Kitabı oku: «The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth», sayfa 3
Zango lies just over 20 kilometres south of central Luanda, where the capital’s sprawl thins out, giving way to the ochre scrub of the bush. Like a matching settlement to the north, it is supposed to represent a new beginning for Angola’s slum-dwellers. To listen to officials, Zango is the promised land. ‘We are moving them to more dignified accommodation,’ Rosa Palavera, the head of the poverty reduction unit in the presidency, told me.25 ‘There are no basic services [in Chicala]. There is crime.’
Even if one overlooks the official neglect that lies behind the lack of amenities in Chicala, Zango is hardly preferable. Those who moved to Zango were lucky if they found basic services merely on a par with those they had left behind.26 Sometimes the new houses were even smaller than the old ones. In aerial photographs the new settlements looked like prison camps, with their squat dwellings arranged in unvarying rows. Shacks that were far more rickety than anything in Chicala had sprung up too. Those who tried to make a go of it by commuting back from Zango into the city each departed well before dawn and returned at midnight, scarcely leaving enough time to sleep, let alone see their children. Other new arrivals simply went straight back to Chicala, a daring move given that the slum lies within the purview of the military bureau run by General Kopelipa, the feared security chief.
On the drive from Zango back toward the centre of Luanda, the road crosses the invisible frontier that separates the majority of Angolans from the enclave of plenty that the petro-economy has created.
The gleaming new settlement at Kilamba was constructed from scratch by a Chinese company at a cost of $3.5 billion. The guards on duty at the gates adopted an intimidating strut as we drove toward them down the long, curving driveway. They let my companions and me through in exchange for the price of a bottle of water. Inside the atmosphere was eerie, reminiscent of one of those disaster movies in which some catastrophe has removed all trace of life. Nothing stirred in the dry heat. Row after parallel row of gleaming, pastel-coloured apartment blocks between five and ten storeys high stretched to a vanishing point at the horizon, tracked by manicured grass verges and pylons carrying electricity lines. The roads were like silk, the best in Angola. Outside the most affluent parts of South Africa, particularly the gated communities known to their more poetic detractors as ‘yuppie kennels’, I had seen nothing in Africa that looked anything like Kilamba.
The newly completed units were for sale for between $120,000 and $300,000 apiece to those rich enough to escape the crush of central Luanda. The first residents of Kilamba’s twenty thousand apartments were said to have moved in, but there was no sign of them. About half of Angola’s population live below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day; it would take them each about 260 years to earn enough to buy the cheapest flat in Kilamba.27 The prices came down after an official visit by the president, but nonetheless only the wealthiest Angolans could afford to live there.
Teams of Chinese labourers in blue overalls and hard hats trundled into view in pickup trucks. Like other Chinese construction projects in Africa, Kilamba was built with Chinese finance and Chinese labour, and it formed part of a bigger bargain that ensured Chinese access to natural resources – in this case, Angola’s oil. The Chinese and Angolan flags fluttered above Kilamba’s entrance. This was a flagship project for China’s undertaking in Africa: Xi Jinping toured the site while it was under construction in 2010, three years before he ascended from the Chinese vice presidency to the presidency. A vast billboard proclaimed that Citic, the Chinese state-owned conglomerate whose operations span banking, resources and construction, had built the new town. Oversight of the construction had been assigned to Sonangol, which subcontracted the management of the sales of apartments to a company called Delta Imobiliária. Delta was said to belong to the private business empire of Manuel Vicente and General Kopelipa. Both men were perfectly placed to use the power of the public office to dispense personal gain for themselves, just as they had been assigned concealed stakes in Cobalt’s oil venture. Kilamba was, in the words of the Angolan campaigner Rafael Marques de Morais, ‘a veritable model for African corruption’.28
Hexplosivo Mental raps with intensity – brow furrowed, left hand gripping the microphone, right hand chopping through the air. Like Public Enemy and other exponents of protest rap before him, he makes it his business to attack the abuses of the mighty. A rangy figure in a hoodie, he gives loud and lyrical voice to dissent in Angola that had long been mostly whispered, exhorting a counterpunch against the ruling class’s monopoly on wealth and power with tracks like ‘How It Feels to Be Poor’, ‘Reaction of the Masses’, and ‘Be Free’.
One Tuesday in May 2012 a group of ten young Angolans gathered at the Luanda home of one of a new generation of politically conscious rappers. Hexplosivo Mental was among them. They had been involved in organizing the small but concerted demonstrations that had rattled the regime. In the vanguard of protest against the Futungo’s power, the group had had brushes with the authorities before, notably when the police dispersed their demos.
This was not the first time the house had been raided. But the band of fifteen men who turned up at just after ten that night wanted to teach the dissidents a more serious lesson.29 Elections at which dos Santos planned to ensure a thumping victory were three months away, and the deployment of oil money alone would not be enough to neutralize public displays of opposition to his rule. Bursting through the door, the men bore down upon their victims with iron bars and machetes, breaking arms, fracturing skulls and spilling blood. Their work done, they zoomed away in Land Cruisers. One account of the attack alleged that the vehicles belonged to the police – evidence that the assailants were part of one of the pro-regime militias whose task was to instil fear ahead of the polls.
No one died that night, but when I spoke to Hexplosivo Mental weeks later, his badly injured arm was still being treated. We arranged to meet discreetly at a busy roundabout in Luanda. I waited thirty minutes or so before he called to say he had had to go back to the hospital. When he spoke later by phone the young rapper put it simply: ‘Before, we did not know how to protest. Now we are growing.’
There were some serious anti-government demonstrations in the run-up to the elections, but if Hexplosivo Mental and his comrades hoped to mount a challenge to an entrenched regime on the scale of the Arab Spring revolutions that had erupted far to the north, they did so in vain. The amount of official funding available to political parties was slashed from $1.2 million in the legislative elections of 2008 to $97,000. Meanwhile, the MPLA was said to have spent $75 million on its campaign.30
The MPLA has genuine support, especially in the coastal cities that were its bastion during the war and among those Angolans so traumatized by the conflict that they see a vote for any incumbent, no matter how venal, as the option that carries the smallest risk of a return to hostilities. The regime leaves little to chance, dominating the media, appointing its stooges to run the institutions that conduct elections, co-opting opposition politicians, and intimidating opponents. Kopelipa presided over an electoral apparatus that left 3.6 million people unable to cast their ballots – almost as many votes as the MPLA received.31 The MPLA’s share of the vote fell nine points compared with the 2008 election, but it still recorded a landslide victory, with 72 per cent. Under a new system the first name on the winning party’s list would become president. More than three decades after he took power, dos Santos could claim he had a mandate to rule, despite the findings of a reputable opinion poll that showed he enjoyed the approval of just 16 per cent of Angolans.32
In August 2014, three years after the US authorities had begun their corruption investigation into its Angolan deal, Cobalt issued a statement revealing that the Securities and Exchange Commission had given notice that it might launch a civil case against the company.33 ‘The company has fully co-operated with the SEC in this matter and intends to continue to do so,’ Cobalt announced. Joe Bryant called the SEC’s decision ‘erroneous’ and said Cobalt would continue to develop its Angolan prospects. At the time of writing no proceedings have been brought, and Cobalt continues to deny wrongdoing, as it has throughout. Cobalt’s share price, which took a billion-dollar hit after news of its secret Angolan partners emerged and declined even further after some mediocre drilling results, fell another 10 per cent when the SEC’s warning emerged.
Cobalt’s founders have already turned a tidy profit. Between February 2012, when Cobalt revealed that it was under formal investigation, and that April, when Kopelipa and Vicente confirmed to me that they and Dino held stakes in Nazaki, Joe Bryant sold 860,000 of his shares in the company for $24 million. Between the start of the corruption investigation and the end of 2013 – during which period Cobalt also struck oil in the Gulf of Mexico – Goldman Sachs, a joint Riverstone-Carlyle fund, and First Reserve, another big American private equity firm, each made sales of Cobalt stock worth a net $1 billion.34
I tried to find out who had taken over the stake in Nazaki that, according to Vicente, he, Kopelipa, and Dino had ‘liquidated’ as well as whether their business associates were still shareholders, but neither the trio nor the company itself would tell me. In February 2013 Nazaki transferred half its interest to Sonangol, the state oil company. The official journal did not disclose the size of any fee that Sonangol paid for the stake, but bankers’ valuations indicated it was worth about $1.3 billion, at least fourteen times the amount Nazaki would have been expected to pay in development costs up to that point.35 If any fee was paid, it represented a transfer of funds from the coffers of a state where the vast majority live in penury to a private company linked to the Futungo. Then, in 2014, three weeks after Cobalt disclosed that it was facing possible proceedings by the SEC, the company announced it had severed ties with Nazaki and with Alper, whose ownership remains undisclosed. Both companies transferred their stakes in Cobalt’s venture to Sonangol. Again, none of the parties involved revealed what, if any, fees were paid.36
Cobalt is just one among dozens of companies vying for Angolan crude, and Nazaki was but a single cog in the Futungo’s machine for turning its control over the state into private gain.
Just before Christmas 2011, as Manuel Vicente was preparing to hand over the reins of Sonangol to his successor and with the expenses of the following year’s election looming, seven international oil companies snapped up operating rights to eleven new blocks in the Atlantic. The acreage was in the ‘presalt’ zone, where Cobalt was already exploring. As in previous bidding rounds in Angola and elsewhere, the companies agreed to pay signature bonuses. These are upfront payments that oil companies make to governments when they win rights to explore a block, often through auctions. The payments are perfectly legal, though frequently the amounts paid are not disclosed. If they were delivered on the sly to officials, such payments would be called bribes; instead, they are deposited in the leaky treasuries of oil states.
Any Angolans curious to know how much their government had brought in from the auction would be disappointed. Mindful that in 2001 BP had been threatened with ejection after it announced plans to publish some details of its Angolan contracts, the oil companies kept the terms of the bonuses safely shrouded. Norway’s Statoil made something resembling a disclosure. It said its total ‘financial commitment’ for two oil blocks, where it would be the operator of the project, and working interests in three other blocks came to $1.4 billion, ‘including signature bonuses and a minimum work commitment’. The regime’s overall take from the whole bidding round would have been a multiple of that figure.
Both the Futungo’s business ventures and the state institutions’ activities are kept within a fortress of secrecy, so much so that Edward George, an Angola specialist who has studied dos Santos’s rule for many years, calls the regime a ‘cryptocracy’ – a system of government in which the levers of power are hidden.
When I met Isaías Samakuva at a London hotel one afternoon in early 2014 he had been the leader of Unita, today Angola’s main opposition political party, for more than a decade. Samakuva has spent his life fighting a losing battle, but he remains eloquent and composed. He had been posted in London as Unita’s representative in the 1980s and had come back to see family and try to lobby against what he saw as Western powers’ readiness to cosy up to dos Santos in order to safeguard their companies’ access to Angolan oil. ‘The international community itself protects these guys,’ Samakuva told me, sipping a cup of tea.37 ‘Their money is not actually in Angola. They deal with the banks in Portugal, in Britain, in Brazil, the United States. The only explanation that we can find is that they have the blessing of the international community.’
The eruptions of the Arab Spring were giving dos Santos the pretext to tighten security still further, Samakuva went on. ‘Dos Santos is so entrenched in power that he won’t allow what happened in Egypt.’ Samakuva added, ‘We have to have real peace, not just for them and their interests.’
Samakuva does not doubt that the key to the Futungo’s survival lies in the shadowy structures of the oil industry. ‘There’s no separation between private and state,’ he said. ‘There’s no transparency. No one knows what is the property of Mr dos Santos and his family.’ I asked him about one particular company. ‘I think it is the key to all the support that is given to Mr dos Santos, to his rule.’ How can one company provide such vital support, I asked. ‘We can only speculate. Everything is in the dark.’
The company Samakuva was talking about operates from the golden Luanda One tower. It is the sister company to China International Fund, whose flag flies above the entrance and which has raised billions for infrastructure projects under undisclosed terms, among them an expansion of Kilamba.38 Cobalt, Nazaki and other oil groups have offices on the lower levels, but the top floors are reserved for the company that Samakuva had in mind – China Sonangol. Since 2004 China Sonangol has amassed stakes in a dozen Angolan oil ventures, including some of the most prolific, as well as a slice of the country’s richest diamond mine. Sonangol, the state oil company that is the Futungo’s financial engine, owns 30 per cent of China Sonangol. The remainder belongs to the band of Hong Kong-based investors that is known as the Queensway Group and is fronted by a bearded, bespectacled Chinese man called Sam Pa.
2
‘It Is Forbidden to Piss in the Park’
IT IS HARD to imagine a place more beautiful than the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The valleys are a higher order of green, dense with the generous, curving leaves of banana plants and the smaller, jagged ones of cassava shrubs. The hillsides are a vertiginous patchwork of plots. Just before dusk each day the valleys fill with a spectral mist, as though Earth itself had exhaled. The slopes drop down to Lake Kivu, one of the smaller of central Africa’s great lakes but still large enough to cover Luxembourg. On some days the waters lap serenely; on others, when the wind gets up, the lake turns slate-grey and froths. At the northern shore stand the Virunga, Lake Kivu’s crown of volcanoes.
Beneath the beauty there is danger. From time to time the volcanoes tip lava onto the towns below. Cholera bacteria lie in wait in Lake Kivu’s shallows. Deeper and more menacing still are the methane and carbon dioxide dissolved in the water, enough to send an asphyxiating cloud over the heavily populated settlements on the shores should a tectonic spasm upset the lake’s chemical balance.
But there is something else that lies under eastern Congo: minerals as rich as the hillsides are lush. Here there are ores bearing gold, tin and tungsten – and another known as columbite-tantalite, or coltan for short. Coltan contains a metal whose name tantalum is derived from that of the Greek mythological figure Tantalus. Although the Greek gods favoured him, he was ‘not able to digest his great prosperity, and for his greed he gained overpowering ruin’.1 His eternal punishment was to stand up to his chin in water that, when he tried to drink, receded, and beneath trees whose branches would be blown out of reach when he tried to pluck their fruit. His story is a parable not just for the East but for the whole of a country the size of western Europe that groans with natural riches but whose people are tormented by penury. The Congolese are consistently rated as the planet’s poorest people, significantly worse off than other destitute Africans. In the decade from 2000, the Congolese were the only nationality whose gross domestic product per capita, a rough measure of average incomes, was less than a dollar a day.2
Tantalum’s extremely high melting point and conductivity mean that electronic components made from it can be much smaller than those made from other metals. It is because tantalum capacitors can be small that the designers of electronic gadgets have been able to make them ever more compact and, over the past couple of decades, ubiquitous.
Congo is not the only repository of tantalum-bearing ores. Campaigners and reporters perennially declare that eastern Congo holds 80 per cent of known stocks, but the figure is without foundation. Based on what sketchy data there are, Michael Nest, the author of a study of coltan, calculates that Congo and surrounding countries have about 10 per cent of known reserves of tantalum-bearing ores.3 The real figures might be much higher, given that reserves elsewhere have been much more comprehensively assessed. Nonetheless, Congo still ranks as the second-most important producer of tantalum ores, after Australia, accounting for what Nest estimates to be 20 per cent of annual supplies. Depending on the vagaries of supply chains, if you have a PlayStation or a pacemaker, an iPod, a laptop or a mobile phone, there is roughly a one-in-five chance that a tiny piece of eastern Congo is pulsing within it.
The insatiable demand for consumer electronics has exacted a terrible price. The coltan trade has helped fund local militias and foreign armies that have terrorized eastern Congo for two decades, turning what should be a paradise into a crucible of war.
Edouard Mwangachuchu Hizi avoided the brutal end that befell many of his fellow Congolese Tutsi as the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 spilled across the border, but he suffered nonetheless. The son of a well-to-do cattle farmer, Mwangachuchu was in his early forties and working as a financial adviser to the local government in Goma, the lakeside capital of eastern Congo’s North Kivu province, when extremist Hutus on the other side of the water in Rwanda embarked on what is reckoned to be the fastest mass extermination in history, butchering eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutus in one hundred days. Two million people fled, many of them into eastern Congo, where analogous ethnic tensions were already simmering.
On his way to work one day in 1995 a mob dragged Mwangachuchu from his jeep.4 He was choked with his tie and stripped. The mob dumped him at the border with Rwanda, where Tutsi rebels had seized control from the Hutu-led government following the genocide. His herds slaughtered, Mwangachuchu found himself among the flotsam of war, albeit more fortunate than those consigned to the squalid refugee camps beside Lake Kivu. He was granted asylum in the United States in 1996, along with his wife and six children.
Mwangachuchu watched from afar as the Hutu génocidaires licked their wounds in eastern Congo and began to launch raids against the new Tutsi-led authorities in Rwanda. He looked on from Maryland as Paul Kagame, the steely guerrilla who had become Rwanda’s leader, and his regional allies plucked an obscure Congolese Marxist rebel called Laurent-Désiré Kabila from exile in Tanzania to head a rebel alliance that swept through eastern Congo. The rebels perpetrated revenge massacres against Rwandan Hutu refugees and génocidaires as they went and then pushed on westward across a country the size of western Europe, all the way to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. They toppled Mobutu Sese Seko, the decrepit kleptocrat, and installed Kabila as president in 1997. But Kabila barely had time to change the country’s name from Zaïre to the Democratic Republic of Congo before his alliance with his most powerful backer, Rwanda, started to fray. A little over a year after he took power, after Kabila had begun to enlist Hutu génocidaires to counter what he perceived as a Tutsi threat to his incipient rule, the alliance snapped. Half a dozen African armies and a score of rebel groups plunged Congo into five more years of war, during which millions died.
When Mwangachuchu went home in 1998, the dynamics of eastern Congo were shifting once again. Anti-Kabila rebels supported by Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government had taken control of the East. No one in this ethnic cauldron is ever safe, but the latest realignment favoured Congolese Tutsis like Mwangachuchu. He set about reclaiming his ancestral lands at Bibatama, 50 kilometres northwest of Goma. Mwangachuchu knew that the territory contained something still more precious than fertile pastures for grazing cattle – the rocks beneath were rich with coltan.5
Investors from Congo’s old colonial master, Belgium, had mined the area around Mwangachuchu’s lands, but their joint venture with the government had collapsed in the mid-1990s. Invading Rwandan forces and their allies looted thousands of tons of coltan and cassiterite, the tin-bearing ore, from the company’s stockpiles, UN investigators found.6 When Mwangachuchu arrived home, artisanal miners around his mountain hometown were hacking away at the rock with picks and shovels. The cassiterite would fetch a few dollars per kilo. But far-off developments in global markets were about to spur the coltan trade – and pour cash into eastern Congo’s war.
The boom in mobile phones as well as in the rest of consumer electronics and games consoles caused voracious demand for tantalum. The two biggest companies that processed tantalum, Cabot of the United States and H. C. Starck of Germany, foresaw prolonged high demand. They signed long-term contracts, locking in their supply of tantalum ores.7 That created a shortage on the open market and sparked a scramble to find new supply sources. In the course of 2000, prices for tantalum ores rose tenfold. Congo was ripe for the picking.
Thousands of eastern Congolese rushed into coltan mining. Many exchanged a farmer’s machete for a miner’s pick. Militias press-ganged others into mining. Livestock had long been the East’s most prized commodity, but now, suddenly, it was coltan. In 1999 North Kivu officially exported five tonnes of coltan; in 2001 it exported ninety tonnes. Even after the flood of Congolese supply brought the world price back down, coltan remained more lucrative than other ores.
Coltan was not the sole catalyst of the conflict – far from it. Congo was seething before the boom and would have seethed even if coltan had never been found. But the surging coltan trade magnified eastern Congo’s minerals’ potential to sustain the myriad factions that were using the hostilities to make money. ‘Thanks to economic networks that had been established in 1998 and 1999 during the first years of the Congo war, minerals traders and military officials were perfectly placed to funnel [coltan] out of the country,’ writes Nest.8
Mwangachuchu started mining his land in 2001, employing about a thousand men. An amiable man with an oval face and soft features, he breaks bread with his workers and sometimes even works the mines himself, people who know him told me. Mwangachuchu Hizi International (MHI), the business he founded with his partner, a doctor from Baltimore named Robert Sussman, swiftly came to account for a large chunk of North Kivu’s coltan output. ‘We are proud of what we are doing in Congo,’ Sussman said at the time. ‘We want the world to understand that if it’s done right, coltan can be good for this country.’9 But UN investigators and western campaigners were starting to draw attention to the role Congo’s mineral trade played in funding the war. The airline that had been transporting MHI’s ore to Europe severed ties with the company. ‘We don’t understand why they are doing this,’ Mwangachuchu told a reporter. ‘The Congolese have a right to make business in their own country.’10
Other foreign businesspeople were less concerned about doing business in a war zone, which is what eastern Congo remained even after the formal end of hostilities in 2003. Estimates I have heard of the proportion of Congolese mineral production that is smuggled out of the country range from 30 to 80 per cent. Perhaps half of the coltan that for years Rwanda exported as its own was actually Congolese.11
Militias and the Congolese army directly control some mining operations and extract taxes and protection money from others. Corrupt officials facilitate the trade. The comptoirs, or trading houses, of Goma on the border with Rwanda orchestrate the flow of both officially declared mineral exports and smuggled cargoes. Other illicit routes run directly from mines across the Rwandan and Ugandan borders. UN investigators have documented European and Asian companies purchasing pillaged Congolese minerals. Once the ores are out of the country, it is a simple step to refine them and then sell the gold, tin, or tantalum to manufacturers. The road may be circuitous, but it leads from the heart of Congo’s war to anywhere mobile phones and laptops can be found.
In the absence of anything resembling a functioning state, an ever-shifting array of armed groups continues to profit from lawlessness, burrowing for minerals and preying on a population that, like Tantalus, is condemned to suffer in the midst of plenty. In 2007 Mwangachuchu fell out with Robert Sussman, the co-founder of his mining business, a dispute that would lead a Maryland court to order the Congolese to pay the American $2 million. Mwangachuchu pressed on alone. His lands went on yielding up their precious ore. And he began to cultivate a new partner: the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (National Congress for the Defence of the People), a militia that largely does the opposite of what its name suggests.
The relentless conflict in eastern Congo has prevented the development of large-scale industrial mining there. Almost all mining is done by hand. The East’s minerals have fuelled the war, but the value of its output is tiny compared with the immense mines to the south.
Congo’s Katanga province, sandwiched between Angola and Zambia, holds about half of the world’s stocks of cobalt.12 The metal is mostly used to make the ultra-strong superalloys that are integral to turbines and jet engines. It is mined as a by-product of copper, a crucial ingredient of human civilization, from its first uses in ancient coins to the wiring in electricity networks. The African copperbelt stretches from northern Zambia into Katanga and holds some of the planet’s richest copper stocks. In Katanga vast whorls of red earth and rock have been cut into the forest, open pit mines that descend in steps like amphitheatres.
Katanga has endured secessionist conflict and suffered heavy fighting during the war. But, lying much further from the border with Rwanda, the principal foreign protagonist in the rolling conflicts, Katanga has known more stability than the East. Mining multinationals from Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia, South Africa and China have operations in Katanga; the region’s mining output dwarfs the rest of Congo’s economy. Congo’s rulers have built a shadow state on the foundations of Katanga’s minerals, resembling the one that Angola’s Futungo has fashioned from crude oil.
Augustin Katumba Mwanke grew up in Katanga idolizing the executives who ran Gécamines, the national copper-mining company. As Congo crumbled in the dying years of Mobutu’s rule, a combination of fierce intelligence, luck and determination carried him to South Africa, then brimming with possibility after the end of apartheid. He worked for mining companies before landing a job at a subsidiary of HSBC. In April 1997, when Laurent Kabila’s forces captured Katanga on their advance across Congo, the bank grew nervous that the rebels might not honour a loan it had made to Gécamines. A delegation was dispatched to Congo for talks with the rebels. Katumba was added to the party in the hope that a Congolese face might help the bank’s cause.13
‘When they came I saw a young man who looked very bright,’ Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, then the rebels’ finance chief, told me years later.14 An agronomist who had trained in Kentucky, Mawapanga was on the lookout for talented recruits as he prepared to inherit a ransacked treasury. He took a shine to Katumba. ‘I told him, “You should come back. The country needs people like you.” We were just joking. I said, “I can give you a job, but I can’t pay you yet.”’ The lighthearted exchange contained a serious offer. Mawapanga exhorted Katumba to have the bank second him to what was about to become Congo’s new government. Katumba craved influence but had foreseen a career in international business, not the chaos of Congolese government. Nonetheless, aged thirty-three, he headed home to take up Mawapanga’s invitation. His transformation into one of Africa’s most powerful men had begun.
