Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen

by Lisa J Shannon

  She wasn’t. She stood motionless in her son’s computer room. “Who is it this time?”

  “Lisa’s son.”

  Heritier.

  Kony-driven food shortages meant high food prices, which meant malnutrition. Anemia took over his little body, choking off oxygen to his brain.

  He had been living with his dad, who took him to the hospital far too late for B-12 shots and mega-doses of iron—if Dungu’s hospital even had vitamin shots. Heritier had only a day or two before he was gone. Baby-boy fingers and smiles and soft eyes were tucked into Dungu’s dark ground, like forever buried treasure.

  I catalogued the what-ifs: Could I have wired Heritier money somehow? What if I had leaned extra-hard on people from the US who occasionally travel to the area? Could they have taken care packages—messages, picture books, flower postcards, cash for food and medicine? Was there any way I could have brought him home? Shouldn’t I at least have asked? What if I had stayed in Dungu, just to be with him? Kevin did that, after all. Francisca swore there was nothing I could have done, that even she couldn’t wire money to Dungu. Even if I could have gotten money through, he was with his dad, who wouldn’t have used it for Heritier. Francisca told me, time and again, it wasn’t my role.

  Still, I’d let go of our delicate lifeline.

  And now, Heritier was gone.

  For the people of Orientale, there are all the things that are gone, that will never come back.

  Mayano, our first driver, drank himself to death. Heritier’s sick younger auntie, dead. Nyakangba won’t go through the programs like other returning child soldiers. He still talks about killing.

  Dieu Merci has never been seen again.

  Rumor has it Father Ferruccio, after all those years wedded to Africa, was sent back to Italy after a stroke.

  André, Fulabako, Marie, Antoinette, Bernard, Patrick, Kuli, all gone. Roger’s grave, abandoned with the plantation.

  The mango trees chopped in riotous protest, gone.

  Heritier, gone.

  Francisca of course got more calls. One day, it was her other cousin, a nun dragged from her vehicle by LRA and burned alive on the road. “They’re killing my people,” she said. She stared as tears blurred her sight, then dripped onto the protective glass on her dining room table like polka dots. “I need to do something.”

  In 2013 Francisca went back, for her first trip on her own. Things were a little better; security had improved after US Special Forces showed up in late 2011. One morning, she slipped over to the school that she helped found all those years before, where Kevin brought her bananas and peanut butter at snack break. She dropped off some pencils. Hundreds of students were crammed into four small classrooms and a few collapsing shelters whose roofs had blown away. The children carried bricks from home to use as seats. When it rained, they all stood and held their bricks as the water ran down the walls and rushed over the floor. More than six hundred students shared only one open hole in the ground for a toilet.

  Standing there, she decided that’s where she’d start. Even if everything else was washed away, if only one thing was allowed to grow, she decided it had to be the minds of Dungu’s children.

  For all of Orientale’s losses, there are still those things that do grow back. In Congo’s rich soil, something always grows.

  Attacks around Duru continued. Papa Alexander thought about moving back to the coffee plantation, maybe clearing the overgrown mess, cleansing the land of all those memories, and rebuilding like he did decades ago. But Cecelia said, flat out, No. If he went, he would have to do it on his own, because she would not step foot on that land again. Alexander won’t live without Cecelia. He listens to her now. So, it was decided.

  He went back to visit, though. To say good-bye, to return the plantation to the ancestors’ spirits, to the snakes and wild pigs, to let the vines eat it up. Maybe one day the trees with thorns will favor the soil and thrive there again.

  Papa Alexander didn’t want much of anything new. Years on, he still wore the tattered outfit he’d worn every day during our visit, dirt rubbed deep into the blue flip flops, blue slacks, and blue shirt, with a baseball cap shadowing his eyes. But Francisca’s brothers insisted: It’s time to live again. They bought him a red plaid button-down with short sleeves in crisp cotton, and a sharp pair of khakis with a belt, plus new sandals and a cap—a uniform as dignified in the cafés of Washington, DC, as in the government offices in India.

  Under Mama Koko’s oldest mango tree, Francisca’s brothers cleared the underbrush, laid a cement foundation, and began stacking adobe bricks for Mama Koko’s new house. Even if she still refused to keep the good dishes, or to invest in a new tablecloth, her new home will have a tin roof, its own private sitting room, and two bedrooms, one for her and one for Francisca.

  Back in Portland, when Francisca is not fundraising to rebuild the school, she dances around the living room alone. Sometimes she catches herself in the mirror, and says to herself out loud: Hello lovely! She spends her days off with grandkids and tends her urban pet chickens, who dart out of their enclosure to chase after her for back scratches. At work, as she organizes the olive bar, salt, or cheese display, customers might again hear her singing African hymns to no one in particular.

  As for me, when I think of Congo now, I push rewind, screeching backward, past the burnt grass like snow, the smoldering cinder huts, and the smoke still rising; past Mama Cecelia’s clean sweeps and washing, and the prayers sweet Marie sent floating to the heavens, hoping they’d stick.

  I linger on that day in August 2008, Roger and Marie’s wedding day, as though I could have accepted Francisca’s invitation to visit back then because times were good, gardens were lush, and the fish were the size of children.

  I imagine roaming the crowd throughout the celebration, mixing with the relatives who’d traveled all that way. I hear the Congolese church music echo out of the chapel, fading to thumping, trills, and hoots, punctuating the crowd’s dancing. Father Ferruccio playing games with the children. Roger’s brother André and son Fulabako, nearly men, fogging over with drink, playing it cool as they scan the crowd for girls. Dieu Merci stuffing himself on sweets. Nyakangba, the bride’s go-to helper, fetching whatever she needs. Mama Cecelia’s patient hand on Papa Alexander’s, as the two of them preside over the festivities. Mama Koko sitting next to them sipping a beer, her wry laugh mixing with the drumbeats. Marie in her carefully chosen super-wax gown, pressed and crisp, Roger in his new suit and tie, embracing her, dancing. A time when Orientale was still the real Congo, when they were still human, still blessed, and everything, every human choice, was still possible.

  Epilogue, or a Tale of Many Termites

  • • • •

  Once, I asked Francisca if she thought our visit, or her families’ stories, would make any difference. She said, “We have this saying: You need two termites to make oil, meaning union equals force. It’s like if you have one termite munching on some tree branch, then another termite comes along and starts chewing, pretty soon other termites sense it. There must be something good to chew on over there. Then, you have all the termites chewing on the branch and before you know it, the branch comes down. I didn’t think you could do it, or we could do it. But if sharing the story gets ten or twenty or a hundred more people involved, this LRA thing could be finished.”

  In some ways, things have gotten better in Dungu since our trip, thanks to the work of Congolese advocates like Dungu’s Abbey Benoit, who has tirelessly documented human rights abuses in the region, and partner organizations like the US-based Invisible Children, The Enough Project, and Resolve. Through the advocacy of everyday citizens—students, grandparents, moms—the United States Congress passed in 2010 the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, which mandated a regional strategy to end the violence. In late 2011, one hundred US Special Forces were deployed to central Africa to offer technical assistance to African troops hunting for Kony.

  The same wee
k Heritier died, the Kony 2012 video went viral and more than 100 million people learned about the conflict, triggering unprecedented interest in Kony’s capture and an end to the LRA. Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch summarized the impact of the video:

  We found so much more interest from a whole range of policymakers. I’ve been working in central Africa for 13 years. I’ve been documenting LRA atrocities since 2006 and Human Rights Watch has been doing it since the late 1990s. There have been peaks and troughs but we have never seen the kind of interest that Kony 2012 created. It was very very exciting… . There’s still a long way to go but the criticism of the video, which was so scathing and vitriolic … just completely missed the point. Kony is still out there… .

  As of the summer of 2014, Kony is indeed still out there. People are still dying even in Duru at the hands of the LRA, which now likely consist of fewer than one hundred core fighters.

  When people learn about atrocity, most often inspiration is squelched by doubts. Who am I to help? Is it my place? Questions like these make even die-hard activists screech to a halt.

  But these days I wonder if maybe the termite chewing—all our humane efforts—is like Father Ferruccio’s bells ringing through the burning night, seemingly pointless, dangerous, crazy, but perhaps a barely visible victory for God or good or love. Maybe they are like the stream-water prayers of Francisca’s ancestors, sputtered out into the forest, without knowing where they would land, what forest spirit they might touch. Maybe the best we can do is release each humane act, each best effort, to be another droplet sent sputtering into the world like a prayer, without knowing what rain it might bring down, and what blood it might wash away.

  What You Can Do Before Setting This Book Down

  • • • •

  I recently wrote my friend Sasha—the one who said, “If you see the LRA, you’re dead.” I asked him what readers might do one year from now, five years from now. He said, “Visit Kony in jail?”

  I love that thought. We don’t know how and when this madness of Kony’s will end. But the damage and the structural issues in Congo’s broken government that have allowed the violence to persist will take decades to heal. We can all do something to bring down that branch. Here are some top suggestions.

  1.Help Francisca rebuild Dungu and Congo’s future by supporting the work of Friends of Minzoto, which is partnering with the long-established Canadian Brother­hood in Dungu. For details on how you can help, visit minzoto.org.

  2.Invisible Children continues to work in LRA-affected communities, including Dungu, while advocating for an end to the violence. Visit www .invisiblechildren.com, which provides “LRA Tracker” reports on attacks and abductions.

  3.Check out The Enough Project’s Raise Hope for Congo Campaign. Support its efforts to end impunity in the Congolese army and to fight for security-sector reform. Stay abreast of opportunities to participate in initiatives to end atrocities in Congo and elsewhere by visiting www.enoughproject.org and www.raisehopeforcongo.org.

  4.Rebuild leadership capacity in Congo by supporting grassroots Congolese activists through The Eastern Congo Initiative at www.easterncongo.org.

  5.Sponsor your own “sister” in Congo through Women for Women International at www.womenforwomen.org.

  Appendix: Congo and Joseph Kony

  • • • •

  Congo’s Heart-of-Darkness mythology is deeply intermingled with age-old stereotypes of Africans. Few modern-day figures more perfectly fit the vision of the African “savage” than Joseph Kony: a crazed, power-hungry witch-doctor, roaming the forests with bands of armed youth, bludgeoning the innocent to serve delusional hopes of ruling a country all his own.

  It’s tempting to cast Kony as the bad guy because, well, he is. The International Criminal Court has anointed him the World’s Most Wanted Man. The fact that Kony’s violence has been allowed to go on—like so much of the violence in Congo—raises questions about the system in which Central Africa has broken down.

  In the interest of maintaining focus on the personal story of Francisca, Mama Koko, and their family, I chose to reserve an overview of the geopolitical background—which has cultivated the ongoing system of violence in Congo—for this appendix. What follows is a very brief synopsis of a complex history, and I encourage all interested readers to deepen their understanding of Congo and Joseph Kony with further reading and study.

  Joseph Kony emerged in the late 1980s as a self-proclaimed prophet and founded the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an offshoot of a rebellion led by an Acholi cult figure, Alice Auma. The LRA emerged as factions fought for control of Uganda, where the Acholi people in Northern Uganda had long been targets of mass atrocities. Kony, who had trained as a traditional healer as a young man, fused traditional Acholi beliefs and practices with bits of Christianity and set his sights on taking over Uganda. His goal was to rule over the country with the Bible’s Ten Commandments.

  Kony did not have much success recruiting ideologically driven rebels to his cause, so he filled his fighting force with abducted children. The militia launched horrific attacks on civilians and forced their abductees to become sexual slaves or to perform mutilations, massacres, and rapes and abduct more children. Conservative estimates indicate that during the LRA’s twenty years in Uganda, more than 20,000 children were abducted and nearly 2 million people were displaced.

  Though Kony branded himself as a cult leader and played the part to full dramatic effect by speaking in tongues, wearing wigs, and claiming spirit possessions, the vast majority of LRA fighters didn’t remain in his militia out of ideology or loyalty to Kony, but because they were afraid they’d be killed for trying to escape.

  In the late 1990s, the government of Uganda forced Acholi communities into camps termed “protected villages,” which were much like Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II—possibly to eliminate the threat of their collaboration with the LRA. The conditions in the camps were dire and there was little access to food, medicine, or basic livelihoods. Because of this, many human rights advocates also considered Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni a perpetrator of mass human rights abuses.

  Meanwhile, the government of Sudan—longtime foes of Uganda—provided ongoing support to the LRA in the form of military training, weapons, and a safe place to regroup.

  In 2005, the International Criminal Court issued indictments against Joseph Kony and several of his top commanders. The same year, a mass offensive by Ugandan troops finally pushed Kony to abandon his camps in Northern Uganda. More than 95 percent of the people residing in “protected villages” returned home. The region finally began to stabilize; since then, donor governments have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into rebuilding the area.

  But the LRA didn’t disappear; they just moved next door, into Congo’s Garamba National Park, and then to the swaths of forest stretching from Orientale Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo into Sudan and the Central African Republic.

  In early 2006, the United Nations sent Guatemalan Special Forces into the Garamba National Park, which was serving as a quasi-headquarters for the LRA. But the mission backfired and a four-hour shoot-out with the LRA left eight Guatemalan Special Forces dead. This bungled mission not only sparked intense debates within the UN, it also scared off other governments that may otherwise have sent troops to battle the LRA. So the LRA was left, uncontained.

  In September 2008, the LRA launched mass attacks on civilians in Congo. The attacks intensified by December 2008 in what is now known as the Christmas massacres. Hundreds of people were murdered during the holiday season.

  During the next two years, many LRA groups splintered, sometimes operating hundreds of miles from the next group, some maintaining little or no contact with Kony, who was hiding somewhere in the bush, ruling by satellite phone. Some members defected. By January 2010, when Francisca and I went to Dungu, official estimates indicated that LRA ranks had dwindled to no more than 150 to 200 core fighters
. Some estimated their numbers as fewer than 100. Nevertheless, the LRA’s reputation and the terror they instilled in the people of Congo were enough to allow them to reign over the region. Even as their attacks began to yield fewer victims, locals often fled, and more than 465,000 people in Congo, the Central African Republic, and Sudan were displaced.

  By 2010, in Congo alone, the LRA had killed more than 1,900 people, abducted more than 2,600, and displaced more than 347,000.

  But it wasn’t just the LRA and the UN’s failure to intervene that led to the violence suffered by families like Mama Koko’s. Congo’s essentially nonfunctioning government also fostered an environment in which locals were vulnerable to attacks and distrusting of their own leaders and army.

  To understand this collapse of local government—which allowed the LRA violence to spiral—we must look further back to the nineteenth century, when King Leopold of Belgium took control of Congo, making it the only colony in the world owned by one private individual. During his brutal rule, Congolese were chained up, mutilated, and beheaded by European administrators. It was during this period that Joseph Conrad penned Heart of Darkness. Though many considered the novel’s imagery—such as severed body parts strewn around an administrator’s garden—to be metaphorical, in fact, reviews of historical records indicate that some administrators did in fact keep severed heads of “natives” in their yards. Under King Leopold’s rule, Congo’s population plummeted by 10 million over a period of three decades. King Leopold built himself elaborate palaces out of funds from Congo’s looted goods such as rubber, all the while masquerading as a charitable leader who offered the Congolese people an opportunity to become civilized and protection from Arab slave traders.

  In 1911, Belgium took ownership of Congo and maintained colonial rule for the next fifty years. While Belgium focused on building infrastructure and extracting resources from the Congo, Congolese rarely advanced to managerial roles. When the Congolese people gained their independence in 1960, only nineteen Congolese people held college degrees and fewer than fourteen thousand were enrolled in secondary school. In a 1961 news report, journalist John A. Kennedy cited a conversation with a senior United Nations education consultant who said that Belgians chose to discourage Congolese from attending college because “students who were sent to England, France, or the United States to study came back as ‘partially educated radicals.’” 1