Dying to Live

by Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga

  Ndjoundou, the village that welcomed us on the afternoon of May 17, 1997, was located on the right bank of the Oubangui River and inhabited by a few hundred people at the most, the majority of whom were fishermen and hunters. Surrounded by a dark and vast primary growth forest, the only access to the village was the river. We hoped that we would finally be at peace, reasoning that our killers would not cross into the Congo in our pursuit.

  Upon our arrival, after thoroughly searching us for any weapons, the local authorities led us to an area behind the village where we could set up. The site was in the woods and we had to provide our own shelter: a tent for those who still had their tarps or alternatively, a palm-leaf roof hut.

  The local people were very generous, especially towards the children, offering them food and clothes. But after two days, the influx of refugees began to strain their limited resources. The local Red Cross then took over and started providing first aid, such as bandaging wounds and distributing malaria pills. In addition, Congolese policemen assumed responsibility for the refugees’ security.

  Speculators quickly descended on us from Mossaka, a city to the south, offering to exchange our dollars for CFA francs at disadvantageous and non-negotiable rates. We needed local currency to buy the food, such as fish and manioc flour, which was abundant in the region.

  A week after our arrival, the UNHCR and Doctors Without Borders began to provide medical care and distribute food, such as wheat flour, rice, salt and peas. Taking advantage of the presence of doctors in Ndjoundou, we had the cast Emmérence had been wearing since she had fractured her arm at Tingi-Tingi removed. We hadn’t wanted to take it off without a doctor since we wouldn’t have known what to do if the bone had not set properly.

  While in Ndjoundou, we learned the already old news that Kinshasa had fallen and that Zaire was now controlled by Kabila and his accomplices. The change in the situation brought immediate consequences for us. After the fall of Zaire’s capital, the Rwandan government began negotiations with the authorities in Brazzaville, led by President Lissouba, to repatriate Rwandan refugees on Congolese soil. So instead of the peaceful haven we thought we had found, we actually were caught up in an unfolding nightmare.

  Well-armed police from Brazzaville were dispatched to Ndjoundou, surrounding our camp and preventing us from leaving. They were keeping us there until we could be transferred to the Congolese capital of Brazzaville where we would then be sent back to Rwanda by air. Once again, anxiety and terror besieged the 3,500 refugees, already pushed to the breaking point. We couldn’t believe we would end up in the lion’s den in Kigali after so much effort to escape our executioners.

  We began to wonder if there was any way to get out of our open-air prison and to avoid being repatriated against our will. The only solution we saw was leaving Congo-Brazzaville. But it wasn’t so simple. You had to be crazy or as desperate as we were to even consider such a scenario.

  Among the countries nearby Congo-Brazzaville, namely Gabon, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Angola and of course, Zaire, where there was obviously no question of returning, the closest to us was the Central African Republic. The border was more than five hundred kilometers north of Ndjoundou and could only be reached by the Oubangui River through the city of Impfondo, capital of Likouala province. But in Impfondo, we would risk being intercepted by the Congolese military or police. We decided to take the western route, hoping to make it to Cameroon or Gabon. In the 1980s, to address the problem of overpopulation in Rwanda, Kigali had negotiated an understanding with the Gabonese government in Libreville to accept a number of immigrants from Rwanda to Gabon. We therefore thought that we would be welcome there.

  I started asking the villagers whether it was possible to travel west from Ndjoundou. But in this marshy area crosshatched by rivers, there were no roads or trails: the only way to travel was by water. Not only did we not have enough money to pay for a long canoe ride, but we were afraid of being caught by the police and treated as fugitives.

  I was introduced to a man who claimed to be a hunter and who promised, for a fee, to escort us through the forest to the village of Youmba, situated on the Likouala-aux-herbes River, a three-day hike. He said that he had hunted extensively in the forest and knew its every nook and cranny. Once the agreement was negotiated, we began to gather everything we might need to survive in the jungle for several days. Our preparations had to be conducted under the utmost secrecy to avoid arousing the suspicions of the police or other refugees who, out of jealousy, might turn us in. At nightfall, when we were ready, my sister Thérèse’s family and my own began quietly to leave the camp where we had been confined like animals. We had to separate into small groups and find a break in the perimeter security to get past the police surveillance.

  Under cover of darkness, the hunter loaded us into his canoe and paddled us to a small campsite in an uninhabited area on the banks of the Oubangui River, a few miles north of Ndjoundou. From there, we would begin our journey into the forest. When we arrived, we discovered a small group of refugees were already there. Our guide returned to Ndjoundou that same night and brought another group the next night, so we had to wait a whole day before starting what would prove to be our worst experience up to that point.

  With the entire convoy now assembled, we started off early in the morning down a path dimly lit by the few rays of sunlight that penetrated the dense foliage of the gigantic trees. As we descended into the sea of calm and peaceful greenery, the trail faded away until it completely disappeared, and so as to avoid getting lost, we had to stay close to our guide, who had been joined by a colleague. They were armed with a shotgun, an axe and a machete, essential equipment for survival in this jungle.

  By four o’clock on that first day of walking, we were all exhausted and we decided to stop after finding a place to spend the night under the stars. The sharp thorns that littered the forest floor had bloodied our shoeless feet. The hunters, used to going barefoot, had thick calluses on their feet that spared them from the kinds of injuries we were suffering from.

  Our two guides prepared to sleep a little distance away from us, just at the edge of the light cast by the fire. The next day, when we awoke at dawn, we were shocked to see they were nowhere to be found. They had abandoned us! We then had to reorient ourselves to survive with the means at our disposal.

  We knew that our destination was to the west. Lost in the heart of this boundless territory, our only point of reference to keep us oriented was the sun, which we could barely glimpse through the canopy. But physical barriers, such as ponds, rivers and thorny vines, dictated our direction; each obstacle forcing us to deviate a little bit further from our chosen trajectory. The second day was very hard for all of us. We walked all day, pushing through vines and mangroves colonized by black and red ants whose bites were extremely painful. In the evening, thinking we had at least made a little progress, we were surprised and disheartened to find ourselves back where we had spent the previous night.

  I remember that there were heated arguments that evening among the refugees, each accusing the other of having led the group into the quagmire we found ourselves in. From the time we had gone into exile, people with previous fighting experience, who knew how to function under conditions of war, had increasingly assumed the leadership of our constantly changing collectivities. They were sought out for advice and their opinions were more valued than those of people who didn’t have the experience or skills to survive a life where the strongest and the most audacious usually held sway. So it was men who had been soldiers or officers in the defeated FAR (Rwandan Armed Forces) who became the leaders of our group, claiming that their poorly thought out opinions were drawn from their military experiences. When I tried to explain that several factors, including the season of the year, should be taken into account in determining which way was west, they saw me as an undisciplined whiner and troublemaker. Even if the rest of us were convinced we weren’t going in the right direction, we had no choice but to follow along lik
e a bunch of sheep in fear of being cut off from the larger group and left alone to face the many challenges ahead.

  The third day, when we were scheduled to have reached the village the hunter had said marked the end of the forest, we realized that we hadn’t actually gone more than about ten kilometers. We were running low on provisions. We had to ration ourselves. Instead of doughnuts, we prepared some very diluted porridge in order to conserve what little flour we had left, and we cut down to just one meal a day instead of two.

  On the fourth day, we organized ourselves into two groups of men tasked to find some way out of the maze. We tried climbing to the top of the tallest trees in the hope of detecting some sign of human activity in the distance such as smoke or the sound of voices, but once we got to the top we only found even taller trees blocking the view. We also lit a fire, sending up a lot of smoke to see if by some miracle, a passing hunter might spot us, but in vain!

  Fortunately, that day, one of our scouting groups had the good luck to meet another convoy of people trying to flee the camp. This group was also led by two guides, obviously more honest than ours. They agreed to let us join them for a sum of CFA francs. They were also armed with a gun, a Kalashnikov. They were true connoisseurs of the forest, able to determine, simply by watching, if a bee was leaving its hive or returning. Armed with this knowledge, we were able to discover a colony of bees halfway up a large tree. Since the hive was up too high to harvest the honey, we had to cut down the tree with the guide’s axe. There was so much honey that the containers we had were insufficient to hold all that we could harvest. This highly energizing foodstuff lifted our spirits, especially as we had run out of food and were exhausted from walking.

  Before nightfall, one of the men informed us that he had lost his wife, who was carrying a baby on her back. All three had been walking in the rear of the procession. At some point, the husband had moved away from the group to answer a call of nature, asking his wife to stick with the group. She had fallen behind, and since we were walking through a swampy area and it was therefore very difficult to make out the rest of our footprints on the trail, she had lost track of us. It was two or three hours after her husband had joined the procession again before he realized that his wife was no longer with us.

  We stopped to help him find his wife and child. We tried calling out her name as loudly as possible, but she didn’t answer. Five or six men went back with the husband hoping to find her on the road, but after an hour of walking, they had to abandon the search for fear of suffering the same fate. The man, who could not be left alone in the middle of the forest, had to stay with us and continue on, leaving his wife and child behind him, at the mercy of nature.

  More than six months after her disappearance, when we were more than three hundred miles away in the village of Pokola near the border with Cameroon, the husband learned that his wife had been found by hunters and was still alive. We immediately collected enough money for him to travel to the Ndjoundou camp.

  The woman later said that when she had realized she was lost, she stayed where she was, so as not to drift even further away, hoping she would be found. When we called out, she heard us and tried to answer, but as her voice was very weak, she couldn’t make herself heard. Since she had no food with her, the baby boy began to show serious signs of weakening after two days, finally succumbing on the fourth. When his body started to decompose, scavengers approached the woman, who remained near the body, but when they noticed she was still alive, they flew away. Luckily, she was finally found by hunters who carried her to the Ndjoundou camp on a stretcher made from pieces of wood. There, she was treated by doctors from Doctors Without Borders. After her recovery, she married another refugee from the camp. When her first husband came to be reunited with her, he found her already pregnant. But the new spouse agreed to return her to him and he took her with him to Pokola. She was deeply traumatized and could barely speak, her eyes staring at an undefined point in space without ever blinking.

  During our fifth day of walking, we came out of the dense forest into a kind of savannah with grass that was sometimes more than two meters high. Wide paths had been carved out by herds of wild animals—wild boars, elephants and buffalo—and we would sometimes come across piles of steaming dung that indicated the recent passage of a herd. In the savannah, game abounds and our guides killed two large boars in just a few minutes of hunting. They kindly shared one with us for free, the other they sold to people who still had money.

  After walking a full day on the savannah, on the sixth day we reached Youmba, a small village on the banks of the Likouala-aux-herbes River inhabited by a few hundred people. We struck camp, happy to be able to take a break. We weren’t a large group—about thirty—but the village didn’t have enough food to satisfy a group of starving people such as us. It once again took some ingenuity to find something to eat. Not knowing how to hunt or trap, I figured I could put into practice some basic notions of fishing I had picked up. In the early morning, I scoured some mud puddles in search of bait, mainly earthworms, that I then dangled from some rudimentary hooks I had found. Congolese lakes and rivers are rich in fish, catches were often ample, and I was able to catch enough fish to feed my family and sometimes even give some to our companions in misfortune. But it was also a challenge to find food to eat with the fish. Cassava, which was the only side dish that grew in the area, wasn’t enough. We asked the villagers’ permission to harvest the taro that was growing wild, especially around the cemetery, that the villagers did not eat. For us, it was a godsend; the tubers are one of the most widely consumed foods in Rwanda.

  Out of reach of the police who had been trying to force us to return to Rwanda, camped in a village where we could find enough to eat, and after having spent a week wandering through the forest, there didn’t seem to be any reason to ever leave. In addition to providing us these basic comforts, the villagers also discouraged us from continuing our journey by foot through the damp and swampy jungle that surrounded us, telling us that the only way to go anywhere was by canoe. Having almost no money to pay for boatmen, it seemed like our only option was to stay in the village despite our desire to continue our journey.

  Seeing that we ate almost everything in sight like a swarm of locusts, and also fearing the wrath of their ancestors whose graves we were desecrating, the villagers finally decided to get rid of us. Ten days after our arrival, we were taken by boat to the village of Monzolomba at the mouth of the Sangha River, where, according to them, we could take boats to Gabon and Cameroon, to the northwest, or to Brazzaville in the south.

  On June 5, 1997, in Monzolomba, we learned that heavy fighting had broken out in Brazzaville, the capital of the Congo. The Cocoye and Zulu militias, supporters of President Lissouba, were fighting the Cobra militia of former President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, in the context of upcoming presidential elections scheduled for a few weeks later in which the two men were contesting for power.

  The country quickly divided in two: the north under the leadership of Sassou and the south under Lissouba. Informed of the presence of well-trained soldiers among the Rwandan refugees on Congolese soil, Sassou-Nguesso wasted no time sending messengers to wherever we were in the effort to recruit men who had been in the FAR (Rwandan Armed Forces) and other volunteers to go fight alongside the Cobra. Without hesitation, many of our former soldiers enlisted in Sassou’s army and, every week, boatloads of recruits floated down the river carrying the new recruits to Brazzaville. The enlistees seemed excited and proud to find themselves back in uniform as well as to receive a degree of recognition.

  The news of the outbreak of war in Brazzaville was rather well received in our ranks. We figured Lissouba would first have to contend with Sassou before being able to turn to the question of the forced repatriation of Rwandan refugees. Our situation had rapidly changed. Now, the order went out to all the villages to help us and make sure we were taken care of. Many Rwandans who had started up the Sangha from the camps at Lukolela and Mossaka abandoned the id
ea of continuing to the north and some even returned to the south.

  While the threat of forced repatriation had diminished, the war was still raging around the capital. Drawing on my past experience, I told myself that despite the relative calm, it would be a good idea to continue our journey to Cameroon and Gabon and get as far away as possible from the combat zones, since once conflict breaks out, no one can predict how it will end.

  The population of Monzolomba, where we had been for about a week, had grown tenfold due to the influx of Rwandan refugees and Congolese from Brazzaville. Food had become scarce and very expensive. We decided not to delay our departure any further. With what little money we had left, we hired a boatman to take us north to a less crowded village.

  We needed to develop an effective strategy that would enable us to eat and continue travelling at the same time: instead of asking for food, we asked for work and, in this way, transformed ourselves from beggars into contributors in the eyes of others.

  This strategy worked well. In the morning, we cleared brush for a farmer who fed us during the day and then in the evening also gave us some dried or fresh fish, a little oil and cassava for the children. When we began to get acquainted with him, he offered to transport us to another village, which he did when he didn’t have any more work for us.

  The news that Rwandan refugees were an effective workforce and would work for almost nothing spread throughout the region. Residents of remote northern villages started recruiting Rwandans to work in their fields. Thus, we fell into a form of disguised slavery: our master could sell us to another under the pretext that he was no longer able to provide for us, that he had no more work or that he wanted to travel.

  When a canoe loaded with refugees approached a village, the inhabitants would rush down to the dock singing a song in Lingala which moved me, entitled “Ba Bakomi Rwandans, Ebele, Ebele,” where they rejoiced that the Rwandans had arrived en masse! Each villager would select one or more slaves and bring them home. I always stayed at the dock. Nobody wanted me, because I had children and a wife who had to be fed and housed without working. Sometimes I went two or three days before finding work, and while others had food and shelter, I slept with my family under the stars with an empty stomach. It seemed that having children had become some sort of a crime!