The Secret of the African Dictator - Inspired by Real-Life events.

By Christian Filostrat

The United States falls in love with Mobutu Sese Seko and lavishes him with security, support and gifts. He finds happiness in what he always refers to as his "defining relationship" - until the Soviet Union vanishes into history and Washington's affection turns to indifference, then disapproval.

 

Mobutu is hiding something that will allow him to survive Washington's betrayal.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: PIERRE KROFT LEGACY PUBLISHERS
• Release date: Aug 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215625002

Christian Filostrat

I didn't always work as a full-time writer. I traveled the world as a semi-US diplomat for more than two decades, allowing me him to collect experiences and stories to write about when I no longer wore scratchy suits and blue-colored ties and sat down at a keyboard. I connected with the African narrative, and of all the stories I heard around the world, the ones about European colonialism and what it wrought in Africa captivated me the most. So I gathered stories about the arrival of Europeans, their outlook, policies, and attitudes before and after European women arrived on the continent, and the impact everything European had on the African people. After the Soviet Union fell apart, I worked at our embassy in Bucharest, Romania. One of my responsibilities was to obtain Holocaust-related documents from the Ministry of the Interior and the State Security for the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I once came across a letter to the State Security from wartime president/dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu about a farmer named David. A paper clip was used to secure David's picture to the letter. He was a poor farmer dressed in rags. Why would Romania's dictator write to inquire about a single farmer's transportation status? What I write is heavily influenced by those files from the Romanian Ministry of the Interior's archives.

Book preview

Quantum of relish.  

Of all retributions, personal revenge is the most satisfying. Bambuti saying

Overture

WHEN A DETACHMENT OF smiling security guards come to the Dictator's secretary's office and give her a video tape in a gift bag encrusted with the Dictator's seal, she gets tears in her eyes. She has been given a recording of an operation that was planned by her boss and that she and his security chief carried out. Given the unusual nature of the job, she is confident that he will recognize and appreciate her efforts in completing this personal project successfully on time. Thrilled, the Dictator wants her to set up the video in his office and watch it with him.

They are staring at a massive Sony monitor with a 82-inch screen. Surveillance cameras have captured security guards emerging from the back of the American ambassador's residence. They then proceed to the window in the ambassador's wife's bedroom.

Cries that were before indistinguishable are now clearly audible: a woman exalting in a sexual conquest in a rich voice. The guards were either listening in or keeping tabs on things.

The ambassador's limo is then caught on another camera as it approaches his residence. When the vehicle comes to a stop, the ambassador does not wait for the guard at the driver’s side to open the car door for him. He's come across what appears to be a robbery in progress, and he dashes inside to apprehend the thief. The door to his wife’s bedroom is ajar. His wife’s pale skin is blotched with purple, and her limp breasts flap like two-topmast pennants in the storm of her irrepressible motion. Fuck me Maurice, she’s screaming as she’s clinging on. She is riding Maurice, the driver she has been using since arriving in Kinshasa. His hands are clasped behind his head. And his eyes may have been closed. When the Dictator notices that the driver is dressed in his uniform and yawns, he bursts out laughing, his lungs wrenching with uncontrollable laughter. The secretary bolts from the office.

It’s Maurice who is alerted by the slamming door. He tries to get out from under the sweat-drenched woman, who is maniacally rising and falling on his groin in a paroxysm of up strokes and down strokes, her movement stuck in a rhythm. Fuck me, Maurice, for Christ's sake, she screams on the down strokes. She tightens her grip on him and begs him to stay put with even shriller pleas. When she notices that he’s looking in the direction of the door, she turns her head partially in that direction. Her husband is staring at her. Shut up, he screams at her, thrusting his head forward like a heron spotting an elusive fish. Shut up, for Christ’s sake.

As her climax nears like a torrent from a burst dam, her craving has her by the throat, making her up and down strokes frantically more eager to go with her screams of sik beni kuzu, Turkish for fuck me, lamb. She is only aware of her craving and is oblivious to herself, where she is, or her husband's pleas. 

The Dictator is awestruck by her and filled with admiration for her determination to be fulfilled. Nothing, in his opinion, will pry her from Maurice's groin until her craving has had it's fill. When she gets what she’s after, the cameras have swiveled to record the crowd listening in outside the ambassador's house so the Dictator can see for himself how well the operation succeeded.

The dictator is furious. He was looking forward to watching her get her fulfillment and respond to the climax she had worked so diligently to achieve. Then too he wanted to share her joy for some inexplicable reason. But only a woman exuding the mystical cry of a woman in bliss, and some hard-to-hear sounds can be heard. But at this point, the Dictator is also jubilant over what he has done to the American ambassador. He's almost giddy with excitement, certain that the ambassador would think twice before repeating Washington's vulgar act of humiliating him.. 

He continues to watch expectantly, unsure of what will happen next, but practically euphoric with anticipation.

According to the chronograph at the top left of the screen, it's four days later. Following a brief pause and some static followed by a count down, the ambassador's wife appears. She is taking off her clothes in front of her bedroom door and putting her right hand out for her driver, Maurice, to take. Maurice is sitting in a chair behind her and looks resentful as he watches her undress. Instead of taking her hand, he shows her his organ. She kneels reverently in front of the blood-gorged organ brimming with the Chinese stimulant as her right foot touches the ground. She glows like she's on fire, unlike him. Just as she's about to take Maurice in her mouth, he spins her around, grabs the back of her neck, and pulls her over the nightstand until her head hits the floor. His shaft finds its way to her buttocks. 

The driver's face is so full of malice that he appears to be grimacing at the surveillance camera.

Fired up by the stimulant he assault the woman with a merciless barrage of thrusts. Screaming and flailing will not bring the blood-gorged demonic impaler out of its concealed lair. There is no going back. The camera has filmed every second of what Maurice, the driver, has done to the ambassador's wife.

Interspersed with fits of laughter, the Dictator recollects that this was not exactly what he asked for, and decides that it is a first for the ambassador’s wife in this manner, and that it’s all too much for her. He concludes that his agents were simply overzealous, but he can't discount the possibility that his secretary, who is always looking for ways to prove her worth to him and has a reputation for nastiness, is the one who gave the agents the instruction to treat the wife of the American ambassador this way. He’s left wondering whether the woman is still alive, and he has simply not been informed of her whereabouts.

At this point in the scene, he's concerned that he might have passed out from laughing so hard. It's a good thing for him that the video ends abruptly.

Although it’s a small measure of personal revenge, the Dictator takes immense joy in seeing it through and exacting it on disloyal and fickle Washington through its ambassador - and the treacherous Tutsis in particular. He recalls one of his Bambuti friends from the Ouesso Forest saying that revenge is the most fulfilling of all retributions. When his secretary comes back into the office, he is sound asleep in his chair.

Chapter 1

Mokonzi na Bakonzi

(Chief of Chiefs)

LIKE MOST DICTATORS, he came to power in a coup. With the help of Western intelligence agencies, he and Belgian soldiers deposed the democratically elected prime minister and buried him unmarked before exhuming and dissolving his body in acid. The West suspected the prime minister of siding with the communists when he declared himself a nationalist anti-colonialist. They denounced the Dictator in the East. They loved him in the West. And, like the monster from myth, he showed unwavering loyalty to those who loved him. 

That loyalty was priceless, and accusations that he was crooked, undemocratic, or cruel didn't diminish his significance. For the West, he was a bulwark against communism. The pivot around which twelve million square miles of the earth's surface and one billion people revolved; the center of his continent's gravity. It didn't matter that he was everything his critics claimed.

His name – Mokonzi na Bakonzi, Chief of Chiefs, the Great Elephant and invincible warrior, who because of his fortitude and unyielding resolve to triumph goes from victory to victory leaving conflagration in his path – was as exalted as his position and stretched three lines long, the longest name in the world.

WHILE HISTORY NEVER ends, it does pause occasionally to reflect on turning points and how people interacted with one another.

The turning point for the Dictator came when Washington dispatched its diplomatic troubleshooter, Dr. Creve Coeur Klingesthousen, to tell him that Washington had been exaggerating his importance all along.

The USSR having relegated itself to the circular file, in the words of Soviet theorist Leon Trotsky, Washington didn’t need its dictator anymore.

The Dictator was shipwrecked. He was because his regime had become a one-dimensional power, relying on one commodity to keep the Dictator's bank accounts full. That one commodity was the battleground for influence in the East-West conflict. He was sure that the Cold War would go on forever because his rule depended on it. But, like everything else, the Cold War ended, and the U.S. became the only superpower left in the world. Similarly, Washington believed that its dominance would last forever and that it could do whatever its perceived interests demanded. They demanded that all traces of previous obligations to the Dictator be erased. And as if by magic, Washington discovered 'realpolitik' in relation to the Dictator, as if it hadn't been the Dictator's most ardent suitor during the previous thirty years. Once blessed, he was now benighted and scandalized, despised by the rest of the world and reduced to the status of international pariah with nowhere to turn. The decline into disgrace continued apace with no indication that it would ever end. People began to say that Kinshasa was a mix of Somalia and Liberia.

Contrarily, if the Dictator hadn't had the inner fortitude to go along with his no-holds-barred ruthlessness, which kept him in power for more than 30 years, he would not have been as resilient to winds and tides coming from all geopolitical directions after neocolonialism arrived in Africa in 1960 to finish what colonialism had begun, stripping the continent of its resources.

Ruthlessness, along with all of his other distinguishing characteristics, fed into his fanatical, life-or-death desire to exact revenge on Washington and the Tutsis for what they were doing to him. Boredom vanished. Never in his life had he felt more alive.

Why was the Dictator so reckless and oblivious to the dangers of relying on a single foreign power to maintain his dictatorship? Self-important people are prone to carelessness because they only hear what they say to themselves. Nobody was surprised that he hadn't kept an eye on the Berlin Wall or packed his bags. He was the only one capable of orchestrating his own demise, and no one was surprised. His practical knowledge had been lost. Practicality was not arrogant. Or reasonable. Or at least logical. Simple. His physiological fight-flight response didn’t include flight. A lifelong ruler wouldn’t be satisfied with a realistic and dignified exit.

He had the option of naming his successor. Then he could have taken his loot and flown in a Concorde to his villa in Brussels, Geneva, or St. Tropez. He could have retired in Morocco, where his friend, King Hassan II, would have welcomed a fellow monarch. But that was a practical option, and practicality can conceal lies. He hadn't needed to elbow his way up in so long that he had forgotten where he came from. Another thing: It was not in the nature of the man he had become, a man who had commanded the respect and awe of the West's most powerful men to the point where he believed he was invulnerable.

He always felt before he thought. But he was no romantic. He wielded absolute power thanks to hands that his ancestors had fashioned specifically for him to hold the reins of power. And pointlessly wealthy, he didn't have to be a rational thinker too.  In addition, he lacked the fortitude and spirit to be grounded and to avoid taking things for granted.

Trampled enemies could scream until they ran out of air. He was the most qualified to rule, and he took pride in being referred to as the world's megalomaniac — a roundabout way of noticing his importance.

Another official from the United States was on his way to see him, and he too was going to fall in love with an old and respected partner. He was also sure that the American official was coming to reassure him that he would always be a prominent and influential player in Washington. That the Cold War's end had nothing to do with him. If he had any questions, Washington would then spend the money to answer them. America let money do its thinking for it. Millions of dollars in ‘foreign aid’ were a good way for Washington to make things right. He’d be courted in the same way he'd been before, albeit with a little more vexing persistence. It only took one Washington official to rekindle the romance. He was caught in a double jeopardy: the passage of time and his own mind. 

He ignored President Clinton’s warning that his rule and Kinshasa’s future were in peril. President Clinton had recommended that he retire to Morocco three years prior, but instead of planning a lavish retirement in Rabat he was preparing to greet Dr. Klingesthousen. The Republicans always had a stronger affection for him than the clueless Democrats.

But Klingesthousen wasn’t coming to romance him. Klingesthousen was coming to evict and humiliate him. Washington's rejection would be the Dictator's most ardent suitor from now on.

Oddly enough, his primary concern was how he would greet America's envoy. How haughty should he come across? But that was before Klingesthousen made the shocking trip to Brazzaville before coming to Kinshasa across the Congo River.

PRIOR TO THIS MORNING, Washington would not have sent a high-ranking official to Brazzaville without first obtaining approval from the Dictator. The Americans seem to have abandoned standard operating procedures. Washington, in fact, had ushered in a new era, a Zeitenwende, a historic shift.

He thrashed about, trying to keep his balance. Only the prospect of retaliation against his enemies, the Tutsis, kept him hopeful. By sending Kinglesthousen to Bazzaville before sending him to Kinshasa, Washington was using its most commanding humiliation tool to appease the Tutsis. It didn't help that the president of Brazzaville was using the chance to get back at the Dictator for past wrongs by showing off like a Congo peacock about how Klingesthousen had visited him first. Insinuating that Washington had taken away the Dictator's legitimacy and showing that Brazzaville was more important to the US than Kinshasa.

All over Africa, drums and radio stations rejoiced at the news that the man who flaunted his wealth and arrogance and was an embarrassment to the entire continent had suffered such a mighty tall humiliation in such a public way.

Chapter 2

A question of chromosomes

EXCEPT FOR HIS BELT size, Creve Coeur Klingesthousen, a large-waisted man, reminded you of the late sportscaster Howard Cosell. He was, however, not a liberal, but a protégé of the Vice President of the United States, who assigned him to the State Department as an enforcer of his neoconservative ideology. The administration did not have faith in the secretary of state or his bureaucrats to rid themselves of the misguided Old Diplomacy of Non Intervention that was practiced at the State Department. The enforcer's job was to declare loudly that neoconservatism had been installed as the order of the day in Washington. 

Klingesthousen's assistant would ring a bell that the wife of the vice president's chief of staff had recovered from a firebombed firehouse on U Street and Florida Ave down the street from the White House. The bell warned the staff not to follow the misguided Old Diplomacy of Non-Intervention. Offenders would then have a Stand corrected meeting with Klingesthousen's intern, whom he liked and made his executive assistant. Several bureaucrats quit their jobs.

The bell, along with the dimwitted intern who spoke like Eliza Doolittle when Professor Higgins had the six marbles in her mouth, were all intended to wear down the secretary of state, whom the vice-president despised for being a fixated-on-his-image moderate. He polishes his reputation like a classic Rolls-Royce, grumbled the vice president to the president, whom he dominated.