In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo

Experience has taught that politics is a game played by conmen and hypocrites.

Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just

What constitutes charm? A presence, a capacity to command attention, an innate conviction of one's own uniqueness, combined, as often as not, with the more manipulative ability of making the interlocutor believe he has one's undivided attention and has gained a certain indefinable something from the encounter.

Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo's population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.

I could see their menfolk patrolling nervously up and down toting sub-machine guns and draped in cartridge belts. They were wearing their trademark sunglasses, those gold rimmed feminine accessories which should look comic on a man but instead manage to look as sinister as the wedding dresses and blonde wigs worn by Liberia's drugged fighters. They are the modern equivalent of the wooden masks donned around night fires by warriors preparing to do battle, which turn their wearers into something utterly alien -- faceless instruments of violence capable of unspeakable acts.

Bantu Philosophy: People cling to life and are not yet at the stage where they wil fight for the quality of that life. They feel as long as they are surviving, that is enough.

No other African autocrat had proved such a wily survivor. No other president had been presented with a country of such potential, yet achieved so little. No other leader had plundered his economy so effectively or lived the high life to such excess.

is hard to think of a place where life is harder for the disabled than Africa, a world away from the linguistic euphemisms, collective guilt and uneasy piety of the West.