April 21, 2004Hopes and Tears of Congo Flow in Its Mythic River
On the muddy banks of Kisangani, the river releases a man who risked cholera and crocodiles and spent three months on a decrepit barge all for a chance to travel a thousand miles to sell, at long last, a sack of plastic ladies shoes. Outside Mbandaka, where the river trips over the Equator, it glances up at the shell of a dictator's unfinished palace, now home to a pair of cows. In a hidden creek in the hard-knocks capital, Kinshasa, the river hears the screams of an unwanted girl. Her father banished her to the water, believing that she was a witch. Today, as this country tries to knit itself together after a half-decade of war that ended last year, the river is witness to Congo's slow, aching rebirth. It is both symbol and substance of the country's reunification, and the life it nurtures on its banks shows the enormousness of the task. A power-sharing government has been installed, but the authority of the state has yet to reach old rebel fiefs. There is no national army to speak of, only gunmen who remain loyal to rival warlords. Peace still eludes pockets of the nation, like the mineral-rich Ituri region. Ethnic Hutu militias, some responsible for the killing frenzy in neighboring Rwanda in 1994, squirrel away in the eastern Kivu hills. Not least, most everything has stopped working. Schools, hospitals and a functioning legal system are but a memory. Roads, train tracks and turbines must be rebuilt. Today the river, coursing 2,700 miles, is the country's principal highway. Mighty and mythic, it carries everyone and everything: hyacinths, memories, traders, the dead. Once, people here called it the Nzere, or the river that swallows all rivers. It could be called the river that swallows all stories. A long legacy of greed and suffering is inscribed on its back, from the brutal rubber empire of a Belgian king in the late 19th century to Congo's latest war of partition and plunder. That war killed an estimated 3.3 million people, mostly through disease and starvation. It sliced the country into pieces as three major factions, along with an array of militias and foreign sponsors, scrambled for Congo's riches. And it broke the river, the country's spinal column, into bits. Last July, on the heels of the peace accord, the river reopened and the first commercial barge crawled up, loaded with cement, fuel and hope. Villagers lined the shore. They scrambled up the tributaries to have a look. "I tell you, it was a grand welcome, like it was Jesus coming!" recalled Antoine Bawe, 48, the captain of one of those first barges. This evening, as dusk darkened the river at Kisangani, Mr. Bawe, fresh from his fifth journey upstream, sat slapping mosquitoes on the long, flat back of his vessel. By this hour, his barge had become a riverside saloon, buzzing with the supple beats of Ndombolo and the clinking of brown bottles of Primus. Ndombolo and Primus. Music and beer. During the war, those two things defied partition. They unified the Congolese, all along the river. A Slow Current Today the barges that crawl up and down the Congo River, between Kisangani and Kinshasa, are the most vivid symbols of the country's slow reawakening. For ordinary traders like Gerald Mutuku, the shoe salesman, they represent a long-awaited lifeline. Even so, his journey upriver to Kisangani a trip that should ordinarily take a couple of weeks went on for nearly three months. The tugboat engine broke down twice. The barge got banged up on sand reefs. At least Mr. Mutuku, 63, was lucky not to suffer the fate of so many others, on so many other crumbling barges, that capsize and dump their passengers into the mouths of crocodiles. For a moment, on the glorious Sunday of Mr. Mutuku's arrival, it seemed almost worth it. No sooner had he stepped ashore in Kisangani than he was mobbed. With nothing coming in from Kinshasa for so long, the market women descended on his wares, eagerly inspecting his sack of pink and green plastic shoes as though it were Christmas morning. Early last century, men made ivory fortunes in this trading town. Trucks rumbled into the market, ferrying potatoes and rice from the interior. Trains departed from an elegant riverside railroad station to get around the impassable rapids upriver. About the only way to bring goods to the river now is by bicycle. They cut through the bush with sacks of rice on the back, bananas on the handlebars, pedaled by porters who drip sweat from their eyelids like giant raindrops on the dry dirt paths. The trains have long stopped in their tracks. At the old station, ferns have forced their way into a first-class cabin. The railroad chief, Emile S. Utshudi, has turned engine parts into a grain mill. He says it is how he makes a living. He has not been paid in six years. "In the minds of the population, it should be a new start, a new regime that's just and prosperous," Mr. Utshudi said. "Me, I too hope it's a new moment, but I have to tell you, it's the end of our sleep, but we haven't yet woken up." Mr. Utshudi, ever the bureaucrat, keeps a desk, stacked high with papers enumerating the needs of his beloved railroad, inside the stately colonial-era post office. Tucked away here, in a dank second-floor chamber, is a memento of the country's most famous postal worker. It is a salmon-colored copy of an employee newsletter, L'Ιcho Postal, edited by the man who became Congo's anticolonial leader and then in 1960, until his assassination a year later, its first and only democratically elected prime minister Patrice E. Lumumba. That such a thing exists at all, in a post office with no glass panes in its windows nor any stamps, is nothing short of astonishing except that all that remains is its cover. The pages are gone. Like a sprawling memorial to greed, Kisangani today stands on layers of splendor and ruin. The palaces of Mobutu Sese Seko, the American-backed dictator who ruled for more than 30 years, still line the river, as relics of meglomania. Policemen and their wives are squatting in one. Another, farther down river, has been put to use as a barn. Mr. Utshudi remembers the parade of rival armies that pummeled his city. Mr. Mobutu's soldiers battled and lost to the rebel forces of Laurent Kabila in 1997. Rwandan and Ugandan armies came in 1999 and 2000. One massacre followed another. Once, Mr. Utshudi said, he saw the bodies of 15 children floating in the river. Today a new Congolese army is being cobbled together from the remains of the old fighting factions. Under the tutelage of soldiers from Belgium, the former colonial ruler, ex-enemies are learning to pitch tents, hold riot shields and march in unison. A unified army is a centerpiece of the peace deal, and the transitional government has divvied up top military posts among leaders of the former factions. Yet the chain of command is tenuous, at best, and critical questions remain: where the soldiers will be deployed, how they will be paid, fed and equipped, and whose command they will follow. In recent months, gun battles have broken out between loyalists of the government in Kinshasa and the ex-rebel army in the east. Military installations in the capital have been attacked by assailants whose motives remain unclear. Each side has held onto its weapons. Each challenge is an invitation to return to bloodletting. The war may be over, but trust has yet to be won. With demobilization largely a dream, soldiers still prowl along the river, still with empty bellies. Downstream from Kisangani, before the river touches the Equator, they linger on in a village called Lolanga. During the war, this was the rear base of government forces. For years, with nothing coming in from Kinshasa, villagers up in the hidden creeks had holed up in the jungle, barefoot or, worse still, naked. Civilians abandoned their fields and fled into the bush. Today, cassava has been planted for the first time in years. The market, the most reliable barometer of war and peace across the continent, bustles with pigs and plastic flip-flops. But the gunmen hungry, greedy, armed still hover in sufficient numbers to intimidate the villagers, extract their hard-earned produce and keep them quiet. "If the soldiers aren't paid, they are going to find some other way," said one villager, Ambrose Makele. Hazardous Conditions Farther downriver, in the fishing village of Bikaba, the women say they have grown accustomed to giving soldiers a portion of their day's catch, or a basket of their day's harvest of corn or sugar cane. At least now, they hasten to add, they can plant a little corn and cane. During the war, they gathered roots to curb their hunger. At least now, they say, they can row up to market and sell cassava bread or smoked monkey. On a good week, the river sends news of a barge coming. But the terror has not stopped. Imbombo Boleki, 22, described how only a few days before men in uniform arrived in his village and ordered him to row their canoe upstream. There was no pay involved, nor much choice. Had he refused, he said, he would be beaten with a strip of hippopotamus hide, called a chicotte. That is what happened to other men who rebuffed the soldiers' demands. That is what has happened before. At the turn of the last century, the rubber empire of King Leopold II of Belgium also built itself on forced labor along the riverbanks. Those who failed to meet the king's rubber quota were beaten with the same chicotte. Or they had their hands cut off and tossed into the water. Adam Hochschild records this history in his 1998 book, "King Leopold's Ghost." The river, he writes, swallowed them, too. "My father took me to the river," said Alfie, who is 7. "He said I was a witch." With that, she burst into tears. Who knows whether her father, whom she described as a soldier, wanted her dead or simply wanted to get rid of her. All Alfie recalls is gasping for breath and being scooped out of the river by a gang of street children outcasts like her who lived on its banks in the capital, Kinshasa, where the river winds toward its end. The other children brought her to an orphanage run by Maguy Makusudi, who held her in her arms and translated her shy, halting words from Lingala to English. Alfie is small for her age, frequently withdrawn, and hardly unusual among Congolese of her generation. Anecdotes from children's advocates suggest that across the country, more and more children are accused of sorcery, blamed for the ills that befall their kin in what remains a time of unfathomable hardship. The grown-ups who care for them see it as a barometer of national despair. When nothing else explains the gnawing misery of daily life, the supernatural steps in. Sickness, death, joblessness, hunger all can be blamed on witchcraft. Children, defenseless by definition, can be the easiest scapegoats. Difficult children can be the most vulnerable: the sickly, the precocious, the retarded, the rebellious. Often, their trouble starts when someone at home falls ill, or a mother remarries, or a breadwinner walks out the door. Sometimes, prayers are recited for the child witches. Sometimes, the children are beaten, forced to swallow herbs or drink gasoline. Finally, they are left to rot on the streets. Ms. Makusudi's orphanage, a row of rooms with flimsy foam mattresses on the floors, is a gallery of cast-out girls. There is a girl with tiny, shorn-off toes who remembers watching her mother put poison in her dinner. There is a rebellious teenager whose family turned to a revival church, seeking her exorcism. There is Alfie, whose parents cannot be found. Struggling Upstream It is impossible to tell how many children have been turned out, only that they have swelled the ranks of kids who sleep under the shop awnings of Kinshasa and pour into orphanages like Ms. Makusudi's. Rare in decades past, the trend is attributed by social workers to the war's economic toll and the rise of revival churches that regard the quotidian misery of Congolese life as the work of the devil. It does not hurt that accusing a child of sorcery helps to get rid of an extra mouth to feed. "For years, people don't see any hope," lamented a Catholic priest named Zbigniew Orlikowski. "They don't want to face reality, because it doesn't work." The challenges that lie ahead for Congo lap against the riverbank. When the ex-rebel leaders arrived in Kinshasa last year to take part in the power-sharing government, they brought hordes of soldiers their own soldiers and installed their headquarters along the river, the city's prime real estate and its best escape route. Jean-Pierre Bemba, the leader of the faction called Movement for Congolese Liberation and now one of Congo's four vice presidents, still keeps his private helicopter parked in the back garden of his whitewashed mansion, just in case. On a steamy afternoon not long ago, his soldiers lounged under its shade. Farther along the river, the rebel-chief-turned-vice-president Azarias Ruberwa, of another former militia, Rally for Congolese Democracy, also sits under the protection of his loyalists. Joseph Kabila Jr., an ex-major general in his late father Laurent's rebel army and now the elusive thirtysomething president of the transitional government, remains cloistered among his own. Troops loyal to all three men stand accused of a horrifying list of abuses, from mutilation to mass killings, cannibalism to widespread rape. Whether and how justice will be sought for these crimes remains among Congo's principal challenges. The courts do not yet function. No truth and reconciliation process is under way. There is talk of an inquiry by the new Hague-based International Criminal Court, but trepidation, too, about whether it would upset the delicate balance of peace. Besides, all three men are potential contenders in the next presidential elections. Under the peace deal, those elections are supposed to be held in 2005, but one would be hard pressed to find any hint of preparations. Nationality laws have yet to be negotiated, a potentially prickly matter in such a vast and diverse country. There has been no effort to count eligible voters, let alone educate citizens about their rights and obligations. Few Congolese can remember ever going to the polls; the last elections were held in 1960. On the shores of Kisangani, in the riverside saloon of Mr. Bawe's barge, a young man named Coco Bombenga wondered aloud whether his country's leaders were even interested in the business of democracy. As Ndombolo and Primus flowed, Mr. Bombenga hectored a foreign journalist to remind the world of his wishes. Sure, he said, peace had reopened the river, and people could now buy and sell fish. But what about his hunger to elect his own rulers, he demanded. "If we can only live to eat, that's not enough," he said. "We are not animals." |
From must-see cities to the best beaches, plan a getaway with the Spring Travel Guide! -------------------------------------------- This service is hosted on the Infocom network http://www.infocom.co.ug
