Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen

by Lisa J Shannon

  Admittedly, even back in the States, I lingered in unnaturally long pauses on the blank lines next to “Home Address.” I started to resent it. As in, Back off, bucko. Enough with the ‘Home Address’ bias. Not everyone has one, okay?

  In Congo, the “Marital Status” field also held a mocking tone. I had to check the only box that applied: Célibataire.

  I’d tried it all, but none of my pat answers worked here.

  After a few rounds of this, Francisca and I agreed, between delighted chuckles, on our new answers. Who are you with? Myself. What is your function? No function.

  Eventually we were let into the compound, figuring that our American passports had done the trick.

  Inside the air-conditioned offices, we met a mix of foreign and Congolese aid workers from the handful of NGOs in town, all there for a meeting. In pre-meeting chitchat, a scraggly European man described a new project he was developing: only a few million dollars to build a road circling the perimeter of Dungu, so the UN and Congolese army could use it for safety patrols. He drew the road project on scrap paper for us. That means the LRA would still be here, Francisca thought. Roads sound permanent. We don’t need to plan for the LRA long term. (Later that day I showed the sketch to Francisca’s brother Antoine, who crumpled the scrap-paper map and handed it back. He said summarily, “Get rid of the LRA.”)

  Another aid worker told us that the estimated number of remaining LRA soldiers—not including abducted children, but true commanders, leaders, believers—was fewer than a hundred, perhaps as low as sixty. The UN source suggested that official estimates were higher, for fear the international community would de-prioritize a response. My takeaway was the exact opposite, in that eliminating a hundred remaining core LRA fighters seemed like a manageable task.

  Francisca and I filed into a small conference room and sat against the wall. The Europeans and Americans took their seats at the conference table, while most of the Congolese crowded in the corners or stood silent against the walls. It seemed to Francisca they’d learned a long time ago that speaking up would get them nowhere.

  The discussion was conducted in French, so Francisca periodically whispered a rough translation to me. Even without French, it was easy to track, having narrowed to a debate between the Frenchman apparently in charge and a Congolese man advocating for investing in rebuilding the court system and prosecuting rapists.

  The Frenchman spoke the universal language of contempt. He rolled his eyes and exchanged knowing glances with the fellow foreigners, followed by variations on the standard French frowning and a pucker of the lower lip with a breathy sputter: Ph! It is not poss-ee-ble.

  Francisca watched, noting that he didn’t ask questions, especially “What do you think?” There’s another one, she thought. What does he base his decisions about aid on, if he doesn’t speak with people from here? How can you help me if you don’t know me?

  But the Frenchman thought an investment in rebuilding the court system in Dungu was ludicrous. And what he said went.

  The Mango Tree Riots

  • • • •

  “We won’t have mangoes this year,” Mama Koko mused, as we lounged on our stoop at the Procure—our daily ritual after arriving back from our self-imposed 4 p.m. curfew. “Normally they’re already the size of my thumb. But the flowers just bloomed and dried up. No fruit.”

  She paused, as though reading an oracle. “It’s going to be a hard year.”

  Food was on everyone’s mind. It was time to prepare the fields for the year’s planting. Following the LRA sightings on the outskirts of Dungu, everyone with land even a mile outside of town, especially to the north, mentally traced their route and calculated their odds. They had all pondered how fast they could run, who and what they would leave behind in that split second, should they see the dreadlocked men. They had all weighed the risk-and-regret equations, chewed the roulette fruits in their sleep. Would you die for a few piles of beans? Bushels of cassava?

  No, they would not clear and plant in the coming weeks. The markets were already dusty and bare, mostly with shiny white garlic in mesh packaging imported from China, along with some piles of salt, scattered peanuts, cans of oil marked “USA,” or oh-so-sweet pineapple on a good day, if you got there early enough. But little more would be coming. That meant hunger for most of the year.

  Earlier that morning, Francisca’s brother Antoine picked me up from an Internet session at the Canadian Brotherhood’s building with an announcement: Bad news. Something about tree cutting. I couldn’t quite make it out. When we arrived at the Procure, Francisca was waiting. Odd, as she was supposed to have left for Mama Koko’s an hour earlier. She greeted me. “Last night, there was an incident.”

  At Mama Koko’s and throughout the neighborhood, down-time conversation had centered on gunmen, in their varied uniforms, those UN boots that would not step out of their vehicles onto Bamokandi ground, those lips that would not part to smile at their children. All eyes tracked the Congolese army soldiers from elsewhere in Congo who caressed their teenage daughters with one hand but would not step off the main road to patrol, and would not raise their gun other than in late-night drunken squabbles or, on the odd day, when they herded the locals like cattle for slaughter, blocking their escape from an attack. And everyone eyed the dusty plumes kicked up by the smooth-riding, air-conditioned United Nations SUVs.

  Each resident of Bamokandi had been left to stew. Each resident of Dungu had privately asked themselves, Who is on my side? Not the ones in the SUVs. Not the ones in Congolese army uniforms. Not one of the gunmen.

  A popular rumor wove its way through Bamokandi: The gunmen are all on the same side. The United Nations secretly sponsors the LRA, giving them food, supplies, uniforms.

  That morning, the neighborhood was abuzz, with a new variation on that theme.

  The story had already filtered through layers of Bamokandi residents who saw it with their own eyes, or at least knew someone who knew someone who definitely saw it with their own eyes. The story on the prior day’s incident went like this: An off-duty Congolese army officer and his wife noticed a United Nations vehicle carrying six armed civilians. He followed the car and watched as it stopped. Civilians piled out of the back, armed, next to an entrance to the forest, at the same spot where LRA gunmen were sighted over the last few weeks. The Congolese army officer who was watching yelled: LRA!

  Every nervous Bamokandi ear had stayed trained for that call, poised for the cue of another attack.

  According to the witness, the men climbed back into the vehicle and sped off.

  It was just the spark needed to concretize the rumors. Locals now had proof: The UN was sponsoring the LRA.

  Bamokandi dwellers choked with rage.

  Men got their machetes. Their spears. Their guns. They took to the streets. As though to spit on thoughts of the future, they chopped down whole mango trees and laid them across the roads for miles, blocking all United Nations access, stoking each other: If they won’t protect us, we’ll protect ourselves.

  They covered the entire stretch from the UN airport through the attack area, up the road past Mama Koko’s, all the way to the bridge into town. When Francisca heard, she felt sick: Destroying the mango trees! They are killing the future. Even if one person survived this whole LRA thing, what would they eat?

  Congolese army officers fueled already-wound-up residents with coffee and cigarettes, encouraging them to stay awake all night. In the center of town, crowds gathered in protest and things continued to heat up. Francisca’s brother peered out of the front of Mama Koko’s house throughout the night, scared that it could get ugly fast.

  At some point, the United Nations officers fired shots.

  Stoking the standoff, the Congolese army fired back.

  Francisca’s family insisted that we stay at the mission in lockdown.

  I tried to no-big-deal the tension, focusing instead on unbraiding Francisca’s hair. But Francisca was shaky. Her mind drifted, mapping out a saf
ety plan. What will we do if this gets out of control? Normally, she’d take us both straight to the UN. Today, though, the UN was the enemy of the people. Being seen out and about could trigger attacks against me, if people mistook me for a UN operative.

  We’ll leave everything and run. What do we really need? Only our cameras and passports.

  We’ll hide. But what about Lisa’s bright white skin? Mine will blend into the shadows. Hers will glow, even far away, in the forest.

  I could rub her down with ash, all over her face and arms to make her dark, for camouflage. Then we could slip into the bush behind the Procure, and make our way to the forest next to the airport.

  We would hide out until we hear a plane land. Then I’d sneak out and try to convince the pilot to fly her out.

  She decided not to tell me about her escape plan until much later. She didn’t want me to worry.

  By midday, the center of town was flooded with Congolese soldiers, while UN helicopters flew back and forth from the town center to the airbase.

  We spent the day hanging around a hot cement hallway in the Procure. I analyzed the rash on my hand. I sipped warm bottled water, trying to avoid the harsh sun and my cave of a room, and texted updates about the riots for my mom to post on Facebook.

  Francisca and I kept our eyes on the parking lot, waiting for senior community leaders to pass through and give us periodic updates. Mostly all we heard was, The situation is tense.

  The mayor told us, “It’s big.”

  By evening, community leaders had passed through the Procure, admitting defeat after a day of negotiations. The UN had dismissed the incident as an invention of the Congolese army. It turned out that the chain of rumors started when a Congolese army officer had simply seen UN soldiers wearing new uniforms and mistook them for LRA. The UN failed to clarify the true story for a couple of days—a clarification that would have tempered the backlash.

  “The problem is that the Congolese army is known to make up stories to provoke upset,” another community leader added, looking shaken. “They know exactly the right buttons to push.”

  It seemed to work. For the remainder of our trip, I never heard anyone complain about the Congolese army’s failure to protect them. Not one more time.

  To make the most of a lost day of interviews, in the late afternoon we slipped over to the hospital nearby. In a dank, urine-stenched children’s ward lined with rusty metal beds, we met Fran­­cisca’s cousin Heritier, the still-nursing baby, Antoinette’s boy.

  Limp, with grief-stoned eyes, Heritier had been in the hospital for weeks, drained and refusing to rally, despite blood transfusions. It wasn’t that he’d been physically injured in the attack. But, the night in his dead mother’s arms had left him cold, as they all said. He caught cold. That cold seemed to have a vice-grip on him.

  Heritier’s dad dutifully hovered over him, somber and long-faced. I took some photos of Heritier, who struggled to sit up.

  “This is my other cousin!” Francisca blurted out. Sure enough, baby Heritier had a neighbor. Half of Dungu seemed to be Francisca’s “other cousin,” and the children’s ward was apparently no different. On a broken vinyl mattress a few beds over, a twenty-something mother cradled her firstborn and only child, also a baby boy. This other boy was fragile, pale with wasting arms, with disproportionately wide eyes as in those sketches of aliens, with the look of one foot out of this world. Francisca visited with the young mother, while I dotted her baby’s fragile arms and legs with butterfly stickers. The gifts elicited no more than a glance at the stickers and a stare at me.

  I moved back to Heritier, placing a couple of stickers on his hands, too. He looked confused. I could only offer perfunctory condolences. Hoping to help the boy, on our way out I slipped Heritier’s dad twenty dollars.

  Ash-Like Snow

  • • • •

  The day after the mango tree riots, the governor of Orientale Province stepped in, declaring that the real problem was the mayor of Dungu. The locals needed a villain and the governor knew that he had to make someone—anyone—responsible for the incident to pacify them. Firing the mayor did the trick.

  The riots subsided the next morning, but Bamokandi still smoldered.

  Keen to see the remnants of the machete-wielding rioters, we trailed after the air-tight UN SUVs resuming their morning commutes between the air base and town, as locals cleared the downed mango trees from the road.

  At the cusp of town, Mayano pointed to a Protestant mission. “They saw the LRA this morning.”

  We pulled into the brick complex, all but abandoned save a few groundskeepers and a minister. Now, this place was what I had pictured from the sky over Congo, this was what I had imagined of Le Procure de Mission: spotless and nestled into grassy rolling hills.

  As we stepped out of the car, the air crackled and gurgled with fire. I looked up at the hazy sky. Ash and burnt grass drifted in the air like snow. Smoke rose in a ring from the ravines encircling the mission.

  Francisca scoped the place out, imagining from behind what tree or road or field the LRA might surprise us. As was becoming a habit, she mentally worked through our getaway: The river is close by, through the forest. I know the fishermen in the area who keep canoes. We could run through the forest and catch a canoe back into town. Yes, that would work. Most white people—if you say “Run!”—wouldn’t just run into the bush. But Lisa, she’s a runner. She runs in the forest. If I say “Run!” she’ll run through the bush.

  Groundskeepers led us to the far end of the hilltop and pointed into the forested ravine, a jungle dense with ancient trees and climbing vines. The LRA were sighted there the night before in the underbrush, a big flashlight in the trees and darkness.

  “How did you know it was them?” I asked.

  “We could see their flashlight,” the groundskeeper said.

  “But how did you know it was them?”

  “It was them.”

  There wasn’t much more to say about it. This Protestant mission was in the inauspicious position of being the last compound before the bush, teetering on the edge of town. If anyone was going to receive LRA visitors, the mission was surely it.

  Walking back to the car we saw, from a distance, a group of men emerge from the burning ravines. They had weapons.

  I tensed.

  “Local defense,” Francisca said.

  The label wasn’t soothing, given the rioting, threats, warnings from leaders to stay away because locals might take out all of those frustrations on a foreigner, even with Francisca at my side. In fact, I’d never run across a militia that didn’t consider itself some form of “local defense.” Given the explosive riots and the ominous sight of any and every machete I’d seen in Congo, I could only assume “local defense” equaled menacing and bloodthirsty.

  They called to us. We stopped. They moved closer. Their bulky male forms seemed to shrivel and their weapons came into focus. They were downright rickety. Closer still, and my tension drained to heartbreak as the four approached. A bean stalk of a boy, no more than thirteen years old, held a homemade mini-spear. A shy-ish, slender man wore a homemade slingshot around his neck, and carried a bow and arrow set made of twigs and twine. The third man held a metal spear almost his height. And then there was the white-bearded, sixty-something school principal, to whom they’d assigned the most deadly of their weapons, a rusty machete, presumably to bulk up the meekness suggested by his utilitarian school administrator uniform. They’d spent the whole morning burning the ravines and fields around the church, to eliminate potential hideouts for LRA gunmen.

  Francisca thought: There’s our protection. If the LRA show up, these guys will take care of us.

  What was the master plan of these mad rioters, rushing to the defense of their people, charging the front lines? I struggled to see it. What exactly would they do when an LRA loomed over them or their neighbors with an A-K or axe? Sting him with a hand-chiseled spear? Shoot an arrow from the bow, taut with frayed twine? Slingshot h
im?

  These were Dungu’s few good men. Stacked against the UN and Congolese army’s meager stores of valor, they were certainly the best and bravest. Based on the desperation in their eyes, I’d guess they would have burned down the whole Congo basin forest if it meant smoking out the LRA.

  Burnt grass had sliced streaks on their sweaty arms and pants, and left charcoal crisscross markings on their faces. Ash drifted through the air in swarms, burnt and lost, like prayers caught in some crosswind.

  “What do you want?” I asked. “What do you want the world to know?”

  “We need peace,” one of them said. “Stability.”

  We walked back to the car, now dusted with ash that had settled on the hood and windshield. One of the men called after us. “We don’t want cornmeal! What is that stuff, anyway?”

  Reception

  • • • •

  A couple of days after the riots, we resumed our interviews back at Mama Koko’s. Francisca and I held court at the yapu as neighbors and family rotated in and out. Whenever we emerged from interviews, Mama Koko pulled Francisca aside and let her know who had stopped by for a visit and how long they’d waited to greet her. She relayed how insulted and angry they were when they left without so much as a hello.

  Francisca was torn. She’d already floated the idea of wrapping up the interviews (“enough of this LRA talk”) and dedicating the rest of her time to the family. I was annoyed, and tried to remind Francisca of the reason I was spending my scarce funds on the trip, that the interviews and research were essential and meant to be support for her family. Francisca in turn tried to explain to the family that this trip was different, but they didn’t get it.

  “Can’t you just ask your friend for more free time?” Mama Koko asked. “Why don’t you just tell her you can’t do any more? We’d like to visit more with her, too.”

  I tried to give them space. Francisca and Mama Koko took alone-time during our evenings and pre-breakfast hours, while I paced the dusty courtyard at the Procure, waving my cell phone at the sky, checking for reception.