Dying to Live

by Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga

  Our celebration was short-lived. Refugees from Bukavu and the Inera and Kashusha camps who had arrived at the village by way of Miti, preceded by Mobutu’s soldiers fleeing with the fruits of their plunder, informed us that the RPA soldiers and rebels were right behind us even though the Zairean armed forces had destroyed the bridge to slow their advance.

  So we quickly resumed walking towards Walikale, northwest, still hoping that relief would come from the UN, whose planes flew over us every day. This time, we weren’t walking on a forest path, but on a road through the bush alongside which there were scattered dwellings.

  Three days after our stop in Hombo, we learned that RPA soldiers and rebels had attacked the village, killing every refugee they could find and forcing those who were not yet out of the woods to stay there, wedged between the gunmen attacking Shanje and those attacking Hombo. Today, sixteen years later, we know that there are people who were able to withstand the harsh environment and the attacks by RPA soldiers who still roam the forest, where they are pursued and hunted down like animals.

  The sad news spurred us to quicken our pace, as we were afraid that our motorized pursuers would benefit from the paved road to easily catch up with us. The thought that RPA soldiers coming down from Goma could reach Walikale by road through the town of Bunia in the north and thus outflank us especially motivated us to walk faster. We had to get past Walikale before they arrived there in order to continue on to Kisangani.

  As we advanced, the road became worse and worse, finally becoming totally impassable for vehicles. Abandoned along the road were 4x4s that Zairean soldiers had requisitioned back in Bukavu, and military equipment and munitions, including some Katyusha rocket launchers. In their confusion, the Zairean soldiers spread terror in all the villages through which they passed. They killed, raped, stole, tortured and shot into the air to scare people so they would give them food (goats, chickens, bananas ...) and even some of the gemstones abundant in the region.

  Walikale, two hundred and fifty kilometers northwest of Bukavu and four hundred kilometers from Kisangani, was a small town with old houses for the most part in ruins, but more or less in decent shape compared to the villages we had passed through. When we arrived, there were a dozen Zairean policemen patrolling who prevented us from camping there and urged us to continue on our way. The local residents brought food to sell along the road, such as cassava, bananas, sugar cane and rice. My family and I spent a pleasant afternoon there taking advantage of the clear water of the river that ran through the town to take a nice long bath in the hot sun. It was probably the first time that we had been able to wash since we had evacuated the camps at the beginning of November 1996.

  Despite the presence of a small airfield, we had no reason to stay at this very dangerous intersection. In addition, rumours were circulating that a new camp was going up twelve kilometers west of the city. We had to hurry to get there if we wanted to get a decent spot. In this new makeshift camp, thousands of refugees were already crammed in together waiting for the coming of the UN, like the Messiah. A small yellow plane flew overhead every day without ever landing. On whose orders I don’t know, men began clearing the bush and cutting down trees that had overgrown the runway. They were hoping to receive food and medicine. After two days of waiting and seeing nothing happen, we resumed our march towards Kisangani, thinking we’d be safer there, especially as the government of Zaire had just set up its headquarters there for the war raging in the east.

  The road from Walikale to Kisangani was paved and as wide as it was straight, a good road, incomparable to those of our country by a lot, but in places overgrown by bush due to a lack of maintenance and especially of traffic. On average, two vehicles might use it over a week! It was lined with small villages about ten kilometers apart and situated on the banks of the abundant rivers of the region, with clear water filtered by the humus of the great forest.

  As Mobutu’s troops had passed through, the inhabitants of these villages had fled deep into the woods, taking with them everything they could: clothing, food, farm animals, etc. These people were obviously accustomed to abandoning their homes along the road, because every village had a camp in the forest where the residents could take shelter when a threat arose. It was a common reality in a country where the soldiers were poorly paid or not paid at all and forced to survive by stealing from the people.

  Area villagers had also developed an efficient and sophisticated way to communicate with other villages. On drums made from hollowed tree trunks, they beat out patterns adapted to the situation: danger warnings, invitations to festivities, death announcements, a wedding, an attack, etc. Whenever we arrived in a village, a small group of men would mingle trying to sell us food. As soon as they realized that we were not a threat, they’d start drumming and a whole host of people would emerge from the woods to sell food or exchange it for a variety of items, especially clothes, radios, machetes, or tarpaulins, which were very popular in the rainforest where the roofs were made of straw.

  As the road stretched on, the notions of time and distance were overshadowed by poverty, illness, fatigue, hunger and especially by the visceral fear of the RPA and the rebels, who continued tracking us. The problem wasn’t in front of us, but behind us. A cane in his hand, a bag on top of her head, a sack on her back, a child on his shoulders, men and women walked slowly on the edge of the asphalt road, which shimmered in the hot sun, burning their feet, bare and laced with wounds, reminders of the terrible crossing of the forest between Shanje and Hombo. Naturally, not everyone moved at the same speed. Young people who had neither children nor parents to stick with formed the advance of the column, which enabled them to find food along their way that was still in good condition, such as fruit. In the middle of the line were families with children who could only cover a few kilometers a day. At the end of the column were the old and the sick and a handful of armed men to protect our rear. At the beginning of the trip, two or three days’ journey separated the first and last walker. We had now been travelling for a month, and a distance covered by two weeks of walking now separated the front ranks from the last stragglers of this procession of three hundred thousand people.

  In this region, located just a few degrees south of the equator, December coincides with the beginning of the short dry season. The torrential rains of recent months had been replaced by the warmth of the sun shining twelve hours a day and scorching everything on the ground. Most people now preferred to walk at night to avoid the daytime’s high temperatures and the risk of sunburn. My family and I gave it a try, but we quickly discovered that it was very hard and exhausting for the children to do. We decided to continue walking during the day and made sure that we didn’t sleep more than once in the same place. It was back on the road every day.

  Our days were divided into three main phases. We’d wake at dawn and fold up the tarp. We’d set out walking, each person with their own luggage. As it was still dark, my wife and I would carry our youngest daughter Emmérence until around eight o’clock in the morning. About eleven o’clock, the sun would become insufferable, the heat oppressive, our bellies empty. A good time to take a break. We’d settle in a shady spot in a village when we were lucky enough to find one. We’d set down our bags and eat our meal, leftovers from the night before. This would be a good time to scavenge for food. Leaving my family to rest, I’d root around the deserted village, like a tracking dog, in the hopes of finding something edible. I’d search the river bottom for cassava, which the villagers would ferment under water in order to eliminate toxicity. If I was lucky, I’d find some fish caught in traps. I would also go looking out in the fields. Since they aren’t always located close to the villages, I had to find and follow tracks through the forest sometimes for a distance of up to a mile. Once I had discovered a field, I’d first look to see if there were any fruit like bananas or papayas. Then I’d hunt for tubers such as taro and yams. I frequently found cassava, but it had to be tasted to see if it was sweet. Of course, it was a risky
operation, because the villagers were sometimes standing guard over their fields, sometimes with shotguns, as I once experienced.

  That day, I followed a small trail through the forest. After ten minutes, I came across a field where there were a lot of bananas and sweet cassavas. I picked two bunches of plantain bananas and brought them back to the village where I had left my family. Seeing what I was carrying, other refugees begged me to take them to the field. While waiting for them to gather their harvest, I walked further into the field in search of ripe bananas. Suddenly, I saw three women and two men with spears and a shotgun. When they started talking to me, the others fled. After surrounding me, the strangers asked me to put down the small axe that I was carrying. Realizing that they were afraid, I darted towards them as though desperate, and, as if by magic, they yielded enough space for me to get away. When I re-joined my family in the village, everyone was crying because they had been told that the owners of the field had killed me.

  Around three o’clock in the afternoon, the sun having decreased in intensity, we’d resume walking to try to add a few kilometers to the morning’s hike. By six o’clock, the sun was setting. We’d be very tired and need to find somewhere to sleep. The ideal place was obviously a village, but in this sea of greenery, you could walk for a day or two without coming across one. When that happened, it’d be necessary to spend the night in the bush beside the road. Before sleeping, while my wife was busy massaging the children’s feet and cleaning their wounds with warm water, I’d pitch our tent. We had invented a very quick and easy way to put it up in a couple of minutes using just three pieces of wood that we used as walking sticks during the day.

  For those of us who had radios, the evening was also the time to listen to the news. We knew that the world’s media were talking about us and there were, here and there, including at the United Nations, attempts to solve our problem. The most listened to stations were Radio-France Interna­tionale, Voice of America with its broadcast produced in the Burundian and Rwandan languages of Kirundi and Kinyarwanda, the BBC and its program entitled Gahuzami-ryango, and to a lesser extent Radio Rwanda, which extolled the victories of the Banyamulenge while continuing to deny Rwandan army involvement in the massacre of refugees. It was also a good way to know how much distance separated us from our pursuers and so to be able to decide whether to increase our pace or ease off a bit.

  Before going to sleep, we’d pray. In this extremely difficult time, we had only God to rely on. We had all become believers, and everything we experienced throughout the day seemed nothing short of miraculous. How else could you explain how all these people could walk down the same path and find food and water, and were able to cross large rivers without knowing how to swim, if not by divine grace?

  Ten days after leaving Walikale, we reached the Oso River bridge, which marks the border between the provinces of North Kivu and Maniema. Some Zairean soldiers told us that NGOs were waiting to help us at Amisi, a few more hours of walking. Upon our arrival in Amisi, a small and relatively clean town, we noticed some tents had been erected at the end of a landing strip fashioned into the road, which had also been enlarged. Amisi was an outpost built by NGOs to welcome and care for the refugees coming out of the forest before sending them on towards Tingi-Tingi, three days’ journey away.

  It was there, at the world-famous camp of Tingi-Tingi, that my family and I, a few skeletons wrapped in torn and dirty rags, finally landed after a month and a half of walking, fifteen days after the arrival of the first refugees, who had been there since December 4.

  CHAPTER 4

  Tingi-Tingi or Misery Row

  Tingi-Tingi is a small village with a few thatched-roof houses mostly lining the right side of the paved road (the same one). It is located seven kilometers from Lubutu, the capital of Maniema province, and two hundred kilometers east of Kisangani.

  How did we end up at Tingi-Tingi?

  When we left Walikale, we had in mind that our next destination should be Kisangani, where the Zairean military headquarters for the eastern front had just been established. We hoped we would be able to receive food aid there, but more importantly, military protection. However, the Zairean military suddenly decided to make us all stop at Tingi-Tingi. The official story was that they could not let three hundred thousand people invade Kisangani, which would have seriously compromised its defense. But we suspected that they wanted to use the refugees as a human shield and as advance scouts to detect any infiltration by the rebels, who in fact were mostly Rwandan and Burundian soldiers.

  The site also had the advantages of being a few kilometers from the Lubutu hospital and of having an airstrip that would facilitate supplying the camp. The builders of the Walikale-Kisangani road had created the airstrip simply by widening the pavement at strategic locations.

  The camp was located on the south side of the road, in what appeared to be a second-growth forest. There were traces of crops, such as cassava and palm oil, which suggested the soil had once been tilled. But it was now impenetrable bush dotted with trees of reasonable height.

  The refugees were grouped together according to the administrative jurisdictions they had belonged to in Rwanda: prefectures, communes and sectors. This way of organizing the camp was designed to facilitate people living together, but also to detect attempts at infiltration, reconnaissance or espionage on the part of RPA soldiers and rebels blending in with the refugees, since the soldiers, rebels and refugees all looked the same and spoke the same language!

  Those who still had their tarps built their shelters with them. Others had to make do with palm leaves, which also provided excellent protection against the sun and the heat that raged in December. After almost two months of uninterrupted walking, it felt good to find a place to pitch a tent and rest for a while. Indeed, it felt very good and was a great relief to realize that we would not have to hit the road again come the next day.

  From the middle of December 1996, refugees were crammed in large numbers into Tingi-Tingi. On average, ten thousand new people arrived every day, and problems related to lack of food, water and medicine quickly began to be felt. The high concentration of people weakened by hunger and the difficult trip provided fertile ground for the spread of disease.

  In the early days of our journey, we had been able to

  find something to eat in the villages. Now that we were all confined to one place in a virgin forest in the middle of nowhere, what were we to do? I watched the children, emaciated and lethargic, lying in front of the tents in the shade of the palm trees, surrounded by a swarm of flies that they let crawl into their nostrils. I was constantly in tears at my inability to feed them all. To avoid having to watch them dying, I’d take my walking stick and go for a walk around the site, just to distance myself a bit from their misery.

  In the area around Lubutu, seven kilometers from Tingi-Tingi, there were villages where food could be found, but the Zairean soldiers prohibited the men from going there, threatening to kill them if they did. Only women and children were allowed to go. So we decided to send our thirteen-year-old son Ange-Claude. He spent his days in the villages husking rice in a mortar. At the end of the day, they’d give him four cups. To re-enter the camp, he’d be required to give one cup to the Zairean soldiers who manned the roadblock at the entrance to Tingi-Tingi. For a little over a week, we were fed by the sweat and blood of our poor son.

  People found ways to survive. In Rwanda, people aren’t that familiar with wild game. Since there are no large natural forests, we don’t really know what kinds of plants and animals are edible in the wild. Most people don’t even know how to catch a fish. Clearly, the refugees who had previously lived on agriculture and livestock were not prepared for this primal form of subsistence. But little by little, under the pressure of hunger, the bravest began to learn hunting and gathering. They collected turtles and sometimes trapped snakes, which they didn’t eat, instead exchanging them with the Zaireans for rice. The story of two men who died after eating snake meat, however,
undoubtedly dampened the enthusiasm for hunting this game, which was nevertheless abundant. One man’s wife and children, who had refused to eat the dinner that had been served despite their gnawing hunger, definitely owed their lives to their squeamishness.

  After this incident we were limited to gathering old cassava leaves we sometimes found one or two days’ journey away. With no money to purchase food, or with the villagers unwilling to sell their crops, starving refugees had no choice but to steal, risking death at the hands of the local people known as Tiris, famous for their poisoned arrows. Quite a few refugees died at their hands.

  In the camp, the situation deteriorated steadily and the number of deaths increased exponentially. The dead being always entitled to respect, we found ways to organize funerals, however modest they may have been. After all, it was hard to show a corpse less respect than the living, who no longer enjoyed any. The ceremony was limited to burying the remains at a maximum of fifty centimeters deep, depend­­ing on the number of people participating and their physical condition. Before the arrival of the NGOs, we did not have the necessary equipment to dig graves, so that instead of shovels we used our hands to dig up the earth. The stench of rotting bodies, half buried in the cemetery five hundred meters from the camp, could be smelled from quite a distance away. Throughout the day, a steady stream of mourners filed down the road to the cemetery, and by the middle of January 1997, you could count a hundred funeral processions a day.

  December 25, 1996 was a Christmas unlike any other. Even before the civil war, more than ninety percent of Rwandans had been committed Christians. The events experienced in 1994 and the misery that ensued had reinforced us as believers and practitioners! The situation we were living through was beyond the reach of human agency and only God can work miracles! There was nothing else to do but pray, again and again. At this Christmas celebrated in the middle of the African jungle, we did not doubt God’s omnipresence. Everyone, dressed in their rags, gathered together in some corner of the camp around the pastor or priest, according to their denomination, asking God not, this time, to allow us to go home, but rather to give us food and spare us from the rebels’ bullets.