“Fish from the river, M’sieu Jacques. And manioc. And tomatoes. And eggs. No wine, but there is, of course, beer.”
“He just said the magic word,” Father Lunsford said. “Give him a hundred dollars.”
“I think first the underwear, and then the beer. Then, if you will get us the fish, we’ll cook while you see what you can do about our clothing.”
At that point, Jack remembered Dr. Dannelly and Mr. Hakino.
“Tomo, these gentlemen are Mr. Hakino, who is a very important official of the government, and Dr. Dannelly, who is a very good friend of General Mobutu.”
Tomo did not seem very impressed with either of them.
“They will be staying, M’sieu Jacques?”
“For not more than two days, or three.”
"I think there is enough underthings for everybody,” Tomo said.
[FOUR]
Apartment 10-C, The Immoquateur
Stanleyville, Oriental Province
Republic of the Congo
1645 17 January 1965
Colonel Jean-Baptiste Supo, military commandant of Oriental and Equatorial provinces, was a tall, muscular, 210-pound thirty-six -year-old with very black skin and sharp features. When, at eighteen, he had left his home in the Katanga Province to enlist in the Force Publique, his basic training instructors—black and white—had cruelly teased him by saying his mother had obviously been very friendly with an Arab. They had called him “Camel Boy.”
He had not understood the teasing. His mother was a fine Christian woman who had been educated by the Catholics and became a teacher. She had been very disappointed when he had finished secondary school at the head of his class and chosen the Force Publique over a career with Union Miniere, who were always looking for young men from good families and good academic records.
He had to take the teasing in training, but when he was assigned to his first unit, he knew he didn’t want to and didn’t have to. Five days after he had reported to his first unit, he found himself standing before the company commander, a Belgian captain named Dommer, charged with breaking three teeth from the mouth of his corporal by striking him with his fist.
Captain Dommer asked him, in Swahili, if he had anything to say before he announced his sentence; he expected at least ninety days, possibly longer, of punishment.
“If he insults my mother again, my captain,” Private Supo had replied in French, “I will knock the rest of the teeth from his mouth.”
“Exactly how did the corporal insult your mother?”
“He called me a motherfucker, my captain. My mother is a good Christian woman.”
Captain Dommer had then asked him about his mother, and where he had gone to school, and what his father did, and he told him about his mother being assistant principal of St. Matthew’s School in Kiowa; that he had graduated from St. Matthew’s with honors in mathematics and French; and that his father was maintenance supervisor for the Union Miniere mine at Kamundo.
At the evening parade that day, it was announced that Private Supo had been sentenced to four months’ imprisonment for striking his corporal, and he was handcuffed and put into the back of a truck with everybody watching as the truck drove out of the compound.
He had a hard time keeping from crying. His mother and father would learn that he was in prison, and would be ashamed of him.
Five miles out of the compound, the sergeant driving stopped the truck and came in the back and took the handcuffs off and told him that Captain Dommer was giving him a second chance. He was not going to prison, but to the 23rd Company, which had need for someone who read and wrote French fluently and had a knowledge of mathematics.
The sergeant chef of the 23rd Company was a tall, large man in an immaculate, crisply starched khaki uniform.
If Private Supo ever even thought about hitting another noncommissioned officer, the sergeant chef of the 23rd Company said, or did anything that in any way made Captain Van de Waele, the commanding officer of the 23rd Company, sorry that he had given Private Supo a second chance when Captain Dommer asked him to, he would know about it and he would slice off Private Supo’s balls and cock and feed them to the pigs.
The sergeant chef of the 23rd Company when Private Supo joined it was named Joseph Désiré Mobutu. When Sergeant Chef Mobutu left the 23rd Company three years later, it was to become the youngest sergeant major ever in the Force Publique. By then Private Supo had become Corporal Supo.
Five years later, Senior Sergeant Supo became sergeant chef of the