There was no panic despite previous experiences with armed men and the nature of the forces confronting the people.

Instead the city met the invaders head-on and dealt with them brutally and swiftly. There was no chaotic breakdown, no orgies of looting and pillage by undisciplined soldiers. Instead the people stood behind their government, flawed as it is, stood behind their army, inexperienced as it was, stood behind their President, imperfect as he is and in no uncertain terms showed their enemies and the world that they were a nation, a determined people and they would not be broken.

If that sounds like fulsome triumpalist prose, it is and unashamedly so.

For what we have witnessed in the last few days- the Battle of Kinshasa-- if you will, was more than just another battle in Africa's seemingly unending wars. What transpired in the Congo was a major seismic shift in Africa's ceaseless struggle to find itself and its place in the modern world. And underpinning this shift is a dynamic which illustrates the continuity of the African liberation struggle. We have, many of us fallen into the belief, that with the departure of the colonialists and the end of the Cold War and the ostensible dismantling of apartheid, that the era of Africa's struggle was over and the African nations must now buckle down and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The common wisdom was that all Africa needed was the will and discipline to bring itself up to acceptable standards of modern civilized nations. This is anachronistic thinking. African history has accelerated to such an extent that even the most skilled self-proclaimed expert keeps missing the big picture. Africa is cycling through phases of historical and social development in one century what took Asia and Europe centuries to evolve and still the evolution speeds on. Africa is at war. While that statement seems redundantly obvious we need to examine it and its deeper implications. For too long outsiders have defined Africa, but from the defense of the ADFL government and the battle of Kinshasa Africa has publicly defined herself. Four African armies worked together, commanded each other's troops, coordinated logistics and defeated a cunning and deadly [the rebels had secreted sleeper brigades in the city, waiting for the signal to rise] enemy whose interests were inimical to the health of the region. Not too many of the best armies achieve that degree of successful coordination. This implies a long standing, hitherto cooperation between the armies of Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia and mutual political understanding. And despite speculation of the role of the various protagonists and what agenda they have, it seems fairly obvious to me: their role is to protect each other while protecting themselves. A public precedent has been set. All for one and one for all. If the governments of any of these countries in the future is under military threat it can call on the unstinting support of its fellows. This is where Africa's seismic political shift has occurred. Unlike in West Africa where Nigeria calls the military shots, in the four combined armies that contributed to the victory in the battle of Kinshasa, it seems that the best qualified men commanded. In the air although the Angolans have the better equipped air force and more planes, it was a Zimbabwean who commanded the air arm. On the ground an Angolan commanded. Four African armies fought as one African army and they were not fighting any proxy war, but for their collective interest. This can only strengthen the forces of African nationalism, which is by no means a spent and irrelevant force as "experts" would have us believe. The same cannot be said for Rwanda and Uganda and we need to examine that statement. The United States has been encouraging Uganda to be the lynch-pin of a so-called African "rapid reaction" force. Trained by US special forces [Uganda and Rwanda still have troops undergoing special forces and intelligence training in the US] this was to be the military equalizer on the Continent. But given burgeoning US interests in the region one must ask rapid reaction against whom and on whose behalf? The days of direct European and US military intervention in so-called "Third World brush fires" is gone.

Somali urban guerillas underlined the lack of feasibility of such tactics. So along comes the "rapid reaction" force. One wonders, had such a force been invested in the Congo, on whose side would they have come down? When one considers the number of Ugandan and Rwandan military men who have been and are continuing to be processed at the Special Forces School at Fort Bragg in the USA the question answers itself. Consider this: 63% of Latin American officers processed through special forces schools in the US in the 60s and 70s ended up using or allowing their skills to be used in the active and brutal repression of their own people. Thanks to the initial failure of the rebellion and the defeat at the battle of Kinshasa, the lack of popular support for the rebels, the rest of Africa is beginning to look with suspicion on the governments of Uganda and Rwanda. Museveni has tarnished his "African renaissance" image with this intervention and Kagame-- well, Kagame has squandered any sympathetic credits he might have earned as a result of the 1994 mass killings. Never a sympathetic character to begin with, Kagame is beginning to emerge as devious, manipulative and perhaps in the pay of extra-regional interests. His arms come from South Africa, his soldiers are trained by Americans. There is even an Israeli connection. Go figure.

Kabila?

Kabila is a man who has lived for thirty-eight years in the shadows . He has survived because he has operated in the shadows and with good reason. Mobutu long lusted after his head. Kabila is justified in being almost paranoically security-conscious. He appears enigmatic, brusque, furtive and skeptical. But these are the tactics of survival. When Western correspondents report that he has "fled" to Lubumbashi or that he sleeps in different locations every night, the man is merely being prudent and following habits that allowed him to survive for 38 years.

He knows the nature of his enemies and is prepared not to underestimate them. This does not qualify him as an instant Western media darling, but it will guarantee his survival. Kabila knows that had the rebels overrun Kinshasa and caught him, they would have proceeded to a post-victory bloodletting that would have scared Attila the Hun. The Kinois, too, understood this, hence their mercilessness with captured rebels. To expect a people who have recently come through a war and waited with frayed nerves for weeks for the rebel attack on the city, their reaction was naturally cathartic and not as mindless and some would like to assert There have been many instances of citizens handing over captured rebels to the security forces. The people of Kinshasa are not raving psychopaths. For them to react with such violence to the rebels was not attributable solely to government propaganda. They had genuine reason to fear these "liberators" this time round. Kabila knows his enemies. Che Guevara, the legendary Cuban-Argentine revolutionary said of him: "Kabila is the only one of the African revolutionaries who understands the true nature of the imperialist forces confronting Africa." Kabila may never be wildly popular throughout the Congo, but he is the face of Congolese nationalism and the Congolese people will support him. The Congo will not come apart as many analysts suggest.

Kabila defended his nation against unpopular forces backed by Rwanda and Uganda, whose actions cannot be justified in the African context. That is why no African nation seriously questions Angolan, Zimbabwean and Namibian defense of Congo's government and territorial integrity. It is even possible that with survival Kabila might come to be recognized as the face of resurgent African nationalism, a nationalism with a potentially continent-wide implications.

SOUTH AFRICA AND THE REGION

South Africa is severely crippled by its apartheid legacy and is not dealing with the realities. South Africa is not perceived as a truly black nation. The preponderance of white influence negates that assumption. The utopian fantasy of a "rainbow" nation mocks the memories of the murdered dead and 300 years of evil and injustice. Any public attempts by the present government to redress the yawning inequalities of continuing black poverty and unassailable white privilege meets with shrieks from the whites [who against all sense of justice still insist on enjoying the privileges of their ill-conceived "bwanatocracy"] that they are being "persecuted" and the careful African government pulls its fingers out of the fire. Ominous elements are meting out their own form of justice in the rural areas, however. White farmers are being targeted for assassination. Alarmed, they form rural militias and petition the government for moral and military support--and get it. No one seems willing or capable of understanding why this rural warfare is occurring and will continue to occur and intensify. There is a dangerous fiction--bruited by whites, mostly-- that Africans after apartheid and 300 years of white oppression have been "generous, forgiving, remarkably free of bitterness." Dangerous fiction. To avoid contemplating the unthinkable whites create this propaganda and firmly believe in it. This is an insanely mistaken delusion. Armageddon still looms. The ingredients, the dynamics and the dry tinder of anger and frustration lie bundled waiting for the spark. The African government which wants South Africa to be for "all South Africans" has not delivered to the South Africans who count the most: the angry, disenfranchised lumpen African majority whose patience has worn thin.

South Africa's black leaders [and this includes the Western-revered, iconic and morally unassailable Mandela] seem incapable of understanding and acting decisively on these social and political pressures which threaten a racial Gotterdammerung such as the world has never seen.

South Africans, whites, obscenely over-privileged have not truly confronted the beast they nurtured which still prowls around in the nation's collective psyche. Time runs out. What does all this have to do with the events unfolding in the Congo, the physical and ultimate political heart of Africa? There are forces, organizations, individuals-- the detritus of apartheid South Africa's political terrorist past whose sole purpose in life was to bring down African governments and leaders by any means necessary and to maintain and perpetuate white racist rule in Africa. Unrepentant, unchanged, unforgiving, these forces have not disappeared, but like shorn weeds like beneath the soil. Their roots are still in the so-called Afrikaner community. Their networks are still active. And their destabilizing networks stretch back in time to even before the 1960 independence of the Congo. When post-independence chaos erupted and the long-suppressed anger of the Congolese people exploded, threatening profits of the rapacious mineral interests and fueling the cold war paranoia of the United States, there was only one direction to turn. The prevailing logic was: only racists could "control and handle" angry black people[ who must either be on drugs, or manipulated by some fiendish communist plot rather than justifiably angry at exploitation, degradation and a racist system second only to South African apartheid at the time.] In the 1900s when the Haitians raised rebellion, the same logic prevailed and US marines from the Deep South were shipped to Haiti on the premise that only they knew how to "handle" blacks. So to quell the just rage of the long-suffering Congo people the "white mercenary" came into being. Intelligence agencies that collaborated with each other so as not to "lose" the Congo :French, British, US, Belgian, Israeli, Portugese and West German fielded the mercenary armies. Whites from South Africa formed the bulk of the marauding mercenaries in Congo and the surrounding region and no one has forgotten or forgiven them. Send them in, let have free rein to butcher and loot and drive the fear of the white man into the African. But it was a corrupted policy which was failing even as it succeeded. Instead of cowing, this policy radicalized. Dien Bien Phu and the Korean War and the rise of China showed that European military power was not unstoppable. The Portugese colonies emerged from their long colonial night with a series of brutal risings in 1961 which were even more brutally suppressed. Captain Enrique Galvao, a disaffected Portugese officer seized the cruise ship Santa Maria and proclaimed a revolt against the dictator Salazar.

Sensing a crack in the Empire's facade, militants of the MPLA attempted to seize power in Luanda. The revolt was mercilessly put down and Portugese conscripts shipped to quell the rising were told by their officers that they were not going to Africa to fight men but "beasts and human animals filled with drugs and infected with communism." Fifteen years later the "beasts" exhausted them and the Portugese sued for peace. Then the newly liberated aided their brothers in Zimbabwe fighting the "Rhodesians." Everything in Africa is interconnected.

Despite the superficial boundaries and European linguistic barriers, Africans are much closer to each other than even they themselves understand. Look at any internecine conflict on the Continent. Every refugee finds a refuge. At great cost to themselves, African governments care for millions fleeing civil strife. Borders mean nothing. When armies march people just pick themselves and go where there is no fighting or where armies cannot follow. The foreign aid agencies get all the glory and sound bites and trumpet themselves as the saviors of Africa, but it is the common African people who unstintingly open their hands to their suffering brethren. At the end of the Nigerian Civil War, the Federal government, the winners, spurned Western humanitarian aid[ on the grounds that it was hypocritical since the West did so much to perpetuate the Civil War] and singlehandedly and successfully in a short time fixed their humanitarian problem, and healed their nation without massive media hype or telethons and lopsided administrative costs. The Rwandan situation has broken with and threatens the African tradition of sanctuary. When the defeated Hutu government fled Kagame's armies, they took their arms with them and Mobutu, ever the political opportunist prepared to use the broken Hutu armies as one more ingredient in his festering pot. Mobutu's habits of power manipulation and intrigue could not change. For whatever reason the United Nations turned a blind eye to Interhamwe militia control and terrorization of the refugee camps. From that moment the UN lost all credibility with Africans. The UN coddling of the Interhamwe militias has jeopardized the African principle of succor and aid to refugees. Will defeated armies flee across borders with refugees and use them as the guerillas' sea from which to mount offensive action against the victors?

The internal dynamic of Africa's political evolution has shifted. Destabilizing rebel movements like UNITA and the recent Congolese rebels with dubious backgrounds will face determined collective action that will crush them If, as expected Zimbabwe, Angola, Rwanda and Congo combine their military forces, UNITA and the Congo rebels and most of the region's insurgents will shortly be bloody history. The four nations also will assert their nationalism in a collective manner. In this developing politic the UN will become increasingly irrelevant, and the capacity of the traditional Western interventionist nations to influence events in the region will be greatly limited. The four nations have demonstrated their military power. It is but a short step to translate that into regional political power. South Africa for reasons cited before will find herself sidelined in this equation. South Africa, in whom the West has invested so much faith [because of the white minority] unfortunately has proven that she cannot be trusted by Africans, since the loyalty of its white citizens is questionable. The Congo war has exposed contradictions and fault lines. South Africa will have to confront the degrading realities of its black citizens and act immediately on them else she will face again social upheaval at home and political ostracism and isolation on the Continent. The SADC will emerge stronger, not weaker and the die has been cast. The four nations: Angola, Congo Zimbabwe and Namibia will ensure that Congo will not fragment and they will be the region's iron core attracting the other nations like filings. There will, of course, be attempts to disrupt this grouping, but a certain political inertia has been overcome and as the cliche goes "The clock cannot be turned back."

George Dash