musasizi, a Makerere lecturer, and Sandy Stevens Tickodri-Togboa, a professor who, in his early teens, had dedicated his life to studying electricity after receiving a hefty electric shock from the power main at his parents’ house. In 2008, Musasizi and Stevens Tickodri-Togboa accompanied a handful of their students to an event called the Vehicle Design Summit in Turin, Italy.
The summit, which gathered university teams from twenty-five institutions around the world, sought “to catalyze an Energy Space Race.” Its ambitious goal—in 2007, a year before Tesla launched the Roadster—was to produce a plug-in electric hybrid for the Indian market. The students open-sourced the best ways to build such a machine. When the MIT students who started the project met with The New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman in late 2007, he wrote enthusiastically of the project, suggesting that they were making “the Linux of cars.” The students, Friedman said, “blew me away.”
By 2008, the students at the summit had created a prototype, and it was time to go home. But the Ugandan team, mugging for pictures inside the skeletal frame of the VDS prototype, had only just begun their work on electric vehicles. When they returned to Kampala, they applied for funding from Museveni’s office to make, this time, a fully electric car. The president began to take a special interest in Musasizi and his team.
Over the next two years, the team assembled a car, the Kiira EV, a buggy hatchback that was painted in Day-Glo green (in case the electric vehicle’s green credentials weren’t clear enough).
