Perhaps I had a leathered heart, toughened from so many war stories, but with only five weeks in Congo, I didn’t have the luxury of slowing down. On a normal day in South Kivu, I was on the road interviewing people eight to ten hours a day. My focus was on leveraged impact. We had to do Francisca’s family justice.
The next morning, as we ate in the dimly lit Procure breakfast room, Francisca asked, “So when are we going to be done with these visits and interviews?”
Mama Koko’s War Tribunal
• • • •
Word got out around greater Dungu that we were talking gunmen at Mama Koko’s. The should-be dead—the ones who saw the LRA and lived—showed up, one or two at a time, lingering in the yapu, hoping for an introduction and an invitation to offer testimony. We coined them “Mama Koko’s War Tribunal.” With each new guest, each new story, each set of shell-shocked eyes, another little chunk of home as Francisca knew it crumbled away.
We tucked ourselves into Mama Koko’s dim, bare-cement living room. A faint smell of must mixed with aromas of Congolese food lingered from lunch or drifted in from the kitchen out back. Delicate baby-blue flowered curtains were drawn tight over wooden picture-frame windows. A coffee table with a lime-colored tablecloth separated the two wooden armchairs from the three-seater wooden couch, each pillow with a different cotton cover in mini-florals or purple paisley. It was already late January, but a shiny accordion-style Christmas banner still hung beside a window, below a bees’ nest that had survived the Congolese army takeover of the house. An any-minute evacuation was always possible, so the family stopped fixing the place up each time they moved back in. This time they left the leviathan-bees almost the size of my thumb to haunt the corners, swoop across the room, and dive at our heads as we stitched together the story of the family’s encounters with Kony’s gunmen.
I figured we’d start with the most recent attacks and work our way back, and since Antoinette had died just a few weeks before we arrived, we’d start with Modeste, Antoinette’s dad and grandfather to the still-nursing baby. He was the first to sit with us privately.
Papa Alexander followed us into Mama Koko’s living room and sat on the opposite end of the sofa, seemingly put off that we hadn’t yet gotten to the story of his LRA beating. I didn’t know yet that half of Alexander’s family had been murdered and abducted.
Modeste spoke with barely audible tones and restrained hands, as though paralyzed with shock. He had been at home at the time, just a few houses up the road, taking care of some of the grandchildren while his daughters worked. He heard gunshots, then screaming. He grabbed the two little boys. Along with everyone else in Bamokandi—thousands of neighbors—he ran toward the Dungu Bridge, toward town center, hoping to reach the UN for protection. By the time he reached the narrow bridge over the Dungu River, Congolese soldiers had blocked it. It was the only escape route.
Blocked? I paused to clarify.
Papa Alexander shook his leg, anxious, poised to jump into the conversation.
Modeste explained: The army lined up across the bridge with guns pointed at the thousands of people trying to escape. They were told they couldn’t cross. But if the attack was in progress less than a mile away, I asked, why didn’t the people cross the river elsewhere or just wade across? He said, “The water’s deep. We can’t swim.”
Alexander couldn’t hold back anymore: “If we tried, the Congolese soldiers would shoot us like we were the rebels.”
Modeste and other folks from Bamokandi slept that night around the warrior statue and roundabout, corralled as though in a holding pen.
“It’s not right,” Modeste said, shaking his head. “The soldiers should be in the front, with the people in the back, so they can protect us. But the soldiers were in the back and we were up front with the LRA coming.”
At daylight, a boy found Modeste among the crowd and gave him the news: Neighbors had found Antoinette’s body, and left her baby in his dead mother’s arms until the family arrived and her sister pried the little boy away.
Modeste boiled. “I can’t even talk to my own government. Because they don’t care about the way people are dying from the LRA. They don’t do anything about it.”
A few days before, Modeste had marched with his fellow citizens through the center of Dungu to protest the Congolese government’s failure to protect. “I would ask [our president] Kabila: Why did I vote for you? Everything that is happening to us, you don’t do anything. We don’t even hear your voice. You say nothing. You don’t care.”
I asked, “It sounds like you blame the Congolese government and the Congolese army for what happened. Is that right?”
The question was directed at Modeste, but Papa Alexander couldn’t contain himself. He said, “Yeah, it’s like that.”
“Yeah, it’s like that,” Modeste echoed.
Papa Alexander said it again: Yeah. It’s like that.
Superman Paul
• • • •
Like Modeste, Paul was a survivor. Despite his missing four front teeth and his bald head, he looked eighteen. It turned out he was thirty-three. His innocent eyes made him look much younger.
The day he came by, Francisca and I didn’t notice him sitting to the side, unassuming, lost in the steady flow of Francisca’s relatives who floated in and out of the yapu. Hours passed as Francisca visited with family at Mama Koko’s, and finally, someone introduced him. He wasn’t another cousin, not related at all. He knew Francisca’s cousin Bernard and was there when Bernard died on October 31, 2009, just a few months before our arrival. After our belated introduction, we slipped inside the living room and Paul began to tell his story.
Food was the problem. It had been more than a year since the attacks began. Paul’s parents had already been killed by the LRA, so he was taking care of his twelve orphaned brothers and sisters. The whole village was hungry, but people were too scared to go to their fields, abandoned in the LRA’s wake.
Francisca’s cousin Bernard helped organize forty-five farmers to make one last trip to collect their crops. The willing ones among them broke into groups of ten.
Paul was in Bernard’s group. They had known each other for years, swapping farm labor the way good neighbors do. Bernard was like that: a stand-up-and-take-charge sort of man.
The group split into pairs, headed out to the fields, and collected crops without incident. The problem came on their way back. Their neighbor Patrick saw a boot track in the mud. It wasn’t a familiar boot track. No regular Congolese person wears shoes like that, they decided. Patrick knew what it meant.
He ran back to the place where Bernard’s group had agreed to meet, hoping to warn the others. But once everyone was gathered and began sorting out their getaway plan, Patrick insisted on going back. The thing about Patrick, Paul explained, was that the LRA had already burned his house and stolen everything. All he had left in the world was a piece of plastic given to him by an aid organization that he used for a tent. But as soon as he saw the boot track that day, he ran, leaving behind all his crops—and his makeshift tent.
He wanted that plastic tarp.
He went back out to the fields, this time on his own. The tent was gone. That was the moment he knew they were all dead.
This time Patrick came back slowly, quietly, feeling the weight of LRA eyes on him. By the time he got back, it was dusk. There was no time to escape. Paul and Bernard knew the LRA were somewhere, right there, watching. The ten from their group crowded under the open straw hut and lay down for a long night. They tried to sleep, as best one can when you know you are being watched, when you know you’ll be killed at first light, when you know it is your last night on earth. The men were silent, except when someone asked for a cigarette. Paul noted to Francisca, “We were human, after all.”
In the very early morning, a hard, driving thunderstorm came down. When the first light peaked into the hut, they gathered their things and set out.
They walked in the open, along the road. Paul walked in
front. He smelled cigarette smoke. He wasn’t smoking. He turned and looked at his neighbors behind him. They weren’t smoking. Paul stood still. So did his friends. He scanned the bushes. Nothing.
The tip of a gun stuck out from the grass.
Then he saw a boot.
And a cigarette.
The LRA didn’t move. Paul pointed and the farmers all ran, scattered, without knowing if the LRA was chasing them.
Paul ran back to the meeting spot.
Why didn’t he just keep running? Why not save himself? They were his neighbors. They were his family. You don’t just leave people.
Paul met up with the other nine members of the group. Each had fled back to the meeting spot at the hut, including Bernard and Patrick, the one who had gone back for his plastic tent. They walked together, the ten of them. In the fields, the ten farmers saw ten men in Congolese army uniforms. The gunmen called out, pretending to be Congolese army. Some of the farmers ran away, and didn’t look back. But not Bernard, not Patrick. Not Paul.
The gunmen approached them, speaking strange Swahili, broken and odd. They weren’t from around there. One of them said, “Sit. Sit.”
Bernard and Patrick knelt down in the road. Paul did not.
The gunmen tried to soothe them, blessing them with the weird Swahili, as they cocked their guns. “Sleep. Sleep. Don’t be afraid of death.”
They shot Patrick in the head.
Bernard’s hands were on the back of his head. They shot him through the chest. His arms flew in the air. Paul could still see it, the way Bernard fell backward, arms flying.
They hadn’t noticed that Paul didn’t kneel. He stayed back, still. But now it was his turn. One of them barked, “Who do you think you are? Superman? Get over here.”
Paul ran. Bullets flying, the gunmen stayed on him as he ran through the forest and fields, fast. He ran past huts, screaming warnings to people so they could run, but without breaking his pace. He kept running and running and running until he was on a road. He lost the gunmen. He must have gone in circles, because he saw his own bike. He jumped on and rode and rode and rode. He doesn’t remember much about that ride.
In town, they wanted Paul to go back to show them where to find the bodies, but they all saw his shock. He can’t talk, they said. Give him some time.
Villagers found Bernard’s body. His chest was split open, cracked wide, empty.
“Stop! Oh, stop!” Francisca cried in English. This was her cousin Bernard. She didn’t want those images in her head. She had heard about LRA rituals, the ones where they ate people’s flesh. In a flash, she imagined Bernard’s empty chest. She thought someone must have eaten her dear Bernard, the strong man who used to ask her dad about Francisca: How’s your “boy”? Boys were supposed to be preferred, of course; girls were thought to be a waste of time. André always praised Francisca for being faster than any of the boys, though, and Bernard would echo André: “Your dad is right about you. He loves you very much, and we love you, too. You can do anything.”
Francisca said, “It’s too much.”
Over the weeks, other survivors came often: former teenage “forest wives,” elderly men, ten-year-old child soldiers. They each had a story worthy of volumes. As we listened, my friend’s warning rang in my head: “If you see the LRA, you’re dead.” Looking into the eyes of each survivor felt like witnessing a walking miracle.
Sometimes, when the survivors told their stories, Francisca thought she would throw up. But she had to be there. She was among the only English speakers in town, and the survivors were willing to talk to me mostly because they knew her as a local. She stopped looking them in the eyes. If she looked, she cried. Better not. She stopped looking at their faces, trying to avoid the pangs of empathy. Instead, she tried to shut it off by thinking about the calls Joseph Kony was making to his commanders on his satellite phone. Can’t they trace those calls? How hard is that? How many satellite calls are trekking to space and back from the middle of the Garamba National Park? Where is the world?
Papa Alexander still sat close by and jumped in now and then, offering impatient commentary on other people’s stories. He asked, “When do you want to hear about what happened to me?”
A Knock on the Door
• • • •
As the days went on, Francisca dutifully translated, absorbing the stories, but she was saturated. She got tired of explaining to her friends and family members: “If Americans know what Kony is doing, they will care. They will want to do something.” Did she still believe it? She didn’t know—it all felt too vague. She explained to me that she wanted something more concrete, more tangible to do—a real-world project—that would help the people of Dungu.
So, in between interviews, we scouted out potential projects. First we stopped by a women’s sewing cooperative, then a local health clinic, hoping we might be able to arrange medical supplies. On the way out, we paused by an elementary school.
“I helped start this school,” Francisca said in passing. For a moment, she lost herself in the memory, back in the days when she was a single mother of three young children, in the early 1980s.
Everyone who knew the town gossips—and that was everyone in Dungu—knew things hadn’t worked out between Francisca and her kids’ dad. Late-night callers often circled; for months, their uninvited knocks on her door kept her awake almost every night. From the time the knocks started, she told the men through the closed door to go away. Instead, they hung on for hours, begging in hushed tones.
She retreated into silence, not a word, not a crack in that door. Most often it was the henchmen of the chief, who already had five wives. He sent police to try to collect her for his nighttime pleasure.
Francisca did not find a trace of flattery in the endless late-night knocking. She knew where they were coming from. They think I’m a thing. So the men circled, sometimes until 2 a.m., when she was trying to rest up for her job across town teaching at the new pre-school she was helping to found. On the school’s first official day of classes, it was just Francisca teaching two of her children and two children of the couple who asked her to establish the school. Within a week, they had so many students that they moved into a classroom at the Canadian Brotherhood’s monastery.
One day on the four-mile trek home from her new job, police arrested her, claiming “justice must be done.” Justice, they insisted, had to be negotiated at the chief’s private residence. Francisca declined to take the police up on their offer to negotiate her release. Instead, she opted to wait them out in jail. For hours, she ignored their endless nasty jokes and offensive questions. When she was released at the end of the day, she asked the Diocese if she might barter extra work around the mission in exchange for living on the school grounds, to escape the harassment, and the late-night knocks.
Francisca took on sorting piles of “lift and throws” or “rotten person’s clothes”—used clothing from America—alongside her friends. One day, Francisca’s friend pulled out a massive pair of men’s underwear, teasing Francisca: “These belong to your future husband!” They knew an American Peace Corps volunteer was supposed to arrive soon, and her friend was trying to buoy Francisca by convincing her she was going to marry him.
Pure silly, Francisca thought, because, as everyone knows, no normal man would want a woman who already has three children.
The night the American was due to arrive, his host—a neighbor who lived across the street from Francisca—was out of town picking up fruit for the cooperative. Francisca and her friend volunteered to stay up to greet the new resident.
By the time the SUV pulled in, it was far after dark. Francisca strained in the harsh headlights to see the emerging lanky, baby-faced American with long blonde hair. She blurted out, “Bonjour, mademoiselle!”
“Hey, I’m a man!” Kevin was barely twenty-two years old and not exactly straight-laced. More of a wannabe hippie, he was hungry for any alternative to becoming a company man.
The night they met, he was fr
esh off a four-day ride by truck from Kisangani to Isiro, followed by an all-day truck ride from Isiro to Dungu. They showed him to his room. Eager to get acquainted, he stashed his stuff and came back out to talk. Kevin and Francisca stayed up for hours visiting in that brick house with its corrugated tin roof.
Over the following months, during shared dinners and group conversation, Francisca tried to ignore Kevin’s gaze lingering on her. He found Francisca beautiful and, most of all, confident. Negotiating at the market, hanging out with friends, in front of her class, she carried herself like a leader, a big sister, like a woman in charge. It took several weeks for him to figure out that the three children she lived with were in fact hers, and that she was four years older than he was. By then, he didn’t care.
Sometimes Francisca spotted Kevin working on his first project, a retaining wall by the river. He was always dressed in grubbies and working alongside his guys. One day, she asked, “You coming for lunch?”
“Why would I take lunch? They don’t go for lunch,” he said, pointing to his impoverished crew. Francisca hadn’t seen that before. She mostly saw white bosses who wore nice shirts to work, sat in their office, and told people what to do. She was especially surprised when she passed by the worksite later and saw him divvying up roasted peanuts and doughnut holes between himself and the crew for lunch.
Kevin fell in love with Africa, his home next to the river, the giant acacia tree next to the house, the pride in filling buckets of water from a well he had dug himself. He biked out to remote villages to work, on back trails, through deep mud puddles, sometimes twenty-eight miles out of town.
On one of those early evenings, he asked Francisca to go for a walk. Francisca didn’t trust men. And she didn’t find white men all that attractive—the ones she’d met were all goofy show-off types. But Kevin was handsome, no question. She liked his tone of voice, steady and direct. She agreed to the stroll.
Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen Page 6
