Congo (80 page)

But Papy had other things on his mind. One day he decided to try his luck again at ivory. With a little help from a few Pygmies, it shouldn’t be too hard. “The village chieftain gave me his permission. It took us four days to locate a track, and we followed it for a week. When we finally saw the elephant, he had only one tusk. Later we found a whole herd. I shot one of them, a female. That evening we ate the trunk. It was good.”

Of the some six thousand elephants in the Okapi Reserve where Papy wandered, more than half were killed for ivory or meat. Poaching became big business in Congo. In Kahuzi-Biega Park, almost 50 percent of the 130 mountain gorillas, already a very rare species, disappeared as well. Virunga Park had more than twenty thousand hippos; only thirteen hundred of them survived the war.
⁴⁶
Given a mobile population that consumed between 1.1 and 1.7 million metric tons (between nearly 1.21 to 1.87 million U.S. tons) of bushmeat each year and burned 72 million cubic meters of wood, nature suffered greatly under the war.
⁴⁷
Industrial forestry came to a halt but, with the supply of electricity cut off, all of Congo went back to cooking on wood fires, consuming one cubic meter (1.3 cubic yards) per person annually. Bushmeat usually came from monkeys and antelopes. For sale on every market one saw smoked, almost charred monkeys with eyes seared shut and mouths wide open. During my first trip to Congo in 2003 I even saw elephant meat being sold on a Kinshasa street market.

Papy’s poaching career, however, was short-lived. “The next day we went back to get the tusks. We found a little one, standing beside its dead mother. I shot it too. Compassion, what is that? When I got closer I saw that it had only two weensy little tusks.
Bon
, gold was more my sort of thing anyway.”
⁴⁸

T
HE SECOND PHASE OF THE WAR
lasted so long because so many profited from it; not just the big multinationals far away, not just the slick traders in their climate-controlled suites, not just the military leaders in the neighboring countries, but everyone at every level of the pyramid. After the miserable Mobutu years, the common people were finally getting the chance to earn a little money of their own. That became clearest of all during the coltan rush. Farmers in Kivus north and south abandoned their bedraggled fields, children left school by the bunches, even teachers turned their backs on their classrooms. “We know that digging coltan can’t solve our daily problems,” a few
creuseurs
said, “but here we earn a lot more than we used to.” The risks they took were all part of the game. Men in particular had a chance to regain their financial autonomy. The informal economy of the 1980s had provided women with new opportunities, but artisanal mining during the war was strictly a man’s world. “Digging for coltan is very profitable,” two
mamans
told me, “but the husbands are the only ones who gain from it. As soon as they have some money they go off and find another woman in Goma; they even buy a house for her, and that while our own children barely get along and can’t even go to school.”
⁴⁹

The war had not begun with profit in mind, but now that so many were turning one it simply went on.
⁵⁰
Commerce and war held each other in a stranglehold: in addition to the militarization of the economy, there was also the commercialization of violence. Soldiers like Papy offered their services anywhere the money was good. The informal economy of the past had now become a military economy: it was still about the large-scale smuggling of Congo’s riches, but with a Kalashnikov added to the equation. Extreme violence became extremely common; ethnic hatred looked suspiciously like commercial rivalry.

“They took Kasore, a Lendu in his thirties, away from his family and attacked him with knives and hammers,” an eyewitness reported in gold-laden Mongbwalu in Orientale province. There the Hemas and Lendus, the Ituri district’s two major population groups, had fought for control over the pits. The mines, which once generated an ethnic melting pot, now were sources of dissension. Uganda’s policies fanned the fires of racial hatred.
⁵¹
The Hemas, the eyewitness said, “killed Kasore and his son (of around twenty) with knives. They cut the son’s throat and tore open his chest. They cut the tendons at his heels, crushed his head and removed his intestines.” After some attacks, the assailants told those left to listen that now they knew who was the boss. The flipside of globalization was tribalization: the international raw-materials robbery was accompanied by the revival of old rituals or the creation of new ones. A
féticheur
forced one Heman man to undergo a bizarre test: “He had two eggs. They tied me up, I was scared to death. He rolled the eggs over the ground at my feet. I was told that if the eggs rolled away from me I would be considered innocent. But if they rolled toward me, then I was a Hema and therefore guilty. I was lucky, the eggs rolled away. But Jean, who was with me, was not as fortunate. The eggs rolled the wrong way and they told him to run for it. While he was running away, the Lendu shot arrows at him. He fell. They cut him to pieces with their machetes, right before my eyes. Then they ate him.”
⁵²

In addition to profits, the war was also about new forms of morality. The reports from human rights organization rarely include eyewitness accounts from combatants. But in Kasenyi, a fishing village on Lake Albert, I succeeded after some difficulty in getting a number of them to talk. There is little truth to the prevailing idea that all child soldiers were kidnapped. Many went into the army voluntarily. “Our village was attacked twice. My grandfather, sister, and brother were killed. I was twelve and I joined up. Of my own free will. Our massacre was the reply to their massacres. I stayed with the UPC [the major Hema militia] for three years.” This young Hema, who insisted on remaining anonymous, was now a veteran: “We were trained by Rwandan mercenaries. Bosco Ntaganda was our general. He fought with Joseph Kony too. I was at the bloodbath at Mahagi. We took mothers, fathers, children. I was told to kill and I killed. Killing women and children, that was hard for me. Fortunately I had a rifle; I was afraid to kill people with a machete. The soldiers took girls to marry. I had to watch as they raped them. Bosco said: ‘When you’re a soldier, women are free. Everything is free.’”
⁵³

In a country where the educational system had been destroyed, where there were no jobs, where dowries were unaffordable and the average life expectancy was only forty-two, the war provided not only profits but also a sense of purpose. Children with no future suddenly had an ideal and an identity.
⁵⁴
“My brothers are fishermen now, they work on the lake in their canoes,” another young man told me. “In the war they were with the PUSIC [another Hema militia]. They were twelve and fourteen in 2002. When they came back from the war, they spoke laughingly of their pillaging and raping. The war was a joke, perhaps a joke that brought death along with it, but still a joke.”
⁵⁵
Veterans among themselves bantered stories back and forth, like students after a drunken night on the town. The fighting had been a bacchanal of blood and beer, a Dionysian ritual of running, grabbing, and biting, a blowout with roasted goat meat, smooth female flesh, screaming voices, gun smoke, female flesh that grew moist anyway, there you go, a rush, a curse, a carnival, a temporary upending of all values, a conscious transgression, a forbidden pleasure smothered in a sauce of fear, goose flesh, and humor, lots of humor. A gruesome feast of life’s brittleness.

At a certain point, as I sat drinking beer on the waterfront with Muhindu, the man who had dumped bodies into Lake Kivu, he said something disconcerting. “A soldier is like a dog. If you open the gate, he causes damage. In the morning, before we were sent out, our leader would say: ‘Go out and do something foolish.’ We ransacked houses. We took cell phones, money, and gold necklaces from people. We raped. If you give someone permission to kill, after all, what difference does a rape make?”

I
WAS SITTING IN A HALF-DARKENED OFFICE IN
G
OMA
. You could hear the noise from the street. There were no banners of international NGOs in front of the door, no logos, no air-conditioning. This was the anonymous, discreet workplace of La Synergie des Femmes, the city’s only shelter for Congolese women, run by the women themselves. Across the wooden table from me is Masika Katsua, a forty-one-year-old Nande woman. She used to live in the interior. The Nande were successful traders in places like Beni and Butembo, and that had created a lot of bad blood. “It was in 2000. We were at our own home. My husband imported goods from Dubai. The soldiers came in. They were Tutsis. They spoke Rwandan. They sacked everything and wanted to kill my husband. ‘I’ve already given you everything,’ he told them, ‘so why do you want to kill me?’ But they said: ‘We kill big traders with the knife, not with a gun.’ They had machetes. They started hacking at his arm. ‘We have to chop hard,’ they said, ‘the Nande are strong.’ Then they butchered him, like in a slaughterhouse. They took out his intestines and his heart.”

While she spoke, she never looked up. She scratched incessantly with the plastic cap from a ballpoint pen in the grain of the wooden table.

I had pick up all the pieces. They held a gun to my head. I wept. All the pieces of my husband’s body. I had to gather them together. They cut me with a knife, that’s how I got this scar. I have another one on my thigh. I had to lie down on his body parts, to sleep on them. I did that, there was blood everywhere. I wept and they started raping me. There were twelve of them. And then my two daughters in the next room. I lost consciousness and ended up in the hospital. After six months I still wasn’t healed. I was still bleeding and gave off terrible smells. My daughters were pregnant. A boy and girl were born, but my daughters refused to have them. I took those children under my wing. When I came back, it turned out that my in-laws had sold everything, the house, the land, everything. They said it was my fault that my husband was dead. I had no sons and therefore no right to stay. The family turned me away. When my grandchildren ask me now about that scar, I can’t tell them. It was their fathers who did it.

In 2006 Masika was once again beaten and raped, this time by Nkunda’s men. They had come looking for her because, after fleeing on her own to the interior, she had started organizing classes for other rape victims. New victims came to her each day, girls who didn’t dare to press charges. “I want to kill Nkunda. God forgive me. If I die for doing that, at least I will have done something that gives me release. I’m still alone. The men don’t want me anymore, and I hate all men. I want to help other women. My home is open to them. I pray a lot. I hope for nothing. I try to forget. But when I think back . . . on how my husband and I lived together . . . all that sadness.”
⁵⁶

And the waters of Lake Kivu slap against the docks. The top of the Nyiragongo volcano vanishes amid the clouds. Jeeps with tinted windows drive slowly over the roundabout. Two boys are pushing a big wooden bicycle through the mud. The bike groans beneath a man-sized bag of colorful flip-flops. And inside a half-darkened office a woman rubs the cap of a ballpoint pen slowly back and forth over the wood, as through trying to scratch something out.

CHAPTER 13

LA BIÈRE ET LA PRIÈRE
(SUDS AND SANCTITY)

New Players in a Wasted Land

2002–2006

A
SK ALMOST ANY
C
ONGOLESE WHERE HE WOULD REALLY
like to live, and there’s a good chance that he will say “
na Poto
,” in Europe.
Poto
in Lingala comes from Portugal, the first European country with which Central Africa became acquainted. In more concrete terms,
Poto
means Brussels or Paris, because the rest of Europe—with the possible exception of London—doesn’t count. Jamais Kolonga, the first Congolese man to dance with a white woman in the 1950s, proudly told me that all eight of his children now live in Europe.
Poto
means success. Ask the same Congolese where he definitely does not want to go, and you will be sure to hear “
na Makala
.”
Makala
means charcoal, but it is also an outlying district of Kinshasa where charcoal was once made, and where today Kinshasa’s Centre Pénitentiaire et de Rééducation is located, the central prison. In the popular imagination, the word
makala
stands for everything the Congolese fear and hate. Ever since the days of Mobutu, that horrible word summons up images of starvation, torture and murder.
Makala
is where the state shows its fangs, a gloomy, pitch-black place dripping with blood and death. Taxi drivers often refuse to take you there.

“And you must absolutely, absolutely not lose this little blue slip,” the guard says to me before opening the gates. In a chaotic entrance hall where everyone shouts that he is responsible for
la sécurité
, I am frisked a number of times and have to turn in my cell phone and my money. In exchange for my phone I am handed a crumpled piece of cardboard with a number on it; I had taken out the SIM card beforehand. My cash—twenty dollars, I brought no more than that on purpose—disappeared into a drawer. An official tore off a scrap of paper and wrote on it that I, Monsieur David, had turned in twenty dollars. But even more important than these two hat-check stubs, it seems, is the little slip of blue paper that I hadn’t asked for. Smaller than a cigarette paper, it nevertheless turns out to be essential to my future well-being. “When you come out later on, you have to hand this in. If you don’t have it, we can’t let you through. Then you’ll have to wait for evening roll call, to see if everyone is still here.” My questioning look receives a reply. “We have to make sure you didn’t give it to a prisoner who’s taken off, you see.” And what if a prisoner happens to be missing? “Then you’re the prime suspect.” And what if I really don’t have it anymore? “Then you stay here.” Welcome to Makala.