Dying to Live

by Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga

  It was these people who were surprised by the sudden arrival of a number of Kinyarwanda-speaking soldiers who stormed into Wendji aboard Tata trucks. They attacked the camp by firing on anything that moved and by tossing grenades at groups of refugees and into any possible hiding place. Having nowhere to run, the poor refugees rushed into the river, where they were shot to death and drowned. After a few hours, the dead numbered in the hundreds. Local people, who watched helplessly as the carnage unfolded, were ordered late in the afternoon to clean up the encampment by throwing the dead into the river and covering the pools of blood with dirt. For the next six months these indigenous people would abstain from eating fish from the Congo that had fed on human flesh, even though fish is normally part of their basic diet!

  While one group of soldiers searched throughout the village of Wendji, another boarded two trucks towards Mbandaka. On the way, they fired their machine guns at refugees who were fleeing north in response to the warnings of the refugees from Ingende.

  In Mbandaka, refugees arriving in the city after May 9 were sent by the police to facilities of the Zairean Office national des transports (ONATRA – national mass transit company), to wait for a boat that could take them either to Kinshasa or Congo-Brazzaville. Unfortunately, they were surprised by the arrival of the RPA who slaughtered them down at the docks. They conducted search campaigns throughout the town, hunting down and killing the refugees and locals who had offered them refuge.

  With the help of HCR and other NGOs, a transit center was later set up for the survivors. Mostly dying women and children, they were sheltered in this camp of misery before being repatriated to Rwanda by air.

  Meanwhile, canoes crammed with refugees who had escaped the Wendji massacre continued to arrive in the small village where we were staying, sheltered by the local population, We were afraid that they were being followed by the killers, and whenever we saw a boat in the distance, we’d hide in the forest until the identity of its occupants could be verified. Some boats pulled ashore on the island, but others passed by without stopping to put more distance between them and the danger.

  Through the means of another hundred-dollar bill, we convinced two young men to take us on to the market at Mayita, where merchants from Congo-Brazzaville could, they told us, arrange to take us back with them. In order to avoid problems with the other islanders, the boatmen preferred to organize the voyage at night, to the delight of many mosquito species that inhabited the marshy environment and whose bite felt the same as getting an IV injection at the clinic.

  Once we arrived at the Mayita market, on another island, local villagers told us that we had once again been fleeced; that the Congolese merchants did not come to this market, but rather the one at Mobenzano, which was a half-day canoe trip to the west. We had to pay another hundred dollars for the trip to Mobenzano. We arrived there in the morning, four days after our departure from Wendji.

  Unfortunately, the market was only held one day a week and had just taken place the day before! The islanders refused to take us to Congo-Brazzaville, claiming that their neighbours on the other side of the river were enemies who thought they were even more disgusting than snakes, as in the famous Lingala adage “Boma Zairian nyoka tika” which means “kill the Zairean and leave the snake!” Later we learned that it was true that this hatred towards Zairean Congolese existed and was based on the habit the Zaireans had of stealing fish and game caught in their neighbours’ traps!

  Since we couldn’t afford to wait for the market to be held the following week, we negotiated with the locals to at least take us to the border, for a fee, of course. This was not without difficulty, as the inhabitants of this deep jungle had themselves never heard of the dollar. Having nothing smaller, we had no choice but to pay in hundred-dollar bills!

  As people were always transported under cover of darkness, it wasn’t until dawn on May 17, 1997, that we were discretely left off in a village called Bruxelles, located on the east bank of the Oubangui River, across the river from the village of Ndjoundou in Congo-Brazzaville. A crowd of over a hundred other refugees were already waiting there, having spent the night after being denied permission to cross the river by the Congolese border guard on duty. He claimed to be waiting for a decision from his superiors whether to allow the Rwandan refugees, most of whom didn’t have any identification, to enter the Congo.

  Finally, on that memorable afternoon of May 17, permission was granted and we were able to reach Congo-Brazzaville, where we would finally be out of our tormentors’ reach. We were ferried across at no charge, thanks to the local authorities and the population of the village of Ndjoundou. We finally said goodbye to Zaire, after a long and difficult seven and a half months’ journey through the jungle. All told, we had walked nearly three thousand kilometers.

  CHAPTER 7

  Changing Sexual

  Sensibilities and Mores

  in the Refugee Camps

  Before continuing the story of our journey, I would like to take a moment to discuss a point that seems important: how life in the camps affected the refugees’ sexual sensibilities and mores.

  Generally, Rwandans are very reserved sexually, and it is extremely rare to see public demonstrations of affection. When we are out in society, we do not kiss, caress or walk hand in hand; we avoid saying the words for sexual organs, etc. Everything sexual happens in the utmost privacy.

  The crowding together of thousands of people into the camps created a new way of life that little by little forced the occupants to accept new forms of sexual expression in order to adapt to their new situation. Before, people had typically lived in isolated houses surrounded by fields rather than in villages, and the Rwandan refugees had to learn—not without difficulty—to deal with the overcrowding that characterized daily life in the camps, where people were packed in like sardines.

  Acutely conscious of the proximity of their neighbours, most of the refugees built fences around their tents in an attempt to re-create as much as possible the dispersed and individualistic character of their housing in Rwanda. But there wasn’t much privacy inside the tent either, with parents and children sharing one very tiny room. Entire families coexisted in nine square meters. And, given the fecundity of Rwandan women, the number of children in one tent could often exceed seven or eight.

  Finding privacy was naturally difficult in this situation, and couples had to exercise discretion to avoid traumatizing their children. Even those who didn’t have children or who had infants could not be very demonstrative in a transparent tent where everything could be seen and heard by the neighbours, whose own tent was at the most one meter away. Thus, the practice of kunyaza (wet sex) that Rwandans are renowned for, which involves vigorously tapping the woman’s external genitals with the penis, causing profuse secretions and very loud sounds, was abandoned because it risked waking up either the children, the neighbourhood or both. This way of making love that both men and women from Rwanda delight in was both impractical and inappropriate given the circumstances. Except under the cover of a driving rain or midnight thunderstorm, couples had to make do with alternative methods that made less noise, but were also less entertaining and exciting!

  Despite the restraint of parents concerned about their children’s development, the inevitable exposure of young people to sex that came with living in close quarters had an impact on the kinds of relationships they developed in the camps. Teenagers, both girls and boys, shocked or made curious by the open sexual relations of their parents, sometimes responded by leaving the family tent. Their options included living together in the same tent with other teens, or looking for a sexual partner of their own with whom to start a family. This strategy was not only a means of satisfying their libido, but also and especially a way to achieve a kind of complementarity. Rwandan men do not know how to cook, and are therefore dependent on finding a woman prepared to watch over a simmering pot for hours at a time. Thus, the man, who was usually the provider, would go out looking for food, and the woman would
cook it.

  A large number of children in the camps were not accompanied by adults, their parents having been lost along the way or killed. In addition, young women were in high demand due to the massive demobilization of young soldiers, often flush with the spoils of battle, to whose advances the young women, hungry and poor, were vulnerable. Parents whose children were no longer in school were confronted with the problems of idleness and delinquency. There were many widows in the camps whose husbands had been killed or imprisoned in Rwanda. In short, all the ingredients were there to lead teenagers down the road towards early marriage, sexual promiscuity and prostitution.

  In the camps, marriage usually took the form of a simple arrangement between a girl and a boy or a man and a woman who agreed to share this life of poverty. There was no ceremony. But, as was the custom in Rwanda, when the girl’s parents learned of the arrangement, they could seek a dowry from their future son-in-law, which was no longer the traditional cow, but rather a sum of money determined by the size of the young man’s wallet. More conservative parents often demanded their daughter be formally married. At the beginning of our exodus, such weddings were conducted by former mayors who had fled Rwanda with the municipal seals needed to issue marriage certificates. Later on, it was Zairean camp administrators who presided over the ceremonies. For believers as well as for the most affluent, having a priest or pastor bless a marriage was the icing on the cake. Although people from different camps in the same region would sometimes enter into one of these different types of unions, they were most often arranged between people living in the same camp.

  In 1995 there was a massive influx of girls from Rwanda who came to the Kivu camps either to marry their old friends living in exile, or to seek a spouse, as marriage prospects in Rwanda had become virtually nonexistent, almost all young men having been either killed or imprisoned.

  The destruction of the camps by the RPA and Kabila’s rebels in 1996 and the pursuit of the refugees across Zaire dealt a fatal blow to what was left of the family structure. In the chaotic flight which often accompanied an attack on the camps, people lost track of loved ones swallowed by the human tide that flooded the country roads to escape the enemy’s advance and unfortunately did not have the good luck, as we did with Ange-Claude and Claudine, to later find their relatives somewhere along the road. And then there were those who were forcibly repatriated to Rwanda. Since they were rounded up like cattle, there was no way to ensure that family members stayed together. People did whatever they had to in order to survive. Sometimes a woman alone or with a couple of children, or a man and a woman without a child or children without parents, etc., would finally find themselves alone in Rwanda, the others having fled or been killed.

  It is safe to say that by the time all fighting had ceased, every refugee, whether in Rwanda, Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic, Angola, Zambia, or in the forests of Zaire, had lost members of their families. Unaware of the fate of their loved ones, never having seen their cadavers nor heard mention of the circumstances of their deaths, many held on to the hope of seeing them some day, and parents kept their baby cradles!

  For the rest, it was every man for himself. You had to escape, run, even without shoes, through this infinite ocean of dense forest and swamp where everything seemed hostile to human beings: ants, mosquitoes, flies, spiders whose bites would kill you, some of the world’s largest and deadliest snakes, roots, thorny branches, allergenic leaves and pollen, dead trees and branches which could fall on you in the ripple of the slightest breeze, rivers of previously unheard of dimensions filled with biting fish and giant crocodiles, all under a blazing sun! Mother Nature herself seemed to have made a pact with Kagame’s soldiers and rebels to contribute to our total extermination. In this extremely challenging world, physical strength, courage, luck and imagination played a role in enabling a small number of refugees to find solutions to problems with thousands of unknown variables and ultimately, to survive.

  Under these circumstances, it was absolutely vital to have a male at your side, otherwise it was very hard to get by. It was the man’s responsibility to transport food, tents, tools such as machetes or axes, to carry the youngest children or children who were sick or injured ... and sometimes even his wife! It was he who put up the tent at nightfall. While others were resting, it was he who ventured into the bush in search of food, water and firewood. He who built rafts to get his loved ones over the rivers. When bridges had to be jury rigged out of brush and fallen timber, it was he who was called upon. When it came time to answer to the local authorities for damage caused to property or misdemeanours, such as stealing food, it was the man who bent and took the caning.

  Because of this, women who were not accompanied by a man, young women and teenaged girls did everything in their power to attract a male companion, into what usually amounted to a casual or temporary alliance. They were often required to change sexual partners frequently throughout the journey, moving from one man to another in search of protection. In a way of looking at it, women were sold from one man to another without their knowledge. A man would simply tell his partner that he had business to attend to and that she should continue on with the person he had just introduced her to, all the while claiming that he would see her again later on down the road. The new protector would become her master until he handed her off to somebody else, either as an act of friendship or for an amount of money. Obviously, this was a game played mostly by the young single people who walked at the head of the line without too many responsibilities and with the added benefit of being the first to come upon whatever food there was to find.

  Men like me, who still had the “misfortune”—or so it seemed at the time—to be accompanied by women and children, lived another reality. In addition to the many daily tasks necessary for survival, we were responsible for keeping the whole group moving. And it wasn’t always easy! The trials we endured were particularly harsh and painful. On the road, everyone got tired, even the men! It was hard to cover the fifty kilometers a day we were forced to travel. At a certain point, the children who walked beside us simply could not take another step. They would then collapse on the side of the road and begin to cry. The women did the same. Just as tired, but carrying more responsibility than the others or perhaps more aware of the danger, men sometimes found themselves in the unfortunate necessity of having to use the chucotte (stick), as if he were driving a herd of cattle! He had to do it in spite of his better nature.

  The situation was very revealing of the degree of a person’s love, courage and patience. But for some, it was also a perfect opportunity to arrange things more to their liking. Why go to all the trouble to encourage a woman to keep on trying, when she was someone you didn’t even like and who you wanted to be rid of? Some very supposedly “courageous” men, in my eyes actually ruthless and cowardly, chose to save themselves, abandoning their wives and children. Short of miracle, it was a condemnation to death! Later, these men came to sorely regret their choices when they encountered others who, despite all the difficulties, had managed to stay with their families.

  The most unusual outcome was probably divorce. How could a couple decide mutually to separate on the road to exile, in the middle of the vast equatorial forest? One morning, we found a woman crying, sitting on the edge of the road with her three children, who asked us to intervene and ask her husband not to divorce her. It wasn’t easy to understand how a man could divorce his wife in full flight in the middle of nowhere. We also thought that if he was really determined to do so, he should ask her to leave the marital home, as is our custom. However, we were in the jungle! We advised the woman to take her children and follow her husband.

  Pregnant women were without a doubt among the people who suffered the most from the extreme conditions of our journey. With no doctors or nurses to care for them, many did not survive childbirth. Labour was most often conducted behind a bush beside the road, and after the delivery, the young mothers were forced to immediately resume walking in fear
of being overtaken by the soldiers and rebels!

  During our ordeal, the modesty that had previously characterized Rwandan sexuality disappeared in spite of anyone’s best intentions. The length and difficulty of the journey had reduced us to tatters. Women in torn clothes walked with breasts and buttocks uncovered; the men often with only a few pieces of cloth to cover their genitals! People simply did not have clothes to wear! Harassed by the midday sun, with the temperature climbing to over forty degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), everyone jumped into the river to cool down, and nobody was embarrassed to undress to go in the water. Sex had lost its importance. Anyway, there was nothing left to hide. Women’s breasts and buttocks had melted away and all their hair had fallen out! Everyone had lost at least half their weight and their libido as well.

  However, for those young men and women with no family responsibilities whose libido continued to function, it was still possible to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh. That became evident later on in Congo-Brazzaville, when a large number of women began to give birth starting in November 1997. The road babies had arrived!

  CHAPTER 8

  Congo-Brazzaville:

  Another Country,

  Another War

  We arrived in Congo-Brazzaville in the most deplorable physical state. The children were very sick and emaciated. We were at the end of our rope. Our only hope was to find a place where we could rest and heal in safety.