Chaves had a long-term boyfriend but has no children, not yet. “And when I do, I want to simplify things,” she said. The half dozen friends around her agreed, the magazines still open on the table before us: attractive objects, they said, but so excessive, so disturbingly too much. These São Paulo women were in their 20s and 30s, with two children or one or none. They followed precisely the patterns described to me by national demographers. When I asked them whether they ever felt nostalgia for the less materialistic life of their elders, two generations back—eight children here, ten there, with nobody expecting decorators to gussy up the sleeping quarters—I was able to make out, among the hooting, the word presa. Imprisoned.
But their answers were nearly drowned out by their laughter.
Chapter 7: Rift in Paradise: Africa's Albertine Rift Valley
BY ROBERT DRAPER
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine who reported on Afghanistan’s opium crop in the February issue. He and photographer Pascal Maitre have collaborated on stories in Somalia and Madagascar. If we could please get the file back by COB Monday, we should be done! Fantastic work, I know this was a bit of a piecemeal project—not easy!
The Mwami remembers when he was a king of sorts. His judgment was sovereign, his power unassailable. Since 1954 he has been the chief of the Masisi territory, an undulating pastoral region in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the same as his father and his grandfather before him. Though his given name is Sylvestre Bashali, the other chiefs simply address him as doyen—senior-most. For all of his adult life, the Mwami would receive newcomers to Masisi. They brought him livestock or other gifts. He in turn parceled out land as he saw fit.
Today the chief sits on a dirty couch in a squalid hovel in Goma, the Congolese city several hours south of Masisi. His domain is now the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis that has lasted for decades, yet largely eludes the world’s attention. Masisi has been overtaken—by thousands of Tutsi and Hutus refugees returning from Rwanda to what they claim is their lawful property; by tribal militias aiming to acquire land by force; by cattlemen from neighboring countries searching for less-cluttered pastures; by hordes of itinerants from all over this fertile and dangerously overpopulated region of east Africa seeking somewhere, anywhere, to eke out a living. Recently, a member of the Tutsi rebel army seized the Mwami’s 200-acre estate, forcing him, humiliated and fearing for his safety, to retreat to this shack in Goma.
The city is a hornet’s nest. As recently as two decades ago, Goma’s population was perhaps 50,000. Now it is at least ten times that number. Armed males in uniform stalk its raggedy unlit streets with no one to answer to. Streaming out of the outlying forests and into the city market is a 24/7 procession of boys ferrying immense sacks of charcoal on bicycles or wooden scooter-like chikudus. North of the city limits seethes the Nyiragongo volcano, last heard from in 2002, when its lava roared through town and wiped out Goma’s historic Belgian district. To the east lies the silver cauldron of Lake Kivu—so choked with carbon dioxide and methane from the city’s organic discharge that some scientists predict an eruption will one day kill everyone in and around Goma.
The Mwami, like so many others far less privileged, has run out of options. His stare is one of regal aloofness. Yet despite his cufflinks and manicured gray beard, he is not a chief here in Goma. He is only Sylvestre Bashali, a man swept into the hornet’s nest, with no land left for him to parcel out. As his guest, a journalist from the West, I have brought no gifts, only demeaning questions. “Yes, of course my power has been greatly affected,” the Mwami snaps at me. “When others back up their claims with guns, there is nothing I can do.”
The reign of the Mwamis is finished in this corner of East Africa, which has become a staging ground for violence of mind-reeling proportions in the past few decades: The murder and child abductions of tens of thousands in northern Uganda, the massacre of close to a million in the genocides of Rwanda and Burundi, followed by multiple civil wars in the eastern Congo, the last of which is estimated to have killed more than 3 million people, largely through disease and starvation—the deadliest since World War II. Armed conficts that started in one country have seeped across borders and turned into proxy wars, with the region’s various governments often backing a numbing jumble of acronymned rebel militia groups—the LRA, RPF, FDLR, CNDP, RCD, ADFLC, MLC, the list goes on—each vying for power and resources in one of the richest landscapes in Africa.
The horrific violence that has occurred in this place—and continues in the lawless Congo despite a 2009 peace accord—is impossible to understand in simplistic terms. But there is no doubt geography has played a role. Erase the borders of Uganda, DRC, Rwanda, and Burundi and you see what unites these disparate political entitites: a landscape shaped by the violent forces of shifting plate tectonics. The East African Rift bisects the horn of Africa into two—the Nubian plate to the west and the Somalian plate to the east—before forking on either side of Uganda. The western branch of the rift contains Africa’s Great Lakes, where the deep rift has filled with water, and is close to the volcanic Virunga and Rwenzori mountain ranges.
Called the Albertine Rift Valley (after Lake Albert) this three thousand square mile geological crease of lowland forests, snow-capped mountains, fertile savannahs, and chain of lakes is Africa’s most fecund and biodiverse region, the home of mountain gorillas, okapi, lions, hippos, and elephants, dozens of rare bird and fish species, not to mention a bounty of minerals ranging from gold and diamonds to the key microchip component known as coltan. In the 19th century European explorers like David Livingstone and John Speke came here searching for the source of the Nile River. They gazed in awe at the profusion of lush vegetation and vast bodies of water, according to the scholar Jean-Pierre Chretien: “In the heart of black Africa, the Great Lakes literally dazzled the whites.”
The paradox of the Albertine Rift Valley is that its very richness has led to scarcity. People have crowded into this area because of its fertile volcanic soil, its plentiful rainfall, its biodiversity, and an altitude that protects it from malaria and tsetse fly. As the population soared, more and more forest was cut down to increase farm and grazing land. Even in the 19th century the paradise that visitors beheld was already wracked with a central preoccupation: Is there enough for everyone?
Today that question hangs over every square inch of the Albertine Rift Valley, where the birth rates are among the highest in the world, and where violence, between humans and against animals, has erupted in a horror show of land-grabs, spastic waves of refugees, mass rapes, and plundered national parks—the last places on Earth where wildlife strives to survive undisturbed by humans. For the impoverished residents of the region, overcrowding has spawned an anxiety so primal and omnipresent that one hears the same plea over and over again.
We want land!
The suspected lion killer sits near the shore of Lake George and plays a vigorous board game, known as omweso, with one of his fellow cattlemen. He looks up, introduces himself as Eirfazi Wamana, and says he cannot tell me his age nor the number of his children. “We Africans don’t count our off-spring,” he declares, “because you mizungu don’t like us to produce so many children.” Mizungu is slang for whites in this part of the world. Wamana offers a wry smile and says, “You don’t have to beat around the bush. Some lions were killed here, and the rangers came in the middle of the night and arrested me.”
In late May of 2010, two rangers in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park saw vultures hovering over a field about a kilometer from Wamana’s village of Hamukungu and discovered the dead bodies of five poisoned lions. Nearby were two cow carcasses that had been sprayed with a bluish chemical. Early intelligence pointed to Wamana, but he was released for lack of evidence. Another suspect fled the area. “They held me for a day,” Wamana says, “but they have not released me from their investigation. I am not running away.”
Hamukungu village sits at the northern edge of the park, whe
re the predominant tourist attraction is its population of lions, which has dwindled by 40 percent in less than a decade. “The number of villagers has increased,” says Wilson Kagoro, the park’s community conservation warden, “as has the number of cattle. And this has created a big conflict between them and us. They sneak into the park late at night to let their cattle graze. When this happens, the lions feast on the cows.” Given that parkland grazing is illegal, the aggrieved pastoralists are left with no recourse. But that does not mean that they are without countermeasures.
“We are surviving on God’s mercy,” Wamana says when I ask how so many people manage to survive on so little land. “The creation of this national park has made us so poor! People have to live on the land!” It’s a common complaint among the overcrowded villages that ring the region’s networks of parks and reserves. Queen Elizabeth and many of its neighboring parks in Uganda were established in the 1950s and 60s with the recognition that this region had the highest density of large mammals of any place on Earth—31.4 tonnes per square kilometer in Queen Elizabeth National Park. But social and political upheaval has made it difficult to protect the wildlife. Over decades, poachers and desperate villagers have raided the parks and decimated the populations of elephant, hippos, and lions. By 2006 large mammal biomass was down to 9.5 tonnes in Queen Elizabeth, according to Andrew Plumptre, director of the Albertine Rift Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
The legendary Virunga National Park in the eastern Congo—Africa’s oldest as it was founded in 1925—is the most imperiled by the overpopulated region’s frantic land-grabbing. The countryside, once teeming with charismatic megafauna, is eerily vacant. The park’s lodges are gutted. Since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, all but the eastern sliver of the park, which hosts its famed mountain gorilla population, has been closed to tourists. The park is a war zone.
Rodrigue Mugaruka is the warden of Virunga’s central sector of Rwindi. He is a former child soldier who participated in the 1997 overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko, the long-time dictator of the DRC (then called Zaire). In eastern Congo the vacuum created by Mobutu’s exit unleashed fierce competition among proxy armies and various militias for its diamonds, gold, copper, and coltan. Now Mugaruka is doing battle with those militias—called Mai-Mai fighers—who control illegal fishing and charcoal production in ten villages that have cropped up inside the park surrounding Lake Edward. He had recently regained control of the sector from thousands of Congolese soldiers stationed here to monitor the mines. “They’re supposed to be protecting the park. Instead they were destroying it. The government wasn’t paying them so they were killing the wildlife for food.”
Mugaruka’s efforts to enforce park regulations do not sit well with the tens of thousands of Congolese who have fled areas of conflict and taken up residence in the villages. In the fishing hamlet of Vitchumbi, the warden orders park rangers to chop up, douse in kerosene, and set fire to several unlicensed fishing boats, illegal nets, and bags of charcoal while the villagers look on bitterly. In a fishing boat dented from gunfire, he ferries us to Lulimbi village, from which we drive to the Ishasha River bordering Uganda, where 80 per cent of the park’s hippo population was slaughtered and sold for bush meat by militias before the park rangers recently took control of the area. Later we head to the park’s northern Tshiaberimu sub-sector, where an armed patrol subsidized by the Gorilla Organization provides round-the-clock protection to a family of ten mountain gorillas from villagers who have been encouraged by politicians to kill the apes and claim the parkland.
Rodrigue Mugaruka knows that he is a marked man. The Mai-Mais—and the Congolese businessmen who fund them—have designated him as a target. “Their objective is to chase us out of the park for good,” says the warden. “When we seize a boat and a net, the businessmen tell the Mai-Mais, ‘Before we put another net in the water, you must go kill a ranger.’ Three of mine have been killed in the lake. If you consider the whole area, more than 20 rangers have been killed.”
Last February Mugaruka discovered a huge supply of rice that was illegally grown inside the park. He ordered the rice burned. A few days later, several of his men were waylaid by about 50 Mai-Mai fighters at the park entrance. Eight were shot to death. Government officials soon received a petition signed by 150,000 residents demanding that Virunga National Park be reduced in size by nearly 90 per cent. The petitioners gave the government three months to release this land to them. After that, warned the petition, the residents would all grow crops in the park—and defend their activities with arms.
The document was, in effect, a declaration of war against Warden Mugaruka and his outnumbered rangers.
We want land!
The speaker is Charles, a 24-year-old sitting on a freshly cut log in a forest, a machete in his hand. He does not belong here, in Uganda’s Kagombe Forest Reserve. Then again, maybe he does. No less than the Minister of the Interior visited Charles and the other Kagombe inhabitants recently. “He told us we can stay a while,” says Charles with a grin. The minister’s political cronies, it would seem, have an election coming up—and in this part of the world, the best way to placate voters is to promise them land.
Charles and a few other pioneering young villagers moved into the forest in 2006. “We’d been living on our grandparents’ property, but there were too many people on the land already,” he says. “We heard people talk about how there was free land this way.” Apparently a migrant tribe, the Bachinga, had already begun to settle in Kagombe, and when the National Forest Authority tried to evict them, Uganda’s President Yoweri Musevini—himself facing reelection—issued an executive order forbidding such action. Thereupon a few local politicians urged the indigenous Byanyora tribe, which included Charles and his friends, to grab some forestland as well, lest all of Kagombe be inhabited by non-locals.
Charles and his friends each claimed about seven acres of timberland and began slashing away. They built grass-thatched huts, feed storage sheds, roads, and a church. They planted maize, bananas, cassava, and Irish potatoes. Then they sent for their wives and began to have more children. Today Charles is one of about 2,000 inhabitants in the forest reserve and has no desire to leave. “We’re very well off here,” he says.
The forest, meanwhile, is a smoky wasteland, razed for miles in all directions. The damage goes beyond the aesthetic: Kagombe serves as a wildlife corridor for elephants, lions, buffalos, and other animals migrating from adjacent refuges in northern Uganda, the DRC, Rwanda, and Tanzania. As Sarah Prinsloo of the Wildlife Conservation Society observes, “The health of the wildlife population in these national parks is dependent on corridors like Kagombe.” The habitat destruction of the corridor has contributed to a plunging animal birth rate throughout the region. In Kagombe itself, most wildlife has vanished.
The forestry agency’s sector manager of the area, Patrick Kaketo, contemplates the environmental devastation with a despairing smile. “They’re cutting all of this down,” Kaketo says. “And we can’t touch them. For us, it’s a kind of psycho-professional torture.”
How did Africa’s land of plenty descend into a perilous free-for-all? For over a thousand years, migrant farmers, pastoralists, and mineral-seekers have gravitated to the Albertine Rift Valley with high hopes that were invariably met. The first wave of Bantu immigrants some 2,500 years ago, “were running away from the Sahara desert and malaria in present-day Cameroon and Nigeria,” says Pierre Ruzirabwoba, director of Rwanda’s Institute of Research & Dialogue for Peace. “Then, several hundred years later, came a group of people from present-day Somalia and Ethiopia who were running away from conflict and overcrowded cattle pastures. When conflicts would arise over land, the Mwami’s deputies—one in charge of grassland, the other in charge of farmland—would make sure everyone had what was sufficient.”
Trouble arrived when the Europeans did, at the end of the 19th century. While permitting the Mwamis to continue their local governance, the colonizers were struck by the physical differences betw
een the darker-skinned Bantu, or Hutu, majority and the taller, lighter-skinned Ethiopian descendants, or Tutsis. Imposing their own racial stereotypes on a region that had previously never distinguished by color, the German, Belgian, and French administrators deduced that the Tutsis were intellectually superior to the Hutus. The former were therefore given plum government jobs, while the latter became soldiers and farmhands.
In 1932, Rwanda’s Belgian occupiers officially codified a racial caste system—and, inevitably, racial hostilities that spilled over the borders into Burundi and the Congo—by handing out ID cards that designated about 15 percent of its subjects as Tutsis, 85 percent as Hutus, and a tiny fraction as Twa pygmies. By the time the colonizers departed as the countries gained independence in the early 1960s, recriminations had already led to ethnically-based killings of Tutsis, followed by retaliatory murders of Hutus. Today, tensions between those two groups continue to play out in the Congo.
But the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 was the result of more than Hutu-Tutsi ethnic hatred, fueled by politicians hungry for power. The latter years of the 20th century brought a sobering recognition that there was in fact NOT enough for everyone in the Albertine Rift Valley—and with that, catastrophe. An alarming rise in birth rates coincided with the collapse of the coffee and tea markets during the 1980’s, leading to great deprivation; poverty led to even higher fertility rates, and thus to an even greater strain on the land. While it’s true that many industrialized countries have population densities as high as Rwanda did at this time, they also have mechanized, high-yield agriculture that allows a few farmers to grow enough food for the whole country. In Rwanda’s subsistence agricultural society, the only way to grow more food was to clear forests with slash-and-burn agriculture.
By the mid-1980s, every acre of land outside the parks was already being farmed. Sons were inheriting increasingly smaller plots of land. Soils were depleted. Tensions were high. Belgian economists Catherine Andre and Jeanne-Philippe Platteau conducted a study of land disputes in one region in Rwanda both before and after the genocide and found that an increasing percentage of households were struggling to feed themselves on so little land. Interviewing residents after the genocide, it was not uncommon to hear Rwandans argue that “war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.” Thomas Malthus, the famed British economist who posited that population growth would outstrip the planet’s ability to sustain it, couldn’t have put it more succinctly.
7 Billion Page 8
