One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  “I talked once with a mzungu”—a white man—“from the Methodist church. He interviewed me and he helped me, gave me a blanket. But it got stolen,” he said.

  I told him that I did not have any blankets to give, though he had not actually asked. Savvy Keto knew how to get me to volunteer what he wanted to know. This gift for people, for reading them, for getting adults to open up to him, was a gift that had served Keto well in the past, would serve him well in the future. Maybe it was this that kept him alive when the world around him fell to pieces.

  We were eating granola bars while we talked, and I think he enjoyed that, perhaps saw it as fair barter for his story.

  “I’d like to help other children,” he said. I think he sensed my nervousness and wanted to make me feel more at ease. It was his turn to smile, to reassure me that he would talk, that he liked talking to visitors. It was embarrassing to be comforted by a child, a victim of war. I was supposed to be the expert here, providing the comfort, the support. My nervousness leveled the playing field for him, gave him a role to play. Keto did not want to be patronized; he wanted respect. He got it. He has it still.

  “It’s okay,” he said and settled back in his chair and started talking again. He told his story without interruptions, except to let the translator speak or to nod when I seemed to understand something on my own because he had used a French word that I knew. Both of us liked those few moments of direct connection as he spoke, but otherwise, he spoke without much emotion and without many pauses…. It amazed me at the time, though I grew used to it over the years, how so many children who had been through unspeakable horrors could talk about the most disturbing things with little emotion. These were the facts of their lives. These were their stories.

  “I came from Baraka,” Keto said. He told his story, how he sat in school with his brother listening to the teacher recite the French lessons for the day: je m’appelle, tu t’appelle, il s’appelle….

  “When I went home, I didn’t find my parents. My brother and I didn’t know where my parents or grandparents were.” They stood for a while in their empty home, calling for anyone they knew. With gunfire and flames around them, the two boys decided they must escape on their own. They made their way to the lake still clutching their schoolbooks to their chests. “They were our only possessions when we fled. I still have them after all these years.

  “We went first to Fizi, a place near where I am from, and there we found crowds of people. There we found my father’s brother. He said we should leave the Congo, but he wasn’t prepared to flee. We were later told that that uncle, who did not come with us, had been burnt to death in his house.”

  In Fizi, the boys found their mother again. “I don’t know what happened to my father—I have not seen him again—but my mother took us to Kibrizi, where refugees go when they get to Tanzania, and then we spent three years in the Nyaragusu refugee camp. Mom died in Nyaragusu. We heard lots of things…that mom died of AIDS, but I was young and didn’t understand. People were scared to care for us; they thought that I had AIDS, so we stayed with another uncle, but he left at the repatriation, went back to the Congo.”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted. I looked at the translator. “Did he say ‘repatriation’?”

  “Yes, he did,” my translator told me. “Some children learn all the words used by the UN, especially the unaccompanied minors. This one speaks very well, is very smart.”

  I turned back to Keto. I was amazed at the vocabulary that refugee life gave this kid. Words like “repatriation,” “transit center,” “food rationing,” and “distribution.” These terms are a reality for millions of the world’s children, and they learn them in order to survive. They are magic words, words that open doors. Conflict creates a new vocabulary, and the dependence these children have on international aid teaches them to speak its language. I was reminded of the sisters, six and nine years old, that Anna Freud mentions in her writings on the Hampstead Nurseries during World War II. Walking down a London street after an air raid, the girls would look at houses and declare “Incendiary Bomb” or “High Explosive” based on the damage. It was not a morbid interest in the weapons of mass destruction around them that made these two British girls munitions experts, it was just the world they lived in. For Keto, his world was humanitarian policy.

  Keto’s story sounded not rehearsed but performed, as if he already knew that part of living as a refugee was telling your story to foreigners, the price of admission to refuge.

  The asylum narrative is part biography, part myth, part plea, and part propaganda. It is how one person places himself, his terrible ordeals, in a larger context; how he makes the unreal real to those who can only imagine, how he becomes more than an individual suffering, part of a movement, a refugee, and in adding his story to the larger story of a people, of the displaced, he is simultaneously unique and not alone.

  “Ready?” my translator asked. “He wants to know if he can continue.”

  “Um, yes,” I said, flipping the page in my notebook and dropping my pen. He waited for me with his chin resting on his hand—his default position it seemed—while I got ready again. Keto was clearly the one in control here. “What did you do after your uncle left?”

  “We stayed with his girlfriend. My older brother didn’t like this woman, so he went back to the Congo, and when I was alone with her, she started hating me. That’s when Christian Outreach transferred me to this camp.”

  In Congo, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is destroying many of the normal structures that ensure children are not abandoned. In the past, in Congolese society, when a child’s parents died, the community took the child in and provided for him. The fear of AIDS, combined with intense poverty, disrupted this practice. Many children who lose relatives to AIDS are discriminated against, harassed, and often turned away. Besides the emotional turmoil of losing a parent, they have to face the hardships of abandonment, prejudice, and fear. And because of the war, soldiers moving around the country, taking many women, raping or sleeping with prostitutes, AIDS is spreading: a new kind of weapon in wars that are aimed at destroying civilian life. Many children do not have Keto’s good fortune in finding someone to care for him. And many, like him, had to flee not just the fighting, but the stigma of the disease, often more devastating than the soldiers. Communities do not want the burden of an unclean child. A recent trend suggests many of these children in the eastern Congo are being accused of witchcraft and sent away. They often find themselves working as child laborers in mines, benefiting little from the adults who exploit them. They are outcasts, unwanted, unmissed, and their deaths are rarely noticed. Many such children have met their end in the bottom of abandoned diamond pits.

  “In Lugufu, there was a man who knew me and knew that Mom had died. I stayed with him. He made sure I was studying, but I couldn’t afford the school fees for secondary school, so I had to go back to primary school. I started cutting grass and collecting it for people to build with so I could have money to pay for school, so I would be in school one month and out of school the next, working. Then they lowered the fees, so I could go back to school all the time. So that is my story of how I crossed. The journey was hard, but I don’t think I want to go back to Congo. I don’t know that I have anything to go back to.”

  He doesn’t.

  The Democratic Republic of Congo should be a wealthy nation. The ground is rich in gold, copper, diamonds, zinc, and coltan (a mineral used in cell phones). As is the case in many developing countries around the world, the presence of natural resources is, for most of its citizens, a curse. If the elites can draw their wealth directly from the ground, what need do they have of taxation? And without taxation, what need do they have of the people? Their mandate comes from control of the ground, control that can only be gained, can only be held by bestowing favors and by force. The people stand in the way of access to the earth, to the riches beneath the surface. The people demand services, protection, a piece of the wealth under their feet.
Power dragged from the earth has no love of the people; they are easier to deal with buried in it than standing on it. For this reason the history of the Congo has been a history of brutality. It has little to do with tribalism and “ancient ethnic hatreds,” the oft-spouted phrase that hides the true nature of the conflict: wealth and power.

  When the Congo was a Belgian colony at the dawn of the twentieth century, it was the personal property of King Leopold II. Using forced labor from the locals, he extracted a fortune from the vast territory, which is almost a hundred times the size of little Belgium. It is said in Congo that the streets of Brussels are paved with Congolese gold. The price for this gold was an estimated 10 million human beings dead, due to King Leopold’s policy of destroying crops and villages to quell revolt, forcing men, women, and children into slavery, and the free use of capital punishment.

  After independence from the Belgians in 1960, a U.S.-backed coup ousted the first democratically elected leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and placed the government in the hands of Joseph Désiré Mobutu in 1965. Mobutu was then the Army Chief of Staff. He was to rule for the next thirty-two years, stealing about 4 billion dollars from his country while many of the inhabitants remained some of the poorest people on earth. To describe his style of government, journalists used the term “kleptocracy.”

  He changed his name to the praise name Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, and changed the name of his country to Zaire, a Portuguese corruption of the name of the country’s largest river. He created “Mobutuism,” a policy designed to drive colonial influence from Zaire. To this end, he outlawed the necktie and designed a new fashion statement, the abacost: a two-piece outfit of pants and a tunic worn with an ascot. He was a master of the politics of the ground. He bestowed favors on his allies, access to the minerals and metals in the soil, and a share of his largess. Foreign companies and local Big Men benefited greatly from his favor, even as the people starved. Much like Marhsal Tito in Yugoslavia, he suppressed ethnic nationalism when it threatened him, and divided people along ethnic lines when it served his interests. The army wasn’t paid—he told them to fend for themselves with their weapons and take what they needed from the people.

  His rule grew more and more precarious. In 1995, the parliament passed a referendum that would strip Mobutu of all real power and leave him as a figurehead to create a smooth transition to democracy. It was one of the first and boldest democratic moves in Zaire since the coup that ousted Patrice Lumumba. Mobutu ignored the referendum, as did the rest of the world. But the frustrated political opposition to his rule turned into a military opposition soon enough.

  With the backing of Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi, the Marxist guerilla Laurent Kabila (who had fought briefly with Che Guevera during the late sixties), formed the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL) and marched on Kinshasa. He ousted Mobutu in 1997, and the man once known as the Father of the Nation became a refugee himself. Mobutu died in Rabat, Morocco, shortly after his exile began. He is buried there in a cemetery now, ironically, given Mobutu’s legacy in Africa, as “Pax.”

  Laurent Kabila’s takeover set the stage for the start of what would be known as Africa’s world war. After the fall of Mobutu, Kabila changed the name of the country to the Democratic Republic of Congo. He had come to power with the support of neighboring Rwanda, but resentment grew against Rwandan power in the Congo, and against his support of the Banyamulenge, who were Congolese Tutsis, often labled as Rwandan themselves. In order to shore up his political gains, Kabila turned against the Rwandan and Ugandan governments that had helped him invade the country and overthrow Mobutu. The Banyamulenge in the east rioted. Both Rwanda and Uganda invaded. Other nations jumped at the opportunity to exploit the abundant natural resources of the new “Republic” and rushed to Kabila’s aid, sending in their own armies. In 1998, all-out war began in the Congo.

  At any point there were five armies of other nations fighting, as well as countless local militias, like the Mayi Mayi (which consisted of at least twenty different factions), and the genocidal interhamwe from Rwanda. Rwanda’s legitimate army was fighting the interhamwe in the eastern Congo, as well as Kabila’s government based in Kinshasa, and extracting a wealth of diamonds from the land to finance the war. They also backed the rebel group RCD-Goma, who controlled most of the eastern half of the country.

  The war in the Congo was declared over in 2003. Four rebel leaders became vice-presidents. At the time of writing, fighting continues in the east, displacing thousands more people, some of whom had been hopeful that peace might finally come to their country with the end of the war and the first democratic elections since 1960. Azarias Ruberwa, the former head of RCD-Goma and now one of the vice-presidents (and a thwarted presidential hopeful with an army at his beck and call), suspended his party’s participation in the Kinshasa-based government for four days. Ethnic conflict between the Banyamulenge (Congolese Tutsis) and other ethnic groups has flared, resulting in massacres, widespread human rights abuses, and continued violence. Militias and bandits still terrorize much of the Ituri and North Kivu districts and for many Congolese the war has never ended.

  The war in the Congo killed nearly 4 million people as a direct result of violence or, far more commonly, due to malnutrition and disease exacerbated by the conflict. The International Rescue Committee reported that between 1998 and 2004, around 1,200 people died every day because of the war. That death toll is equivalent to three 9/11 terrorist attacks per week.

  While young children are the most vulnerable—one in four die before reaching five years old—it is adolescents who are the most susceptible to forced recruitment as soldiers, sexual exploitation, and exploitation of their labor. In short, it is adolescents who are most at risk for violent deaths. With their parents often unable to support them, adolescents in armed conflict are more likely to be sent from home to find work in the cities or to take on the burden of supporting the family themselves. Not yet adults, they are no longer nurtured as children. They have neither the protection of the young nor the rights of the grown.

  Keto was happy to show me his self-confidence, his ability to manage for himself during the violence and instability in the Congo and the camp. He figured out how to pay his own school fees and aid in supporting the man who had taken him in. He is a central figure in the economic survival of his caretaker as well as himself. He does not have, nor does he seem to want, a passive role in his well-being. He would like assistance, but he knows how to bargain to get it: telling mzungu researchers his story, for example.

  I heard similar stories to Keto’s throughout my time in the Congolese camps in Tanzania.

  “One day the soldiers came,” Michael told me. Michael, who was fifteen, fled the Congo almost two years before I met him. He, like Keto, lived near Baraka in the area of Fizi, where he worked with his father running a table in the market. He was extremely well dressed for what I had envisioned an African refugee would look like, especially an orphan. He had on a clean blue Oxford shirt and long khaki pants. He also had sneakers that would be considered nice by any standard, not particularly coated in the thick red dust that covered pretty much everything else, as if he had cleaned them moments before I arrived to meet him. He had indeed done so.

  He told me that he was suffering and that he lived on his own with boys his age who had also lost their parents, though he did not get along very well with them. He said they stole his clothes.

  “I borrowed these clothes to come here and meet you,” he told me. “One day, when I was bathing, I came back to get my clothes and the shirt I have was ripped. All my other clothes were stolen.”

  Michael sat very straight in his chair and smiled when he gave my hand a firm shake, like a businessman closing a deal. He was trying very hard to be like his father, who was a businessman. He used to travel with him, wheeling and dealing, he said in English: “Doing business.” If he had money, he told me, he would start buying and selling, traveling around
carrying on the business for his dad, whom he still wants very much to make proud.

  “I was in the back room when the rebels came,” he said. The rebels burst into his house, knowing his father was a businessman and would have money. The burst in through the front door armed with machetes and rifles. “That’s when I saw my mother and father killed, and all I could do was climb out the window.”

  He scratched the back of his head and looked at the floor. I was about to speak, to help him move from this painful memory. He was fidgeting and quivering slightly at the lip. Then he sat up straight again and met my eyes dead on. He was pulling himself together, not wanting to stop the interview.

  “It was chaos. I was running and everyone around me was running and when I got to the shore of the lake, I realized I had no money.”

  Standing at the side of the lake, young Michael started crying. Around him the world had erupted into violence. Moments earlier he had seen his parents killed. He could not go further on his own. If he stayed where he was he would either be forced into the army or die. Maybe both, in that order.

  “The man who had a boat saw me and took pity on me,” he said. “He said I could cross if I bailed the water out of the boat. So I got on and bailed water the whole time we crossed the lake. The boat was so crowded, and everyone was upset. When I first got to Kibrizi [the UN reception center] and saw the green plastic sheeting and all the people I didn’t know, all I thought of was my parents. A car took us to the camp, and now I live here. I have no clothes of my own and no money to do anything. I think about my father. I go to school. I play football, but there aren’t enough balls. I am a good striker. I win a lot of games.”

  Michael did not seem to get along with others the way Keto did. Usually, when I finished talking to a child in a refugee camp, a crowd would gather around that boy or girl, a multitude of other kids and several adults as well, wanting to find out what happened, what the mzungu wanted to talk about, what he had to say. Information is a valuable commodity in a refugee camp. When I walked, I tended to have a tail of about ten children behind me. When I walked with Michael, no children followed. One or two would come up and ask him a question to which he gave a brief answer, and then the other kids would look at me and the translator for a moment and walk away. No crowds gathered to Michael when we were done speaking. He walked off alone.