Armed men showed up. One with red eyes knocked on Francisca’s door and motioned for her to roll down the window. As she lowered the glass between them, the Interahamwe hovered a few inches from her, dousing her with his putrid breath. He spoke Kinyarwanda, presumably to discern if she was Tutsi. Francisca understood none of it. Kevin interjected, “Can you speak to her in French? She’s from Congo.”
The guy moved on.
Finally, word came that Congo would accept the foreigners.
Decades later, Francisca’s memories of Rwanda have a break here, a break there. She doesn’t want to remember. This was the site of the most concentrated period of ethnic cleansing in human history, a 100-day genocide during which between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by the Hutu majority.
Francisca and Kevin tried to move back to Kigali after things calmed down, but rumors circulated that Kevin had visited the wrong friends in Kenya. The new Tutsi government that had ousted the genocidaires decided Kevin had been a collaborator with the Interahamwe.
After months of passport struggles, they finally made it to America with all of the kids, except for Francisca’s oldest son Jean, then a teenager, whose father wouldn’t allow him to leave Congo. She had to leave him behind.
In Portland, Kevin was offered a permanent position at an engineering firm. At their antique dining room table, it was decision time: Go back to Africa, or build a life in Portland. Francisca pulled each of the kids aside and asked, “You remember, don’t you? Do you really want to go back there?” Not me, the kids agreed. Kevin called for a family vote: Get a career-track job in Portland, or go back to Africa!
Kevin’s was the lone vote in favor of returning to Africa.
Their dream retreated into the corners of their craftsman bungalow, into the carefully framed African prints and cloth work, into the figurine reminders of the life and the family they had left behind. Francisca was left with the daily pangs of missing Jean and Mama Koko and the rest of the family. Kevin never returned to Africa.
Mama Koko’s Retreat
• • • •
Mama Koko waited until her private time at night, long after everyone at the Procure had gone to bed and Dungu had gone quiet, to tell Francisca about the day in September 2008 when the LRA attacks started. The day that Francisca set up the cheese bar while her family buried Roger’s body. The day before the phone calls started.
Uneasy murmurs had been circling in Dungu about the LRA gunmen. They’d killed a couple of people in the market. People began to pass through, fleeing into town, saying it was getting bad up north, that the gunmen were coming.
The family decided that Francisca’s brothers Antoine and Gamé would make an emergency trip to the fields along with their wives, to harvest what food they could ahead of the oncoming panic. They set out on their motorbikes, leaving Mama Koko at home to look after the children.
That day, the trickle of villagers from north and west of Dungu swelled, flooding the area near Mama Koko’s, warning the bewildered townspeople that they were out of time. The reports picked up as the day went on. Attacks occurred closer and closer to Dungu. Too close. Everyone from Bamokandi grabbed their bundles of food and cooking pots and crossed the Dungu River, then the Kibali River, in a mass exodus to the south.
Mama Koko weighed the situation as the children played around the dusty yapu. She was responsible for all the family babies, five of whom were under five years old, with only a couple of pre-teen nieces to help. They had only so many hands and backs on which to strap the babies. But the neighborhood was sweltering with panic.
Mama Koko didn’t pause to load up supplies for an evacuation. She gathered the children and ushered them across town to a friend’s house. They spent the night. In the morning, she hoped to slip back home to get some supplies—sheets and a pot for cooking. But the road into town was blocked. Then she heard gunshots.
She had to get out of town. She had to find Antoine and Gamé. She grabbed her grandbabies and joined a caravan of villagers walking south, heading to her family fields, hoping to find her sons and make a plan from there. She walked a long time, coaxing and lugging the little ones, coaching the teens, trying to listen in on updates from neighbors in exodus.
Mama Koko and the children finally arrived at the family fields. Her sons weren’t there.
People passing by the fields paused long enough to tell her it wasn’t safe for them to stay. She, too, knew that they had no choice, that they had to keep going. To where, she had no idea.
It was such a long walk, so hot, and dragging the children was so wearying. They didn’t have a cooking pot, or even water. They were all so thirsty. They walked straight into the middle of nowhere. Twilight set in.
Mama Koko scouted a spot in the bush off the road and rallied the children to pile leaves into a bed, where they huddled together, and slept.
In the early morning, Mama Koko stood and felt the weight of it all on her sixty-nine-year-old bones. There was no choice; they had to continue to flee. They set out for another day. But she was dizzy. The world swayed and Mama Koko collapsed. The girls couldn’t rouse her. She lay on the ground, unconscious, surrounded by panicked, weepy teens and screaming grandbabies.
Water splashed on her face. Strangers hovered over her. She was still on the road, children’s cries around her. Passersby had doused her with what little water they had. She pulled herself up, and they kept going.
A small church parish gave them food that night, and let them sleep inside. The next day they set out again.
Antoine and Gamé frantically combed the refugee-filled roads on motorbikes, trying to guess what route Mama Koko might have taken with the children. Finally, they spotted her. The shattered brood piled on the motorbikes and made their way to another family plot farther out.
On the edge of a rice field, the family collected palm leaves and wove them into walls for a hut, with a plastic tarp for a roof. It wasn’t at all like when Francisca was a girl, when they were hiding from the Simba in the mango grove. Back then, André came back from the bush with bags of peanuts. The bush was our bank, they would say. But in 2008, the LRA owned the bush—no more bank. This time everyone was in hiding, every family with their own secret spot. People missed the harvest.
The family stayed for months. Mama Koko spent most days sitting at the corner of the hut, fighting off pneumonia, looking at the rice field, watching the sky.
One day, she heard a loud noise, like thunder. She looked up and saw fighter jets shoot through the sky. Then the boom of the bombs. Good. Kony must be dead, she thought.
Families inched out of their hiding spots, speculating that this must be the end of the LRA and it was time to go home.
When they finally made it back to Mama Koko’s parcel in Bamokandi, everything was gone: no shoes, no cooking pans, no sheets. They surveyed the damage, as the parade of shocked neighbors, friends, and cousins began, everyone swapping updates—who lived, who died, who hadn’t been seen in a long while.
It was only a few weeks before they had to flee, again.
Papa Alexander: The First Sitting
• • • •
We’d been in Dungu a couple of weeks before we sat down with Papa Alexander. In Mama Koko’s dim living room, Papa Alexander settled himself on the far end of the couch and removed his worn baseball cap so we could see his eyes.
Even though Papa Alexander’s wife Mama Cecelia was the one who washed Roger’s wounds that ill-fated September day in 2008, Roger was not Cecelia’s son. He was not even the child of one of Papa Alexander’s many other wives but, rather, his firstborn son, from way back in the 1960s, when Alexander was known around town as André’s handsome younger brother.
As a young man, Alexander bypassed the local farmer’s daughters and family friends. He fixated on Neseti, whom he had found in his beer-hazed evenings among the young and restless of Duru. She was the kind of girl all the guys wanted to get alone, and Alexander did.
Francisca was a pre-teen when Neseti started coming around. She stood out, and not in a good way. She was pretty, but Lord, was she loud. Talk, talk, talking all the time. And she smelled. She was a smoker, not of cigarettes but of stinky water-vapor pipes made of bamboo.
Neseti’s charm thinned, even for Alexander, after baby Roger’s birth. She slipped out during evenings, late, then later still, leaving Alexander to watch sleeping baby Roger and to soothe his cries while listening for Neseti’s drink-heavy footsteps. One night the blue light of morning made it into the hut without Neseti making it back.
A day passed.
Another day passed.
And another day went by with the baby crying long and hard in Alexander’s arms, as his new single-dad reality dawned.
Neseti eventually reappeared a few days later. It was no surprise when she announced she’d met another man and would not be back. Fine, but Alexander was not prepared for her to leave town with baby Roger, not to be heard from again. Yet, that’s exactly what she did.
Alexander had no more luck with Sako, who moved on shortly after the birth of their baby girl.
From then on, when it came to women, Alexander decided to keep it simple. Simpler than love. Simpler than lust, even. He liked to entertain. He needed help around the house. And he had money. With the cold eye of a project manager, Alexander collected wives.
Ngalagba was a great cook.
Monokoko kept a tidy house.
Toni made good coffee.
Cecelia was an afterthought, a refugee from South Sudan whom he had spotted around town. He had the dowry on hand, so he made an offer. She rounded out the team with her needlecraft and crochet.
Between the early mamas and the four wives, Papa Alexander’s brood swelled to twenty-six children. The decades passed, marked by harvest feasts with André and Dette and long evening talks with the children around the fire. Aside from the sporadic grief of losing infant children, life was good.
Francisca had watched Alexander’s wives as she moved through her young adulthood. Toni was tall and beautiful; she laughed plenty, but she never harvested much. As all the other women went to work in the field in the morning, she would wake up and sit a while.
One morning, Francisca saw her bring water to Papa Alexander to wash his face, without the usual kit. He tried to prompt her. “Where’s the soap and towel?”
“Why don’t you ask your other women to get you soap?” She marched back into her hut, emerged with the bar of soap, and threw it at him. “Or get it yourself!”
As he got up to leave, he said, “I don’t know what your problem is, Toni.” She followed him with her fist.
Monokoko was quiet. She kept a perfect house, pressed Alexander’s shirts, and watched most of her children die in infancy from weak-blood diseases.
Ngalagba, for the most part, stayed drunk. She didn’t care about much of anything, but hid away, drinking. She stumbled around the courtyard, slurring, as if no one knew what was wrong with her. They knew. They all knew.
Cecelia was beautiful, and clean like Monokoko. Young Francisca always liked her the best. She’d had an education and often asked Francisca how her schoolwork was coming along.
Alexander never forgot about Roger. He talked about him all the time, looked for him for years, asking around about Neseti. No one knew where they went.
Francisca entered a teachers training program, and by the age of eighteen she was ready for her first job, working for a school. Little did she know it would lead the family to rediscover Roger.
Francisca was a single mom, of baby Jean, when they transferred her to Gilima, a town about thirty miles from Dungu. She moved into a simple mud-and-grass hut on a compound for teachers. It had two bedrooms and a little patch of land out back, perfect for a garden. She added pineapple bushes, onions, potatoes, and cassava.
At school, for their annual botany lesson, Francisca’s class joined another one in the courtyard, huddling around a tree to learn about root systems and photosynthesis. A stir rose up in the back of the class and one of the students piped up, pointing at Francisca: “Désiré says that teacher is his sister!”
“Liar,” someone said.
Francisca’s fellow teacher laughed, opening the door to rounds of taunts, booing, and shouts of Liar! More mocking rumbled through the crowd.
Francisca approached the ten-year-old boy. He looked terribly familiar. In fact, he looked exactly like a young Papa Alexander. She asked, “What is your name?”
He was imploding with shame. As he opened his mouth, even in his first syllable, she could hear Papa Alexander’s voice.
She cut him off. “Are you Roger?”
The boy had been watching Francisca since she arrived as a new teacher a few weeks before, but he was too shy, too scared she would reject him just like his mom always said Alexander had done. Even though his mother had renamed him Désiré, he knew his real name. He nodded.
“Papa has been looking for you!”
“My mom told me he didn’t want me.”
“Not true,” Francisca said, wrapping him in her arms. “We’ve been looking for you for years.”
Right then, in front of the whole class, little Roger’s lifetime of imaginary rejection crumbled. He broke down, sobbing in Francisca’s arms.
Alexander came to Gilima as soon as he heard. He tried to get Neseti to let Roger go back home with him, but she wouldn’t allow it.
A few days after discovering Roger, Francisca spotted him pacing back and forth on the road in front of her yard, trying to look casual.
“What are you doing out there?” she called out. “Come on in!”
As soon as Roger stepped inside, single working-mom Francisca didn’t have to ask for his help: He jumped right in, volunteering to draw water from a nearby stream with other boys, recruiting baby Jean to go with him to the back garden to collect cassava for dinner. What with the low-tech cooking equipment, his extra hands were a godsend, whether they were pounding peanuts, grabbing some onions from the backyard, holding the meat while she cut, or carrying baby Jean around on his shoulders. From then on, Roger stopped by often, several times a week sometimes, as much for a good meal as to avoid going home.
Francisca could see that Neseti hadn’t taken to motherhood. She drank and still smoked that bamboo pipe. The smell of smoke had settled into her body, her shiny complexion turned to a dull ash. She hit Roger, and her boyfriend was no kinder. Francisca was happy to provide him a refuge. As often as Neseti would allow Roger to escape to Francisca’s without a scene, he would.
Roger constantly asked about his long-lost family. What do you think my dad is doing right now? What’s he like? Always steering the conversation toward the real question on his mind: When are we going to visit them?
Just as Dette was surrogate mother to Alexander, Francisca ushered Roger into his young adulthood. After four years, though, when she got a job offer back in Dungu, she scheduled her departure. She wanted to live close to Mama Koko and the family again. On Francisca’s moving day, Roger hitched a ride out of town and never looked back. He moved in with Papa Alexander and stuck close for the remainder of his life, rarely farther than a few miles away from his dad.
When Roger was old enough, he sidestepped the party-girl trap and moved in with a regal church-going local, Marie. They remained in Duru, near the coffee plantation, and Roger opened a little shop of his own.
War flared across the border in South Sudan in the 1990s. André, Alexander, and the family had to abandon the coffee plantation to flee the mass of refugees. When they finally emerged from hiding, Alexander surveyed the dried-up trees, the coffee beans stunted and gone to wild, the fields overgrown to bush and brambles. Dette didn’t want the coffee plantation. The land was wrecked, raided, broken to fruitless nothing. Alexander decided to reclaim it.
Ngalagba had left Papa Alexander for another man ten years before. Monokoko opted to stay in Dungu to help out with her grandchildren. Toni was not up for the tedium of manual
labor. That left Cecelia, who dutifully returned to the coffee plantation and shared the daily sweat with Alexander and the boys, though her hands were now wrinkled and her skin withered.
It took years but the land did come back, yielding a coffee fortune beyond anyone’s hopes—especially those of Toni, who then begged to join them. Papa Alexander told her Don’t bother. Clearing and trimming, fertilizing and constructing, Papa Alexander rebuilt the family coffee empire on André’s land with Mama Cecelia—with most of his sons and daughters, their spouses, adopted children, and dozens of grandchildren at his side.
Life was not just good. Life was better than ever.
Until the day they brought Roger’s body home.
Who Are You With?
• • • •
There were only about twenty or so white people in Dungu the February of our visit. For the most part, we avoided them. But a few weeks into our trip, a French UN higher-up spotted me on the street, and stopped us. “How long have you been in Dungu? You haven’t come by… .”
We decided to log a cursory visit to the UN compound at the center of town, a sterile white outfit made up of portable offices in shipping containers, sealed to hold in conditioned air.
Signing in with security at the UN gate, we bumped up against a common problem. Every time we had crossed an international border, checked into a hotel, or signed in with security in a guarded compound, obligatory forms asked: Who are you with? What is your function?
It was weird enough in the US, answering endless questions about how I supported myself as a volunteer, the independent nature of my work. But in Congo I was met with blank stares, confusion, and often flat-out dismissal. The strangeness was exacerbated by the fact that I wasn’t sure I knew, even secretly, what my “function” was. As we filled out the entry form at the UN, as so often before, Francisca looked at me puzzled. “Who are we with? What is my function?”
Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen Page 8
