by Helen Thorpe
The Congo is a huge place, about the same size as Western Europe. The three-thousand-mile-long Congo River forms one of the DRC’s borders. So large is the river’s basin, it spans two different rainy seasons, which means it is almost always raining somewhere in the river’s immense watershed. Many books about the Congo—Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which unfolds during the Belgian colonial era, for example, and V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, which takes place during the thirty-year-long reign of Mobutu—rely upon the great, wide, muddy river for their primary setting. But the river does not touch Goma. The city we hoped to reach lay on the eastern side of the Congo, twelve hundred miles from the capital city of Kinshasa. Because Goma is not connected by the Congo River’s tributaries to the rest of the DRC, the city is more strongly linked economically to the Great Lakes region of Africa, i.e., the country’s neighbors to the east. Goma lies on the floor of the East African Rift Valley, where it hugs the shores of Lake Kivu, one in a long series of rift lakes. This part of the DRC has seen more violence than any other.
We chose to approach Goma from the Rwandan side because that was the easiest route to the city. We drove through mountainous terrain, steeply terraced with fields, the engine of our van reaching a high pitch on every climb. The relative scarcity of farmland was one of the primary reasons genocide erupted in Rwanda in 1994; when the mass killings took place, Rwanda was the most densely populated country in Africa, and one of the poorest. Our journey retraced the history of conflict in the area. This was the route by which Rwanda invaded the Congo (then Zaire), precipitating the First Congo War, which lasted from 1996 to 1997. After the genocide, Hutu militia groups had fled from Rwanda into the Congo. The Tutsi-led government of Rwanda believed that people in the eastern part of the Congo, many of whom were Hutu themselves, were harboring Rwandan Hutus. Some Hutu militia groups based in the Congo were conducting ongoing raids in Rwanda. Rwanda teamed up with its ally Uganda to launch a war to stop these incursions; the vast wealth of their neighbor must also have been appealing, for Zaire possessed huge deposits of copper, tin, gold, radium, uranium, cobalt, and diamonds. Both Rwanda and Uganda, by contrast, relied almost entirely on the production of tea and coffee. On our drive through Rwanda, we passed tea plantation after tea plantation, women bent over the bright green shrubs, picking leaves by hand.
The Rwandan and Ugandan armies joined opposition figures within Congolese society and pushed all the way across Zaire to Kinshasa. Aided by allied groups from Angola, they converged on the capital city and ousted Mobutu Sese Seko. Opposition leader Laurent Kabila took his place as president and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kabila quickly fell out with his former allies, however, and after only one year of peace, the Second Congo War began. Nine African countries became embroiled in the conflict, also called the Great War of Africa or the African World War, and five million people died, more than in any other modern conflict except World War II. The war officially ended in 2003, but dozens of armed groups remained active to the present, especially on the eastern side of the country.
Three and a half hours after leaving Kigali, Rwanda, we rounded a corner, plunged down another hill, and suddenly beheld a huge expanse of gray-blue water, covered in lines of ripples: Lake Kivu. Heat rose as the day waxed, but the extraordinary foot traffic swelled nonetheless as we approached the city. I saw many women wearing close-fitting dresses with frilly sleeves and flared skirts, made of exuberantly patterned fabric in intense shades of hot pink, electric blue, golden yellow, deep purple, and orange. The dresses, known as pagnes, gave the women a look of being ready for church, even though it was the middle of the week and they were running errands on foot. At first I wondered how women of such varying shapes all found perfectly form-hugging pagnes, until I spied the roadside tailleurs hunkered down over black manual sewing machines. The women were walking with their hips circling from left to right in a dance-like manner, so that they could carry goods on their heads. Balanced on the heads of various women, I saw: an enormous sack of potatoes, an entire case of orange Fanta, a box of dishes, a stack of sheets, a bundle of firewood, a bag of charcoal, bricks, a yellow jerrican, a vast bowl of bananas, a tray of mangoes, and dozens of ripe red tomatoes neatly arranged in a pyramid shape on a platter.
At the border itself, a large green sign with white writing proclaimed DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, with a big white arrow pointing onward. First we had to show our documents to officials on the Rwandan side, where soldiers in black uniforms with their pant legs tucked into black military boots carried AK-47s as they patrolled the area. A keen-eyed man wearing a uniform, sharply pointed black dress shoes, and no socks scrutinized my passport for several minutes, queried me about my profession, then waved me along disinterestedly. A small crowd of men hovered nearby, under the shade of an enormous magnolia tree, studying the goings-on for opportunities to make money. We were the only mzungus in sight (literally, aimless wanderers, a Bantu term for white people). Petroleum tanker after petroleum tanker stood waiting to cross into the DRC. Both the Congolese government and the United Nations were devouring gasoline, for the movement of their troops required massive amounts of fuel.
Our main worry was that we had been denied visas to enter the DRC. I was also breaking the law by entering the country through Goma; journalists were required to enter through Kinshasa, after seeking permission from the Congolese Ministry of Information, which I did not do. We assumed the denial of our visas had to do with the recent political unrest. Joseph Kabila had replaced his father as president, but he had grown unpopular and was facing serious opposition. The question of whether the country might hold an election had become a favorite topic of conversation in the Congo. Talk of an election coincided with an uptick in violence, and Newsweek had just run a story with the headline, “Can Democratic Republic of Congo Afford Another Civil War?”
We were hoping to buy tourist visas at the border. A local fixer named Emmanuel Bugingo had made our travel arrangements. This had included renting vehicles, hiring drivers, finding hotels, making contact with people we hoped to interview, and, euphemistically, “tipping.” As Emmanuel had explained in a series of emails, many people in the Congo expected to be paid small bribes. I had decided not to bribe any family members I might be lucky enough to meet, so that I could pursue my main story without feeling compromised, but I had agreed to join in meetings arranged for the researchers, whether or not they involved bribes. The instructors from the Air Force Academy had asked Bugingo to minimize the number of “tips” he made, while giving him permission to pay small amounts (generally $20) as needed.
To make the idea of being tourists seem plausible, we had bought a minisafari to see some chimpanzees. We did not know if this gambit would work, but arriving with proof of a safari seemed our best hope of entering the DRC. As we waited in a line to pay $30 for our tourist visas, a white airplane with UN stenciled on it roared overhead—it was the first of hundreds of white UN vehicles (planes, pickups, SUVs, armored security vehicles) we would see. The UN at present had twenty-three thousand employees stationed in the Congo, most of whom were themselves armed soldiers. Because of the level of ongoing violence inside its borders, the DRC held the infamous honor of being the site of the UN’s largest peacekeeping mission anywhere in the world.
Bugingo’s plan worked—we passed for tourists. Elated, we walked to our hotel and met a driver who showed us around town. Goma turned out to be a despoiled but unforgettable place. My main impression was one of constant commerce: A group of men walked by us carrying red and gold armchairs over their heads; a man pushed a chukudu, a two-wheeled wooden scooter, loaded with rebar; another man used a chukudu to haul a greasy generator. Meanwhile, fantastically dressed women in eye-catching pagnes sat by neat piles of red tomatoes, brown potatoes, green cabbages, fresh brown eggs, reddish-orange mangoes, bags of shelled peanuts and sugarcane. Other women sold lumps of charcoal, the primary cooking fuel used by the city’s residents. Every inch of roadsid
e space had been commandeered for commercial activity. At a communal tap, children were bent over double carrying yellow jerricans filled with water; each jerrican held approximately five gallons, and a typical household consumed several cans per day. The sky was gray, the roads were gray, and most of the structures were gray, but the streets were crowded with bright red boda bodas, the local word for motorcycle taxis. In this violence-plagued nation, I had expected to find difficulty, but I had not anticipated witnessing exuberance in equal measure.
An active volcano loomed on the horizon, and its intermittent eruptions had covered major parts of the city with lava. Local people joked about how quickly the soles of their shoes wore out because of the sharp volcanic rocks embedded in the lava flow. The roads we drove down were alternately paved with tarmac, paved with lava, or unpaved, and were frequently riddled with enormous potholes. We saw several SUVs and pickups paralyzed by broken axles, and the air smelled acrid from a combination of vehicle exhaust, burning charcoal, and volcanic emissions. Yet Goma remained highly functional, despite the lava, the potholes, the danger, and the bad air. Young people flocked there to attend college, the United Nations stabilized the local economy, and enterprising business owners sold goods imported from East Africa to villagers who traveled to the big city for everything they could not find in the eastern Congo’s small towns.
In one of the city’s mazelike markets, I wandered from stall to stall. Near the front entrance, vendors hawked solar panels, radios, earbuds, and other electronic devices; then blue jeans, dresses, and beaded leather sandals; after that, dishes, glassware, thermoses, and cutlery. The market sold the old-fashioned type of irons, the kind that were heated in a fire. Beyond the household items was the food area, tables piled high with fresh fruit and vegetables. Then I saw fresh fish, fish that had been smoked, and fish that had been salted and dried. One table featured piles of sorghum flour and ground roots, and another smoked caterpillars (hasharat). White-aproned butchers sold raw meat, but I veered off toward stalls filled with wildly colorful Congolese fabric. I selected two bolts, one with a pattern of orange roses and another with red and yellow geometric shapes on a purple background, to give to Beya, Solomon and Methusella’s mother. Despite threats to their safety on nearby roads, hundreds of people had traveled great distances to come to Goma to do exactly what I was doing: shop.
Everybody in Goma spoke of the extreme level of danger in the surrounding province of North Kivu. Originally, I had hoped to drive from Goma to the village of Buganza, so that I could visit Solomon and Methusella’s relatives. However, I was told emphatically that I could not make the trip without risking my own life and the lives of anybody who traveled with me. The road to the village ran through the Virunga National Park, one of the planet’s most biologically diverse areas and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which had also become a base for various armed militia groups. I felt cowardly about not attempting the trip until I spoke with a white woman from Colorado who had just survived a journey in which her vehicle had been stopped by armed marauders. She had been seated in the far back of a van otherwise filled with local residents, and the African passengers had hastily buried her under chickens and packages, for fear that if the bandits noticed a white passenger, they would all be taken hostage. Then a man on a motorcycle had paused to pelt the bandits with stones, rescuing them all. I abandoned the idea of attempting a trip to the village.
* * *
The United Nations official responsible for Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration—a fancy term for taking guns away from rebels and persuading them to return to farming—gave us a lucid summary of the armed groups in North Kivu that occupied most of his attention. Two of the groups had foreign origins. One was the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, the main Hutu rebel group that continued to oppose the Tutsi-led government of that country. It had been hiding out in the unpopulated parts of North Kivu for decades, though recently the group’s sway had waned due to internal squabbles and issues of leadership. The second foreign group, and the one that worried the UN official the most, was the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel militia that had recently acquired the status of a terrorist organization. Originally, the ADF had formed to oppose the government in Uganda, but it had evolved over time into a radical Islamic group whose main activities were now “robbing locals and being scumbags,” the official told us. It was a tricky organization to combat, because of its diffuse nature. There was “pure ADF,” “splinter ADF,” and “what the locals call ADF but isn’t really,” he said. Also, this organization had a strong grip on the imaginations of its adherents. “They are much more ideological, and they are much nastier,” he added. “We are getting very few surrenders from this group.”
Besides the armed groups of foreign origin, people living in the villages of North Kivu were besieged by local militias known as mai mai. Initially, the mai mai had formed to defend villagers against outside threats, but over time the mai mai also began raiding villages. All of the armed groups relied on pillaging for sustenance, preying in a parasitic manner upon the residents of rural areas. For food, the armed groups would swoop down and steal people’s harvests. For sex, the armed groups relied on kidnapping young girls and forcing them into unwanted marriages or raping village women. Basically, whatever men in civil society worked to acquire by peaceable means (food, family, physical contact), both the rebels and the mai mai took by force. For them, the gun had become a way of life.
Researchers were calling the situation in the eastern part of the DRC “the world’s deadliest humanitarian crisis.” One peer-reviewed study, published in The Lancet in 2006 (when Solomon and Methusella were still living in North Kivu), reported that the mortality rate in the DRC was 40 percent higher than in Central Africa as a whole. Many of the deaths occurred due to violence, but an even greater number resulted from illnesses that would have been treatable if aid workers could have accessed imperiled communities; because of the insecurity, however, huge numbers of people in the Congo had been going without health care.
The United Nations official explained that he could not offer the rebels what they wanted most, which was money; offering cash payments in exchange for guns would only create a market for weapons and provide a stream of revenue to support the very groups he hoped to disable. Instead, the UN was offering enticements such as one motorbike for a bundle of five AK-47s, or an entire cooking set for an individual AK-47. Sometimes UN troops gave child soldiers soccer balls in exchange for their weapons. Those who defected also earned the chance to acquire job skills at rehabilitation camps run by the UN, where they could learn activities such as driving, farming, and hairdressing. The only problem was that the former militia members terrified the very villagers who had to welcome them back if they were to return to civil society. At the moment, due to the precarious political situation, the rate of repatriation had slowed significantly, as elders were refusing to accept violence-prone young men back into their communities at a time when everything felt combustible. “The situation in North Kivu and South Kivu is very volatile, and therefore to pour in former combatants now would be unwise,” the UN official said. Word of the bottleneck in the rehabilitation camps had leaked out, and after hearing about the prolonged stays in the compounds, fewer rebels were turning over their weapons.
* * *
Fear of another full-blown conflict hung over Goma much as the active volcano dominated the skyline. We had dinner one evening with an attorney who was overseeing the attempt to create a viable judicial system in the eastern Congo for the United Nations. Previously, the attorney had been stationed in Afghanistan, and before that, in Bosnia. She believed passionately in the UN’s efforts at peacekeeping, and her work involved an initiative to take court officials out to villages where mass killings had occurred. “It’s easier to take twenty people from Goma out to the bush than it is to take one hundred people from the bush here to Goma,” she explained. Her hope was that if the Congolese people could experience justice, the
habit of committing atrocities might be interrupted. At the present moment, however, she appeared to fear it might be a losing battle. About the future of the Congo, she asked rhetorically at one point, “Will it be burning?”
We also met several local journalists for drinks or for a meal. All acknowledged that they were employed directly by the federal government, and explained that if they tried to report a story that made government officials appear inept or corrupt, they would be jailed. The journalists were obliged to report that there were no more rebel groups operating anywhere in the Congo, for example, even though that was not true. When I asked one of them what he had talked about on the radio that day, he said he had done a feel-good story about a government-sponsored holiday. Bugingo gave each of them $20 for talking to us.
At one point, our driver vanished, and we found a new chauffeur sitting in his place, a taciturn man with acne-pitted skin. Later, we learned that he was a captain in the Congolese army; Bugingo wrote in an email that the man “volunteered to ensure your comfort.” The Congolese government exerts almost total control over the dissemination of information inside the DRC and tries to keep tabs on foreign journalists; I assumed the army captain had various motives for accompanying us, and that guaranteeing our comfort was only one of them. I believed he probably also apprised local military commanders of our whereabouts. We watched what we said in the car.
